All Wrapped Up (A Pine Mountain Novel) (26 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

Ava got all the way to the threshold of Pete and Lily’s cozy lakeside cottage before her good old-fashioned cry became an out and out grief quake.

“Holy shit, Ava. What’s the matter? You sounded awful on the phone. Are you hurt?” Her brother tugged her gently over the frost-covered boards of the porch, worry blazing in his green eyes. He followed his top-to-toes visual
assessment with a gentle sweep of his hands over the arms of her thin wool sweater. “And where the hell is your coat?”

God, she hadn’t even felt cold. Not from the weather anyway. “I, uh . . . I don’t know. And, no. I’m not hurt.”

The lie scorched a path past her lips, but Pete looked panicked enough as he brushed the sleep out of his eyes to give her a third look-see in as many minutes. No
matter the provocation during their rough and rocky upbringing, Ava had never let Pete—or anyone—see her cry this hard. Not when she’d accidentally broken their father’s favorite beer mug and he’d “accidentally” broken her arm in return. Not when she’d spent holidays with Nadine’s huge, loving family only to yearn wholeheartedly for one to call her own. Not even when she’d watched the sun break
over the horizon from the deck of that early morning ferry on the day she’d left Sapphire Island seven years ago.

The bone-deep pain that had replaced everything in her chest when Brennan kicked her out of the Double Shot had put all that other hurt to shame before she’d even made it to her car.

Ava stuttered out a sigh. “I’m really sorry. I know it’s nearly ten, and you guys get up so early
to open the bakery, but . . .”

Pete cut off her apology with a wave, leading her down the hall to his brightly lit kitchen. “Lily sleeps like a prizefighter going down for the count. She barely even budged when my cell phone rang. And I don’t care about the bakery.”

Ava’s lips parted over no sound, and her brother shook his head as he pulled a high-backed farmhouse chair from the table in
invitation. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. Running the Sweet Life means a lot to me. It’s the career I always wanted. But it’s a place, Ava. People are more important.”

Hell if
that
didn’t prompt a fresh round of tears from her mutinous eyes.

“Yeah.” She slapped at her cheeks with the back of one hand, forcing herself to get it together as she tucked her legs beneath the cranberry-colored tablecloth.
“I might’ve missed that memo.”

“I’m sorry.” Pete sat across from her, scrubbing a hand over his five o’clock shadow. “But I’m afraid you lost me.”

Ava inhaled a rickety breath, and exhaled the pocket version of her life’s events over the course of the past few weeks. While gabbing freely about her love life with her overprotective and under-restrained brother had never ranked particularly
high on her list of sure-let’s-do-that, Ava hadn’t thought twice about calling him tonight. She’d done enough damage in the past by keeping her feelings inside, and she had to admit, Pete was a surprisingly good listener when he wanted to be.

“Jesus,” he murmured, blowing out a slow breath across the table. “What happened after he told you to leave?”

Ava slumped in her chair, but didn’t deny
the truth. “Well, since my menu of options had exactly one crappy selection, I left. To be honest, it all happened really fast. I didn’t mean for him to find out the way he did.”

She’d been waiting to tell Brennan about the story—and Gary’s subsequent ultimatum—until after they left the Double Shot for the night. Upsetting him at work wouldn’t have helped matters, plus, she’d thought maybe if
she had a little time to really think about it, she’d come up with some way to make things right.

But then she’d been so mired in looking for a Hail Mary in that damned report that Brennan had taken her by surprise, and yeah . . .

Now they all knew the unhappy ending to that story.

Frowning, Pete eyeballed the fresh round of tears clinging to her lashes. “Do you want me to go down there
and break his legs?”

Ava coughed out an involuntary laugh. Okay, so maybe Pete wasn’t
entirely
a calm, cool listener. “Thanks, I think, but no. If anyone deserves blame, it’s me.”

“I’m not sure that’s quite true.” Pete pushed back from the table, moving over to the stove with practiced, comfortable strides.

“Please.” Ava’s heart twisted against her breastbone, but it was past time to face
the truth. “For the last two weeks, I’ve been writing a story about the one thing he’s been trying to hide for the last two and a half years. I should’ve told him.”

“Maybe. But you wanted to write the story to show him what he meant to you. Telling him would’ve defeated the purpose.”

Before Ava could open her mouth to argue, her brother gave her a dead-certain look that told her he knew of
what he spoke. “Trust me on this one. Sometimes stories need to be shown. And you had no way of knowing everything that happened at that fire. You didn’t intend to hurt him.”

“I still stand by the story I wanted to tell. Brennan is . . .”
Amazing. Courageous. Gone.
“Worthy of the recognition,” she choked out. “But he went so far as to leave his hometown to try to get away from what happened
there. And now everyone will know about his past.”

“Hmm. I’m no expert,” Pete said, pulling a carton of milk from the fridge, “but it seems to me that hiding from your past isn’t usually the best plan for coping with it. Especially if it’s tough.”

And didn’t they both know that firsthand? After all, leaving Philadelphia sure didn’t kill the demons that had been born there, either for her or
her brother. Still . . . “Yeah, but he’s not some dirtbag covering up a scam or a scandal. Exposing him like this isn’t right.”

Pete tipped his head in a nonverbal
okay, you’ve got me there
. “What about your original article? The one you wrote before you knew about Mason? If you stand by it like you said, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing to let Gary run it.”

Ava’s mind clicked back to
the piece she’d spent the last two weeks fitting together, bit by meticulous bit. “I
do
stand by it. Or I did. I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter anyway. Gary wants more sensationalism. He wants the dirty details of that fire front and center on page one, and he won’t settle for anything less.”

