Isaiah
He knew it. God damn it.
From the moment he’d laid eyes on Kelli when he first arrived at her place, he’d known it. Unless he got the hell out of there ASAP, it’d be just a matter of time before he was a goner. It was why he’d been so adamant and hadn’t even cared about being rude when trying to get out of this assignment. He wasn’t even as worried anymore about how he’d handle this with Nathan and his other siblings, who weren’t exactly fans of Kelli, as he was about something else now. The first thing any of them would question, and rightfully so, was her integrity.
Isaiah understood why she’d gone about things the way she had now. It was why he’d ultimately given in tonight and why he was done trying to fight his feelings for her. If the tables had been turned, he likely would’ve done the same thing Kelli had when she’d tried to explain herself last year. He, too, would’ve put her safety first then chased after her for a chance to explain himself, despite how his actions might appear to the rest of her family. Had she had a sister he’d had to use to get the chance, while wrong, given no other choice, he would’ve likely done whatever it took.
But there were still other things he needed to get straight. Already she’d lied to him about Matt. She’d done so convincingly enough. Though he did have to wonder how much the utter jealousy had blinded him to the reality. Had Isaiah not been so hung up on feeling irritated by her affection for the guy, he might’ve picked up on the insincerity. Still, whether he’d been drunk or not, Gilbert’s words tonight would not be so easily dismissed.
Just keep her away from any guys you’re tight with.
He wanted to believe Kelli hadn’t done what Gilbert was accusing her of. But even then she’d only denied cheating on Gilbert, not any involvement with his best friend. Even if it did happen after they’d broken up, it was still a shitty thing to do. Clearly, this and everything leading up to this was why he’d been reluctant to get involved with her. Did he really want to get involved with a woman whose morals were so unlike his? What else would she be capable of?
The second he turned the corner toward their suite he saw Gilbert at the suite door. Kelli was standing at the open door in her bathrobe, talking to him. To her credit, she hadn’t let him in, but it still pissed Isaiah off.
One glance in his direction and Gilbert said something to Kelli then started walking away in the other direction. “Elevator’s this way, Gilbert,” Isaiah said loudly.
Gilbert slowed but didn’t stop. “I’ll take the stairs.”
In the moments it took Isaiah to reach the suite door where Kelli still stood, Gilbert made it to the stairs door and was out of sight. Isaiah turned to Kelli. “What’s his hurry? Why was he here?”
Kelli opened the door wider to let Isaiah in, but he waited where he was for an answer.
“He’s still drunk. I guess my not responding to any of his texts or answering my phone—”
“What the fuck does he want now?”
“To apologize.”
Isaiah peered at her because she didn’t seem nearly as upset as she’d been when she and Gilbert had last spoken. “Yeah? So everything’s all hunky-dory now between you two again? You back to being best friends with your ex, Kel?”
“No, actually.” Kelli reached for his hand and tugged until he budged and walked in with her. “I didn’t get into it with him now because it’s pointless. Everyone knows there’s no talking to a drunk. But as soon as I get the chance to speak with him when he’s sober, I’m breaking things off.”
Isaiah stopped in his tracks as he dropped the bag he was holding onto the bar counter. “Breaking what off?”
Someone knocked at the door before she could answer. They both turned to the door then exchanged glances, and Isaiah stalked to it, swinging it open. Seeing the room-service attendant was a relief, but Isaiah didn’t have time to wait for him to set it all up. “Just push the cart in. I’ll handle the rest.” He took his wallet out and tipped the guy, dismissing him quickly, then turned back to Kelli. “Breaking what off?” His tone was now even more demanding than the first time.
“Our friendship—my entire relationship with him.” She pulled the cart into the front room. “Do you wanna eat here or in the bedroom?” She stopped and turned to him. The sweet smile on her face seemed out of place, considering the circumstances. “Let’s eat on the bed the way we did that first weekend.”
