Bury the Hatchet (22 page)

I COULDN’T DECIDE
who I was angrier with: Tallie, for having gone to see Kade even though I’d made it perfectly clear there was no reason for her to involve herself with my asshole brother, or Kade, for having said a fucking word to Tallie about Carrie. My pulse was throbbing in my temples, a frantic beat that mirrored the way I wanted to pulverize something with my fists.

It pissed me off even more because I’d come home from practice ready to talk to Tallie about going to the game tomorrow and the Ice Breaker on Thursday, getting her involved with the other guys’ wives like she’d been wanting to do. I had hoped to start introducing her to that aspect of my life, and now this other side of things had blown up in my face.

Yes, I should have brought up the subject of Carrie with Tallie before now. This marriage might not be going anywhere in the long term, but at least for the time being, Tallie was my wife. She deserved to know these things so no one could blindside her with them. If it hadn’t been Kade, someone else would have likely let that cat out of the bag sooner rather than later. It just happened to be Kade who’d let loose with it, and it happened to go down sooner than I had been ready for. So even though my brother had no business saying a fucking word to Tallie about anything, part of the fallout was on me for not getting my act together and explaining my relationship with Carrie so there could be no misunderstandings.

If I’d been upfront about things, explaining all of this before Tallie and I had even gotten married, she wouldn’t have had any reason to doubt what I told her, and she would have known enough about my brother to steer clear of him. But since I hadn’t and she’d gone to him without a full understanding of who and what he was, there was no telling who she would believe.

If Kade had felt the need to bring Carrie up, I had no doubt he’d done so to get back at me for placing him in Horizons to begin with. He’d put up a hell of a fight when Dad and I had dragged him into the center, getting a few licks in against both of us before we’d finally subdued him. That just went with the territory with my brother. Depending on the day of the week and whatever he happened to be on, he somehow possessed a superhuman strength. We’d been lucky to get him into that facility at all, and I had no doubt he had been plotting his revenge against me the entire time he’d been there. He surely blamed me. He always had, since his very first stint in prison, because I’d been the one to call the cops and have him arrested. Never mind the fact that he was the one in the wrong.

Getting mad about anything my brother had done this time around wouldn’t help anything, though. I’d learned that lesson. What he’d done was done. All I could do now was try to fix those things that could be fixed and move on with whatever I could salvage of my life. That’s what I’d been doing for years. I’d become a master at it, or at least I liked to think so.

“What did he tell you? About Carrie?” I asked Tallie once I could find my voice again. It was possible that he’d only brought up my ex to explain about Kaylee and where she was now, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath about that.

She reached for the wine bottle on the counter, carried it to the table, and refilled her glass again. If she wasn’t careful, in no time she’d be as drunk as she’d been that day on the beach, especially since she’d barely eaten a bite of her dinner. Wine and an essentially empty stomach were not a good combination. Granted, it might help with the pain of the burn, but that didn’t mean she needed to go overboard.

“Enough,” she murmured after taking another sizeable swallow.

I didn’t want her drunk, and if she stopped now, she shouldn’t get to that point. At least I hoped so, because I wanted to have a reasonable, adult conversation. We needed to clear things up, and we both knew what alcohol did to her: it sent her libido into overdrive. I absolutely wouldn’t mind having a romp in the sheets with her, but I’d be damned if I would do it while she was drunk. Not going to happen.

I crossed over and collected the bottle, popping the cork back into place and setting it in the fridge.

“I wasn’t done with that,” she said.

“I think you are.”

She set her glass down and took a seat again, frowning. “You’re acting just like Lance. Trying to tell me what to do.”

That stung, but this conversation had nothing to do with him. She was just trying to deflect my attention from whatever she didn’t want to discuss, and I refused to allow that to happen. I sat across from her, drumming my fingers over the surface of the table to distract myself from her full, sexy lips and pouting eyes. “So he told you Carrie and I used to be a couple?” I ventured.

“Used to be?” Tallie raised skeptical eyebrows at me.

Fuck
. So much for the idea that he’d kept it to the parts relevant to himself. “If not that, what did he say?”

