Lenny’s words rang between her ears like the world’s most repulsive tinnitus.Fucking my brother won’t stop him from hating you when he finds out you’ve been lying to him.
“Yes,” she admitted.
“You have Arthur, though.”
She rocked back. “What?”
“I’m just saying, you know what it is to love a… complicated person,” he said. “It’s one thing I really admire in you.”
“Arthur isn’t complicated!” Izzy snapped. He was, in fact, all too easy for her to understand. So was Lenny. Both of them had taken their grief over the loss of a parent, the loss of love, and sharpened it into a weapon.
The difference was who they pointed the blade at.
She shoved away from the bar. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Dane followed her out into the empty street. “Isobel, wait.”
“I don’t want to fight,” she said, head aching.
“Are we fighting?” Dane challenged.
She didn’t turn to face him, but the sound of his footsteps over the pavement warned her of his approach. Delicately, Dane put his hands on her upper arms. When Izzy leaned back into his chest, he wrapped his arms more firmly around her.
“They’re not the same,” she whispered.
The Arthur she knew had only ever tried to make life a little better. She’d missed him so much, and now he was back and her father was hurt because of him, and Dane was bent on chasing him down.
Everything about it felt wrong.
Dane kissed her hair. “Let me take you home, love.”
She turned, but Dane was a blur. Damn these tears. Damn his stupid shirt and his stupid perfect smell. Izzy wanted to see him come undone. She wanted to pull the wild out of this careful, measured man. “Is that an order?”
“Do you want it to be, Isobel?”
And though he’d said her name already that night, something about the shape of it on his lips now loosened the tension in her chest. She took a deep breath, savoring the syllables.
Dane smiled, unaware of how such a little word could so deeply rearrange her. “Come on. We’ll negotiate a truce on the way, hmm?”
And maybe it was the alcohol plying her, or maybe she was tired of carrying it all alone, but when he pulled his keys from his pocket, she stepped forward and slipped back into the person she wanted to be.
Battered, but still fighting.
Isobel, again.
As they drove through Audrey’s single stoplight, Dane reached across the console and took her hand. Isobel let him rub his thumb over the ridges of her knuckles. For diplomacy and all.
Dane gave her fingers a squeeze. “Everything will be okay.”
Isobel said nothing, wanting to believe him.
Chapter 21
Eva
It could have been an animal.
The words beat a frantic rhythm in Eva’s head as she cleared a fire pit. The slink of vinyl and the clatter of tent poles rang out behind her. When Arthur swore, she peeked and caught him nursing a smashed thumb. Gloves on, of course. With a rock, he hammered the stakes of their tent into the ground.
