Page 29 of Wright Kind of Trouble

I gagged and held a hand up. “Please don’t. I just…don’t.”

He took a step back, fisting his hands into his hair. He looked like he was tearing himself in half. And I wanted to sympathize with him. I wanted to make it all better. But he was the one ruining it all. He was doing this. And there didn’t seem to be any way for me to fix it.

“Look, Jordan would have killed me before, but his nineteen-year-old little sister? I thought you were twenty-two or twenty-three. Maybe twenty-five if I was being generous.”

I paused at that, tilting my head. “Wait, why would my brother have killed you?”

He looked like he was drowning at my question. “Fuck, you don’t know who I am, do you?”

“Um…I don’t know what answer to give for that.”

“Sinclair,” he said. “Chase Sinclair.”

“Oh…oh,” I whispered.

The situation came back to me in bits and pieces. Stops and starts. I hadn’t been here when Jordan and Annie got together, but I’d heard the story while out with my family. Annie had thought she would marry someone else until she started dating Jordan, and Jordan had punched the guy in the face when he interfered.

That person had been Chase—my Chase. His melancholia at the wedding—the thing that had made me first stop and stare—made perfect sense. He had been watching the girl he’d thought he’d marry walk down the aisle to the man he’d lost her to.

I’d never asked what had become of the guy who could get Jordan Wright to unleash like that. It hadn’t seemed important at the time.

I only knew the Sinclair name. The one who had tried to steal Jordan’s girl. Who had broken Julian’s heart. Who had tried to sabotage the vineyard. Their enemy.

An enemy I had inherited by virtue of my name.

Oh fuck.

“Yeah. Oh,” he said.

“I didn’t know you were a Sinclair,” I said, suddenly feeling increasingly sicker. “But you knew I was a Wright. You knew that Jordan was my brother. You didn’t care about it then!”

“No, I didn’t,” he admitted.

Then, a horrible thought dawned on me. “Did you do this on purpose to get back at him?”

“What?” he asked. “No.”

“No?” I demanded. “Because from where I’m standing, it sure looks like you didn’t get what you wanted, so you tried to hurt the person who’d stolen from you.”

“That is not what this was, Harley, and you know it. There was no way I could have faked what we had.”

I wanted to believe him, but my heart ached from the rejection. I wanted a real reason and not what felt like a made-up difference in our age. “So this has nothing to do with Jordan?”

He sighed again. “I won’t lie and say it wasn’t tempting at first, but it wasn’t what drew me to you. It wasn’t why this happened. And it has nothing to do with why this can’t continue. If I wanted to hurt Jordan, why would I be ending this? I don’t care about him. I only care about you.”

“Then, why are you doing this?” I asked, my heart plummeting with the truth in his words.

“You know why,” he said in a whisper, like he hated himself.

Our families despised each other.

Jordan personally hated him.

If I thought my brothers would be mad at our age difference, it was nothing on me being interested in a Sinclair. There would be blood in the water.

In no universe would this work.

I watched the blooming flower I’d held dear in my heart from Chase’s attention shrivel and die. My throat was tight with the fight to hold back tears. I wouldn’t let him see me cry. I refused to cry.

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