Over the Hills and Far Away (NOLA's Own #1) (19 page)

I gave him an are-you-fucking-kidding-me sort of look. “No. I don’t think about
him
when I’m with you.”

“Don’t be mad. I just sort of needed to know.”

“I’m not mad,” I snapped. “Just completely uncomfortable.” I was totally mad.

“I don’t want you to be uncomfortable either. I just needed to know—”

Sitting up, I pulled on my underwear. “When I’m with you, Brian, I’m with you all the way, okay?”

He pulled me into his arms. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I told him, but I still got up and got dressed.

“Are you leaving?” he asked, surprised.

I had planned to spend the night, but now, I was thinking about Phil, and it didn’t feel right thinking about him while I was here.

“Yeah, I’m going to head home—”

“No, no, don’t go! I’m sorry, Kenna. I don’t want you to leave.”

Kissing him softly on the lips, I said, “I know, but I think I need to be alone right now.”

Brian looked so crushed. “I’m sorry I asked. It was stupid of me. Please stay. I’ll never mention him again.”

“I just need some time to myself, Brian.”

He swallowed thickly but nodded. “Okay.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I told him, throwing my bag over my shoulder.

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Our relationship was three months deep by this time. The fact was, it wasn’t easy for me to just be friends with Brian. A part of me truly wanted to have more with him. Besides the facts that he was almost too good-looking and phenomenal in bed, he had a beautiful soul. He was smart and funny, and we never ran out of things to talk about. He had a noble calling to help people in need. And I knew he was faithful to me even though he technically didn’t have to be. I’d developed strong feelings for him. There was no way I could have avoided that.

Brian was the type of guy every woman dreamed of one day meeting and making him fall in love with her. Any woman would kill to have him as her man.

What the hell am I waiting for?

Am I really waiting on some stupid adolescent hope that Phil fucking Deveraux will come back for me one day?

Who am I kidding? Well, myself, obviously.

We’d had our moment nearly six years ago, and an erotic song that might or might not have been written by him with me in mind.

I thought of the look on his face the last time we had seen each other and the panic I had seen in his eyes when I’d realized I had to let him go. The fact that he’d nearly jumped off the stage into the crowd to reach me…

“Namaste.”

Just how long am I expected to wait? When is enough, enough? Is what I feel for Phil even real? Am I deluding myself into thinking it could actually happen one day? Was finding that picture of us as children a mere coincidence? What…what about what Mom said?

“You met him—The One.”

I put on “A Madman’s Love Letter” as I drove home.

The one thing, the only thing Brian didn’t have was…
this voice
. And it was the sound of
this
voice
my soul craved more than anything.

Listening to it, to
him
, I could almost imagine that it was what love sounded like. It was the sound of my own sense of love.

Is it even possible that I could just let that go?

The next day, a quiet warm afternoon with the promise of a storm in the distance, I gave Brian a call. He ended up driving over since I’d left my cigarette case at his place. Grandma opened the door for him when he knocked, and no lie, she looked as enchanted with him as I had been the night we met.

Brian and I headed out back to the porch and each took a seat.

“I don’t have a problem continuing on as we have as long as you’re happy,” I told him.

For some reason though, I was looking toward the Plantation House and not at him. The sky behind it was the color of a deep bruise. There was a cool breeze coming from that direction, the storm rolling in.

“Okay. I want that, too.”

Now, I turned to face him, and he really was just so fucking gorgeous that my breath hitched in my lungs. I loved the way the daylight played up the green bits in his irises.

“I’m going to be honest though. I feel really confused, conflicted, inside my head about this. I might need to take a step back from it for a little bit, put a little distance between us. I know I have strong feelings for you.”

He smiled, and I felt a mild ping zip though my chest. “I have some pretty strong feelings for you, too, Kenna.”

He thought this was a good thing, but I just couldn’t feel that way because I knew that if it ever came down to it, I would always choose to give Phil a chance. If Phil came walking back into my life tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter that Brian and I had strong feelings.

Yeah, but what are the chances that will ever happen?

“You deserve someone who is willing to give you one hundred percent, Brian. You’re an amazing man, and I can’t help but wonder why you’d choose to have a half-ass relationship with me, over finding someone who is ready for what you’re offering.”

“Maybe I’m just hoping that, one day, you’ll wake up and realize that what I’m offering is actually what you want.”

I nodded. “It’s not out of the realm of possibility. You make it incredibly difficult for me to keep my feelings in check. But…if that day doesn’t come, you have to move on. We have to keep it in mind that this is temporary.”

“Until you change your mind.”

I gave him a sad smile. “A part of me really hopes I will.”

He glanced around the backyard for a moment before asking, “So, I guess you won’t be coming over tonight then?”

“I think I really just need some time to think things over.”

Nodding, he said, “All right.”

Not long after he’d left, Grandma pottered to the back porch and took his empty seat. “Phew! What a gorgeous man you’ve got there, Kenna. If I were sixty years younger, I’d make a meal out of him!”

That cracked me up. “We’re just friends,” I told her.

“The hell you are. The way he was looking at you, it fair caught my panties on fire.”

Brian Murray, a man so hot that he sets granny-panties aflame,
I thought with a case of twitchy lip.

