You can do this, I tell myself when I’m in front of Marshall’s door. Be his kidney. Just knock casually.

Is there any other kind of knocking?

In an attempt to bring a smile to his face, I bought us both hot chocolate from Starbucks. Charlie was right—until I hear the admission from him directly, I choose to believe in the Marshall I know. That man is a gentleman and would never, ever put his career at risk. As for the matter with his dad . . . I have to trust that not everything is as it seems. I’m the perfect example of that.

Shuffling the cups into one hand, I casually knock on the door and step back to wait.

Masculine voices echo from inside the house, and then there’s silence.

I push out a breath and do a quick rearranging of the Styrofoam cups again, so that I’ve got one in each hand.

The door swings open, my heart catching in my throat, and then Marshall is standing there.

Fully clothed, a little tired around the eyes, but no less good-looking.

“Hi.”

Really? That’s all you could come up with? “Hi” is woefully inadequate for what I’m feeling right now. I want to throw myself at him, ask what I can do to help. Listen to him just as he listened to me about my family.

I guess “hi” will have to do for now.

Marshall’s hand, still locked around the doorknob, shifts as he steps out onto the front stoop and eases the door shut behind him.

“Hello.”

Was the door-closing a hint that I’m not allowed to come inside today? Awkward, definitely awkward. An awful thought hits me: what if he’s changed his mind about us? I look down at the Starbucks cups and wonder if I’ve completely made a wrong judgment call here.

“Is that for me?” Marshall’s fingers slip over mine and pull the hot chocolate from my grasp. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

I can’t help it—my gaze flicks to the shut door. “I saw your missed texts, and I”—well, it’s now or never—“caught wind of the news in the tabloids. I wanted to be here for you, if you needed me.” I shift my weight to my other foot. “I probably should have called beforehand.”

“Fuck. It’s not like that, Gwen.”

I’m not sure whether he can just read me like an open book or if my face has settled into the stereotypical suspicious-woman mode. Either way, the fact remains that he doesn’t want me in his home when shit is spiraling down around him.

Clearly, he’s prepared to comfort me but when the roles are reversed, he’d just rather be alone. Which is fine, just fine, great.

Oh, my God, I think I might cry.

“No worries.” I flash him a bright, oh-so-fake smile. The Old Gwen smile, the fragile one that couldn’t look more pained if I were battling it out with Mona Lisa. “I just wanted to stop by and offer you my kidney if you needed it.” Holy cow, I need to shut up. “Well, we’ve said hi, so I’m going to be leaving now.”

And flee to a place where I can lick my gaping wounds.

And stop talking about kidneys.

“Gwen,” Marshall says firmly, catching my wrist before I can escape down the driveway. He releases my hand to run his fingers through his brown hair. “It’s my brother.”

I don’t see the problem with that. Isn’t it a good thing that he’s still in contact with a family member considering everything? Except . . . “I didn’t realize you had a brother.” I can’t quite hide the wary edge to my tone.

“It’s not . . . It’s complicated. We don’t have a good relationship, and I’d rather you not meet—”

He doesn’t have the chance to flesh out the rest of his explanation.

The door cranks open behind him and a big man steps out. He’s older than Marshall, maybe even older than I am, if the age lines creasing near his eyes and around his mouth are any indication. A black shiner darkens one eye, and he’s rocking a pretty serious-looking gash on his temple.

Their similarities end with their brown hair.

Marshall is warm where this man, his brother, radiates a frigid vibe that could compete with the Gwen of yesteryear. Marshall is tall and muscular, leanly cut for expert agility on the ice. His brother is broad with a bulging gut, his arms as thick as tree trunks.

He looks exactly like the sort of man my mother always warned me lived in those neighborhoods: otherwise known as the less affluent.

I’m not Adaline, however, and so I stick out my hand and offer a pleasant smile. “Hi there, I’m Gwen.”

The man doesn’t take my hand, leaving Marshall to curse under his breath. “Dave,” he grinds out, “this is my older brother, Dave. He was just leaving.”

My hand falls back to my side.

I have a feeling their holiday dinners are just as awkward as mine.

“I’m sorry for interrupting,” I say, jerking a thumb over my shoulder. “I’ll leave you both to it. Marshall, hopefully I’ll see you soon?”

“You look familiar.”

