Dangerously Broken (25 page)

“Agreed. That’s why I’m here. I was about to go over the architectural plans for the two big truck bays, but I see you have other things on your mind. I’ll mull it over myself. You need to go to your girl, I imagine?”

Jamie nodded.

“I’ll hold down the fort. Shop closes at seven anyway.”

“Good. Thanks.”

Duff shrugged. No problem.” He moved past Jamie and sat in his chair, stared at the computer and pulled up the web browser. “Can I get porn on this thing, cousin?”

Jamie shook his head, almost cracking a smile. “Get whatever you want, cousin. That’s . . . I think that’s the point today, maybe.”

Duff turned with a raised brow but didn’t say anything as Jamie grabbed his keys and left.

It seemed to take forever to get back over to Dennie and Annalee’s house, but soon he parked in front of their pretty white and yellow clapboard. He jumped out and tried to steady his pulse as he moved up the front steps. Before he even reached the door Dennie’s grandmother Annalee opened it. The woman was tiny, with snowy white hair and piercing turquoise eyes. It had been years since he last saw her, but even though there were a few more lines on her face, she still exuded that classic Southern woman thing—grace and charm yet tough as nails. Warm but formidable. He’d always liked her.

“My apologies, Mrs. Harper, but I’m here to see Summer Grace. Whether she wants to see me or not.”

Annalee opened the screen door and gestured for him to come in. As he stepped into the house, she stopped him with a surprisingly strong grip on his arm.

“You talk to our girl, y’hear me, Jamie Stewart-Greer? You make her see that death is just the way of the world and something we all have to cope with. Because the shape she’s in now is the only other option, and that’s not a life. You make her
want
a life, y’hear me, son?”

He swallowed past the lump in his throat. “I am sure gonna try, Ms. Annalee.”

Annalee patted his arm. “That’s a good boy.” He didn’t even flinch at the title. “Now you get me my red hat out of the hall closet so I can get to my dinner meet-up. I’ll be in my car. You tell my granddaughter to come with me.”

He nodded, opening the closet and reaching in to retrieve the requested red hat. He would have been grinning like mad if this had been any other day, if he were there with any other purpose. Annalee Harper was one sassy lady.

“Here you go, ma’am.”

She smiled and gave him one last pat on the arm before she took the offered hat and walked out the door.

He stood for several moments, trying to get his thoughts in order. He’d come racing over here on a mission, but Annalee’s words stuck in his head, making him realize how important this was. He shook his hands out before walking down to the end of the hall.

The room was still dark. Dennie was sitting in a kitchen chair pulled close to the bed, trying to get Summer Grace to drink some tea.

“Come on, honey. You haven’t had anything but a little water since you got here.”

Summer Grace rolled over in the bed and turned her back to her friend. Jamie took a step into the room, and Dennie looked up when one of the old floorboards squeaked under his booted foot.

“Oh. You’re here.”

“Your grandmother asked me to tell you you’re going to her dinner meeting with her.”

“Her Red Hat Society? Right—it’s Monday.”

“Sounds like she meant it, Dennie.”

Dennie stood, pushing the cup of tea into his hands. “Okay, then. Guess I’m going. I guess . . .”

She gave him a sharp scowl before moving past him to leave.

“You Harper women are no joke.”

“No, we sure aren’t,” Dennie called over her shoulder as she retreated down the hall. “See you don’t forget that, Jamie.”

He nodded, understanding the unspoken warning to take care of Summer Grace—not that he intended to do anything else.

He stepped farther into the room. “Sweetheart, I know you’re awake and know I’m here. Turn over and talk to me.”

“Don’t you dare try to pull your Dom stuff on me right now, Jamie,” she muttered from under the heavy patchwork quilt that covered her from head to toe.

He moved closer and set the tea mug down on the small night table. “Damn it, Summer Grace.” He paused, making an effort to keep his voice low. “This has nothing to do with kink. There are no roles right now. This is just you and me, and I love you. Let me help.”

She rolled over and pulled the quilt off her face to glare at him, but in moments her face crumbled and, his heart twisting, he rushed to take her in his arms, a little surprised when she let him. She was crying, long, wrenching sobs, and he held her tighter—held her as tight as he could. It was a long while before she pushed away.

