Chapter4
900 Words
Christian POV
Brier had the particular look she reserved for things she intended to say, regardless of whether I wanted to hear them. I recognized it immediately upon walking into the foyer. She was leaning against the door frame with her arms folded, and her head tilted, and the expression on her face was the one she’d had since she was ten years old and had decided something needed to be addressed.
She looked me over, staring at my collar and working down.
“Your shirt.”
I checked. Dirt along one side, a missing button I hadn’t noticed earlier, and a smear near the hem that was probably from the last pole we rolled off the truck. The button had gone when Charlotte grabbed at my shirt during the fall, though I wasn’t going to say that out loud.
“Occupational hazard,” I said. “Charlotte needed an extra pair of hands. The yard’s a construction zone right now.”
“Charlotte left already?” Briar’s face fell just a fraction.
“I invited her to stay. She said she couldn’t.” I moved past her toward the stairs. “I’m going to shower before everyone arrives.”
“She looked nice when she walked out, didn’t she?” Brier said casually, the way she said things she’d been sitting on for a while.
I paused on the second step. “She cleaned up after working all day, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“That is not what I’m asking, and you know it.”
“Briar.”
“Christian.” She matched my tone precisely. “I’m not going to say it now. I’m going to save it for when you’ve had dinner and a glass of bourbon, at which point you will sit still and listen to me like a reasonable adult.” She turned back toward the kitchen. “Go shower. The turkey’s been in since noon.”
I went upstairs.
The room Brier kept for me faced the back of the property. I’d always liked that about it. The rear of the yard was untouched, the garden still dense and overgrown in the way that older LA properties sometimes were, full of sage and something climbing the back fence that nobody had ever successfully identified. Through the window, the slope behind the house was calm and ordinary. All the chaos was at the front.
I stood under the shower longer than I needed to.
Not because of the day, though it had been a full one. Not because of the negotiations, or the flight, or Adam’s voice in my ear reminding me that two weeks felt like a long time from the outside. I stood there because Charlotte Kaelions had hit my chest like a small catastrophe, and I’d held her steady, and then she’d tilted her face up, and her eyes were the kind of clear blue that made a man lose his reasoning if he wasn’t careful, and I had been very nearly not careful.
Contrary to what Brier wanted to believe, I wasn’t oblivious to women. I’d noticed plenty of them in the past four years. Notice them the same way you notice a song playing in another room distantly, without particularly wanting to move closer to it. Charlotte was different in a way I wasn’t interested in examining.
What I’d learned about grief was that love didn’t leave when someone died. It stayed exactly where it was, pressing against the inside of your chest with nowhere to go. Rachel was twenty-nine. We’d been married three years. I’d built the company because I needed to be somewhere to put all the energy that used to go toward her, and it had worked well enough that I’d kept doing it. Not as a strategy. Just because stopping felt worse.
The thought of opening that door again, of wanting someone and having them and then losing them, because that was always the risk, that was what love was actually made of, wasn’t something I’d been able to bring myself close to. Not yet. Maybe not at all.
I dried off, changed into jeans and a clean shirt, and heard a car pull up outside.
Milo found me before I made it to the bottom of the stairs.
He came around the corner at a dead run, six years old and completely committed to the trajectory, and wrapped both arms around my waist with enough force to knock the breath out of me if I hadn’t braced.
“I knew it,” he said into my shirt. “Mom said wait and see, so I knew.”
I crouched to his level. He was taller than the last time, genuinely taller, not the wishful thinking of a six-year-old with Lori’s eyes and a gap where his front tooth had recently been that gave his grin a slightly unfinished quality I found completely charming.
“Young man,” I said.
He stood up straighter immediately, shoulders back, chin up. Lori appeared behind him, laughing.
She stepped past her son and hugged me properly, her blonde hair finding its way into my mouth, same as always. “You look tired,” she said quietly, for my ears only.
“I’m fine.”
“You look tired,” she repeated, in the patient way that meant she was stating a fact and not opening a debate.
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