“All I do is choose this family.” My response was hot and immediate, but at their collective silence, I was forced to reflect. “It might not be the right choice?—”
“Got that right,” Billy muttered.
“But all I’ve done since the moment Mum got sick was choose you lot.”
“We know.” Bronson’s tone had softened and he reached out, squeezing my arm for just a second. “Before you had to step into the shoes Dad left, but Troy. The man’s an arsehole. You don’t want to take on his role. You want to decide who you want to be on your own.”
“As our brother,” Charlie said, “not a surrogate father.”
“Because holy shit, if that’s the way you’ll act when you have kids, Mackenzie better run,” Billy added. “Can you imagine him with a baby?” He drew himself up tall, putting out one arm to cradle an imaginary child. “What do you think you’re doing,shitting your britches all the time? And keeping your mother up at all hours?”
“Get your act together and stop crying,” Bronson added in a mock stern voice.
“Nah.” Charlie stared at me steadily. “I think Troy will be a good dad, if he can get his head out of his arse. Especially if a certain American was the mother of his child.”
Just a few moments of pleasure, that’s all I got to enjoy, before reality came and bitch slapped me across the face. My fingers traced the slide of condensation down my beer can.
“Not Mackenzie.” The memory of her dressing me down yesterday was seared onto my brain. “I fucked things up, just like the farm. I?—”
“Need to find a way to make that up to her.”
Why the hell did I think I needed to protect my family from anything? When I glanced around the room, all of them were sitting there, expectation clear on their faces. They were adults now, perfectly capable of dealing with their own shit.
And calling me on mine.
Later that night, lying in bed, as I was watching the hot northerly winds forcing the curtains to billow up into the air, I heard the sound of footsteps coming down the hall. Not Charlie. She’d gone to bed hours ago and would be dead asleep. My ears could tell the slight difference in step, somehow having memorised Mackenzie’s gait.
I wasn’t convinced my siblings had it right. To me the situation with my girl felt like the farm: fucked up and beyond repair, so why did I roll out of bed? Pulling on a pair of shorts, heading towards a door, it didn’t happen in a dream this time, but I did it anyway. Mackenzie turned around, a guilty look on her face as she caught me staring at her.
“You’ve been busy today,” I said.
“Look, I’m sorry, but?—”
Make the necessary changes to ensure I stopped lashing out at everyone around me, that was the challenge. Was selling the farm enough to make that happen? I didn’t know, but what I did know is I’d spend my life trying to find what did. My arm went around her waist, because I couldn’t take a full breath until I was touching her. Couldn’t stop staring at her, because it was the only time the noise inside my head went quiet. Her little gasp, the way her hands spread across my bare chest. Fuck, I loved every second of that.
“My family made clear that shit can’t continue the way it has,” I said. “I… We’re making changes. Maybe it’ll be enough to have me pulling my head in.” Her eyes widened. “Maybe it won’t, but I know I’ll keep trying.” My head bent down, my lips almost touching hers, but I couldn’t kiss her until I said this. “You make me want to become a better man, Mackenzie. Wanna stick around and see if that’s possible?”
That tortured little sound had me bracing myself for rejection, but then her hand went to my hair and she tugged my head down.
“I want everything you’ve got, Troy Drysdale.”
That was all the encouragement I needed. My mouth crushed hers, breath forced to come whistling through my nose, because I couldn’t pull away from her for a second.
Chapter 27
Mackenzie
“You make me want to become a better man, Mackenzie. Wanna stick around and see if that’s possible?”
Those words, that shy smile, the feel of his body pressed against mine. It had all my very sensible instincts being shoved to one side, burning them up as surely as a bushfire would bone dry leaf litter.
“But…” I gasped between kisses. “Troy…”
“What?” He asked that question in a gentle tone, grinning when I couldn’t answer right away.
“I thought you’d be mad.” With a wince, I remembered what Charlie and I had done. Gone through his financial modelling first, then when I saw a bunch of unexplained expenses, we’d looked through bank statements and followed the trail to discover just what their father had been doing. Extorting money from Troy and the rest of the family, from what I could see. That had led to us trawling through the filing cabinet in the office and pulling out a contract of sale. “Your dad?—”
“Is a bastard and I really, really don’t want to talk about him right now.” I was picked up, my legs instinctively going aroundhis waist. “He’s not in this room, but you are.” Laying me down on the bed, Troy didn’t join me yet, instead, hovering above me. His hand touched my cheek, the knuckles grazing my skin. “You are, and right now, that’s all I… care about.”