“I believe
fuck buddies
was the term he preferred for describing your relationship with her. I took that to mean
friends with benefits
, but considering the way he talked about the two of you together I’m not so sure I believe that was all it was. Seems like you’re a lot more than just friends.”

“We
were
. Past tense. He was just trying to get a rise out of you,” I argued.

“So you’re saying that’s not the sort of relationship you have with her? You don’t go home and sleep with her when you get a chance? You weren’t expecting her to come to—” Tallie pressed her eyes closed and shook her head. For some reason, my gaze settled on her neck. It was long and lean and utterly kissable. “Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter, because you and me? This is just temporary.”

To come to the wedding.
I could fill that part in easily enough. And I
had
been expecting Carrie, but not for that reason. If this marriage was truly going to only last a year, if there was nothing more between Tallie and me than an attempt to repair our images within the Tulsa community, why the hell did it make my heart pound like a stampede of wildebeests to know Tallie had found out about my ex in the worst possible way? Why did it matter to me if she knew? And maybe equally important, why was Tallie so upset by the revelation?

We were both getting in over our heads, and all we could do was tread water and try to conserve our strength to fight the rising tide of whatever the fuck was going on between us. The terrifying thing about it was that I couldn’t put it all down to lust. Not anymore. Yes, I wanted her and had since the day we’d first met, but whatever was happening between us had moved beyond the realm of mere sexual desire and into far murkier waters.

“I think it does matter,” I suggested, taking my time and weighing my words. That wasn’t something I was used to, thinking before I spoke, but now of all times, it seemed necessary.

“If it’s so important, why didn’t you tell me yourself? It’s not like you haven’t had the opportunity,” Tallie shot back, although there wasn’t much heat behind her words. She reached for her glass and finished it off before eyeing the fridge as though she wanted to go back for more. She stayed put, at least for now, turning those amber eyes back to me in a way that made me want to wrap her up in my arms. She looked as hurt as I’d ever seen her. “The fact is that every time I’ve tried to be involved in your life in any meaningful way, you’ve closed the door before I could get one foot through it. You don’t want me to know anything about Kade. You’ve never even hinted about the fact that you’ve got a niece, let alone that you’re in love with another wom—”

“Now hold on just a minute,” I interrupted, and her eyes went wide. “I’m not in love with Carrie,” I said emphatically. I couldn’t deny that I’d been keeping Tallie in the dark, even if her interpretation as to why I’d been doing so was off the mark, but I needed to make sure she understood where things stood between me and my ex.

Tallie’s expression was pure disbelief.

The urge to kiss her until she believed I could never feel that way about my ex hit me like a snow shower from a forward racing in at my net. “I’m not in love with Carrie,” I repeated. “She’s one of my best friends in the world, and I love her in that way—”

“And you sleep with her whenever you get the chance.”

“
No
,” I said, sighing. I leaned back in my chair, trying to figure out how best to explain our relationship. That was the problem, though. If I’d had a clue how to explain it, then I would have already done so, and it wouldn’t have mattered what Kade had told her. “It’s complicated,” I finally said, a feeble attempt if ever there was one.

“I’m listening.” She twirled the fingers of her uninjured hand over the tablecloth, tracing the patterns and staring at her fingers. I stared, too, wishing she were tracing those patterns on my skin instead of the fabric. Yeah, she was listening. But she didn’t want to hear what I had to say, that much was clear. At least there wasn’t anywhere either of us had to be tonight.

“I don’t know where to start.”

“How about when you and Carrie started dating?”

Fair enough. I crossed my ankles, trying to relax my body even if my mind was on high alert, watching her face for every reaction, however small.

“We were sixteen,” I said. “Well, technically I was sixteen and she was still fifteen. She’d been in my classes for years, and I’d had a crush on her for a while. Her birthday was coming up, so I finally screwed up my courage and asked her out on a date. I was so nervous about asking her that I almost puked in the process, but for some reason she said yes. We went to see
A Walk to Remember
. Huge mistake. She cried all over me in the theater. I should have taken her to an action flick, so she wouldn’t mind if I wanted to make out—which I did—but instead, she was using my shirt as a Kleenex.”

