Page 5 of Never Say Yes To Your Brother's Best Friend

My jaw unhinges, and I feel like the rest of me does too. “You burned my brother’s letter? How could you do that? It was something he wrote to you. Something you had of him, and you just…just wrecked it like it was worth nothing?”

Shit, I’m shouting. I’m standing here on his expensive ass doorstep in his expensive ass neighborhood, getting shrill. And maybe I’d be embarrassed about it if I actually cared, but the only thing I care about is that this butthole has taken the level of butthole up to the level of asshole, and that isnot okay.

I might have been persuaded to talk rationally about this and be all calm as we came to some kind of solution, but now? Now I’m freaking digging in. I’m going to be stubborn. Shitting all over this with his asshole ways is not okay.

Whoa, breathe. This man was Jace’s best friend. He’s the man your brother picked out of all the men in the world and planned for you to marry. If that didn’t work, he wanted you to be in each other’s lives. He wanted you to care about him. That has tomean something, even if you can’t see it now. Jace didn’t make mistakes. Not mistakes like this.

I know full well that anger is sometimes a mask for grief, and I have to remind myself of that again. Men deal with it differently. They can’t grieve the same way women do, and the way women have to grieve in this society is bad enough. It’s not healthy. Jace didn’t get a celebration of life. He got the full deal military funeral. I think he would have liked that, but he would have hated it too. He would have wanted a celebration for close friends and family. He would have wanted laughter and jokes and all the good memories. He would have wanted us to take joy in the fact that he lived at all, even if our hearts were torn apart and ripped wide open. He would have—

Funeral.

“Were you there?” I’m all over the place. “Were you at Jace’s funeral? Did you even go?”

“That isnotfair,” he growls.

“Did you even care? Do you? You burned the letter. Maybe Jace meant nothing to you. Maybe he wasn’t like a brother at all. Maybe he had you all wrong. Maybe—”

“Alright.” Patrick doesn’t move. He doesn’t even raise his voice. It’s still a low growl, but there’s something different about it. Something final. Something that’s the equivalent of a foot stomp and an angry crossing of the arms. “You’ve made your point. Come inside. We’ll talk. I was a jerk. Just…let’s just…we got off to a bad start. That isn’t what he would have wanted.” He lets out a shuddering, ragged sigh like I’ve ripped him apart too. I’m all sick with trembling regret. My stomach feels like a milkshake made of all the nasty things, times a merry-go-round and multiplied by a ship tossing about in bad weather. Those dark eyes of his drop down to the doorstep. It’s not made of regular concrete. It’s something fancier and a little bit sparkly. It seems like it would never chip or flake. Something stronger thanconcrete? What could be stronger? “He was like a brother to me. I’m sorry. I didn’t burn the letter. I said that to be a jerk. I…just come in. Please. We’ll talk, but we aren’t getting married. Not over a letter. Not for any reason.”

I can be as stubborn as a big old mule. I can make him pay for his surly ass meanness, but I honestly don’t have it in me to make him pay. Even if it’s just regular me without a letterpersuadingme with all the love in my brother’s heart to take care of this man, I won’t be able to do it.

“Okay.” I don’t agree, but at least this gets my foot in the door, literally. If that’s all I get, then at least I tried my darndest, and it’s important that I feel like I’ve done that. “Let’s talk.”

Chapter three

Rick

I’ve never felt so wrecked in my life.

I got Jace’s letter and had a good laugh. I thought it was Jace’s way of playing a joke on me, the same way he would have when he was alive. Did it also make me incredibly sad? Of course. Do I wish with every fiber of my being that he was here right now? Absolutely. I do. All the time. Did I take the part where he asked me to look after his sister seriously? I did. I was already starting to make plans to figure out how I could do that, but I never thought she’d take the darn letter literally and show up here.

In lightning-fast time, I might add.

She’s Jace’s half-sister, but she looks so much like him that it’s haunting. She has sandy hair, blue eyes, and a fine bone structure with high cheekbones. It looks different on her than it did on him, obviously. She’s beautiful. He was athletic and rugged. She’s tall and slim. He was tall and jacked. I wonder ifthey both look like their dad. They must because he’s the parent they share in common.

She lets out a gasp as she steps inside and takes in the place. It’s the gross, ultra-modern design I can’t stand. Then again, if it were any other design, I still wouldn’t be able to stand it because this washishouse before it was mine. Glass railings, stairs that appear to float in mid-air, square everything, concrete floors, bare walls with an expensive painting or two here or there, furniture that looks like it’s made out of stone and cardboard and feels about as comfy to sit on. Floor-to-ceiling windows in spots, huge hanging light fixtures, and a metal sculpture in the corner of the huge living room that stands thirty feet tall, almost all the way to the lowest point of the ceiling.

“It was my grandpa’s.” I don’t have to explain this to her, but even Jace didn’t know this about me. I feel…naked.

No, correction. Jace knew just about all my secrets, and he did know my grandpa had money, but he didn’t know the extent of it. Even I barely knew. This wasn’t the house my grandpa had when I was little, which was when I became a burden that he seemed to regret for the rest of his life. He solved that by packing me up, shipping me off, and making sure I never came back home. And when I was old enough to make the decisions for myself, I never came back either.

This isn’t really a home. It’s just an empty shell that’s worth a couple of million dollars. And by a couple, I mean likely fifteen. Maybe more. The market keeps going up and up and up.

“He left it to me when he passed away.”

“Oh, I see. It’s really quite something to inherit. He was clearly a loaded old baked potato.”

Aspen is completely unapologetic for that, and my lips nearly twitch. I admire brutal honesty. She’s like Jace that way. He always told the truth, but he peppered it with humor whenever he could.

We might as well sit down here. I gesture at the two couches, and Aspen takes one. She plops down, grunts, and rearranges herself. I can tell she didn’t expect the couch to be so hard. I made the same mistake the first time I sat down. It was like falling onto a pile of bricks. Eighteen months later, my tailbone still feels bruised from that monstrosity.

She arranges her legs, one over the other. Her jeans are fancy and bleached out. They have patterns all over them, and the hems go from tight to flared out. Bell bottoms, I guess, but I don’t think they’re from the right era. They’re too modern. Boho, I suppose. Her top is adorable. It’s a short-sleeved T-shirt with a giant strawberry on it. Her purse is faux leather, the strap crossing over her torso, but I don’t let it draw my eyes there. Her hair, which sweeps down nearly to her waist, is a honeyed, sandy mess. With her matching sandy brows, flecks of ginger freckles dancing over her nose and cheeks, her full pink lips, baby blues, and altogether natural worshipper of great open skies earthiness about her, she looks like she’s always lived in California.

She looks young. That’s what she looks like.

Even though she’s dressed quite plainly for all intents and purposes, and her look is like abohemian princess with zero cares in the world,I can see the dark shadows in the flash of her eyes as they sweep around the room. They finally land on the huge windows facing the street.

“If you don’t like the place, why don’t you just sell it and move somewhere else?”

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