“Bowen?” I could still hear her voice echoing in my head. How the fuck did she even know my name? Oh, right. Katherine, the official meddler of flight 672.
What had I done to deserve this?
Was I some kind of psychopath in a past life, reaping the punishments for my sins in the form of an intoxicating blonde with blue eyes that I swear could deliver sight to the blind?
I was not emotionally equipped to deal with Remi Grey. Christ, I was barely emotionally equipped enough to wake up each morning.
It didn’t matter. It was over. Done. She was gone.
And now, I just needed to take seven thousand cold showers and then avoid McMurphy’s for the rest of eternity to keep it that way.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
The house was dark when I arrived, just as it had been for the last six months, but somehow, I was still surprised by the suffocating weight of the loneliness inside. The dogs barked, the sounds of their feet on the wood floor preluding my daily welcome-home celebration. Sugar danced against my legs while Clyde took a slightly more goatly approach, head-butting me in the kneecaps.
“Okay, okay, I see you,” I clipped, giving them both a placating pet before flipping the light on—and then promptly having a heart attack. “Fuck!” I boomed as my brain scrambled to make sense of why there was a man stretched out on my couch.
“It’s about time you got home,” my brother said, slowly sitting up.
Right. Because my day hadn’t been challenging enough. “Jesus, Tyson.”
He stood up, stretching his arms over his head, and yawned. “I’ve been waiting for over an hour. Where the hell have you been?”
Nowhere near ready to dive into that shitstorm, I avoided his question with another question. “How did you get in here?” I’d taken his key away months ago for this exact reason. If he wasn’t attempting to scare the shit out of me, he wasn’t truly living.
“Cassidy gave me hers when she assigned me babysitting duty tonight. Hope you’re up for sushi and sake. Jared’s coming to pick us up at seven.”
Perfect. Just fucking perfect. Another overbearing ambush from the Michaels siblings.
“I’m going to take a hard pass on that.” I walked to the kitchen, hoping and praying he hadn’t eaten my leftover pizza, but if I knew him at all, the fridge had been his very first stop. “Does this mean you and Jared are officially back together?” I asked robotically, capping it off with a knowing smirk.
“Don’t give me that shit. We all know Mom can’t keep a secret. Telling her is cheaper than announcing it on a billboard but has the same community reach.”
I laughed because he wasn’t wrong. “You still should have told me.” Lifting the empty pizza box off the counter, I shot him a scowl over the bar. “I hope you get food poisoning.”
He grimaced. “Trust me, it felt like food poisoning going down. Who the hell puts spinach and artichoke on pizza?”
After folding the box in half, I stuffed it into the recycling bin. “Someone with tastebuds and a heathy desire to skip the gym on Sundays.”
“Makes sense.” He curled his biceps into a flex and kissed the molehill hiding beneath his emerald-green V-neck. “I did monopolize all the good genes in the family.”
“Bullshit. Cassidy got the good genes. You got Dad’s webbed toes.”
“Jackass,” he muttered, strolling into the small open kitchen, Sugar and Clyde hot on his heels. He propped his hip against the counter and flashed me a shit-eating grin. “Quit deflecting. I’m smarter than that. Where ya been, Bo?”
Like a truly mature adult and not at all like a ten-year-old fighting with his little brother, I curled my lip and mocked, “None of your fucking business, Ty.”
He barked a laugh and shook his head. “You having a life isn’t a crime. You know this, right?”
Retrieving a beer from the fridge, I avoided his scrutiny. “Yes. But you know what is a crime? Breaking and entering.”
He snapped twice—Tyson Michaels sign language for pass me a beer. “Was there a woman involved in this secret after-work detour?”
I ducked back into the fridge to grab another beer, Remi and her ridiculous house plant flashing on the back of my lids.
It made no sense, her showing up at McMurphy’s like that. Atlanta was a big city. Numbers were my forte, but I didn’t need to break out my calculator to know the likelihood of our paths crossing was almost nonexistent.
Coincidences weren’t out of the realm of possibility though.
That didn’t explain why, at the courthouse, she’d stared at me like she was starving and I was her only chance at sustenance. As soon as the gavel had banged, I’d ducked out, hoping to avoid any further interactions with her. Only for an outrageously overpriced Half Moon whatever-the-fuck-she’d-called-it to hand deliver her to the barstool beside me.
