One sardonic eyebrow raised. “For?”
She was short of air again. Dammit. “You know what? It’s late. Good night.” And acting like the coward she’d been for the past seven years, she walked away. Actually, she ran, her sneakers making squeaky noises on the grass as she counted her steps. Because maybe the old Brooke had been fearless and brave, but the new Brooke was nothing but a big, fat scaredy-cat, and she’d just proven it.
Chapter 3
“You going to make mashed potatoes with that thing, or hit me over the head?”
Back at the house, Brooke collapsed in exhaustion on the couch in the living room. “That’s definitely enough todaying for today . . .” she murmured, and closed her eyes.
She was awoken an hour later by an unfortunately familiar sound.
Someone was throwing up. And that someone was throwing up while padding down the hall toward her.
Maddox.
He was crying, nose running, puke-faced, and she was torn between wanting to cuddle him close or run in the other direction. Her sense of auntie obligation won, so she scooped him up. She had to hold her breath, but she got him cleaned, changed, and tucked back into bed.
That’s when Princess Millie appeared and also threw up.
And where there were two, there were always three. Not ten minutes after she’d soothed Maddox and Millie, then Mason was also getting sick.
And then the cycle began all over again.
She’d stepped into her own horror flick.
HOURS LATER, UP to her elbows in poop and puke and exhausted to the bone, Brooke laid Maddox back into his little toddler bed and stroked his hair from his face as he clung to her hand.
“You’re going to be okay,” she whispered softly.
He sent her a sweet, sleepy smile and flashed that dimple, and her damn heart snagged in her chest. Seriously, how was she supposed to resist? He had huge green eyes and drooled when he smiled at her, and he hugged her with his grimy, disgusting hands and loved her with his sweet, undamaged heart. Gah.
Since dawn was making an appearance, she didn’t bother to attempt sleep. Instead, she obsessively scrubbed the sick germs from every nook and cranny of the entire house, including under the couch. She was demolishing all the dust bunnies when she found a tortoise.
A live tortoise.
She texted a pic of it to Mindy with a “WTF” and got a response that Ketchup the Tortoise was Mason’s; he was shy and considerate. He had an aquarium on the floor in the laundry room, complete with a heat lamp and drinking water, but it was left open so he could have the freedom of the place. He went to the bathroom next to his aquarium on a bed of paper towels and he ate out of a pie tin that Brooke should put lettuce and strawberries in once a day—which was all in the instructions Mindy had emailed, and why wasn’t Brooke reading her emails?
“I can’t even,” Brooke said to the room, and then proceeded to lose her phone while using it as a flashlight to stare at Ketchup. She frantically slapped her pockets for an embarrassingly long moment before realizing she was an idiot. She moved to the kitchen and stared out the window, wishing for . . . what? A nap? Caffeine?
A one-way ticket to Mars?
She heard the front door open and close, then footsteps heading her way—light, unhurried footsteps, like maybe her home invader/thief/possible murderer was in no rush. Well, that made one of them. Whirling around, she grabbed the first thing she came to. A potato masher.
Garrett stood in the doorway. “You going to make mashed potatoes with that thing, or hit me over the head?”
She considered hitting him over the head, but wait a minute. He was holding . . . a bag from McDonald’s. Be still her heart. Setting the masher down, she turned to wash her hands. Twice.
“You okay?” Garrett asked.
She might’ve taken comfort in the question, but his voice held that same cool, distant tone as it had last night. He had not forgiven her. She told herself she understood that. “I’m great. I mean, I did just spend a full minute looking for my phone while using it as a flashlight, but everyone does that, right?”
His smile was polite, the kind he’d always reserved for teachers and adults in general, and if she’d had any heart left, it would’ve cracked. She chalked that up to being awake all night, and she was pretty sure she still smelled like puke. Garrett, on the other hand, looked better than anyone had a right to this early in the morning. “So what are you doing here?” she asked. “And why do I feel like I’m the only one of us surprised to see each other?”
“Mindy called me yesterday. Said you were coming home with the kids.”
Her pulse was thundering so hard she was certain he could hear it. “Mindy called you?” she repeated inanely.
“Yeah.” He handed her the coffee, opened the bag, and held out an Egg McMuffin. “And again this morning. She wanted me to tell you that it’s possible the kids got food poisoning from your mom’s egg sandwiches the morning they showed up at your place. She said she feels really bad about it, but didn’t know until she got a text from your mom late last night—”
He stopped talking and went brows up when Brooke took a long, deep pull of the coffee like her life depended on it. Because it did. “So you’re still tight with Mindy,” she said when the caffeine hit her bloodstream. “And . . . you live next door.”
“Yes. I bought Ann’s house a while back.”
She’d first met Garrett the day he’d shown up as the new kid on the school bus. When a stupid boy several years older than all of them had started to pick on Mindy, Brooke had gotten up to sock him in the nose, but Garrett beat her to it.
Neither Mindy nor Brooke had ever had to take a stand again, although Brooke had still done so, unable to stop herself from being what the school liked to call difficult.
She’d made that a lifelong thing. From a young age, all she’d ever wanted was adventure. She’d been the only one in her family with the “wanderlust,” as her mom called it, becoming absorbed early on in photography and rock climbing. The minute Brooke had turned eighteen, she’d left home to work for an adventure guide company, working her way up from scrub to guide for a few years before landing a job at the Travel Network. Her parents hadn’t been thrilled, but they’d let her go. She’d used Wildstone as her home base, but she’d been gone more often than not, which had suited her because there’d been no future for her in Wildstone beyond working for her dad at POP Smoothies. And while she loved a good smoothie, she needed more.
She’d gotten it, along with a whole bunch of things she hadn’t counted on.
Garrett was lounging against the granite countertop, calmly studying her. She had no such ability to be calm. Not with her very messy, god-awful past and her equally messy, murky present colliding. Which was why you came here, she reminded herself. To make amends. To apologize, so that maybe she could also forgive herself and then move on. She could go back to LA and be the Brooke of old again.
But she didn’t have the words for all that, mostly because she couldn’t stop staring at Garrett. He was tall and broad, with messy, sun-kissed brown hair that she’d bet hadn’t been brushed by more than a casual flick of his fingers. He’d never given a single fig about his appearance, and why would he, when he looked like he did? His T-shirt advertised a Wildstone surf shop and fit his toned body just right, as did his jeans. He wore battered hiking boots and a soft, worn leather jacket against the chill of the morning, but that wasn’t what held her captive. It was his light hazel eyes, set beneath black lashes and the dark lines of his eyebrows. His hair was longer than he used to keep it, and the lines of his face more defined by the intervening years, but the way he looked at her—like he could see everything, including all her messy faults—hadn’t changed.