Julian eyed Micah suspiciously, wondering if he was hoping for the same result. If so, he was going to be disappointed. Julian and Xander belonged in California, and Micah had his entire company based out of New York. Besides, none of them were exactly lonely. They all had scores of women vying for their attention.
Just not the right one.
The nagging thought crossed through his mind involuntarily, but Julian ignored it. He’d worked his entire life to get where he was in Hollywood, and there was no way he was leaving. He didn’t need a vacation house in some small town in Maine. Hell, the winters were frigid, and the temperature wasn’t exactly scorching even in the summer, most of the time. Okay, yeah, maybe it would be nice to see his brothers and cousins more, and maybe he’d do a vacation here once in a while. But that was it.
Sometimes he missed his family, but he had a damn cell phone.
Julian continued to listen as Dante, Jared, and Grady all talked about houses, sounding plenty enthusiastic about the prospect of having their cousins owning homes in Amesport.
He downed the rest of his beer, trying not to think about his earlier encounter with Red. If he gave it much thought, he’d end up sporting the same boner he’d had the second he’d seen her again.
She’d surprised him today by quietly giving him dinner and a glass of milk instead of the beer he’d ordered. Strangely, she’d seemed to sense he’d been hungry, tired, and restless, even if she was contrary almost all of the time.
I’m not exactly nice to her.
Nope. He wasn’t, and he generally wasn’t an asshole. Not really. But something about her made him want to antagonize her.
Because I like her.
Shit! He wasn’t in grade school anymore, but damned if he didn’t want to tug on her braid because he liked her. He also wanted to see her flushed, her sultry, dark-green eyes flashing fire at him.
Problem was, he wasn’t about to bang one of the women here. If his cousins or Micah found out, they’d beat the crap out of him. Kristin was friends with every Sinclair wife, and Hope, his only female cousin. She worked for Dante’s physician wife as a medical assistant in her office. Kristin was trouble, and he needed to stay as far away from her as he could get.
The difficulty was, he wanted to seek her out.
He tried not to groan as he thought about how passionately she’d returned his kiss today. He hadn’t meant for that to happen, but now that it had, the memory wouldn’t leave his brain.
“You ready?” Micah asked as he stood.
Julian looked up at his brother questioningly, wondering what he’d missed while he’d been reliving his heated encounter with Kristin. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m ready.” He stood up, handing Dante his empty bottle as his cousin collected trash. Once a Los Angeles detective, his cousin looked so domesticated; Dante was still a detective, but now he worked for the police department in Amesport.
He looks happy. Everyone looks so damn happy.
Julian felt a twinge in his chest as he looked at all of his cousins, every one of them appearing like they had everything they wanted in life. Maybe he wasn’t the type of man to settle down, his life too mobile and crazy to ever consider a relationship, but at that moment, he almost envied them. Most of the time, he was secretly happy for all his cousins. They’d lived through a fucked-up childhood. They deserved to be content as adults.
Another sharp pang stabbed him in the chest as the backslapping and jokes started again as he and Micah went to leave, making him remember the times when all of the Sinclair men had spent summers together when they were younger. There was something to be said about always knowing another Sinclair had your back. In California, Julian could rarely tell enemy from friend in his superficial world.
As he followed Micah out the door, Julian wondered if he’d forgotten what it was like to have anybody he trusted in his life. Sadly, as he walked away from the comfortable atmosphere of family, he couldn’t think of a single person in California who would be at his back if he wasn’t a billionaire or his career wasn’t going as well as it was right now.
CHAPTER 8
The next afternoon found Tessa rolling her shoulders to release some tension as she skated through her warm-up, trying not to regret her words to Micah the day before. Oh, not that he’d treated her poorly, but he had backed off, asking her a few polite questions about the bleakest time in her life before getting up and taking her hand as they made their way back to Randi’s house.
He’d left soon after they’d arrived.
Now, she could feel him watching her as she skated, and he’d been unusually quiet since he’d picked her up this morning.
What did I expect? Did I think he was going to understand why I wanted to off myself? Hell, sometimes I don’t even understand it now. But back then, her desperation had been all too real.
After her mother had died, she’d been so alone, feeling so damn worthless that she hadn’t wanted to live anymore. She’d shared with Micah how she’d put together a cocktail of medications that she’d been pretty certain would kill her, mainly from a stock she’d had left of her mother’s pain and sleeping pills. She’d been ready to go to sleep and never wake up, let the dark pit she’d sunk into take her away.
The only thing that had stopped her at the last minute was Liam. She couldn’t leave him all alone, and she knew he’d blame himself for the rest of his life if she ended her own. She had been selfish, ready to ease her own pain at the expense of her only living close relative.
At the last minute, she’d dumped all of the pills in the toilet and flushed them down the pipes, unwilling to end her pain by causing more for Liam.