Isaiah hadn’t even come down from the adrenaline spike of seeing her at the door with Gilbert then hearing her say she was breaking things off with the guy. He’d been ready to pull Gilbert in by his fucking tie and demand a full explanation of their friendship and Kelli’s involvement with Dylan, if that had been him again at the door. But he grudgingly followed Kelli into her room, where she was already headed with the food, in spite of his still-agitated disposition.
“Kel, we need to talk.” He watched as she happily placed the trays of food on the bed. “I don’t think I could eat until I get a few things straight.”
Kelli crawled onto the bed, sitting down cross-legged as she’d done so often that first weekend, but her smile wasn’t quite as big anymore. “Are you serious about wanting to make this work, even if it upsets your brother—your family?”
He didn’t respond immediately the way he knew he would’ve if things had gone down differently tonight—if he’d never met Dylan, and Gilbert had never brought up her past with him. But who was he kidding? The only way he’d be walking away from her now was if his gut feeling that she couldn’t be trusted entirely turned out to be true. “Yes, but I need answers first.”
She smiled, exhaling a little too noticeably, then patted the bed next to her. “Then have a seat. I’ll tell you whatever you wanna know while we have our late dinner.”
Kicking his shoes off, he got on the bed next to her, and she leaned over and kissed him. “I never cheated on Gilbert, nor did I sleep with his best friend.” Isaiah stared at her, wishing he could believe her without a doubt. Then she added, “But Dylan and I did have a relationship that pissed Gilbert off.”
Remembering the smug smirk on that asshole’s face back at the restaurant had Isaiah seeing red again. “So that piece of shit back at the restaurant is also your ex? Wow. I thought Gilbert was bad.”
Not even seeing Kelli lift her chin stubbornly in that way he’d thought so cute before, eased the tension he was now feeling. This was alarming as shit.
“Not an ex, Dylan and I were never a couple.” Isaiah stared at her incredulously. Did she really think that made this better? “It was nothing more than an online flirtation, and even that was after I’d broken things off with Gilbert. Only Gilbert’s never believed that. He also insists he and I were still together, so in his head, I cheated on him with his good friend.” She shook her head with a disgusted expression. “Dylan wasn’t even Gilbert’s best friend who was like a brother to him the way he tells the story now.”
“I was gonna say, ‘How much of a brother to him could he have been?’ I’d never do that to one of my brothers.”
She pressed her lips together, staring at him for a moment, then shook her head again. “There’s not even much to tell. Gilbert’s just always made it more than it was.”
“You said you’d tell me whatever I wanna know.” Unable to sit so close to her anymore or even sit still, he scooted away and then just stood up. “So you broke up with Gilbert and then had a flirtation with his good friend?”
Taking a deep breath, she let her head fall back then began. “I didn’t even meet Dylan until years after I’d been hanging out with Gilbert. He’d never even mentioned Dylan. That’s how close they were.” She shook her head with a roll of her eyes. “Look. Maybe it’s better if I start way back.” She patted the bed next to her again, lifting the cover to the food trays. “But please sit.”
Isaiah sat down again but not as close as he’d been sitting to her previously. Even if it were just a flirtation she’d had with Dylan, the guy was still her ex’s good friend. Isaiah wasn’t sure how he felt about her being so unconcerned about it.
“When I was just shy of turning thirteen, my mom let me in on something. Dulce, Matt’s mom, had contacted her to tell her she also had a child by my dad. Instead of being upset or anything, my mom felt sorry for her. Like I said before, unlike with me, my father refused to acknowledge her or Matt. Another big difference between Dulce and my mom was that Dulce was still very much in love with my dad. It’s why she left New Mexico to be near him in hopes of him having a change of heart, but he never did. My dad admitted to my mom that he did have a kid when she questioned him, but he said he’d insisted she abort and warned her he wouldn’t want anything to do with her or the child and she still had it.”
Isaiah’s expression must have been as disgusted as he felt because Kelli paused to nod as if in agreement then took a bite of her sandwich. When she was done chewing, she continued.
