Page 45 of Hero for the Holidays

“I know. Because I hadn’t talked to Fia. And listen, our business about the whole thing is our business. Not yours. But feel free to make the rumors real colorful.”

“Nonsensicaleven,” said Fia. “Everybody will mutter at each other behind their hands and we won’t have to put up with it.”

“And once it all blows over,” Landry said, “maybe you can think about going to school at the one-room schoolhouse. We need the drama to pass.”

“Wow,” said Lila. “So this is like asmall-town scandal? Are we ascandal?”

“Oh yeah,” said Denver. “It’s a big one. Because Landry and Fia hate each other. And pretty much always have. At least, that’s what we all thought.”

“You didn’t have a theory on why that was?” Fia asked.

Denver shrugged. “Not really. My brother is off-putting. We all are. We’re kind of used to people just disliking us because they do. I figured it was that.”

“Really?” Fia asked, looking genuinely confused. “My sisters had been convinced the entire time that Landry and I...” She glanced at Lila. “Well, that we were secretly acouple.”

“I guess they were closer to the truth than we were,” said Justice.

Daughtry snorted. “I knew about you.”

“Didyou?” Landry asked.

“Yeah. I saw you kissing her years ago. Out at the cabin. I was trying to bring a girl there. And you were already there. Son of a bitch.”

Lila looked slightly harmed by that information. Fair enough. Landry was harmed by the thought that his brother had seen them.

“Okay,” said Landry. “Enough about my personal stuff in front of my kid, please.”

“Hey,” said Denver. “You brought the personal stuff to the King family. You get what you get.”

And that, he figured, was mostly true.

“My mistake,” he said dryly. “Really.”

But after that, they all went into the dining room, which was already laden with potato salad, rolls and green salad. There were baked beans and pigs in a blanket, and his brothers set meat platters down next to all of it.

This was normal for them. A typical family get-together. They were functional. That was the thing he kept coming back to. They had made a functional family, even without the model of one. He wanted to use that evidence to tell himself that Fia was wrong.

To tell himself that he had been right, and they could’ve all rallied together and raised Lila.

But the truth was, his father had still been around them. And the thought of his father getting any of his poison near Lila, it made him want to kill the man.

It made him feel kinship to Angus McCloud, who, it had been rumored for a great many years, had in fact killed his father.

And no one would blame him.

So maybe the circumstances had been wrong. But he had offered to run away with her. But then... What would’ve become of the Sullivan sisters? Because just a couple years later their parents had busted up and then Fia had spent all that time taking care of her sisters while their mother had checked out. He had observed that even though he’d been distant from her at the time.

And maybe he’d even enjoyed her pain a little bit back then.

Because his pain had been the only pain that mattered.

And the real issue now, looking around the table, looking at all these people who he loved dearly, was that while he admitted that he wouldn’t have actually been a good father at seventeen, it made him question whether or not he could be a good one now.

As Fia had said to him, he had really looked at himself as a thirty-year-old, and had said that he could’ve done this when he was seventeen.

As if he hadn’t learned a damn thing. About how hard life was. And if nothing else, he should at least be able to look back on how fragile he’d been as a teenager, and tried to imagine what he might’ve done with the child.

There was something about being in this house with Fia, which was something he had never done then, that made him face the impossibility of it.

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