Page 68 of Smokin' Situation

“Not sure I should tell either of you, because that girl has been through enough and doesn’t need more of your competitive bullshit.”

“Did Hazel take your balls with her?” Jay asked, stepping forward.

I tried not to laugh at the way our cousin raised an eyebrow. Jay had apparently decided to poke yet another bear today.

“What is your fucking problem?” Reid asked, stepping forward and placing the back of his hand on Jay’s forehead. “Nope, no fever. So why exactly are you coming for everyone’s throat today? And you better not make some joke about needing to get laid, cause I won’t hold Tristan back this time if you do.”

“I’m just…” he sighed, deflating a little. “I need something to distract me right now, and since I thought I’d be able to come home and blow off some—”

“Nope,” I cut him off, shaking my head. “Not going down that path again.”

“Fine. You want to know what’s wrong? I just had to literally get down on my knees and beg the woman I thought I was going to marry someday to come work with me, and she laughed in my face.Again. She laughed in my face again for the second time in as many months.”

My eyes widened, and I met Reid’s gaze. There was only one woman he’d ever been in a serious relationship with. While I knew she was a chef, I also never thought Jay would ever talk to her—or about her—again after his meltdown when he heard she’d gotten married abroad six years ago.

“So, she said no?” I asked, unsure how the topic swung so wildly away from what’d happened with Rhey earlier, but also kind of invested in the answer to this question. If he wasn’t fixated on his former friend with benefits, then maybe he’d be okay with her being something more than that to me.

He shook his head, pacing by the front door. “No. She said yes, after she stopped laughing at me. But then she started again right after she let her feral kid shoot me in the face with a water gun.”

“And she’s moving here to help you open the restaurant?” Reid asked cautiously.

“That’s the plan. There was a unit available in my building, so I put down the security deposit yesterday when I got back to town.” Jay sounded like he was annoyed, but he almost seemed strangely excited by the fact his ex was going to be living close by.

“Mack is going to live in the same building as you—with a kid? Are you going to be able to handle that?” I asked, knowing part of the reason he acted like he did was because of her. And that while he’d been devastated by her abrupt departure to a study abroad program shortly after he’d confessed he wanted to drop out of culinary school, it was her getting married to one of her instructors and having a baby right away that’d really done him in.

“Yeah, she’s in a two bedroom with Hardy. He starts kindergarten in the fall. So, she’s moving in soon.”

“I thought you weren’t breaking ground until next spring?” Reid asked. He’d been helping Jayden out at the distillery when heneeded it. Now that I was healed, he promised to get me up to speed on how much his operation had expanded, but it sounded like he was going to have his hands full.

“I’m not. But she wants to be involved when my architect buddy comes in to draft the construction plans. Apparently, she doesn’t trust me to know how to put together a commercial kitchen properly.”

Reid laughed at Jay’s irritation, but I could see where Mack was coming from. When Jay was younger, he had the tendency to follow the thrill, and when culinary school had turned into more work than he thought it’d be, he dropped out. While I could admit he’d matured since then and seemed to be dedicated to perfecting his craft at the distillery, he still didn’t have enough experience in a commercial kitchen to know what a professional chef needed.

“Enough talking about how I’m going to regret my decision to bring her on, why are we just standing around?” Jay asked, gesturing toward the front door again.

“I don’t even know where she went.” Looking at Reid, he shrugged his shoulders, but I had a feeling one call to Hazel, and he’d know exactly where his girlfriend had taken Rhey.

“Do you even know what you’re going to say to her?” he asked.

“I’m gonna ask her to not hold the family I was born into against me and remind her I knew she was with someone before me.” Jay shook his head, but I had a feeling he knew he’d fucked the way he’d initially handled this up spectacularly. For someone who claimed to be her friend, he hadn’t treated her with much respect. “And that I don’t give a fuck if my brother saw her first.”

“Saw her naked,” Jay muttered under his breath, but he had the decency to look embarrassed when I stared him down.

I should have listened to Rhey earlier instead of walking away. But the sight of my brother with his hands all over her had been enough to send me into fight-or-flight mode—only she beat me to the flight part.

Jay cleared his throat. “I know we talked it out upstairs, but please be careful with her. She’s lost a lot in her life, and there are scarsburied deep that she hides from everyone. I think that’s part of why she stayed with me so long, she knew I was safe because I didn’t expect love to be a part of our relationship.”

Pausing, I gripped the back of my neck, and the lingering nerve pain surfaced as my skin stretched. It was background noise to my thoughts. I hadn’t been lying to him, I’d already fallen hard for this woman, and if she wasn’t capable of the same…

“If she doesn’t want—”

“Fuck,” my brother cursed, shaking his head. “Just keep fucking today up, don’t I? Tris, I wasn’t implying that she couldn’t love you, I just want to make sure she isn’t just someone to pass time for you. She looked devastated when she thought you were going to leave, so if you don’t feel the same…”

“I do.” I didn’t even have to think about it. She wasn’t someone I could walk away from now, and maybe never.

We’d clearly bonded during some stressful situations, and there were still so many things I wanted to learn about her… But I felt like I could finally breathe around her, though. And that wasn’t something I could just move on from without even trying. “She’s…”the love of my life.

“Then let’s go,” he said with a smile, but the sliding glass door to the back patio opened, and our moms walked through before I could follow him out the front.

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