That was worse than her ire. So much worse. Seeing her defeated ripped through me like talons to rice paper walls. Reluctantly, I released her. “What do you need?”
She wrapped her arms around her torso tighter, glancing out at the dark window. “I just need some time, I think.”
I drew in a breath, and it actually hurt, dammit. Everything hurt because I hadn’t realized how deeply my stupid secret would wound her. “I’ll head out, then.” For a second, I hoped she would tell me to stay. But then she nodded, and my heart plummeted. “Don’t leave the chili on the stove, though. It’ll burn and then you’ll start a fire, and you might lose that antique couch of yours.”
The barest hint of a smile twitched at her lips. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have tried to… hurt you back.”
I wanted to tell her that she couldn’t hurt me. I had been slowly ingesting Arabella’s spicy taunts over the course of almost twenty years. I was immune. She was perfect. Instead, I shook my head. “I’d have earned it. I’ll check in tomorrow.”
She still wouldn’t look at me. Wrapped up in that huge sweater and holding herself together, small and fragile, she stared out the window and nodded absently. “Thanks.”
Nothing compared to the torment of turning and leaving her. I’d run in a Tough Mudder race last spring, and the knee-high mud and lung-busting obstacles had nearly done me in. But even that didn’t compare to the strength it took me to turn on myheel, leave Arabella Spencer alone with tears in her eyes, and walk out of that house knowing she would cry.
Nothing had been more painful because I had only myself to blame.
Chapter twenty-eight
Arabella
Icried ugly tears. Chest-wrenching, throat-burning, snotty tears that I hadn’t released for more years than I cared to count. Sure, I’d gotten teary-eyed now and then, and I’d always managed to stuff them back down. But after Spencer left, I was finally left to feel on my own. And my God, did I feel.
It wasn’t just Spencer. He had been the catalyst—the last ignominy before they had all piled too high, gotten too heavy, and had crushed my resolve to be strong. I wilted under all of it. My mother’s betrayals. Betrayals from high school, from friends, from people who had claimed to care for me and then left me the minute my mother deemed them a threat. She’d offered them money, too, the ones she hadn’t liked. They’d left faster than I could call out for them.
Spencer’s secret was a small thing in the long run—an honest miscalculation on his part. But although it was the barest whiff of betrayal, it had unlocked all the others. It had reminded me of deeper hurts, and try as I might, I couldn’t stop my body from reacting like I had back then. In fact, the worst part, I assumed,was that I hadn’t reacted to previous betrayals at all. But Spencer was safe. He was good. He was—or had been—mine, and so for the first time, I’d felt allowed to react.
The chain reaction was hideously emotional.
I cried in my bedroom, wrapped in quilts that smelled like him because he’d slept in my bed the night before. And then, when my tears had calmed and I could breathe normally again, my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten all day. I trudged out to the kitchen to find homemade chili and cornbread. And then I cried into a bowl of it because it was really fucking good and he was really wonderful, and I didn’t know how to separate my fears of never being enough from the real, tangible evidence that he did think I was enough.
At some point, I ran out of tears, but it left me empty. I didn’t know how to feel anymore. I didn’t know how to connect with Spencer in a way that wasn’t tinted with pity or bribing or schemes. I felt so terribly pathetic. My older brother had bribed Spencer to rescue me. Spencer had come here knowing I was sick and needing help. And despite all of that, the cruelest part was that I loved him.
I was in love with Spencer.
Even thinking it, let alone saying it out loud, made me want to vomit. To be that vulnerable with someone else, to give them room to someday stomp on my damaged heart—it frightened me. I’d had so many disappointments already. I didn’t think I could take fully loving and then losing Spencer. It would break me.
I grew tired of my thoughts, eventually, and I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke the next morning, my eyes were crusty from dry, salty tears, and my tongue was sandpaper against my mouth. The insistent beeping from my phone had jarred me awake, and I groaned, pulling it out from under my leg where I’dtucked it last night. I shut off the alarm and stared vacantly out of the dark gray windows.
The sun hadn’t even tried to peek out this morning. Gray, gloomy clouds covered the sky before disappearing behind the jagged peaks of the mountain range. A shiver rocked through me. I hadn’t even stepped outside, and I could feel the snow coming. That was just what my empty, scarred heart needed—a snowstorm to inject my veins with icy fear.
I didn’t have time for that. I had no idea how to go forward anymore, but I had to try. I forced myself off the couch and to the coffee maker, and the smell of strong brew brought me back to a semblance of control. It was like the emotional purge had left me devoid of everything—thoughts, energy, feelings, motivation. I was a shell, filling myself with coffee and hoping it would churn some life back into me.
I got dressed, skipping the shower and wrangling my short hair into a rough ponytail instead, and just as I was zipping up my coat to trudge outside, the unmistakable, squeaky crunch of tires on snow sounded from the driveway. My heart did a double flip. I wasn’t sure I was ready to see Spencer yet. And at the same time, I longed to see him. But I wanted it to be like it had been before, with laughter and bear hugs. I decidedly did not want to see the sympathy and anguish that had been on his face last night when he’d realized how much he had hurt me.
I thunked my forehead against the door. “Don’t be a squishy scrotum,” I chastised myself. “Be brave.”
I opened the door just as a large, gas-guzzling kind of SUV came to a stop in front of my garage, and I realized with a mix of relief and disappointment that it wasn’t Spencer. The driver's door opened first, and a stunning woman hopped out of her seat, her petite frame wrapped tightly in a tailored, black peacoat and her black pumps winking in the sunlight. Her short, black bob slid like silk as she pushed her hair behind her ear, andshe removed a pair of sunglasses as she turned to face me. She looked polished. Professional. Eerily lethal, actually.
As I came down the steps of my porch, she gave me a dazzling smile. “Are you Arabella Rook?”
“I am,” I replied warily.
She surveyed the ground, found a spot on my walkway that was the least snowy, and crunched over to hold out her hand. “I’m Azura Brady. I’m with Brady, Brady, and Hawke.”
I took her hand, and panic clawed up my throat. Had the Scotts already begun to retaliate? “Hi.”
A man got out of the passenger side of the car. He was wearing a black leather jacket over his tall, trim frame. Bodyguard? He looked like a bodyguard. His light brown hair and gentle smile were unassuming, but there was something in the way he carried himself as he moved to the back of the car that reminded me of the way Spencer moved. Athletic and a little too energetic. But he was ignoring us, opening the back hatch and rummaging through it instead.
Azura recaptured my attention by saying, “I hope you don’t mind an unscheduled meeting, but your brother, Dr. Rook, told me about your troubles. I’m the one who contacted Eli on your behalf.”