Dave’s deep voice stops me, and I glance back, looking between the two brothers. “I represent a few of Marshall’s teammates. Maybe you’ve seen me in photos with them?”

It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.

“Nah,” Dave murmurs, pushing his brother aside. “Somewhere else.” He taps his stubbled chin, then points at me. “Northeastern! Ain’t that right, Marshall?”

“Dave, don’t.”

My gut, for whatever reason, tells me to run and to not look back.

I don’t.

Instead, I meet Marshall’s gaze. I wish that I hadn’t. His gray eyes are bleak, bottomless in the defeat that I see there.

“I knew Marshall back then,” I say slowly. “We were in class together.”

Dave laughs, a bitter sound that rings in my ears. “Course you were. My little bro ensured that he got in—”

“Dave, shut the hell up. This isn’t for you to—”

I lift a palm, cutting Marshall off, then look to his brother. “I want to hear what your brother has to say, Marshall.”

The grin Dave gives me is all broken, yellow teeth. “You didn’t know?” He swaggers close to me. “I guess my baby bro is wicked good at keeping secrets. I’m assuming he didn’t tell you how he almost killed our father. Right”—his finger points to his thigh—“here. Got himself put in foster care for that one, am I right, baby bro?”

Marshall’s hands clench at his sides, his shoulders heaving upward with a sharply drawn breath. “He was fucking hitting her, Dave.”

Upon hearing it for a second time, I decide that I hate Dave’s laugh. Hate it with every fiber of my being. It scratches like nails on a chalkboard, squeals like a potato-chip bag breaking open, rubs my nerve-endings raw.

Then he leans in, and I catch a whiff of body odor and booze. “I took the blame for that one when the cops showed up, even though I was innocent.” He blinks, a terrifying grin pulling at his chapped lips. “Thanks to Marshall here, I had my ass in jail for quite a few years, considering that his bitch-ass mother refused to stand up for me. She said that I acted violently all the time, that I was also the one responsible for the bruises on her face. Marshall got to go off while I sat behind bars. But I think . . .” He touches my red hair, and it takes everything in me not to yank back. Stand your ground, stand your ground. “It’s time that Marshall pays the price for a wrong he’s committed. I tried once already but my baby bro thinks he’s so smart. But this way . . . oh yeah, there’ll be nothing he can do about it.”

I don’t see it coming.

Dave’s back thuds against the door, swinging it wide open as the brothers tumble into the house.

“Stop!”

My shout does nothing as Marshall sheds his charming public persona.

Their bodies are a blur of swinging fists and hulking frames. Be calm. Don’t panic. Dave barks out a string of four-letter words as Marshall rolls him over, and I leap back to jump out of the fray.

“You’re a fuckin’ asshole,” Dave grunts, legs swinging up to hook around Marshall’s waist.

In a moment of quick thinking, I glance down to my hot chocolate. Considering the frozen temperatures outside, it’s more chocolate milk than anything remotely hot right now. Not nearly enough to stop over three hundred pounds of angry males, but desperate times and all that.

Marshall has his brother pinned to the ground when I toss the cup, aiming directly for the wall behind them.

Chocolate liquid goes everywhere, splattering their heads and clothes. It’s startling enough that Marshall whips around, brown hair plastered to his face, his right eye already bruising from a balled fist.

“Stop. I don’t care which one of you tells me what’s going on. You two want to tag-team it? That’s fine. But if this so-called wrong involves me, then I deserve to know.”

I deserve to know, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to know.

Already I feel the strain in my heart, and there’s a sickening sensation tugging at my gut, indicating that this moment will be my last with Marshall.

Rolling off his brother, Marshall lands on his ass and props his elbows on bent knees. “Get the hell out of here,” he says to Dave. “You’ve done enough.”

“I don’t think I will.”

Marshall’s eyes narrow. “Don’t play that game with me, bro. After the shit you’ve pulled, your ass is mine. One call to the cops and you’re done for.” He jerks his head toward the door. “Get the fuck out.”

The threat must resonate because Dave lurches to his feet and flies out the door.

Leaving Marshall and I alone.

This is so not what I expected to happen today.

I clear my throat and avoid making eye contact. “What did your brother mean when he said that you made sure to get into class with me?”

His gray eyes meet mine ruefully. “The bet.”