“I know. As young as I was, even I was disgusted. But the excitement at the prospect of having a sibling I could actually associate with, outweighed my disgust. My mom said Dulce wanted her son to meet me. At that point, I’d been so sheltered. I was a pretty shy kid, so Matt and I clicked right away. Dulce and my mom became unlikely good friends. But my dad knew nothing about it. My mom warned Dulce she was better off keeping Matt off the radar so she wouldn’t have to deal with all the threats and dangers from having my dad’s enemies know he had another child.”
She paused again to take another bite of her sandwich, and Isaiah took one of his. This was all interesting, but it still felt far from what he really wanted to know. After taking a swig of his soda, he wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Fast forward to Dylan.”
“I promise you it’s nothing like what you’re thinking, but I have to fast forward to Gilbert first,” she said then took a sip of her tea. “Around the time I was fourteen and Matt was eleven, Dulce’s only sister back in New Mexico was diagnosed with kidney cancer. She beat it, but Dulce decided she should stay there. I was determined to keep a relationship with the only sibling I’d ever had one with. That’s why we started visiting during the summers. During one of those visits, he brought Gilbert with him—Dulce’s sister’s only son who he’d gotten close to. Since Gilbert was my age we got along great and became good friends, even outside the time we spent around Matt.”
Isaiah listened quietly about her and Gilbert. How around the time she turned sixteen, things changed when they started to flirt, and then ultimately, it became romantic.
“In hindsight,” she said with a frown, “I know now without a doubt that I was more excited about the idea of holding a boy’s hand for the first time. Having your first kiss and first boyfriend are the things sixteen-year-old girls are supposed to get excited about. Inevitably thoughts of losing my virginity started up.”
Thankfully, she spared him the details. The only significant part she left in was that losing her “V card” was also more about the curiosity and anxiousness of getting her first time over with. “Everyone was whispering about who had and who hadn’t in school, so it seemed like a no-brainer. Despite what you may think of him, Gilbert is a nice guy, and I knew his feelings for me were genuine, so I decided why not?”
She skipped over the actual event then explained something more significant, something that had Isaiah smiling in spite of the subject matter.
“Remember what I said to you about chemistry the day we said good-bye after our weekend together?”
Isaiah nodded and she smiled. He hadn’t forgotten it even for a day. Not every time he remembered it, was a good thing though. Sometimes he was pissed, but those words she’d said that final day would never be forgotten.
“Several months after Gilbert and I had become sexually active”—she winced as she took another sip of her tea—“I started feeling guilty that he seemed so much more into me than I was into him. It was then that I talked to my mom about it. I told her how it was almost disappointing that I never felt that magical thing I’d heard so much about. He’d been saying he loved me for months, and I finally said it back only because I felt so guilty. He was my boyfriend, my first everything. So why the heck didn’t I fall in love? And that was my mom’s response. ‘You can’t force chemistry to exist where it doesn’t, in the same way you can’t deny it when it does.’”
She reached out and touched his hand with a smile. “I never forgot it because it was a time in my life I felt so confused—so guilty—for not loving Gilbert the way I thought I should. I kept wondering what more does it take? He was my first everything. I should’ve been whipped. But I’ll forever remember the words now because of you. It wasn’t until you that I understood it completely. It’s really not something you can force. That weekend it was so impossible to deny, so I ended up staying until Monday. Blowing off clients for an entire weekend is so unlike me. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to leave every time you suggested we could stay another night. I’d finally experienced that magic I’d been waiting for so long to feel.”
Leaning in, Isaiah kissed her softly. If it weren’t because there was still the burning question about Dylan, he’d be undoing her robe and having his way with her already. So he forced himself to stop kissing her but gazed in her eyes.
“Just so you know, I knew it too. It was why I couldn’t understand why you blew me off the way you did.” She started to say something, but he touched her lips with his finger. “I get it now. I really do. But I’m still curious about your past with Dylan.”
