Page 76 of Tulips and Lost Time

“I don’t dismiss them, but I allocate priority. And right now, they do not trump your needs and wants. And they sure as shit don’t trump what I want.”

“Kari?”

“I’m coming!” She glances past me and down the stairwell that turns onto the next landing. “I’m coming, Marcus.”

“Perhaps.” I lean in and press a gentle, barely there kiss to the corner of her lips. “I don’t know what the fuck we’re gonna do about this, Bear. But I know we’re gonna figure it out. I know I’m ready to make up for my mistakes.”

“As in, your mistake of sending me away? Or the mistake where you slept with Britt? Oh! Or the seventy-three thousand other mistakes I’ve heard about, parading through your door every Friday and Saturday night for the last several years?”

“You’re exaggerating.” But my smile grows larger. “And the fact that you’ve checked in on my weekend companionship proves you’re still interested.”

“The fact you had female companionship proves you’re an opportunistic pig.” She shoves off the wall, using the brick as a launching pad and the box as a shield, jamming the corner into my stomach. “You don’t know loyalty or commitment, Luca. You just know you would’ve gotten in trouble if we went to bed together six years ago. Now you see the green light—no prison time for you—and so you figure you want to add me to the tally marks scratched into your headboard.”

“And I figure you know better than that. Which brings me right back around to the fact that your feelings are hurt, so you’re gonna swipe at me until your heart feels better.”

“And I figure, seeing as how I’ve been out of town for the last little while, you must’ve run out of vaginas to stomp through. It’s a small town, after all, and you’re known to be quite the lady’s man. You want to try something you haven’t had before, and history has proven you don’t like being de-prioritized.”

“Blake?” My lips curl into a long grin. “You’re talking about him?”

“You mean… my boyfriend?” She turns toward the stairs and wanders down. “Who is also moving to town, by the way.”

Boyfriend, my ass.

“The second you found out he existed, you ran off and fucked Britt.” Mercifully, she lowers her voice and meets my eyes. “History doesn’t lie.”

“And six years helps us all mature in new, and beautiful, ways.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’m gonna fix what I broke.” I allow her to go. To traverse the stairs without me. Because I’m not sure I can reach the bottom and look into Marc’s eyes and not share all that history Kari mentions. “Watch your back, Bear. I’m gonna fix this.”

22

LUC

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

“You’re such an ass,” Jess sniggers. She plops a fresh coffee on the table by my hand and claps the back of my head. Barely. Gently. But it’s a statement, regardless. “You screwed up. She was trying to live her life with her fake boyfriend. And you’re aggressively accosting her in the stairwell! What the hell is the matter with you?”

Kane sits forward at the table, fist extended, and a goofy grin on his face. “Aggressively accosting my girl is my favorite thing to do.”

“Your girl is my sister. Shut up.” I slap his hand away and shake my head. “I don’t want to hear about you and her, ever.”

“We had no clue any of that was going on.” Jess drops onto Kane’s lap and wraps her arm around his neck. “No clue! She never even hinted about you and Britt. And she sure as hell didn’t mention the stairwell stuff once she got down to the truck.”

“She’s too private for her own good. She could have taken back her power that day by snitching on me.” I pick my coffee up and carefully, so fucking carefully, hover it over Billy’s head so I can take a sip. “If she had screamed at the top of her lungs and threw me into the fire, Marcus would have beat my ass that day and tossed my body into the lake.”

“But she doesn’t like to make a scene,” Jess concludes. “Instead of speaking up, she locked everything down and dealt with it in private.”

“Which is what I knew she would do.” I set my coffee back on the table and grin. “I knew she’d rather deal with this situation in silence, when she could have just blown the lid off and had me whacked in three seconds flat.”

“And by this situation,” Kane sniggers, “you mean you and your dick?”

Jess wrinkles her nose in disgust.

“Me and my heart,” I amend. Though we’re all aware my dick was totally invested, too. “She said she didn’t want anything to do with me. But the fact that she stopped to argue implied she was lying. She could have simply ignored me. That would have hurt so much more than a little verbal sparring.”

“So your plan was to annoy the shit out of her.” Kane rolls his eyes. But then he looks up and studies Jess with a smile. “No, I see the legitimacy in that plan. It works for me.”

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