Page 43 of Finding Forever

“Too bad, Nox looks like a good time.”

His nostrils flared, and she tossed her loosely braided hair, before determinedly stepping away from him and toward the patio doors through which the others had disappeared.

The rest of the group had retreated to the small, open plan kitchen, crowding the space, everybody still talking at the same time. Gideon was precariously balancing several plastic containers, which appeared to contain different cuts of meat, in his arms, Beth and Kenny were amicably arguing about the best topping for pizza bread, while Nox was loudly and vociferously lamenting the lack of beer options.

“Still quite the outrageous snob, aren’t you, Nox?” Beth inserted dryly, as she shoved a couple of garlic laden focaccialoaves into the oven. “Wherever you’ve been hiding out hasn’t humbled you in the slightest.” Her head swung toward Gideon, who was trying to add one more container to the lot he already had stacked in his arms. “I think t-two trips would be prudent, Gideon—you already have… already have them sta-stacked too high.”

“Aah, and you’re still as bossy as I remember, Elizabeth Finch,” Nox countered good-naturedly, shoveling up a fistful of pretzels in his huge hand and stuffing a couple into his mouth. A few wayward crumbs dusted his out of control, lumberjack beard. He was nowhere near as urbane as his older brother, which was not at all what Fern had expected.

“It’s Elizabeth Finch-Hawthorne,” Beth corrected tartly. “Although I can understand how you’d forget that fact, since you couldn’t arse yourself to come to our wedding.”

A shadow of regret and contrition flickered over Nox’s face, and his shoulders slumped a little as he took the hit.

Gideon froze, his eyes flickering back and forth between his wife and brother, as if he wasn’t quite sure if the exchange had escalated enough to warrant an intervention or not. Fern cast an equally uncertain glance at Cade, who—for a fleeting moment—looked stricken as he watched the interaction between his brother and sister-in-law.

A frown flickered over his features before he spoke, the words cutting through the tension and a little ludicrous in their banality and complete lack of relevance to the topic at hand.

“Fern needs new clothes.”

All heads swung toward Cade at whom they gaped like he’d grown an extra limb, and then—as if they’d synchronized it—to Fern, who cringed beneath their stares. If she hadn’t seen the look of almost desperation in his eyes before he’d spoken, she would probably have melted into a gooey puddle of embarrassment right at their feet.

But somehow—despite the humiliating observation that hadput her firmly in the spotlight—she couldn’t bring herself to be angry at him. Because she was on the cusp of understanding exactlywhyhe’d done it.

He was their big brother, their protector,andtheir peacemaker. He didn’t like seeing them at odds with one another and he’d tossed Fern—who was just some random flotsam he’d picked up along the way and nowhere near as important as hisrealfamily—under the bus in the interest of defusing a possible volatile situation.

A hapless lamb sacrificed at the altar of familial harmony.

“Uh… Niall,” Beth began, her voice tentative, her ire at Nox seemingly placed on hold for now… which meant Cade had succeeded in his desperate diversionary tactics. “You c-can’t… you can’t say things like that. Fern luh-looks perfectly lovely.”

“She dresses like the nun the press seems to believe she is. Andnotbecause she wants to,” Cade negated, his voice curt and no-nonsense.

“Niall, you can’t tell a woman how to dress, come on, this isn’t the bloody eighteenth century,” Kenny retorted, waving her hand in dismissive disgust.

“Men—and their ridiculous hang-ups about our bodies—have been dictating women’s fashion well into the twentieth and even twenty-first centuries,” Beth corrected. “So specifically referencing the eighteenth century is an odd generalization.”

“Let’s not stray off topic, Beth,” Kenny told her. “You know what I mean.”

Cade’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction and Fern gave him a jaundiced look, even though she understood—more than he likely even realized—his motivation. Didn’t mean she had to like it though. In fact, she loathed being the center of attention and wished he’d come up with some other spur-of-the-moment distraction.

“Ithink you look absolutely beautiful, little mouse,” Nox said smoothly.

“If that were true, I doubt you’d be calling me a mouse every chance you get,” Fern said with a snort.

“It’s a term of affection. An endearment as it were…”

Fern rolled her eyes, recognizing that his over-the-top attention was mostly an attempt to get a rise out of his brother. Why he’d bother was beyond her. Cade didn’t care what anybody thought of her or said to her. Not really… Maybe if it reflected badly on him, as her dowdy wardrobe no doubt did, he’d bestir himself to care. But whatever Nox was trying to achieve here was doomed to fail.

“Cade is right,” Fern said, her fingers plucking at a pleat on her ill-fitting, ugly skirt. “I do need a new wardrobe. I led a—I suppose you could call it—shelteredlife before now. I didn’t choose my own clothing. I hate these skirts and blouses, they make me feel like a frumpy spinsterish schoolmarm in a made for television western. I’m not sure why he dragged you all into this though...”

“I figured Kenny or Beth could go shopping with you or something,” Cade muttered, tugging at his collar. “I thought maybe starting from scratch on your own would feeluhoverwhelming.”

She stared at him, mouth agape, heart stuttering in her chest, because—while she hated the attention—his reasoning was so thoughtful. Almost—dare she say?—sweet.

And then he ruined it by following the words up with, “And I doubt you’d have the first clue what to get anyway. Your emotional growth has been so stunted that, left to your own devices, you’d probably replace the nunlike shit with the wildly inappropriate scraps of nothing adolescents wear these days.”

She stared at him in horrified affront. What a truly awful thing to say. Yes, she’d been sheltered to the point ofimprisonment, but that didn’t mean she didn’t know what she liked or disliked. And Cade certainly didn’t know her well enough to have drawn such an authoritative conclusion about her emotional growth. Especially not when his own emotional intelligence was so clearly undeveloped.

She was tempted to call him out on it, but was too acutely aware of her surroundings to do so now. She didn’t know any of these people, they werehispeople. Once again, she was the outsider, the least loved one in the room. It wasn’t her place to speak out.

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