With a deep breath, she nodded and he pulled away slightly to give her a little room. “It was right around that time when I was feeling so confused and guilty about my non-feelings for Gilbert that his so-called best friend showed up that summer. We’d been hanging around the river like we did so often. It’s a small town, so they all knew each other, but Dylan was never a friend to either of them. I think they were more surprised than I was when Dylan stuck around and hung out with us the rest of the day then came back the rest of the time I was there that summer.”
Isaiah’s mood started to go south again as she started to explain how Dylan had flirted with her from day one. Then she told Isaiah how exciting it’d been.
“You saw him,” she said a bit too wide-eyed. “He’s nothing like Matt and Gilbert. He was the older bad boy, rode a motorcycle, had tattoos, and the crowd he normally hung out with was dangerous. He was every good girl’s fantasy.”
To his utter annoyance, she giggled. Fucking giggled! “Heck, I think even Matt and Gilbert had man crushes on him. That is until Gilbert started picking up on just how much Dylan flirted with me. I’d never tell them even now, but Dylan admitted to me when he and I started secretly chatting online and on the phone that he never would’ve gotten so close to Matt and Gilbert if it hadn’t been for me. Gilbert didn’t even start referring to Dylan as his best friend until after he found out about me staying in touch with Dylan online. But today was the first time he upped it a notch to ‘like a brother.’ Anything to try and guilt me.”
“How old were you at that point?”
“Almost seventeen. After I returned home that summer, things went downhill fast between Gilbert and me, not because of Dylan, but because of Gilbert’s neediness. I mean can’t you tell? It’s been years since this happened, and he’s still hung up on it. He wanted to talk to me day and night back then, always asking who I was spending time with, where I was. Before that year was even up, I broke things off with him over the phone. I couldn’t take his constant blowing up my phone. Only he insisted he wanted us to talk things out in person. But as far as I was concerned, it was over.”
“So why secretly?” Isaiah asked, raising a suspicious brow, and Kelli peered at him with a confused expression. “You said you started texting and chatting with Dylan secretly. If you weren’t with Gilbert anymore, why would you have to be sneaky about it?”
“Well, for one, after I broke things off with Gilbert, who I chatted with wasn’t any of his business anymore. And it felt awkward telling Matt about it since Gilbert was his cousin and we both knew how not over me he was. But there was nothing I could do about that. I always knew anything between Dylan and me would never go any further than our chats. It was just exciting. I was only seventeen, and here I had this twenty-year-old man flirting with me.”
Instantly annoyed, Isaiah didn’t even try to hide the eye roll that last comment elicited. From the looks of the guy, he hadn’t changed much. So Isaiah had to wonder if, by chance, his flirting with her tonight had in any way been exciting. But he didn’t ask and she continued.
“In hindsight, if I’d known this would hurt Gilbert so much that he’d still be harping on it after all these years, I wouldn’t have even continued the harmless flirting we did. It was mostly him, but I’m not gonna lie. I enjoyed it. You also have to remember I was only seventeen, young, selfish, and living in the now. I also knew Dylan never considered Gilbert a good friend, much less a best friend. But even so, if I could take it back, I would. People make mistakes when they’re young, and I’d like to think I’ve grown from mine. I’d never do something like that now. I could’ve lied to you about this, but I’m being completely honest here because I really hope you believe you can trust me.”
Isaiah peered at her, desperate to believe everything she was saying to him. She explained how her life changed drastically when her mother passed unexpectedly during a routine oral surgery. “I had no idea how common that was until she died so suddenly and I started investigating it. My dad wanted to sue, but we were told there was nothing that could be done. It was ruled an accident. She stopped breathing after going under anesthesia. The oral surgeon called 911 immediately, but she died a few days later at the hospital.”
Just as thoroughly as she’d explained about Gilbert and Dylan, she explained about her life after her mom passed. It’d been devastating, but she’d held it together for Matt. He’d been dealing with a lot himself. His aunt had relapsed, the cancer was back, and his own mother had been diagnosed with clinical depression.
