Page 79 of How to Say I Do
“Hehurtyou!” Liam bellowed. “Isawit. I was there!”
“I was there, too!” Wyatt’s voice abruptly shot louder than Liam’s. “I was there for thewholething, Liam!Iwas the one he left.Iwas the one this happened to. Not you!”
Liam stormed down the length of the porch. I watched his shadow tip his head back, hitch his hands on his hips. “You tried to hide it,” he finally said. He’d lost the savage edge from his voice. Now, he just sounded defeated. “I had to drag what happened out of you.”
“It was your wedding.”
“So? It was your heartbreak.”
Wyatt said nothing. After a moment, Liam strode back to his brother, and their two shadows merged in front of the door. Liam’s shoulders slumped. Wyatt gripped his biceps. The blaze of the porch light shifted, seemed suddenly softer.
They sat on the top step shoulder to shoulder, and an open window in the living room carried their quieter voices up the stairs to me, to where I huddled on the landing and blatantly eavesdropped.
“Wyatt.” The fight was gone, totally gone, from Liam. Instead of furious, he sounded confused, and, oddly, wounded. “Why is he here?”
Wyatt took his time answering. “He’s here because I want him here.”
“I thought you said you didn’t have any way to get a hold of him.”
“Well, he found me.”
“Was he tryin’ to apologize?”
Wyatt turned away. He looked like a mirage through the glass. “No.”
Quiet settled between them like a pall. Liam hooked his elbow over a knee and waited.
“That is the past. Noël and I… We’ve moved on from Mexico. The reason he’s here, what we’re doing now… It’s all different.”
“And what is it that you and he are doing now?”
It all came tumbling out: my first email out of the blue to Wyatt, telling him that a superstar celebrity wanted to use his ranch for her wedding. Tessa and Tyler coming to visit—“They’re good people, Liam. I like her a lot.”—and Wyatt and I trying to figure out how to turn this place from a working ranch into a celebrity-worthy wedding venue. He pointed out the mostly-finished barn, the new picnic tables he’d built, and the shade sails going up. “It’s gonna be good, Liam. It’s gonna be real good.”
“And all this… It was your choice, right?” If anything, Liam sounded more wary now than before. “I know exactly how you get when someone says they need your help.”
“I coulda told him no anytime. But, Liam, the opportunity here, for the ranch? The site fee alone can run the place for the next five yearsandhelp me expand. I could make dollars out of this place, instead of scraping by making pennies.”
“You know if you ever need help—”
Wyatt shook his head and cut Liam off. “No. No, we can do it.”
“We?Wyatt, don’t you think that’s moving a little fast, bringing Noël in—”
“I meant me and Dad.” Wyatt scraped the sole of his boot across the edge of the porch step. A moth fluttered above the brothers. The dried paper shuffle of its wings was the only sound drifting through the windows. “I’m following his plan.Theplan. The one Dad and I—”
“Dad’s plan included a celebrity wedding?”
Wyatt snorted. “Nah, he wanted to host the high school proms.”
“’Course he did.” Liam chuckled. “He always wanted to keep everybody safe.”
Silence unfurled. A curtain in the living room fluttered. Water dripped in the kitchen sink. The night seemed to collapse and thicken. The porch was ten thousand miles away. My heart was slamming.
“And, you know.” Another boot scrape. Wyatt rocked his head from left to right, a nervous tic he did when he was trying to figure out what to say. “Maybe Noël and I could run the ranch together some day.”
“For real?” Liam turned all the way to his brother. His face was made of hard right angles, a clenched jaw, and naked disbelief. “You serious? Wyatt—"
“Look,yes. Him ditching me was awful. And it hurt like a son of a bitch to see him again when he came out here with Tessa and Tyler, but do you know what hurtworse? Missing him after Mexico. Not being with him. So thechance? The possibility of making it work? Liam, I gotta. I gotta see if we can do this.”
