Page 32 of The Hardest Part

“You’re roasting me from the inside out here—can’t breathe.”

“I’ll lower the heat, okay?” He turned the knob, blowing out a noisy breath. “Just close that dang window.”

“Deal.” Jake sniffed. “My nose bleedin’?”

“No, but I’ll make it bleed if you do that again,” Billy said in jest, chuckling.

At the Tetons, Jake went south toward Jackson. A song that reminded him of Emily came on the radio.Take my name…He hummed along, tapping to the beat on the steering wheel with his thumbs.

Billy glanced over his way. “What you thinkin’ about there?”

“Nothin’.”

“Explain that dopey grin on your face, then,” he said with a playful nudge to his ribs.

Jake tipped his chin toward the radio. “Reminds me of when we asked Emily to be our wife.”

She was sixteen.

He’d just graduated from UW.

Of course, they went to Miss Kim and her uncle, Matthew, to seek their blessing first. It didn’t matter if the gesture was old-fashioned, or that by then, it was already a foregone conclusionthat they’d marry. Their parents raised him and his brother to be gentlemen, and it was the right thing to do.

When Jake left for college, Emily was a gangly girl with wild hair and braces. Always hanging around his brother, he had a feeling she was meant to be theirs someday, but she and Billy were just kids at the time. In high school, the Clary sisters once sought his attention. Everleigh was the first girl he ever kissed, and her sister’s pussy, the first one he ever touched. While he was away at Laramie, besides going to classes and studying, he did what most guys in college do—play hard and fuck harder. But as fun as it was, it never felt quite right.

When Jake came home for spring break his senior year, the braces were gone, and Emily wasn’t a gangly kid anymore. Like a flower in her garden, she’d blossomed. She looked at him differently. Billy looked at her differently. He knew then that the feeling in his gut he’d pushed aside four years before was the right one. It was all falling into place. Shewasmeant to be theirs.

Absently chewing on his lip, his brother smiled at the memory. “I was so relieved.”

“Why? Were you scared she was gonna say no?”

“Hell, no.” And he grinned. “I was scared those Clary sisters would get their hooks into you somehow, or worse, you’d meet some girl in Laramie.”

“That was never gonna happen.” With a shake of his head, Jake chuckled, then glancing at his brother, he said, “Deep down, I think I always knew it would be us three. Just had to wait on the two of you, is all.”

“Yeah?”

He offered a nod. “Yeah.”

“I was makin’ plans in my head to marry Emily on my own in case Everleigh and her sister got their way,” he said with a chortle. “Those girls had it bad for you.”

“So that’s why they hitched up with Jamie Coulter so quick, huh?” He attended their wedding the summer before last. Between them, the sisters had three little ones now. “You were willing to take that chance, brother?”

While not unheard of, Matthew Brooks just did it, after all, a union other than a triad was rare. To do otherwise upset the tripartite nature of the world. One could lose favor, so few ever risked it.

Everything that comes in threes is perfect.

“For Em, yeah, I would have.”

God, how Billy loved her. If only he’d paid closer attention when his brother and Emily were kids, Jake would have seen the depth of it. More than a feeling, he would have known, then, exactly what his future was. And he wouldn’t have kissed Everleigh, or messed around with her sister, or fucked those girls in Laramie. Names and faces he couldn’t even remember. He should have waited for her, as he was waiting now.

Billy was lucky. The only kiss, the only touch he’d known, was hers. Jake almost envied him for it.

He scored a parking spot only a block away from the architect’s office. With ski season in full swing, Jackson was filled with tourists, and a space was difficult to come by. “Excited to see the plans, finally?”

“They’re just prelims, he said, but I am, yeah.” His hat sat on his lap. Fingers gripping the brim, Billy’s dark-rimmed eyes flicked over to him. “When do you think we’ll be able to break ground and get started?”

“Late April, I’d guess.”May, the latest.With any luck, the worst of winter had already passed. “Gives us a year to get it finished.”

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