Kelli also told him about how her father set her up in her own apartment and got her a car. He paid for her schooling and helped her get her first salon up and running. She did say, and quite proudly, that her hard work and passion for what she did was what ultimately made it a success and why she was able to open another one with minimal help from her dad a year later.
As Isaiah had begun to suspect, Kelli was being deliberately frank about everything. “As you can imagine”—she pushed her empty plate away, holding her stomach as if she’d eaten too much—“with things ending the way they did between Gilbert and me, any friendship we’d previously had was over for a while. We still spoke on occasion, and I got the feeling he was still hoping we could try again, but I refused. Then right around the time I turned twenty-one, Matt’s mother, who’d been really struggling with her depression after the death of her sister just a year prior, hanged herself.”
The pain Kelli still felt over that, even after these many years, was evident in her eyes and Isaiah reached his hand out to her. “Matt was the one who found her,” she whispered.
Isaiah listened silently, squeezing her hand at times as she told him about how all Matt had left now was Kelli and Gilbert. How he fell into a deep depression himself. Since he refused to move to San Diego to live near Kelli, and her business was so new she couldn’t move out to New Mexico, she’d had no choice but to join forces with Gilbert—the only other person who cared as much about her brother as she did. The phone call she got from Gilbert the other day and her needing to be there for Matt this weekend made complete sense now. If it had been one of Isaiah’s siblings, nothing would’ve kept him from being by his side either.
Kelli seemed more than willing to go on answering whatever questions Isaiah had, but he’d heard enough for now. He stared at her for a moment as she paused and seemed to ponder.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and she glanced up at him with the expected confusion. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a dick.”
She shook her head immediately. “I understand why you have. I’d be apprehensive of me too. Not only that, but hurt like hell had it been the other way around.”
Isaiah scooted up closer to her on the bed, and she immediately moved to straddle him, sitting on his lap, and brought her hands to his face. “That day you walked out into your uncles’ yard . . . You have no idea how badly I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole, especially after your sister explained you were her oldest brother.” She squeezed her eyes shut, but now that he knew the whole truth he wrapped his arms around her waist tightly and actually smiled, thinking back to that day. “I wanted to die!” she added, still squeezing her eyes shut.
Her eyes flew open when Isaiah chuckled. “Yeah, that was bad. When I first saw you, I thought maybe you were there to see me or you were just a friend of Em’s. So when Nathan said he had someone he wanted me to meet, I instantly had a bad feeling. Then when he introduced you as his girl”—this time he was the one who closed his eyes and shook his head, remembering the pain—“that was bad.’
That last part didn’t have quite the amused tone as when he’d started his comment. “Honestly,” she said, pecking him softly. “I don’t think I would’ve kept my cool the way you did. I probably would’ve slapped you or something, so I was beyond grateful that you didn’t do anything immature like I might’ve.”
“Trust me.” He leaned in and pecked her. “If it had been anyone else but my brother, I probably would’ve.”
She caressed both sides of his face, tilting her face with a sweet smile. “Isn’t it crazy that, even with as much time that’s passed and everything that’s happened, this still feels perfect. It was exactly what I felt that first weekend with you and couldn’t figure out how that could be. But here we are again. It’s like we’re picking up right where we left off, and it doesn’t even feel strange.”
Isaiah nodded with a smile, ignoring the unease that still lingered—not about her anymore and not that he didn’t believe now that she could be trusted. Somehow he could see it in her eyes and feel it in her touch that she was being absolutely sincere about everything. Something told him she’d continue to go above and beyond to make sure he didn’t change his mind about making this work.
What she was saying now was absolutely true. This no longer felt impossible. How could it be when having her in his arms like this felt perfect? But until he had a chance to speak to Nathan—his family—the unease would linger. Only he’d keep that to himself for now. Right now he wanted nothing more than to finally enjoy the perfect.
“I agree. This does feel crazy. But I still think we need to get to know each other a little better, only without words now. We’ve done enough talking for tonight.”
He devoured her mouth as he’d been waiting to do since they’d begun talking, and instantly his mind was on the condom box in the other room.