“But I never told you it was my fault she died.”

He didn’t have to; it was never the baby’s fault when a mother died. But instead of telling him that, she just tipped her head to the side and waited for more.

“I was a big baby, and she was tiny. I was two or three weeks late and they induced her. Officially, the cause of death was post-partum bleeding from an obstructed labor.”

“That sounds reasonable and none of it your fault,” Molly said.

“That’s not what my father told me every single day of my life,” Mack whispered, his hands clenched at his sides.

Oh, God. Molly muttered a silent string of curse words before stepping forward to place her hand on his chest, directly above his heart, needing the connection. “You know that’s rubbish, Mack.”

Mack raised his shoulders halfway to his ears before allowing them to drop. “Intellectually, I do. Emotionally, not so much. And the things you are told as a young kid tend to stick with you.”

Mack raked his hand through his dark hair and Molly noticed the slight tremble in his fingers. “He told me that I should’ve died, not her.”

And she didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that he thought that he should’ve been injured, not Travis. “Oh, Mack, you know it doesn’t work like that. It wasn’t your fault.”

Mack stared at a point past her shoulder, his body tight with tension. “After I came to live with Jameson, I was terrified of messing up, of doing anything wrong. I was the model kid. Jameson said jump and I leaped. I didn’t want to give him an excuse to give me back.”

She didn’t know any of this; maybe they hadn’t been as close as they thought they were. Then again, they’d been kids and Mack had never been one to wear his heart on his sleeve.

“When Grey and Travis arrived, I started to relax a little because they were far worse behaved than I was and Jameson never sent them away, or even threatened to.”

Man, what had it felt like to live with so much insecurity? Molly knew how much she worried about Jameson ever finding out about the money she stole, how it would change their relationship, and it kept her awake at night. She’d been a young adult but Mack had lived with his guilt a lot longer than she had. And it wasn’t his fault!

God, if she could she’d hunt down his father and slap him stupid. What a bastard!

“The accident just reminded me that it’s better for people if I keep my distance, if I stay away.”

Molly stared at him and shook her head. Then she lifted her hand and smacked it back down on his chest, the sound jerking his eyes back to her face. Gripping his shirt, she looked up into his anguished eyes and tried to shake him. Because he was so much bigger than she was, she didn’t move him an inch.

“All right,enough.Seriously, Mack, you’re done with thinking like that. It was not your fault your mother died and your father had no right to blame you! Her death was horrible, but it was not your fault!”

She caught a flicker of hope in his eyes that was quickly extinguished. She tapped his chest again, trying to make her point. “It. Was. Not. Your. Fault. Are we clear on that?”

Mack kept his eyes on hers, his hands coming up to rest on her waist. Well, at least he was listening to her, and was she imagining the fact that some of the tension in his body had dissipated?

“As for the car accident, I know that you were all arguing and, hell, Mack, you know how heated your arguments could be. I was witness to so many of your fights back then. Testosterone was raging, you all wanted to be right and God, you were all as stubborn as each other. I can easily imagine the argument in the truck and I’m not surprised you got distracted. It’s a horrible curve, it was dark and raining and you were all yelling at each other. You wereallstupid,allirresponsible and if there is blame to be assigned, it should be shared. But you were kids and it was an accident, for God’s sake.”

Mack shook his head. “I was driving—”

Molly stepped back and folded her arms across her chest. “I can’t change your mind about how you feel about the past, Mack. Only you can. All I can tell you is that your father’s stupid words and an accident a long time ago shouldn’t still have so much power.”

“But it does,” Mack told her, his words coated with sorrow and grief.

Molly rested her hand on his cheek, feeling the stubble under her hand, the hard line of his jaw. “Only you can change that, Mack. Not me, not Jameson, not your brothers. Only you.”

It would be easy to change the subject, to brush aside the emotion and flit onto another subject, but Molly liked Mack too much—more than she should—to allow that to happen. She stepped closer to him and wrapped her arms around his trim waist, hoping to hug away the desolate look on his face.

Unlike her, Mack had nothing to be ashamed of.

Mack didn’t say much on their walk back to Moonlight Ridge and when they reached the third floor, he disappeared into his office without a word. Knowing that she needed to give him space, Molly immersed herself in her own work. When she finally stopped, somewhere around seven, she noticed that the light was off in his office.

She returned back to her apartment, saw that the guesthouse was in darkness and assumed Mack was with Jameson. She cooked, ate, drank a glass of wine and wondered whether Mack would come to her tonight.

And she kept wondering for another hour, then two. At half past ten, minutes before she was about to give up on him and go to bed, she saw the lights come on in the guesthouse and she debated whether to go to him or to give him space.

But like her, Mack tended to spend too much time in his head, and she knew of a truly excellent way of getting him to step outside his big brain. It involved getting naked and Molly knew Mack had no problem with that...