Tallie smiled. Just a little, but enough to warm me. I took that as a good sign.

“After that, we were officially a couple. Only she had a twin—Chantel. Everywhere Carrie went, Chantel tended to tag along. On the weekends, if Carrie came to my house to hang out, her sister came with her. Kade had already started using drugs at that point. Mainly pot, but occasionally he scored some cocaine. I tried to warn Chantel to stay away from him, but she didn’t listen. Carrie was always the goody two shoes out of the pair of them, and Chantel had always had a thing for bad boys. Carrie and I tended to be absorbed with each other, leaving Chantel as a third wheel. Before long, she was sneaking off with Kade, and he was getting her into all sorts of shit that she had no business messing with. But they weren’t dating. They weren’t serious. They just messed around. Or at least that was what Carrie and I thought, in the beginning. That all changed when Carrie and I came back from one of my games and walked in on Kade fucking Chantel when she was so high she didn’t have a clue what was going on. She had passed out, but he didn’t care.”

“She wasn’t even alert?” Tallie asked quietly. Her face had been a mask up until this point, other than that hint of a smile earlier, but now it was a whirlwind of emotions. “You mean he raped her.” She stated it calmly, concisely. She didn’t ask it as a question.

It wasn’t a question as far as I was concerned, either. “When you’re drunk, high, unconscious, or otherwise indisposed, you can’t consent,” I said pointedly. Tallie didn’t appear to follow my meaning, so I moved on. This was supposed to be about me and Carrie, not Tallie and her foray in a hot tub in Cancun. “That was essentially the end of me and Carrie as a couple,” I said. “No matter how much the two of us cared about each other—and we did, there’s no denying it—Kade and Chantel were always between us. The two of them didn’t have any such problem continuing as they had been. Chantel ended up dropping out of school, and the two of them were in and out of legal trouble for years, always together except when they had one of their knock-down, drag-out breakups, usually when she’d get pregnant. The first couple of pregnancies ended in miscarriages because of her drug use. She had an abortion at one point. Maybe more than that, but Carrie and I only know about the one. They both spent time in prison for drug busts and theft and God knows what else. They were in and out of rehab, but it never clicked for either of them, just like this time won’t click for Kade.”

Tallie opened her mouth, like she was going to interrupt and tell me that maybe I was wrong, maybe this time would do the trick. She didn’t know. She hadn’t been around for all those years. She hadn’t watched the cycle of addiction repeat itself time and again.

I kept going before she could get a word out. “Through it all, Carrie and I were still friends. I was trying to get my hockey career off the ground. She went to college and became a nurse. We’d get together sometimes to lean on each other, and yes, sometimes we ended up in bed. Neither of us wanted anything but the physical in those instances. There was never anything more to it than physical release because of all the frustrations our siblings caused. Our mothers were always trying to get us back together again, but Carrie and I didn’t want that. I wanted my career. She wanted hers. We leaned on each other, and that was that. And then one day, Chantel got pregnant again. That time, she and Kade both made the decision to go to rehab. It wasn’t something they were forced into; it was their choice. We all thought—hoped—it was a signal of them finally being ready to move on with their lives. They stayed clean throughout the pregnancy. Kaylee was born, and everything was looking good. It seemed like they had finally turned the corner and were going to be able to stay clean. For a while. None of us realized they were using again until it was too late. Chantel overdosed. Kade called 9-1-1, but it didn’t matter. She was dead by the time the ambulance arrived. They arrested Kade again, and the Child Protection Division took Kaylee away.”

“To live with Carrie,” Tallie finished for me.

“Not right away, but eventually. And after that, she was busy being a mom to our niece, not to mention grieving for her twin sister. I did what I could to support them both.” I saw a suspicious look come into Tallie’s eyes, and I hurried to curb her reaction before it could fully form. “Not by jumping into her bed. By sending money. By providing what I could. By being a shoulder Carrie could cry on when she needed to, and being a good uncle to Kaylee since her father can’t have anything to do with her. Kade was right about me inviting Carrie to the wedding, but it wasn’t to get her in my bed. It was because she’s part of my family, and I wanted her and Kaylee to be here.”