“Okay, Brock is on duty . . . let’s walk for a bit.”
Lincoln wrapped her arm around mine and guided us down the steps and to the trail that led down to the small gazebo Brock had built Lincoln for Christmas.
“Do you want to talk about John?”
My head snapped around to look at her. “John?” I asked with a surprised voice. Instant guilt swept over my body. Lincoln had thought I’d meant John, when in reality, it had been Ty I’d spoken about. I chewed nervously on my lip.
Lincoln stopped walking and faced me. “Isn’t that who you were . . .”
I felt my cheeks heat and tears threatening to build, but I held them back.
Shaking her head, Lincoln took my hand in hers. “Oh, it wasn’t John you were thinking about. I didn’t mean to make you feel sad.”
“I’m not sad—I feel guilty,” I said, a bit too defensively. It was okay if I still felt sad about John. I knew that. I had loved him. I was going to marry him. But the feelings I now had for Ty were much more intense.
“You know he would want you to be happy, Kaylee. It’s been years, and you haven’t gone out with anyone.”
“I’ve gone out on a couple of dates.”
She raised a brow. “Did you feel anything for those couple of guys?”
“Well, no, but no one has caught my attention.”
“Until Ty.”
With a nod, then a sigh, I replied, “Yeah. Ty. The pain-in-my-ass brother-in-law of yours whom I can’t stop thinking about. In every way. Every position. Hell, I even have weird, kinky dreams where he ties me up with a rope.”
Lincoln laughed. “It’s never been a secret you’ve found him attractive. I just thought you’d moved on.”
“Yeah, so did I. Apparently my body hasn’t gotten the memo. Even my heart is a little bit to blame as well. The bitch.”
“Kaylee, have you thought about talking to him? Seeing where you both could go with this?”
I let out a humorless laugh. “No. I mean, yes. I don’t know, Lincoln.”
I stared out at the mountains again and let my mind drift to the past. A past I had worked so hard on keeping there. The emotions that went along with my past would be enough to drag me back into the water and pull me under if I let them.
“Talk to me, Kaylee.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, then let it out slowly, gathering my thoughts before I spoke. “My whole life, I’ve pretty much had everyone tell me what I was able to do, and what a girl like me just shouldn’t do.”
“You grew up with money—that was probably your folks’ way of taking care of you.”
Facing her, I laughed, this time finding humor in her words. “You do remember me trying to use a hammer to put screws up when you first moved here, right?”
She laughed and nodded. “Yes, I remember.”
“Even with John, there were so many times when he would tell me I couldn’t do something. He used to kid me about it, tease me. At first it was funny: ‘Sure, make fun of me because I’ve never used an iron before, or never hung up a picture.’ Then it started to get to me. Started to really tick me off . . .”
My voice trailed off. I hadn’t ever shared this with anyone but my therapist.
“About three months before John took his own life, he told me he thought we were growing apart.”
“What?” Lincoln gasped. “Kaylee, you’ve never told me this.”
“At the time, I couldn’t really believe it myself. I thought everything was fine. I instantly thought he was having an affair or was interested in someone else. He promised me that wasn’t the case and that he felt like he was holding me back. When I look back on it, I think he was trying to save me from the pain of his suicide by trying to make me leave him.”
“You think he had been planning it that long?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d gotten angry with him because I was trying to put up wallpaper in the guest room. It was hard, but I was slowly getting it. He walked in and told me I needed to just hire someone because I was clearly not made for manual work. It hurt my feelings and felt like the last straw, so I told him that I was tired of the jokes, the little comments about me not being able to do things. He got angry with me, because he said he was joking and thought I had overreacted. He ended up leaving for a few days after he made the comment about us growing apart. It all seemed so surreal that I didn’t know what to think of it. He apologized a few days later, and we made up like we always did. Sex and then more sex.”
Lincoln gave me a sympathetic look.
“After he died, it took me months to get it out of my head that maybe I was the reason he took his life. Before you say I wasn’t, I know I wasn’t. John had some issues that went deeper than any of us knew. But at the time, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had missed signs of his unhappiness. That perhaps he had said things, and I had simply brushed them off, thinking it wasn’t important at the time.
“I honestly never thought another man would make me feel the way John did. And then Ty came along. The instant attraction I felt for him was both a relief and a shock. I don’t feel guilty for my thoughts toward Ty, I really don’t. For the longest time, I thought maybe I was somehow broken because I wasn’t feeling anything toward men, and my therapist told me I had put up a wall to guard my heart. One look at Ty Shaw, though, and that wall came tumbling down, and I was ready to feel something for the first time in months.
“I remember that night at the Blue Moose, Lincoln. The way he was looking at me, the way he held me when we danced. I felt it, and I thought for sure he had too. It was that electric of a connection. I was finally ready to let go of that last little string that was holding me to my past.
“But when he finally kissed me that night, he acted like someone had just struck him in the face. He turned white as a ghost and took a few steps away from me. When a guy starts rubbing the back of his neck after a kiss and says things like, ‘That was a mistake—I’m sorry I did that. Please forgive me,’ a girl starts to worry. I worried for days that I had some weird bad-breath disease or I smelled bad, judging by how he’d acted.”
Lincoln’s lips pressed tightly together to keep from smiling. “Maybe he had a different reaction altogether. One that scared him.”
“Scared him?” I asked. Wait, what? That was an interesting take.
“From what Brock’s told me, Ty’s been through a lot the last few years. The car accident, the pain-pill addiction, trying to find himself . . . maybe he felt something with that kiss that spooked him. You even said yourself that Ty made you feel things you hadn’t felt in a few years. Maybe he felt something for you that he’d never felt before.”
I stared at her for a moment. I wanted desperately to believe what she was saying. Then I laughed. “No, I think Ty saw I wasn’t going to be a one-night stand, and that was what turned him off.”
“Then how do you explain all the bickering? The way he looks at you sometimes, Kaylee? I see it. Brock sees it too. Hell, everyone sees it. He tries to hide it, and maybe he has his own reasons why. What about him being jealous over Channing?”
I went to speak, then snapped my mouth shut again. “Jealous?” I asked, more to myself than to Lincoln. “Do you honestly think he’s jealous?”