My stomach sinks, and my feet backpedal into the kitchen. “It was just Adam who was in on it, right?” I ask stupidly, thinking of my college ex-boyfriend. An ex who’d made it very clear that our relationship meant nothing when I caught him kissing another woman in the middle of my senior year. Even now, I can still hear the nasty note in his voice when he told me I was nothing more than a challenge—a girl like me would never, ever be the real deal for him.

A girl like me. He’d meant promiscuous, even though I’d been a virgin until him. If it weren’t for a dare, he’d told me, he never would have given me a second look.

Marshall had stood next to me—we’d just finished one of our study sessions—an arm wrapped around my shoulders as though he could physically shield me from the hurtful words.

Except that, apparently, he’d been in on it all from the start.

Jaw clenching tightly, Marshall pushes to his feet. “The whole hockey team was in on the bet, not just your ex.”

I can’t breathe. Just like that, the air vacates my lungs and my vision recedes at the corners. “I don’t . . . why?”

“Because your grandfather was Northeastern’s primary donor. Because we were all a bunch of pricks who thought it’d be funny to take the virginity from Mr. Landon’s granddaughter.”

I never cry—but it seems that in front of Marshall, I’m making a habit of it.

I feel the heat of tears slip down my cheeks. I itch to wipe them away, to erase the vulnerability from my being, but I want Marshall to witness my pain. Yes, I may have talked a big game back in college, trying to fit in when I felt so much like an outsider. Adaline had ensured that I never made friends easily—they’ll stab you in the back; just look at what Monica did to me last year.

Who would have imagined that Gwen James, the girl who wore diamond earrings and knew all the best makeup techniques, was nothing but a sheep in wolf’s clothing? Yeah, the saying usually had it the other way around—not for me. I wasn’t the girl who I showed to the world, though I tried my damned hardest to be.

“It wasn’t funny.”

It’s all I say.

“I know.”

It’s all he says.

And then, “It was wrong on so many levels, Gwen. Every level. I didn’t—I never planned to go through with it.”

“Except that you clearly did, Marshall.” I jerk my chin to the right, squeezing my eyes shut against the hurt in my chest. “Did you even need an Accounting class or did you sign up for it because you wanted to win your little bet?”

“Gwen, listen—”

I slash at the air with a flat palm, stopping him in his tracks when he tries to step closer. Disgust and a healthy dose of mistrust form into a ball of nausea in my stomach, twisting and twisting and twisting until my palms turn sweaty and my heart thumps furiously. “You let me believe that you fell for me,” I say, my voice growing stronger with anger. “You sat behind me every day for a semester asking me out—and none of it was real.” The laugh that escapes me is caustic and bitter, and in it, I hear traces of my mother. The thought alone is enough to make me snap. “You did a real good job of pretending to console me after Adam gave me the boot. No wonder you were so adamant that I dump him. Obviously, you were waiting in the wings to swoop in and take his place.”

“Fuck the bet, Gwen!” Marshall storms forward, all masculine perfection, before abruptly twisting away. His muscular arms go up, his hands settling on the back of his neck. Two deep breaths expand his shoulders. “The bet may have been what landed me in the damn class, but it wasn’t what made me want you. Seeing you three times a week was the highlight of that semester. I wanted to hear your voice call me out for trying to cheat off you. I wanted to see your skirt ride up your smooth skin. Seeing you kiss him drove me fucking insane, and not any of that had to do with the bet.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What?” Marshall’s voice sounds as though it’s been carved from granite, cold and infinitely hard.

I steel my heart against him. “I said that I don’t believe you.”

He’s a goddamn rat-snake bastard, Gwenny, my mother would tell me right now. And even though I know that Marshall is like none of Adaline’s ex-husbands, including my father, the words won’t shake. They eat at my soul, twine up my legs like twisting vines, suffocating and all too familiar.

“Gwen,” Marshall grinds out, his palms coming to face me like he’s trying to calm a panicked animal, “we’ve come a wicked long way since college. A long fuckin’ way.” One of his big hands lands on his chest, right above his heart. “I messed up and I fully admit that. But you’ve got to trust me when I say that those were the actions of an insecure kid who wanted to fit in, and they sure as hell aren’t the sort of thing I would do now or ever again.”

But you’ve got to trust me.