“Now there’s someone whose legs deserve to be broken. Asshole,” Pete muttered, sliding a deep-bellied
coffee mug from the cupboard at his shoulder.

“Asshole or not, he’s got me by the hair. Either I write this article with all the gory particulars right there for the world to see, or he will.” The trembling she’d been able to keep at bay worked its way back into her chest, rising up to claim her voice as she continued.

“At least if I write it, there’s a chance I can help Brennan save a little
face. Anything Gary churns out will be astronomically worse. Even if he has to work his ass off to get it done.”

At least she had a tiny bit of leverage there. It would take all of Gary’s questionable brainpower to get a story like this done in twenty-four hours from scratch. His code of ethics might be anorexic, but he still had to research and fact-check just like everyone else.

“What about
Brennan?” Pete asked, coming back to the table with a mug in each hand.

Ava’s eyes filled with tears, and seriously, she was never going to get anything fixed with her idiot face leaking like this. “What about him?”

“Any chance he’ll hear you out once he’s calmed down?”

“No.” Her heart ached at the admission, but hating reality didn’t make it any less true. Or any less deserved. “I never
meant to hurt him. But I still did. I only wanted to stay close to you and Lily, and to tell Nick’s story with integrity. He’s . . .” Her throat clenched, but she willed the words to life. “He deserves nothing less. I just didn’t know that telling it would do more harm than good.”

Her brother placed the mug full of milk and graham crackers in front of her at the table, fixing her with a bittersweet
smile. “You’re always going to be close to me and Lily, Ava. We don’t need to be in the same place for that.”

Ava nodded. Despite the two years Brennan had spent in Pine Mountain, he and his sisters had slid right back into place as if the distance didn’t matter. And when family truly cared about each other, and loved each other no matter what, the distance really
didn’t
matter.

She and Pete
were too close to let anything come between them.

“I know,” she whispered. “People are more important, right?”

“Now you’re catching on.”

Ava dropped her chin, and not even the spicy-sweet scent of warm cinnamon and rich milk could comfort the ragged hole in her heart. “I just wish I’d slowed down long enough to realize that before it was too late.”

Pete leaned in to kiss the crown of her
head. “You’ll find an answer with this article. You always respect the story in front of you.”

The words trickled into her brain, and God, that phrase was so familiar.... “Say that again?”

“What? You’ll find an answer with this article?”

Ava cranked her eyes shut, grasping at voices, memories. “No. The other part.”

“Oh. You always respect the story,” her brother said. “I mean, I know your
choices for this one kind of suck, but . . .”

Ava’s memory kicked to life in a single, beautiful instant, and she stood up from the table in a rush of impulse and absolute certainty.

“My choices might be difficult, but Brennan’s right. I
do
have them. And it’s far past time that I made the right call on this one, once and for all.”

Brennan had never wished for a crush of pre-New Year’s Eve revelers—or better yet, a raucous bachelor party for a double wedding—so hard in his life.

Of course, it was closing time, and the Double Shot was painfully empty. Just like every ounce of space in Brennan’s chest. Two days from now, everyone in Pine Mountain would know exactly who he was. His job. His secrets. His past.

And there
wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

“Here.” Adrian’s voice delivered Brennan back to the Double Shot, the familiar
clink
of glass on wood snagging him back behind the bar.

“What’s this?” Brennan slid a skeptical stare at the two shot glasses full of whiskey lined up neatly across the wood, the half-full bottle of Crown Royal sitting next to them like a bookend with really bad intentions.

“For a bar manager, you kind of suck at this. But we can work on your skills later. Right now, you look like you could use a stiff drink.”

The words
I’m fine
spun up from the defenses long programmed into Brennan’s repertoire, but he bit them in half as he picked up one of the shot glasses. “You’re the boss.”

The whiskey burned a straight path from belly to balls, lighting up all five of
his senses like the Fourth of July before settling in a hard tingle at the back of his neck.

Brennan shuddered in an effort to recalibrate. “Shit.”

“Yup.” Adrian placed his now-empty shot glass on the bar without missing a beat. “Teagan locked the front door on her way out, and Jesse just took off for the night. So are we talking about this?”

“No.” Bitterness that had nothing to do with
the whiskey flooded his mouth, and hell—some defenses never died.

“Okay.” Adrian poured another round, but Brennan’s hand fell just short of the glass. As tempting as it was to literally drown his sorrows, he’d learned a long time ago that going numb didn’t take care of his problems.

Brennan paused. “There’s a lot of stuff you don’t know about me. It’s all going to hit the fan in a couple
of days, and I’m not sure how it’ll play out.”

“Does it have anything to do with this?” Adrian held out a crumpled printout, the title blazing, R
ESCUE
S
QUAD
H
ERO
S
TARTS
O
VER IN
P
INE
M
OUNTAIN
, and sweat dotted Brennan’s brow.

“Where did you get that?”

“I found it on the floor under Ava’s table after she left. Two minutes after you inventoried the walk-in. For the third time tonight.”

Ah,
fuck. There was no sense in trying to get out of this now. Adrian was the most freakishly intuitive guy he knew. Except maybe for Captain Westin.

Brennan ran a finger around the shot glass, but opted for pouring himself a Coke instead. “I used to be a firefighter.”

“Something tells me that’s not quite past tense, considering how you pulled Matthew Wilson out of Joe’s Grocery a few weeks ago.”

“I was injured on the job,” Brennan said, although it was a hell of a sugarcoat. “And I left under bad circumstances. So, yeah. There’s no going back.”

“You know I respect you, right?” Adrian tossed back Brennan’s shot of whiskey without breaking eye contact, and Brennan nodded without thought.