Page 64 of Hold

She nodded. “I take BB-8 very seriously. I’m serious.”

Goddammit.

♦

Liam wished hard that there was gravel on the road, so that when his truck peeled away from the curb, the gravel would flare up behind him, make a satisfying grinding noise, and convey a tiny amount of the fury overtaking him. He stamped on the gas and put as much distance between himself and Thea Fielding as his engine and the stop signs would allow.

He hadn’t felt this exposed, this vulnerable, in months, and he hated it. He gritted his teeth against it.You swore. You swore you’d never put yourself out there like that again.And here he was, like a freaking idiot, surprised because a woman turned out to be faithless.

Thirty-six hours. That was all it had taken for her to turn those big brown eyes away from him and onto her ex. His day had begun with concern and ended in a sick panic when she hadn’t answered any of his texts or his calls. Was she really sick? Or did she regret their week together?

He stopped at a traffic light and rubbed his hands over his face. The splinter in his palm stabbed him again.

She’d giggled when his beard had tickled her thigh.Dammit. Stop thinking about it. It wasn’t anything.

Of course he’d gone to check on her. He was used to thinking about her, to worrying about her and those kids in that beat-up house. He’d thought of her as alone and needing him.

Turned out, not so much.

He smacked the steering wheel hard, driving the splinter in deeper. Then he did it again before turning onto the highway to his own town. The burn helped take away some of what was wrapping around his heart.

When he was nearly home, his phone rang. His stupid heart leaped up, but it was his father. There was no question of not answering. “Hi, Dad.”

“You busy tomorrow?” No preamble. No,how’s it going? No understanding that now that they were almost into August, Liam was going to have to start setting up his classroom and preparing lesson plans.

But some nice manual labor might be just what he needed. Think about water pressure and couplings and compression rings and not about Thea’s breasts under his hands…

“No. What do you need?”

“Got a new build going up in Wareham. Can you do the estimate?”

Liam was surprised. This task involved a lot of trust on his father’s part. If Liam estimated too high, they’d lose the bid. Too low, and they’d find themselves on the hook for the rest. “What kind of build?”

“Multifamily. Sean O’Brien’s the CM.”

Sean was a friend, but a businessman. He’d chosen other plumbers as often as Liam’s father. The bid would have to be impressive.

“Sure, I can go.” He pulled into his driveway.

“Bring your lad,” Pat said. And that was when Liam remembered Jake.

Liam dropped his keys and phone on the table near the front door as he walked through the living room and into the bedroom he’d once shared with Avery. He’d stripped the place of anything feminine the day he’d kicked her out, and that weekend had painted the walls above the plate rails a navy blue that set off the white paneling and reflected his style much more than hers. He didn’t have the money to fix the rest of the house how he liked yet, but at least this floor was how he liked it. It had still been months before he’d been able to walk in there and not see her with her mortgage broker, legs in the air, howling. Yes, she’d been howling. He didn’t think the sound would ever leave him.

And now, a palimpsest laid over that memory, was Thea, tucked into her ex-whatever-he-was’s chest, his proprietary arms around her, head lowered to hers. As they had done for years before Liam the dumbass showed up and now could continue doing when Liam had finished extricating himself from her life.

His phone rang from the living room. With heavy steps, he went out to look at it. It was Thea. This was how far he’d deluded himself about her, right up until he’d told her he was crazy about her. He winced even now as he remembered it, as the phone kept ringing. He hadn’t programmed her name into his phone, because why should he? She wasn’t a permanent part of his life, no one whose number he needed to keep track of. Yet he remembered every digit of that number, could recall it in his sleep.

He stared at the phone. There was nothing she could say to him. He didn’t want to hear her apologize, give him the sob story.He’s my children’s father. He wants us back.Yeah, Liam knew the drill.He can give me something you can’t.

He folded his arms and watched the phone until the call went to voicemail. Then he went to the kitchen, a galley setup open to the living room, and got a beer out of the refrigerator. Drank it, walked out through his bedroom to the back deck and threw the empty bottle at the back wall at the end of the small yard, where it shattered with a satisfying crash. Then he went back in and did it all again.

♦

Jake came home at ten o’clock. Thea was sitting on the edge of the couch in the living room, waiting for him, a cup of tea at her side.

He stopped as soon as he got in the room. “So?” he said.

Thea couldn’t bear the tension in his shoulders. She got up to hug him. It was a measure of how bad things had gotten that Jake let her. She almost wished he’d duck away, but no, she was able to put her arms around his thin, vulnerable back and squeeze as much strength and stability as she could into him.

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