Page 56 of Sunrise Arrows

Her arms come around me, hugging me to her, and she lets out a shuddering breath.

“It’s my fault. Had I not left that night, everything that came after wouldn’t have happened. I deserve to carry the burden of it. I didn’t believe in you and what we had.”

I pull my head back and wrap a hand around her delicate throat, brushing my thumb along her pulse. With her eyes on me, I gently demand, “Tell me the truth, baby; all of it.”

Her tongue peeks out to wet her puffy lips, and after curling them in, she whispers, “I never should’ve believed him. He told me if I left, he’d make sure we were ruined.”

“Who?”

She tries to look away, but I squeeze her pulse to keep her eyes on me and repeat, “Tinsley, who told you that?”

“Hunter.”

CHAPTER19

Archer

It’sthe middle of the night and I’m pounding my fist on my brother’s door.

After Tinsley told me what happened the night she left ten years ago and when she came back a year later, I couldn’t sleep. The details I’ve been missing all these years played over and over in mind, keeping me up for hours after she’d fallen asleep. Finally, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I gently untangled her from me and slipped out of bed, grabbing a pair of athletic shorts and a t-shirt from the dresser before I crept out of our room and dressed on the stairs, hellbent on getting the rest of the fucking answers I’m owed from Hunter, beginning with what the hell did he do with the rest of the letter she wrote the night she ran.

She said it was several pages long, not the ripped portion I woke up to. That she told me about finding the engagement ring in my nightstand and how she was spooked because suddenly her life wasn’t what she’d been working towards and her priorities and dreams were shifting and the fear of regret terrified her—a damn self fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one. In it, she said she knew I’d be hurt and angry by what she did but hoped with space I would call her when I was ready, that she'd wait to hear from me for however long it took. She’d left details and solutions to how we could do the long distance for that first year while I finished school. Had sworn to me that unless I told her otherwise, she would come back the first chance she got. And she did.

For ten months she waited for a phone call that never came, and when she was finally able to come back here, she was met with Hunter and his loathing for her. When she told me what he said to her, I was ready to punch a wall. It was exactly what she parroted back and accused me of thinking about her on the lake four weeks ago. Still, my girl wasn’t cowed by him, not until he relented and started to bring her up to the house.

I hadn’t immediately been able to recall who Tinsley was talking about when she said she saw a redhead come up and kiss me. Hearing it was absurd. It was several years before I even went on a date with someone else, so I sure as hell wasn’t kissing anyone ten months after losing her.

But as she talked about shoving past Hunter, who shrugged and said, “Told you; you’re not wanted here,” and getting in her car and later throwing her phone into the lake, it clicked. She’d seen me with Ashley Morgan—Hunter’s whatever she was to him who hadn’t been able to tell us apart if her life depended on it. Ashley had come out of the house tipsy on Shiner from the barbecue we were having and had thrown herself at me thinking I was my twin. Getting her the hell off me had been a nightmare, and I was wracked with guilt over having felt like I’d just cheated on Tinsley for weeks afterward.

Whether I’d been right in thinking the tabloids were making things up about her and her tourmate or I was wrong, I didn’t care. In my heart, I was still a man in love and was faithful to my girl. Ashley kissing me had shredded what was left and drove me the closest I’d come since Tinsley ran to chasing after her. I’d gotten in my truck and on the road at least a dozen times, ready to meet her at the next tour stop and do whatever I had to in order to see her. I needed to kiss her and hold her again and beg her to tell me what to do to fix us because being without her was slowly killing me and I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Jesus, what the fuck?” Hunter yells from the other side of the door as he wrenches it open. He’s in his boxers, eyes squinting with sleep, as he dumbly checks, “Archer?”

I’m not a violent person and haven’t been in a fight since high school when Mason Hucksley thought it was his job to uphold the stereotype of jocks versus nerds, always shoving Ames against the lockers, knocking his books or lunch out of his hands, and all sorts of general dickish behavior. I had the Hayes name and money as well as my brothers who played football with him keeping me off his radar. Ames, who literally grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, had none of that, and there was no way I was letting him suffer alone. If you went after Ames, you went after me, and along with me came Ryder and Hunter.

However, the moment I see my twin, my fist is rearing back and punching him in the face. His eyes immediately water and blood spurts from his nose.

“What the fuck?” he yells, stumbling back and pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Where the fuck is it?”

“I don’t?—”

“Wrong answer!” I yell, shoving him the rest of the way into his house and slamming the door closed behind me. I have him pinned against the wall and my breath is ragged as I seethe, “What did you do with it?”

“She told you.”

I grab him by his shoulders, jerking him forward before slamming him back into the wall. His head bounces with the impact and I let him go, stepping back. I can’t control myself this close to him.

Tearing through his house, I start turning on lights. There’s nothing in his living room that could hide the letter, so I move on to his kitchen. Ripping out drawers and opening cabinets and the pantry, I turn the room upside down before moving on.

I charge up the stairs, taking them two at a time yelling, “For your sake Hunter, you better not have fuckin’ thrown it out!”

“What does it matter?” he yells back, coming after me. At the top of the stairs, he tackles me and we grapple for dominance before he’s slamming me down into the hardwood, the hit rattling my teeth. “Sheleftyou, Archer. She fuckin’ left you without so much as a thought for what it’d do to you. Packed her shit in the middle of the night and wrote you a goddamn Dear John letter.”

“It wasn’t your choice!”

“SHE LEFT YOU!” he roars, spit hitting my face.

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