Page 16 of The Holiday Heartbreaker

He shrugged. “I think she’s hot. But that’s it.”

If only that were true. Hot, in his experience, had a broad definition and was cheaply had. He liked women. He liked how they looked. He liked how they felt, how they smelled, and how he felt when he was with them. In them.

This was more than that. More than hot.

But it couldn’t even be that.

“Yeah, I think it’s a little more than that.”

Damn his brother for that.

“I don’t do more than that, bro. As you well know.”

“I didn’t mean like that. I just meant... I saw the two of you when you met. Kind of obvious chemistry.”

“I thank you not to remark on my chemistry. It’s creepy.”

He laughed. “Sorry. I don’t have a social gauge. Which I think you know.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

He stood and looked at his brother. Lachlan had scars on his face. A line that ran through his eyebrow, and one that disrupted his lip. From his father’s fists. He and Lachlan looked the most alike of his brothers, but Brody didn’t have a single scar.

Brody had been his dad’s favorite.

He gritted his teeth. “She’s divorced. The whole thing is like baggage, in a way that...”

“Yeah. I get it. I don’t blame you. I don’t do that whole thing either.” And Brody chose not to remark on the fact that Lachlan’s relationship with Charity looked a whole lot to him like a relationship without the sex.

But then, that kind of made sense. It allowed him to have someone in his life. Somebody soft and sweet, a female influence. That wasn’t... Marriage. Love. All that.

Keep your sex and your other stuff separate. Made sense to him.

Actually, sometimes he wondered if Lachlan was a genius.

“Staff meeting tomorrow,” Brody said. “Early.”

“I know. You don’t have to keep tabs on me,” Lachlan said.

“Force of habit.”

“Yeah. I know. As if you don’t need tabs kept on you.”

Lachlan was... Well, correct.

Charity was probably the best stabilizing force in his life. And Brody didn’t even have that. That was the thing. Hunter and Tag had been part of their posse until they had gotten married. But even they had never been quite as given over to the debauched arts as Lachlan and Brody were.

Drinking, sex... They ranched hard, they played harder. It was the thing they were into. But that sometimes meant they were spotty when it came to keeping commitments and schedules and things like that.

Their life had been hell growing up. Well, Lachlan, Tag, Hunter and especially Gus’s lives had been hell. A particular kind of hell, where they had earned their father’s fists and ire just for breathing wrong.

And Brody?

He had been the favorite child of the devil.

He was thirty-four years old and he still hadn’t figured out what the hell to do with that.

He didn’t think he ever would. He would probably just drink about it. It didn’t solve anything. But it numbed it. And that was often the best solution, in his opinion.

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