“I’m sorry,” I said to Hayes, because it was the only sentence I was capable of forming.
“Don’t be.” He stepped closer, his movements slow and careful. “He needed to hear it from us.”
“He needed to hear it from you,” I said. “You’re the one he bleeds for.”
“I’m not asking him for permission,” Hayes said. “I’m doing him the courtesy of telling him the truth.”
I closed my eyes and let the words settle because if I tried to hold them and all the fear at the same time, I was going to implode. When I opened my eyes, his face looked calm, wrecked around the edges, but resolved.
“He’s going to come back madder,” I said.
“I know.”
“He might not forgive you.”
“I know that too.”
“He might not forgive me,” I added, and my voice finally broke because the men in my family weren’t known for changing their minds.
Hayes reached for my hand. “I’ll stand in front if you want me to. Or I’ll stand next to you if that’s better. Either way, I’m not hiding.”
The tightness behind my ribs eased a fraction. Not enough to breathe easy, but enough to breathe. “Okay.”
The lobby settled back into normal around us. Wrapping paper crinkled, cocoa sloshed from a cup onto the floor, and a toddler wailed about a lost mitten like the world had ended. I was shocked that it hadn’t.
“Do you want me to go after him?” Hayes asked.
I shook my head. “He’ll walk it off. He always has. He’ll circle back meaner or softer depending on where his feelings land.”
“And when he circles back?”
“We’ll be where he left us,” I said, and realized as I said it that it was true. It felt like a promise I could keep.
Hayes’s mouth tilted. Not a smile. Something steadier. “Then we’ll be here.”
I nodded, smoothed my sweater like that could make the tremor in my hands less obvious, and turned back toward the desk because the lobby still needed steering and the day wasn’tgoing to organize itself. I took two steps before I felt his hand gently tug on mine. Whatever happened, we’d face it together.
I went back to work. Hayes moved with me. The tree glittered. The quartet continued to play Christmas carols everyone knew. Outside, my brother would decide what kind of man he wanted to be about the fact that I was a woman, not a line he got to decide who had the right to cross.
CHAPTER 11
HAYES
Stetson foundus an hour later packing up the last of the linens.
“Can I have a word?” His expression was neutral, not giving any indication of where he’d decided to land.
I nodded, and we followed him out the back door of the hotel, down a plowed path toward the edge of the trees. The noise of the lodge faded away until it was just boots on packed snow and the faint sounds of ice slipping off branches. He stopped by a trail marker and turned, the brim of his hat throwing a hard line across his eyes.
“This is where I say my piece,” he said. “Then you say yours. Then we figure out how not to ruin Christmas for everyone else.”
“Fair,” I said.
Sidney nodded and tucked her hands into her pockets.
Stetson’s gaze flicked to her and back to me. “I don’t care how long you’ve wanted each other. I care that you blind-sided me. You don’t get to be my brother in everything that matters and then keep this one thing to yourself.”
“I should’ve told you sooner,” I said, and I meant it. “I didn’t because I was a coward about the one thing I’m not supposed to be a coward about.”
