“I’m not looking to have fun. I’m looking to keep people safe.”
“You’re pretty good at that, you know.” When all he gave was a grunt in response, I continued, “Like last night. Convincing me to go with you.” I smiled when he just snorted. “Convincing me, dragging me away…tomato, tomahto. Either way, I’m glad I listened.”
“Me too.” The two words were so filled with emotion, they shot straight to the center of my chest.
I snuggled deeper into his embrace, tipping my head to the side to give him room to nuzzle my neck and remembering what Mrs. Engles had said earlier. About all the hardships Brady’s family had faced and how something had changed him. “When you said people died in these storms, I thought you were being facetious. But you weren’t, were you?”
He was quiet for several long moments, then he finally said, “No. I wasn’t.”
“Your mom?” I whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Was she camping by the ocean, too?”
A heavy gust of air left him, and he tightened his arms around me. “Nope. I’d have found her if that was the case. I was on duty that night, so I wasn’t at the resort. If I’d been there, I could’ve…” He exhaled a harsh breath. “I don’t know. Nothing. Everything. I could’ve told her we had the goddamn rules in place for a reason. Forced her not to break them.”
“What rules?”
“We only had two. Never sail alone, and never during a storm.”
God, I could feel the anguish lacing his words. A picture suddenly materialized in my mind, an image of the gorgeous, auburn-haired beauty at the helm of a sailboat in the middle of a ravaging sea, all alone. My heart ached. For him. For their whole family. For what they’d lost.
We were quiet for long moments, just the faint notes from the band and the sound of the waves filling up the space around us. And I let him just be. Offered him my strength in the silence.
After a few minutes, I said, “Tell me about her? What did she do?”
He was quiet for a long moment, and I worried I’d pushed too hard, reopened a wound that hadn’t ever quite healed. But he surprised me when he answered, “She ran the resort. She loved it. It’d been in her family for three generations.”
“Four now, with you and your siblings running it, right?”
“My siblings more than me, but yeah.”
I didn’t buy that—Brady may not have been at the resort for ten- or twelve-hour days, but I’d been around enough to see that not a day went by when he wasn’t there, checking in on things. Not just with the resort, but with his siblings, as well.
“She was a sailor?”
“Yep. Taught us all. Levi took to it more than anyone, but we all know how.”
“What about your dad?”
Brady stiffened, the subtle relaxation I’d managed to coax out of him gone in a blink. “He was a former factory worker, but he lost his job when the factory closed. And then everything went to hell.”
I made a soft sound of commiseration. “I’m sure that was tough.”
“Especially for an alcoholic. Especially after my mom died.”
I knew if we weren’t sitting like this, my back to his front, with the cloak of darkness shrouding us, he wouldn’t be so open with me. With anyone. Just like I watered myself down so others could swallow me, Brady hid away the parts of himself he didn’t want others seeing. He never let his guard down—hell, I wasn’t sure he even allowed himself that vulnerability with his siblings—but he was now. With me. And I was nothing more than a starving woman, scrambling to pick up any morsel he dropped.
“Is that why you don’t talk to him anymore?” Though I didn’t have any real experience dealing with loved ones facing addiction—as long as you didn’t count work or weed, which my dad and mom, respectively, were quite adept at—I’d had enough friends in school whose family members suffered from addiction, either alcohol, pills, or hard drugs. I’d seen firsthand the wreckage it could cause. Could understand why, in the wake of dealing with the fallout of something like that, especially following a parent’s death, someone would grow fierce. Protective. Rigid and unbending. Controlled.
“I don’t talk to him anymore because he wants it that way.”
I linked our fingers together, brushing my thumb over the back of his hand, trying to give a tiny bit of peace back to him. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
“No?” He breathed out a humorless laugh. “Did you see a welcome mat in front of Cottage Thirteen? ’Cause I sure as hell didn’t, even though I show up every week without fail.”
My thumb froze against his hand, my entire body going still. Wait…the cottage he’d dropped groceries off at earlier today was hisdad’s?