“Okay. I need to stop.” She hiccupped, wiped at her face with her sleeves, then with her hands. “I can’t do this, Jamie.”

“Can’t do what?”

She waved her hands. “This! All of this. Me falling apart and you coming to my rescue like I’m some broken doll. I
hate
this. I hate that you’re seeing this. I hate that you’re here now because it drives home even more that you won’t always be.”

“What? What do you mean?”

She pushed her tangled hair from her face and looked at him directly for the first time that day. Her voice was harder than he’d ever heard it. “Jamie. You left me, too, you know. Left me all alone when I lost Brandon, and then my family fell apart. You were gone.
Gone
. I chose to overlook that somehow, because I was too used to being enamored of you. But I see it now. I remember. So much for you being obsessed with carrying out Brandon’s dying wish.”

He felt like he’d been slammed in the chest with a sledgehammer. “Fuck, Summer Grace,” he said quietly. “Really? That was years ago. I was a sad, fucked-up kid myself. And now . . . now you’re going to hold that against me? To let it make up how you see me? I thought things were so amazing between us lately.” Anger was welling up in his chest, making his pulse throb hot in his veins, making his head ache. “You said you trusted me—how many times did you tell me that? But how much trust do you really have in me?”

“As much as I’m capable of, given that I lose everyone. Everything.”

He shook his head, his fists clenching at his sides. But when the tears slid down her cheeks unchecked, the anger drained away. This was the woman he loved. The woman whose entire history he knew—a history he shared. His shoulders fell as he swept her into his embrace. She fought him, squirming and pounding on his shoulders, his back, but he let it happen. He held her safe until she calmed down. There was more crying, but he knew she needed it. Finally he pulled back and helped her wipe her face with the soggy edge of the sheet.

“Baby. You’ve held so much in all this time. I know it’s because you’ve had to,” he told her. “And I know I could have been there for you, that I could have helped you get through it all. I thought I was the broken one—so damn broken I wasn’t good enough for you. And ultimately I held back with you because of that stupid crap in my head about being a death magnet—”

“Maybe I’m the death magnet, Jamie. First Brandon. Now Madame.”

“She was a
cat
. And she was old. And two losses in a lifetime don’t make you a death magnet.”

Summer Grace shook her head. “And three make you one? But Brandon . . . Jamie, I have to tell you . . .” She stopped, visibly swallowed a sob, but it was still in her voice when she continued. “We had a fight that morning. I was so selfish. So immature. I was totally in the wrong, and I was such a bitch to him when he was only looking out for me. That was the last conversation we had. And maybe if he wasn’t so pissed at me, so annoyed with me, or fuck,
hurt
by me, he would have seen that car coming.” She shook her head again, her gaze on her hands twisting the edge of the quilt. “It really wasn’t you who had some fault in Brandon dying. It was me.”

His heart broke a little at her words. At her self-condemnation. He knew that feeling too well.

“No, sweetheart. No, it wasn’t either of us. Just hearing you say that out loud makes me see it wasn’t me or you or
anything else
, and how mistaken I’ve been all this time in thinking it could have been my fault—Brandon or Ian or Traci losing the baby. It’s just the way the fucked-up world happens sometimes. But, Summer Grace . . .” He reached out and stroked her cheek and she looked up at him. He saw the remnants of tears glistening on the tips of her long lashes. “Sweetheart. I am so damn sorry. I should never have left you alone to deal with the whole mess. Maybe if I’d been there for you, if I hadn’t been so damn . . . afraid of myself, and what I thought I was, I would have been able to protect you from some of it—the pain and the loneliness and that sense of being lost. From all the times your life broke, then broke again. And I am more sorry than I can say that some of the times things broke it was because of
me
. But I let you down because I was too wrapped up in my own shit. And that wasn’t just when we were younger. It was right up until I saw you at The Bastille the first time. Not because you were there, or playing with someone else. But because it made me see myself through your eyes, and I wasn’t too happy with what I saw. I was the guy who disappointed you, who let you down. But when I saw you that night, I was also the guy who was done doing that.”

She was blinking fast, but not so fast that he didn’t see another tear escaping from her eye.

