Until it wasn’t and she had, quite rightly, called him every name in the book, including some he’d never heard of, and stormed out.
And now his father was asking him to go back.
“Do this for your family. Do this for me,” Simon said, coming over to lay his hands on Rhys’s shoulders. “Go to Glynn Bedd.”
He was nearly thirty years old. He ran a successful business that he’d started all on his own, lived a life he loved, was a goddamn adult and did not need his father’s approval.
And still Rhys heard himself say, “Fine. I’ll go.”
“I told you not to go to a Solstice Revel, I told you they were nothing but trouble.”
Head still on the bar, Rhys lifted a hand to give his brother a double-fingered salute.
He heard Llewellyn sniff. “Well, I did.”
“Yes, and I ignored your brotherly advice to my peril, thank you, Wells, very helpful.”
He’d made his way back to the pub after his chat with Simon, and this time, he’d actually managed to have that pint.
Which was probably the only reason he’d confessed all to Wells. Not just that Da was sending him to Graves Glen, but about that summer nine years ago.
About Vivienne and all the ways he’d mucked it right up.
Rhys lifted his head to see that Llewellyn had moved over to the taps, pouring another pint that Rhys very much hoped was for him. This was clearly a Two Pint Conversation.
“Did you love her?” Wells asked.
Rhys fought very hard not to squirm on the barstool. His family didn’t usually go in for this sort of thing, talking about feelings and such. Wells didn’t even have feelings, as far as Rhys could tell, and any emotions Bowen might have were reserved for whatever it was he was doing out there in the mountains.
“I was twenty,” he said at last, draining the rest of his lager. “And it was summer, and she was beautiful.”
So beautiful. And so bloody sweet. He’d felt like someone had hit him solidly in the chest when he’d seen her there at the Solstice Revel, standing under a violet sky, a flower crown crooked on her head. She’d smiled at him, and it had been . . .
Instant. Irrevocable.
A fucking disaster.
“I . . . felt . . . ,” he said now, remembering, “as though I might . . . have loving feelings.”
St. Bugi’s balls, that had been hard. How did people just go about talking like this all the time?
Wells folded his arms on the bar, leaning in. He had their father’s slightly austere features and a sort of resting glare face that Rhys had always found a little alarming, but his eyes were the same clear blue as Rhys’s own. “Maybe you won’t even see her,” Wells offered. “You’ll just be there for what? A day, maybe two?” His smirk turned wry. “That’s about the maximum you can give to one location, correct?”
Ignoring the jab, Rhys nodded. “I’m going to leave tomorrow. Founder’s Day is the day after. Get in, charge the lines, get out.”
“Easy-peasy, then,” Wells said, spreading his hands, and Rhys nodded again even as another vision of Vivienne’s tear-stained face seemed to float in front of him.
“The peasiest.”
Chapter 3
The stack of papers on Vivi’s desk was screaming.
Well, wailing, really, a sort of high-pitched shriek.
Frowning, she turned away from her computer and the email she’d been sending her department head to study the papers there on the corner as they emitted a high sort of wailing sound.