Page 126 of False Start

Didn’t we all?

But if he did—if I did—would we ever have gotten to this place? Would we ever have found each other?

I didn’t want to go back and rewrite one damn ache from my past if I missed this.

Missed him.

“What should you have caught?”

“The fake. I should have caught it and I didn’t. That was my mistake.”

“The only crime here was hers.”

“So what?” he snapped at me. “I should have turned her in then?”

Ah, there it is. “I didn’t say that, but the fact that you did says plenty.”

He squeezed the steering wheel, his knuckles turning white as he pulled into the driveway, rolled to a stop, and turned off the engine.

He wouldn’t reach for me. Not right now, not like this. But I would reach for him.

I flipped the middle console up and slid across the bench seat until my body pressed to his.

He didn’t let go. His hands flexed. His arms locked and rigid as he stared off at something I couldn’t see. Something from another time. Another place.

Cupping his chin, I turned him to me.

“Tell me,” I said quietly.

“What?” he said, his eyes unfocused as the past held him in its merciless grip.

“The part you don’t want to say.”

He made a sound in the back of his throat. The echo of tightly restrained pain…and maybe the beginning of his surrender to it. “I don’t want it to touch you.”

“You don’t need to protect me,” I said as I stroked my fingers through the hair at his temple. Over and over, my nails scraping against his scalp until he leaned into me and his eyelids slid closed.

“The last person I loved and turned in, ended up dead,” he said, his deep voice gritty with pain.

I brushed my thumb along that deep dimple and over his cheek, constantly soothing—him and me. “You reported your father.”

“And brother,” he whispered.

“This is not your fault.”

“It feels like it,” he grated out. “Every single day, every single minute it feels like it was all my fault.” His eyes slid closed and he sighed before opening them again. Just a tiny release of the pressure swelling in him. “You know, our names were always this running joke,” he said with a humorless laugh. “Cain and Abel. A good brother and evil brother, but my mother didn’t care; she just liked the names.”

“And you think you’re the evil brother?”

“Are you saying he was?” he said, his tone cutting, the last of his defenses lashing out.

It’s the only part of him I can keep safe now.

That’s what he’d said.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” I said, keeping my voice soft, knowing he wasn’t attacking me; he was still protecting his brother—his brother’s memory. “He was a child and his father didn’t protect him.”

“I didn’t protect him.”

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