He wiped it with his thumb. “Don’t cry anymore. Come on, sweetheart. I’m trying to apologize.”

“I know you are. Just give me a minute to pull myself together and absorb everything.”

“Jesus on a cracker, you two.” Dennie stepped into the room.

“I thought you went with Annalee to her dinner,” Jamie said.

“Oh, we’ve been hanging out until we were sure Summer was okay. And I see she is. So now we’re really leaving—and leaving you two to work it out. But first I want to say this: I have never seen two people more in love. I’d kill to have what you have. Don’t fuck it up, okay?”

“I love you, Den,” Summer Grace said.

“I know you do, honeypie.” She turned and left the room, and they both held their breath until they heard the front door slam shut and the distant rumble of Annalee’s Cadillac.

Jamie stroked her hair, her cheek. He wanted to kiss her so badly, but he sensed they had more talking to do. That
she
had more to say. “Okay. Talk to me, baby. What do you need to tell me about what’s happened?”

She shrugged, but he could see she was turning ideas over in her mind. She bit her lip, opened her mouth to speak, then paused for several moments. Finally she started.

“When Brandon died it was . . . like the end of the world to me. He was my big brother. I worshipped him. My entire world revolved around him, maybe even my crush on you in the beginning.”

“What did Brandon have to do with a teenage girl’s crush on me?”

“You were the sun Brandon revolved around, Jamie, just like I revolved around him.”

He shook his head, ran a hand over his stubbled scalp. “No. There’s never been anything remotely sunshiny about me. Brandon was the one with the sunshine. Our whole group revolved around him. That’s why it hit everyone so hard when we lost him.”

She reached out and took his hand. “But not like it hit us—you and me. They were all hurt by it. We were both . . . destroyed by it.”

“You know,” he started, his tone low and soft, “I never knew how affected you were by Brandon dying. I thought maybe you were too young to really get it, but now I know better. You hid it so well.”

“I had to. My parents were so messed up. I felt everything falling apart. I needed to be the one who held it together.” Tears welled, and she let them pool in her eyes. “But I couldn’t do it, Jamie. I feel like . . . I failed. My family broke apart. Shattered into a million pieces, like some puzzle I couldn’t put back together. And I broke. I broke and you were too broken by it for me to lean on you.”

“But fuck, Summer Grace—that was my job. You should have told me how bad things were.”

“There were times I wanted to, but you weren’t really around after a while. You got married and I couldn’t talk to you then. Impossible. Because I loved you even back then, when I was sixteen years old. People say a teenager knows nothing about love, but I did. I knew.” She looked up, caught his gaze with hers. “I
knew
, Jamie. I still know.”

His throat was so tight with emotion he could barely get the words out. “Summer Grace. Goddamn it, I love you so much.”

He moved in to kiss her and she turned away with a sharp laugh. “I love you, too, but Jesus, Jamie—you can’t kiss me when I look like this.”

He grabbed her face in his hands, forcing her to look at him. “I can and I will. I want to. I want to kiss you all the time. I don’t fucking care if you’ve been sobbing for twenty-four hours straight, except that I never want that to happen again.”

He looked into her swollen eyes—they were the same cornflower blue. His girl’s eyes. He smiled at her for a moment before he moved in and kissed her. There was a small hiccup from her, then she gave in, her mouth going loose under his. Her arms twined around his neck and he pulled her closer, held her tight until he could really feel her, heartbeat to heartbeat.

He pulled back to ask, “Okay. What else are you mad at me about? Let’s get it all out of the way right now—get it over with.”

“I don’t think I’m mad anymore. At myself, maybe, but that’s just going to take some time. I should have faced this stuff years ago—or at least once I became an adult. I feel like I don’t really have an excuse. Except that it was all simply too big for me to deal with. I think . . . I think I’ve been afraid that if I let myself feel it, I’d end up like . . . well, like
this
.”

“But you survived it.”

“Only because of you and Annalee and Dennie.”

“Hell, I’m half the reason you ended up here. But in the end you survived it because of how strong you are.”

She tucked her hair behind one ear. “I don’t know about that. I think a lot of the strength I let people see is me covering up the part that’s too raw to show anyone.”