Marshall’s words ring exceedingly loud in my head, and it hurts—oh, it hurts—the way I feel so torn. My stomach turns to knots and my palms turn all slick, and all I can hear is Adaline whispering to me about shitty friends and cheating husbands and so much mistrust I could choke on it as though it’s a physical manifestation.

And in the end, all I have is one resounding realization: “I can’t do this.”

Marshall’s hopeful expression hardens, just as it did at Zoe’s engagement party—and I almost laugh because hadn’t I suspected that this would happen all along? Hadn’t I known, even on the day of my father’s funeral, that I would be the one to wreck Marshall Hunt?

“Are we over because of the damn bet?” he asks me, his chest rising and falling with shallow breaths.

My own breathing isn’t that much better. “You should have told me about it long before today.”

“Answer my question, Gwen.” Gray eyes hone in on me, unwavering in their intensity. “Are you fucking breaking up with me because of shit from six years ago?”

No, I’m desperate to say, I’m breaking up with you because I’m broken.

Dramatic, maybe. Coming from anyone else, I’d readily call bullshit. But standing in my shoes as I am? I hear nothing but my mother talking about her shitty husbands, see nothing but the string of men who left me with a damn gift card and a pat on the shoulder.

“You asked me to trust you,” I say, my voice raspy from spilled tears and the sobs threatening to burst out into the open, “and I did. You’ve pushed me to open up, to prove to you that I’m willing to give you my heart. When you asked me to dance at Zoe’s engagement party, I said no because I’ve spent the last year working on myself. Trying to be a better me, a version of myself who trusts easily and lets down emotional walls.”

My hand curls against my heart, as though I can possibly stop it from breaking. “I trusted you today when it would have been all too easy to believe what the tabloids reported. I came here for you, to show you how much I love you.” Voice cracking with emotion, I add, “But when push comes to shove, I can’t take the final step.” I’m too much of my mother. “Somehow, I’ll hurt you or you’ll hurt me, and I can’t do it.”

I can’t be my mother in her bed for days on end, crying after another husband files for a divorce.

I can’t be the girl who sought affection from anyone and everyone, begging for scraps of love, and who didn’t even know how to love herself.

I can’t be the woman I am today, staring at a man like Marshall Hunt and breaking his heart because I’m terrified to let my icy armor melt for good.

“So you’re going to run,” Marshall says without heat. He doesn’t shift closer, and his expression is blank and unreadable.

A tear slips over the crest of my cheek. I want to say no, to leap into his arms and snuggle in close, but if I can’t trust him—if I can’t trust anyone—then what good does that do, for either of us? And if a mention of a bet from six years ago sends my progress rewinding faster than I can blink, then I can’t imagine I’m in a place to date anyone . . . not even Marshall.

“You aren’t your mother”—my gaze flicks to Marshall’s face as he speaks—“and you aren’t your father. You know how to love, Gwen, and you know how to love hard. So I’m going to assume that if you walk out that door, then it’s simply a case that you don’t love me enough to stay.”

His words burrow like a knife in my side, crippling in their sharpness.

And then I speak my utter truth, carving open my fears and letting them spill out: “I don’t know if I love myself enough.”

I don’t think I’m good enough for you.

I don’t think I’m worthy of your love or your trust.

Like mother, like daughter.

I brush past him, head down because I don’t think I can bring myself to make eye contact.

His footsteps echo on the stone floor behind me. “Gwen—”

I don’t turn around at the risk of crumpling in a heap.

“Love is fucking messy, Gwen,” Marshall calls out to me as I step onto his front stoop. “It’s messy and it’s hard and there is no one else in this world that I would rather be in that mess with than you.”

My chest heaves with a silent cry and I cup my hand over my mouth to reel it in and keep it on lockdown. I fumble for my key fob in my purse, yanking it out and blindly unlocking my car.

Marshall standing tall and proud in his driveway is the last thing I see before I peel away. I drive until I hit the nearest convenience store, and then I’m in the parking lot. My hands on the steering wheel, my heart warring with my head.

I’ve done this to myself, and there is no one else I can blame for my heartbreak but me.

For my entire life, I have done everything in my power to be the opposite of Adaline.

But blond hair or red, divorced or never-been-wed, I am my mother’s daughter. The mistrust she instilled in me from birth can’t be beaten into submission—and I’ve lost the only man I’ve ever loved because of it.

I’ve never hated myself more.