Page 5 of Summer with a Brother's Best Friend
Like cake.
I love cake, and if this is the one thing my mother and I can agree on, I’ll hold on to it with two hands and my last gasping breath.
4
ISAAC
“Is this seat taken?” a smooth, hypnotic voice asks me as I raise my glass to my lips. Goose bumps race over my body as if she’d touched me.
Because I know the girl that voice belongs to.
The woman, actually.
“It’s yours.”
The seat.
My heart.
My body.
Anything.
I wish I were being dramatic, but as I turn to look at my first and, really,onlylove, I can’t imagine ever being as happy as I was with her.
“Thanks.” She leans in and kisses my cheek, her hand gripping my forearm as she gets settled on the barstool.
“You look great,” I say without thinking, but it’s true because she always looks so damn good.
We’d been twenty when things had ended, and in the last seven years, she’d gone from the litheness of a beach-going college girl to a sun-kissed woman with curves and legs for days.There was no point in trying to get my hard-on under control. I was guaranteed to be like this for as long as Reece was in Love Beach.
“So do you,” she says, giving me an appreciative look, her gaze dropping to my lap before snapping up to my face, a sweet pink coloring her cheeks. I fight the urge to adjust myself because that one quick perusal has me more worked up than any date I’ve been on since she’s been gone.
The bartender places a beer in front of her, and I shake my head to clear the fog becausehow did I miss her ordering a drink?
“I like this place. I don’t think I’ve ever really been in here,” Reece says, looking around The Cove Bar and Grill, and I nod slowly because we’d never come here, choosing to spend most of our time at the beach or at the Sandy Sipper.
“Yeah, I just needed a little quiet tonight,” I say, turning toward her, the motion shifting her crossed legs between mine.
It would be so easy to pull her into me—into my lap—and kiss her until I’ve erased all the years we’ve been apart.
“Me too.”
“What happened?” I ask, pulling my head out of my ass and back to the present.
She gives me a wry grin and shrugs one shoulder. “I had dinner with my parents.”
My hand grips my glass harder, and her lips quirk up on one side as she tracks the movement before meeting my gaze and giving me a full smile that completely steals my breath.
“Thanks,” she says softly.
“I didn’t say anything.”
Nodding at the glass, she says, “You didn’t have to.” Taking a sip of her beer, she bobs her head from side to side. “I just thought that they’d be proud of me by now, you know?” I open my mouth to speak, but she gives a humorless laugh. “Theyaren’t. In seven years, nothing has changed. My brother is still the golden child, and my mother—ever doting on her hometown hero son—said that it was okay he missed dinner tonight because his job isn’t astrivialas mine.”
“Want me to kick his ass?” I offer. Even though he’s not the whole problem, he’ll have to do. She laughs, for real this time, but I’m not kidding. Best friend or not, I won’t let Maddox hurt her, and honestly, he’s being a chickenshit. He needs to stand up to their mother and end this weird rivalry she’s created between them. Regardless of whether Maddox thinks it or not, he’s hurt Reece by not speaking up. It’s not like he can fix things by avoiding her the entire time she’s in Love Beach.
Which isn’t nearly long enough.