“He
is
pretty good in the sack.”

“I bet he is. Why are you two only friends then?”

Why indeed?
“Because I’m just not ready for more right now.”

“Well, when you’re finished, I wouldn’t mind a crack at him.”

Ripping a very unladylike snort of laughter, I told her, “I don’t think he could handle you, Grandma.”

By mid-August, work at the clinic was in full swing. It was certainly more work than Gavin and I could handle on our own, but there weren’t many people available with our credentials. We’d contacted all of our fellow students in our graduating class, but they had really good jobs as well. Rita was working her own bony ass off. She was looking for, at the very least, a decent deep-tissue massage therapist to join our team.

Things with Brian had steadily grown stronger, and I hadn’t backed off as much as I had in the past with him. It was becoming more and more comfortable thinking of him as, if not my boyfriend, then certainly the guy I was dating. We’d even started holding hands, like, in public. He made me happy.

Lili had proven to be pretty civil about it. I thought Alys had told her to back off and shut up about Phil. I couldn’t say she’d accepted it, but it wasn’t as though she didn’t like Brian.

In any case, Brian and I wouldn’t spend much time together during the week, but we practically lived together on the weekends, and it had gotten so much sweeter between us. This weekend, however, I was staying home with my girls. Brian had to work the late shifts tonight and Saturday night. Even if he wasn’t though, I’d be hard-pressed to go to his place this weekend.

The past few days, Grandma had been complaining of feeling cold. It was fucking August in New Orleans. Cold had no business being here at this time of year. It was sweltering.

She’d refused to go to the hospital, but she’d agreed to go to the doctor next week, and I had gotten her an appointment on Tuesday with her practitioner. In the meantime, in an attempt to warm her up a bit, I’d made her favorite super spicy seafood gumbo, which had turned out to be a little too spicy. Even Lili’s Hispanic eyes had started watering, and she’d glistened with a sheen of spice-induced sweat.

Draping Grandma in some blankets, Alys, Lili, and I plopped down on the couch and watched
Gone with the Wind
, her favorite movie. Lili busted out our three-foot Pyrex bong, Sir Speedy—
he gets the job done
—and the four of us got nice and baked. I loved watching Grandma hit the bong. There was something so wrong yet so completely right about it at the same time.

Ever since the day she’d asked me to stop hiding the weed, she and I had opened up to one another. I’d always known she loved me, but my mother had always been the true love of her life. It was as though the love she had had for Mom had transferred a bit over to me now, and I felt that level of cherishment. It was good to feel that again.

Cold or not, Grandma seemed to be in a happier frame of mind than she had been in years. She’d started to let go of her grief last year, and it’d lifted the heavy sense of depression that had been hanging around the place for the last six years.

We were all a bit teary-eyed and sniffly when the movie ended.

“I think I’m going to head to bed, dears,” Grandma told us.

Alys helped her to stand while I gathered the extra blankets for Grandma to have in bed with her.

“’Night, Grandma Betty,” chimed Lili cheerfully.

I followed Grandma back to her bedroom next to the staircase with my arms full of blankets.

“I don’t know why I’m so cold.” She sighed.

“Well, we’ll find out next week. You feel all right, otherwise, yeah?”

“I do. Nothing hurts, not even my back.”

She was slow to crawl into bed though, looking stiff and weary. I tucked the extra blankets around her, wrapping one around her shoulders. I had a few theories myself about how and why she felt chilled, but I would rather have an unbiased physician take her vitals and draw some blood for testing.

“Will you stay with me awhile?” she asked.

I happily lay down next to her, resting my arm across her abdomen.

After a few minutes of silence, she said softly, “I miss your mother. I’ve been feeling it more and more as of late.”

“But you seem so much happier,” I said.

“I have been. It’s been a joy, having this time with you and Alys and Lili, too. I’ve watched you girls become beautiful young women…especially you, Kenna. I’m so proud of you, of everything you’ve accomplished for yourself.”

“Thanks, Grandma.”

“You know that I love you, don’t you?”

I hugged her a little more tightly, not much though. She had gotten quite frail.

“Yes. I love you, too.”

She grew quiet again, and after a little bit, I wondered if she had fallen asleep. Shifting my weight slightly, I was about to get up when she took a deep breath.

“Kenna?”

“Yeah, Grandma?”

“Whatever it is you’re waiting for…it’s going to happen—and soon, too.”

“Wha-what?” I was not even sure I’d heard her correctly, but my heart started to race, and blood rushed loudly to my ears.

“Your mother was convinced that from the time you’d met the little Deveraux boy, he was the only one for you, and you were meant for him.”

“Mom had a lot of convictions—”

“And they all came true, didn’t they?”

“She wasn’t psychic, Grandma!”

“She was something though. She knew before her heart was dying that it would be what failed her. She knew it years in advance. She knew the day she met your father that she was going to have his daughter. She always knew so much. It was something she learned from her father.”

Grandma rarely spoke of her late husband. I thought the day he’d died, he had taken a part of her with him. She never had a serious relationship with another man after him, had never wanted to be with anyone other than Morgan Craddock. She had had a beau here and there—I never said she hadn’t needed to get laid—but nothing had ever gone beyond having a bit of fun and sex. Morgan always had—would
always
have her heart.