Page 44 of Rainbow Kisses

“And I’m sorry about falling asleep here last night. I don’t want to cause you any issues with your brother.”

I shrugged. “Rebel can be an asshole. You know that. Just ignore him. He doesn’t control my life.”

He didn’t respond to that, but he held my gaze for a few seconds before turning and walking out the door. I wanted to go to the window and watch him walk away, but I knew I had an audience of two young girls.

So I turned with a grin.

“Who wants to get a sugar high?”

ELEVEN

Brian

I gotto the arena and, no surprise, Rebel’s Bronco sat in the players’ parking lot.

Guess we were finally going to confront the elephant in the arena.

Grabbing my gear out of the back of my truck, I headed through the service entrance, expecting him to be waiting for me in the locker room. Except he wasn’t. Guess we were going to settle this on the ice.

Five minutes later, I skated onto the ice, where Rebel was taking shots at the net from center ice. I knew from the parking lot that no one else was here.

I skated over to him, sticking a puck from the pile and getting off a wrister before Rebel turned his attention back to me.

The Lawrence brothers all had the same color hair, but while Rowdy let his grow, Rebel kept his short. And all the siblings had the Colonel’s blue eyes, but Rebel’s were a shade lighter, which made them seem colder. Or maybe that cold stare was just for me.

“We gonna talk this out?” I figured why beat around the bush. “Or are you just going to continue to freeze me out?”

Rebel didn’t say anything immediately, just kept staring until I thought he was going to continue to hate me for the rest of our lives. And that would fucking suck. Because at one point in our lives, we’d been good friends.

“I don’t trust you,” he finally said. “I don’t think I’m ever going to trust you again. And I don’t want you anywhere near my sister.”

Yep, that’s pretty much what I’d expected, right down to the reference to Rain.

I shook my head, leaning on my stick. “You were out of control, Reb. You needed help.”

His jaw clenched, the muscles shifting under his skin. “You went behind my back. After I specifically asked you to keep my issues between us. I was handling it.”

“No, you weren’t. You needed help, Reb. You wouldn’t talk to anyone. I was fucking worried about you. I saw you heading down a hole I have fucking intimate knowledge of, and I didn’t want you to disappear down it.”

“You should have fucking talked to me first before you went to my dad.”

“I fucking tried talking to you! You wouldn’t fucking listen. You had your fucking head in a bottle. The only reason you managed to hide it from everyone else is because you were at college. And your default personality is grumpy, moody bitch so even the people who thought they were your friends didn’t notice. And the ones who did were right there with you, fucking their futures to hell. I could see you getting farther and farther out of reach, and I couldn’t fucking stand it. I could see the goddamn wall you were about to hit. Was I just supposed to let you crash and burn?”

Rebel’s eyes had gotten narrower the longer I ranted, but he kept his mouth shut and let me go. When I finally stopped, sucking in air, I waited for him to hit back.

And waited.

“You didn’t trust me.”

No, I hadn’t, because I knew from experience that people didn’t just get through or get over a drinking problem.

“You needed help.” I wasn’t backing down on this. “I wasn’t going to wait until you were in too deep to get back out.”

“You didn’t fucking trust me to figure it out for myself. You went to my dad. To the one person you knew I wouldn’t want to know.”

“Because he was the only one I thought would be able to help.”

“You went to him because you wanted him to think you cared.”

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