Page 35 of Binding Their Hearts

“I’m here. I—” A quick whoosh of air replaced whatever she’d been about to say. “You know I wouldn’t say anything to the family about your engagement without checking with you first, right? Even if I wanted to smear the news all over Peggy’s holier-than-thou face. She’ll be jealous as hell when you tell her. If you tell her. You could just go my route and tell her to stay the fuck out of your personal life.”

“Jealous?” Disgusted, he would understand.

“That you had a choice, and you’re getting married on your own terms, to hell with the rules and expectations.” Her voice warmed, a distant hug reaching through the phone to wrap him up against the wind. “You did good, little brother. You’ve got two stable-as-hell, loyal-to-the-bone partners, and I know they’re gonna treat you like royalty. And if they don’t, you call me, and I’ll knock some sense back into them.”

“They’re the best.” No doubt about that. But it wasn’t like Peggy didn’t have her best, too. “But Peggy and Chuck have been married almost twenty-five years. She did choose him.”

“Not like you chose Henry and Alice.”

Well, no, Alice wasn’t eighteen and pregnant. “They were high school sweethearts, though. I didn’t even meet my husband and wife”—damn those were great words, and he’d be using them a fuck-ton every chance he got—“until I was more than halfway through my twenties.”

“Ancient.” Nat snorted from her lofty midthirties.

She sighed, and the wind kicked up, rattling his helmet. He angled the front fork to brace the shell against his thigh. The dangling chin strap clips bumped as they landed.

“You probably don’t remember, you were so little”—Nat’s voice carried an edge, a tightness that hadn’t been there before—“but we all went to the carnival, and Peggy and Chuck got into a huge fight—”

“Because I threw up and we had to go home early.” Not remember? The night had inspired his safeword. The stink of the vomit all down his shirt and the rough yank of it over his head, watching it get stuffed in a trash barrel, was one of his earliest memories. Peggy’s grip on his wrist as she led him back to the truck left a color-changing ring he’d poked at for days. This is all your fault, Jay Michael. If I didn’t have to watch you every damn minute... “Chuck didn’t want me stinking up the pickup. They broke up because of me.”

“Jesus, I can’t believe you remember—look, Jay, nothing that happened is your fault, got it? They made choices. Peggy made a choice and then another choice, and then a choice to keep a big secret. And I made a choice to remind her of that last month so she’d keep her damn mouth shut about other people’s choices. That’s not your fault.”

Maybe. That didn’t explain why Peggy would envy his life. “What choices?” He’d been a mess—leaving early had been kinda necessary, not a choice. “What secret? I don’t understand.”

“You remember she and Chuck broke up.”

“And then they got engaged like two months later.” He’d been all kinds of relieved when Chuck proposed at Sunday supper, because that fixed Jay’s behavior at the fair. He hadn’t derailed his sister’s dreams with the love of her life forever, just for a little while.

“Yeah. Because Peggy got pregnant.”

He’d lived through the events same as she had. “Right, with Becky.”

“Exactly.” Nat’s voice dripped with weighty importance.

Sure, maybe Peggy and Chuck had rushed their wedding because of the baby. They would’ve gotten married anyhow; they’d been dating since before Jay could remember. “That’s not a secret.”

“You are sweet and adorable, and I love you, little brother. But you have no guile in you.” Indecisive tongue clicks came through the speaker before a long, blown-out breath. “I heard Peggy and Beth talking a few weeks after the carnival. And they decided she needed to get back together with Chuck and have makeup sex ASAP because she’d already missed her period.”

But what did—oh. Oh, holy fuck.

That was the secret Nat had used to protect him from Peggy. His whole body fritzed with static, the daylight dimming at the edges of his vision. “Becky isn’t Chuck’s daughter?”

“No. Which Becky doesn’t know, obviously, and neither does Chuck.” If grimaces made a sound, it was probably that low creak in the silence. “No one knows, except Peggy and Beth. And me, because I was a snoopy kid. And now you.”

He slid down to the sidewalk, bumping his back against the frame, the gears, the pedal. The concrete was cold under his ass. “Was it even about me? That night at the carnival?”

“Not even a little, Jay. You were an excuse for them to hurl some vicious shit at each other. Peggy was already pissed off—Chuck had been flirting with the girl who ran the slushie booth. She spent the drive back bitching about it. I was sure she was gonna run the truck into a ditch.”

He’d been rattling around shirtless in the truck bed; Nat had had a spot between Peggy and Beth on the bench seat in the cab. She would know. If Peggy and Chuck’s breakup had been his fault, she would know. Twenty-five fucking years he’d believed he owed Peggy for all the trouble he’d been, the nuisance, the burden, for that day and every other time she’d told him so or reminded him of how his bad behavior had made things harder for her.

Well, he’d sure have a lot to tell Henry when he got home. And a fresh topic to bring up with Danny next week. Dizzy, he wedged his head against the bike seat and took a few deep breaths.

“Jay?” Nat’s pitch changed when she was worried. Higher, like Alice’s. “You still with me?”

“Yeah, I just—” Was floored the right word for that? He was outside, so it was ground, not floor, but that had to count. “I don’t know what to say. My head’s pedaling in random directions.”

“You aren’t riding in traffic, are you? Tell me you aren’t.”

“Nope. Not even on the bike. Just sitting.” But sitting wouldn’t get him closer to Henry and Alice. “Thank you for telling me. That—” Arms resting across his knees, he sought out the white wisps of clouds in the deepening blue above. Just another person having an emotional crisis on a thankfully less-traveled public sidewalk, no big deal. “It changes a lot. Having your perspective. Things are always my fault. I kinda forget to ask: What if they weren’t?”

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