Then he asked quietly, “How’d your Dad pass?”

“Hepatitis C,” I answered. “No one knows how he got it but he was an EMT when he was younger so maybe something happened on a call. He had it for ages before they caught it. He was close to dying when he got a donor liver but it attacked the new one and still, he lived twelve years after that before it beat him.”

“And your Mom hated him because…?”

“Mom hated him because he fell in love with his partner in his ambulance and they got married two weeks after the divorce was final. She was humiliated and I get that. But he also genuinely loved Donna. I mean truly, he adored her and it just sucked that he found her after he found Mom. Mom isn’t a bitch or a crazy person, she just wasn’t his other half and Donna was. He felt guilty all his life and made that clear but she never let it go. She isn’t like that with anyone else but unfortunately, for her, Dad was her other half and she genuinely loved him, truly adored him so her heart just broke and never mended.”

“Makes you wonder why we do this shit,” he muttered and I had to admit, there were a lot of times I agreed.

Though, the four months with him and the last three days, I didn’t.

“Why does your brother want to break your ex-wife’s neck?” I asked and he shook his head but smiled.

“Because he loves me and she made me miserable for ten years. The four of us kids were close growin’ up and sometimes, honest to God, Tess, sometimes I could swear the only things Levi wants in life are to see Jill, Laura and me happy. He’s not married, never has been, has dedicated his life to his career, his summer softball league, his season tickets to the Broncos, gettin’ laid as often as he can and his family. He’s the one we all call to babysit, he’s the emergency contact at all the kids’ schools, he never fails to prop his latest piece in a chair at the dining room table at Mom’s house for Thanksgiving dinner and he runs his ass ragged to get to every house on Christmas.”

“I don’t know if that sounds nice or a little crazy,” I shared cautiously.

“You and me both, babe. I get his struggle. There were times I wondered if I’d grow up to be Dad and let a good woman down and f**k over my family because none of us know why the f**k he did all the shit he did and, as a man, you watch the man whose seed made you and you think that shit’s in you. Then again, you also gotta live your life and if that beast lives within, you gotta have the balls at least to try and tame it. But the beast doesn’t live within.

This is not to say that I didn’t think of steppin’ out on Olivia who was a pain in my ass but I didn’t have it in me. And when it got so miserable I couldn’t take it anymore and I had the choice of eatin’ shit my whole life and teachin’ my sons eatin’ shit was the right thing to do, which it isn’t, or getting out from under that mess and showing them it was important to be a man and find my own happiness, I made that choice for me and for them. Levi doesn’t get that life will always be f**ked one way or another and you can’t run away from it. He’s living a life that’s been over for years. We aren’t livin’ with Mom and doin’ our homework at the kitchen table. That family’s changed and that life is gone and he needs to make his own life and his own family.”

“Have you told him this?”

“Getting my brother to listen is like convincing him to let it go about Olivia or Dad. It is just not gonna happen.”

“My sister lives in Australia and my mother lives in Florida,” I told him, he grinned and let my hair go as his arms wrapped around me.

“Finally, two things that show my Tess can be lucky.”

My body relaxed into his and I shared, “I miss them every day.”

His eyes moved over my face as he murmured, “Yeah.”

“Thanksgivings suck. I either go to Florida, where it’s just Mom and me and that’s okay but that isn’t like having a full table with kids being loud and wondering what girl your philandering brother is going to bring to dinner. Or she’s in Australia and I have to find a friend close to mooch dinner from. Those are worse.”

The skin around his eyes went soft and he muttered, “My poor Tess.”

I moved my face a half an inch closer and my fingers tensed into his neck for a second before I said quietly, “I guess what I’m saying is, all this seems like it sucks but it doesn’t.

It’s all based in love and history and loyalty so really it’s kind of beautiful because the alternative would be not having any of that and then where would you be?”

Brock didn’t answer. No, instead, his eyes looked into mine for long moments before his hand slid up in my hair, his body rolled me so I was again on my back, he was again on me and his mouth had captured mine and he was delivering a hard, deep, wet kiss that took my breath away.

When he lifted his head, I fought for my breath as well as control of several areas of my body and he asked, “You hungry, babe?”

“Yes,” I breathed because that was the truth, I was, but I was happy to eat later, as in, lunch the next day.

Brock grinned and the sight of it with his handsome face close, his hard body pressed the length of mine and my lips (and other places besides) still tingling from his kiss, I again lost control of those several areas of my body.

Therefore, to move my mind from him and what he was doing to those places, I blurted, “I think I’ve got popsicle juice on my back.”

“I’ll pay for the dry cleaning.”

“That’s okay. I kick ass with hand wash.”

He grinned again.

Then he asked, “Snickerdoodles?”

From the look in his eyes I knew that he knew I’d marked they were his favorites.

Therefore I shrugged and said, “The first time I made them, you ate, like, seven and you gravitate to cinnamon. It doesn’t take a mind reader to figure out you like them.”

He shook his head, still grinning but now muttering, “No games, no lies, no bullshit.”

What could I say? This was true.

So I didn’t say anything.

He did and this was a murmured, “Let’s get you fed.”

Then he knifed off me, grabbed my hand and pulled me off the couch then into the kitchen.

Then he fed me.

Then he ate three snickerdoodles.

Then he took me to bed.

* * * * *

Oh God. Oh my God.

“Fuck, Tess,” Brock growled and, not able to hold myself up anymore, I fell forward into a hand in the bed beside him as I kept riding him hard, grinding down to take him deep, his fingers on one hand clamped encouragingly around my hip as his thumb on the other continued to press and roll against my clit.