“Oh, bite me,” I murmured. “I’m in this mess because of you.”
He laughed. “What was I supposed to do? Tell my friend he can’t come for a visit because you’re afraid to be alone with him? It’s not like I knew that.”
I ignored Parker, setting the plates onto the counter and moving back toward the table. My voice stayed low so Emmett couldn’t hear us.
“I’m not afraid to be alone with him. There’s just no reason that I should be.” I held my stepbrother’s eyes, daring him to argue. “He’s here to visit you, not me.”
Wisely, he held his hands up and backed away.
Emmett finished drying a plate, the muscles flexing underneath the golden skin covering his forearms. Greer sidled up next to me.
“Maybe he kisses like a fish,” she whispered, “or he’s really bad in bed. Or has a tiny penis.”
“Gawd, that would be so sad,” I said without thinking.
She nudged me. “Why would it be sad if you don’t intend on being alone with him?”
My glare swiveled to my sister. She laughed, drawing Emmett’s attention back in our direction.
My family knew me too well. That was the problem.
Parker knew exactly why I didn’t want to be alone with Emmett.
Greer knew why I was trying to unearth some fatal trait that would make a girl run in the opposite direction.
Because something about this man always turned me upside down. And with the current state of my life, I needed it steady and sure-footed. There was absolutely no space to be disoriented by someone like him.
Someone, I reminded myself firmly, who had already hurt me once.
Emmett was, quite regrettably for him, my very first experience with an athlete who couldn’t see anything beyond his sport. Or least couldn’t see me, not in the big picture of whatever his football ambitions had been.
It was the reminder I needed, and it had my chest going a little tight. Nick might not have crushed my heart, but I was still feeling very, very tender.
So while he dried dishes and asked thoughtful questions and danced like a dream, while he had a jawline that was cut out of stone and biceps that you could balance a small child on, he still taught me a lesson that I hadn’t quite learned until it was too late.
It was impossible to force someone to make you a priority.
It was impossible to make someone feel the same way you did.
And it was impossible to force the stars to align when the timing wasn’t right.
And because I didn’t know exactly what Emmett’s priorities were these days, what stars were in alignment for him, I found myself in need of some fresh air. “I’ll be right back,” I said to the room at large.
My mom caught my eye from where she was reading a book. Her brows bent in concern, and I gave her an encouraging smile.
Parker and Cameron didn’t look up from whatever they were watching on TV, and Greer walked into the kitchen to show Emmett where the dishes went in the cupboards.
Even though I didn’t want to, I looked at him over my shoulder before I walked out the door, and there was a thoughtful expression on his face.
The log house where I grew up was smack dab in the middle of fifteen acres just outside of the town of Sisters, which was sandwiched between high desert and the Cascade Mountain range. Our backyard was jam-packed with towering fir trees, and even though we kept busy exploring the land when we were younger, one of the first things Tim did when they got married was to clear a bigger yard so he could build us the very best swing set any of us had ever seen.
When I cleared the bottom step on the front porch, I took a deep breath and found myself wandering over there. The equipment had been upgraded a few times over the years, so I trusted that it would hold my weight. I sat in the swing at the end and let my sneakers settle into the brown bark that covered the ground underneath.