She wouldn’t look back. No matter how much it hurt.
Chapter Two
Smith sat on an ugly couch in the living room of his oldest brother’s house and did his best to pretend it wasn’t crushing him second by second to be anywhere near reminders of the woman who’d given birth to him. Angela Griffith had died a few months ago and left her house to Cash, not Reid. A situation that nagged him with curiosity, but one that he had no right to ask about unless he wanted to open up to the two of them.
The discomfort of grief he had no business feeling weighed heavily, so he did his best to focus on anything else. And the one subject that continued to come back to him made him hide a small smile.
Erin Briggs.
He’d introduced her to Tilly yesterday. The old lady had told him to wait outside her apartment and slammed her door in his face. Twenty long minutes later, Erin had stepped out of Tilly’s apartment looking shell-shocked. But she’d accepted Tilly’s terms and asked him to move her things into Mrs. Fine’s living room. He’d left it stacked with boxes and a few dressers, sparingly little to fill up the place.
Overwhelmed and annoyed with Erin’s effusive gratitude, he’d hustled away before she teared up again or worse, made him want to offer comfort, which still baffled him. Smith didn’t take to strangers and generally didn’t like people. What the hell had he been thinking to help Erin into anything but a plane trip back to Kansas?
He burned to know what Tilly had said to convince Erin to stay and planned to take it up with the crank pot later, when he wasn’t so glutted with “family.”
“So, you’re more quiet and morose than usual.” Jordan Fleming, Cash’s girlfriend and Smith’s coworker, plunked down in the chair near him and guzzled from her beer bottle.
Smith liked her. Jordan was real. An ex-Army MP who didn’t tolerate anyone’s shit, she’d taken him down once for talking smack. He respected her for it. At one time he’d considered asking her out. She was cute in a rough-and-tumble kind of way. But even then he’d seen something sparking between her and Cash. Though it would have amused him to fuck with the guy, he didn’t want to hurt Jordan.
He snorted. “Do you get bonus points for using a word like ‘morose’? I didn’t think you Army types knew how to read.”
She smiled through her teeth at him. He bit back a grin; it wouldn’t help his cred to look amused or happy being anywhere near his brothers and their girlfriends.
“You’re really giving me crap about being stupid? You’re a Marine. I thought you guys walked around grunting and dragging your knuckles on the ground.”
He glanced up as Cash entered the room. “Well, some of us fit that stereotype, sure.”
Cash grunted.
“See?”
Jordan coughed. “Um, well, ah, what’s up, Cash?”
He glared at Smith, who glared right back, before answering, “Something’s beeping in there, and you told me to keep my hands off your food.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Well, maybe because I accidentally knocked the timer into the sink.”
She frowned then jumped up from the chair. “Oh, the chicken.” She rushed past him, shoving Cash in Smith’s direction on the way. “Be nice,” she growled and disappeared into the kitchen.
Smith just sat, staring at his brother.
Hisbrother.
He’d grown up thinking he was an only child, the product of a questionable accidental pregnancy, according to his ex-mom, Margaret Ramsey. Good old Meg had never liked him, and up until eight months ago, he’d never understood why. A petite blond with ice blue eyes, she didn’t look much like Smith. Brittle and angry all the time, she loved nothing more than to tell him he’d never measure up. Never be as good as his amazing, successful, hard-working cousins.
No matter how hard he worked or how he tried to make her love him, he failed. With his father supposedly dead, he’d had no one but his mother in his life. And yeah, he did blame her for his fucked up inability to make friends.
Then to learn she wasn’t his biological mother? That his “real mother” had raised his perfect brothers—not cousins—the good sons she’d loved and adored? The ones she’dkept?
Was it any wonder he’d hated Cash and Reid on sight?
“It’s so weird how much we look alike,” Cash muttered and took a seat farther from Smith than the one Jordan had occupied.
“Yeah, I don’t like it either.” Smith and Cash might as well have been imprinted from the same genetic cookie cutter. Same dark hair, same green eyes, similar facial features and brawn. “But I’m taller than you.”
“You are not.” Cash frowned. “I’m six-four.”
