I scowled a little. “I don’t look at him with googly eyes. I look at him with normal eyes.”

Ronan gave me an arched brow and that big-brother stare that said I was stalling. I sighed and shifted in place.

“Fine. I guess it started properly when we bumped into each other in town one day. He asked me to dinner. I thought he was taking the piss. He wasn’t. I said yes. Things progressed from there.”

“So this is the dinner you told me about? Why did you say yes?”

“Fine. Okay, he kind of blackmailed me into it. He saw me take some eyeshadow, shoplift, and used it as leverage. But, honestly? I would have gone either way.”

Ronan’s eyes widened as though I’d just told him Santa Claus and Genghis Khan had been having a torrid love affair since the twelfth century.

“Oh God, Ronan, come on.” I rolled my eyes, feeling marginally better now we were engaging in normal brother and sister bickering. “Even you must see how gorgeous he is. It was going out to dinner once. At least, that’s what I thought. And then he said something rude and I threw my drink in his face and left.”

This news seemed to settle him somewhat.

“Good.” He nodded once. “That’s good. So how do you go from throwing your drink in his face to googly eyes?”

I released a giant exhale and sat heavily on the couch, studying my fingers as I answered. “It’s complicated. I knew going out with him was wrong and that it would anger you. I told him we could be friends and nothing more. He never told anyone about my shoplifting problem. And at first I thought he and I were friends, or becoming friends. I was doing him a favor, helping him out. But we just have this thing between us that’s hard to ignore. A draw.”

“You were drawn to him?”

“Yes,” I answered simply. “Didn’t you feel the same way when you first met Annie? Like even though you knew pursuing her was going to be whole lot of trouble you could do without, you couldn’t help doing it anyway?”

Now he only looked at me, his expression inscrutable. He folded his arms, and his lips pulled into a firm line as he admitted grudgingly, “I might have.”

A few moments of silence elapsed before Ronan spoke again. “The thing you have to understand here, Lucy, is that Annie and Sean are two very different people. Annie is lovely and fundamentally kind. Whereas Sean is a selfish, spoiled brat. Sure, he might toy with the idea of caring for your safety, but when it comes down to it, the thrill of a new relationship is going to fade and he’s going to realize how much hard work it is. I don’t want to see you invest in a man who’s going to flake out on you in the long run.”

“You know he never actually slept with Brona, right?”

Ronan exhaled heavily. “He said something to that effect downstairs, yes.”

“So you should also know he’s not the spoiled brat he likes to lead everybody to believe. It’s like a defense mechanism. If he pushes people away from the start, he doesn’t have to worry about being rejected later.”

Ronan was already shaking his head before I’d finished. “Luce, even if that’s true, don’t you think it’s a little fucked up? Yeah, he might have never slept with Brona, but he still fabricated a relationship with her. That isn’t the behavior of a well-adjusted individual.”

“Listen, I’m not defending Sean or what he did to you, I’m just trying to explain a person who is a lot more complicated than one action. He is more than a spoiled brat.” I stood from the couch, no longer in danger of crying, feeling the rightness of my words as I said them. “If someone looked at me tonight, the mess I made downstairs, stealing fecking golf balls of all things, they might call me a spoiled brat and leave it at that. Yes, I’m messed up. What I did was messed up. But I’d like to think I’m not defined by—”

“No, Luce. That argument doesn’t work because you have a compulsive problem. You don’t steal because you want revenge on the K Club Golf Shop. Sean Cassidy does shite to be a mean arsehole. That’s the difference.”

“But don’t you see? Pushing people away is Sean’s compulsion. He’s been rejected his whole life. He did what he did to you because he’s jealous. He thinks you have everything handed to you on a silver platter and everybody loves you without question. It’s basic juvenile jealousy, Ronan. And I bet if you’d been friendly to him from the first time you met, things would’ve been a whole lot different.”

Ronan lifted his voice with frustration. “I wasn’t unfriendly to him. I barely even spoke to him.”

I gesticulated with my hands. “Exactly. Don’t you see? You ignored him, so he built this ridiculous, nonsensical jealousy thing. For God’s sake, you big burly men are all little boys when it comes down to it.”

“I’m not a little boy.”

“In regards to Sean you are. You both need to let this absurd feud go already. Sure, I’ll be the first person to admit he’s not perfect, that he has issues he needs to work on, but so do I, and so do you, Ronan.”

“You’re comparing me to Sean Cassidy?”

I ignored this outraged question and pressed on. “We all have issues. Human beings are flawed, and all we can hope for is to work toward making ourselves better. Not perfect, just better.”

Ronan began pacing again, his hands on his hips, his jaw set. “Bloody hell,” he growled, then a full minute later, “I hate how you make so much sense sometimes.”