Chapter Five

 

 

Beneath his feet, the floor dipped and heaved. Or maybe the unsteadiness was inside him.

With a mental shrug, Shea raised the cool glass bottle to his lips. The liquor burned a trail down his throat and he prayed this would be the swallow that finally numbed the pain.

Instead, the chaos of his emotions distilled into the scalding wound of her betrayal. Her treachery wriggled under his skin and stole the bliss of oblivion from him. Unable to sleep, he’d chosen the next best thing—alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol.

The drunker he got, the clearer things became. They were meant to be together. How could she not see that? Had she forgotten what they were to each other? How could she turn her back on them?

The boat pitched and he stumbled out onto the rear deck. Searing sunlight blasted him. Collapsing on his back on the storage bench, he pulled the bill of his baseball cap down to shield his face from the sun’s blaze.

His mind raced. He needed to reply to the summons or risk his custody status. Due to the kids, state law mandated a sixty-day waiting period before they’d grant the divorce, but that didn’t mean the dissolution of his marriage wouldn’t move forward. There’d be negotiations, settlements, court appearances. His lawyer mind set to work laying out his case. Stating his arguments. Building his defense. Anything that could stop the landslide her divorce filing had set off.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Shit, none of that mattered now. Whether he consented to the divorce or not, he couldn’t make her stay married to him. It wasn’t the 1800s.

Sometime later, when the sun had slipped halfway to the horizon, a shadow fell over him. He cracked open one eye to find two men peering down at him.

Noah nudged him with the toe of his sneaker. “We’re too late.”

“I get his boat.” Luke settled behind the wheel.

Noah scowled down at Shea. “Are you drunk?”

Shea grunted. “Go away.”

“I’ hear he’s been an ass ever since Isobel went on that date,” Luke said, his head bent while he fiddled with something on the control panel.

“What date?” Noah’s head swiveled from Luke back to Shea. “You know about this?”

A groan eased from Shea when he sat upright. Shoving unsteadily to his feet, he shuffled over to the cooler and bent to retrieve a beer from the ice.

Noah plucked the beverage from his hand. “Who’s the guy?”

“You remember Cooper Spence?” Luke folded his arms across the steering wheel.

“Not at all.” With a hiss of sound, Noah twisted the cap off his beer bottle.

“He was in the class between you and Shea,” Luke explained as Shea dug around in the cooler for another beer. “Brainy kid. Kind of quiet.”

A frown clouded Noah’s features. “The kid who wore the bow tie?”

Shea wrenched the cap off his beer and took a long glug of the draught.

“That’s him,” Luke said.

Noah lifted his shoulders. “He was a good guy, wasn’t he?”

“And she’s my fucking wife.” The angry words erupted from Shea and echoed across the water.

Noah took the outburst in stride. “You don’t want out then?”

“Christ,” Shea muttered and sank back down onto the bench. “No.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Jesus, no.”

Noah lowered his body onto the bench across from Shea. “We heard Isobel filed.” Leaning back, he propped his feet on top of the cooler. “So what happened between you two?”

Shea crammed the heel of one hand into his eye socket and rubbed. What the hell? Was he confiding in his brothers now? Good God.

But the words were pouring out of him before he could shut off the valve. “I have no fucking idea. Everything just sort of… fell apart, you know?”

“I have no idea,” Noah said cheerfully. “Before Mina, I hadn’t been in a relationship lasting longer than a few months. Tell me what it’s like.”

From beneath the brim of his ball cap, Shea glared at Noah while he searched for the words, but grief and helplessness swamped him.

Noah reached inside the cooler, snagged another beer, and tossed it to Luke.

“I thought we were fine.” The air squeezed from Shea’s lungs. “We were busy with work and the kids. Life was crazy, a little chaotic sometimes, but we were us. I thought we were stronger than all of that.”

But it’d worn on them. Work, chores, school pickups and drop-offs, practice, dance, haircuts, doctor appointments, birthdays, holidays. The long hours he spent commuting to his soul-crushing job at the law firm, which he’d kept at for seven awful years because the money was good—excellent, actually—and because he wanted to be able to give Isobel and Finn the world.

Life had gotten in the way of living. He was too busy to talk, too tired to listen, and at the end of the day, he’d had nothing left in him to give to the ones he loved most. He was empty.

Too empty to feel.

“When we did talk, all we did was fight.”

“What about?”

“Everything. Nothing. Stupid shit.” Some not so stupid shit, too.

Then one day, Shea looked up from the legal brief on his computer at Finn sitting across the dinner table. A shadow of peach fuzz teased his chin and a permanent scowl hardened the increasingly masculine features on his face. When had he grown from an affable little squirt into an angry, withdrawn teen?

Stunned, he’d turned to Isobel, but rather than finding the sweet girl he once knew at his side, he discovered a woman looking more lost and alone than he could ever remember seeing her look. She should be happy, but she wasn’t.

He’d never forget the wounded expression on her face when she thought no one was watching her. He’d put that look there. No one else.

A sudden surge of bile rose in the back of his throat and he swallowed. “So I left.”

Noah straightened on the bench. “Wait, you left her? Why the hell did you do that?”

The ugly memories were all jumbled in his mind and Shea shook his head. “Because she told me to.”

“You’ve never done a damn thing I told you to do,” Luke complained. “Or anyone else, for that matter.”

Shea let his head fall back onto the side of the boat and stared up at the cloudless sky. “I guess I figured it couldn’t get any worse if I left, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to get better if I stayed.”

In the silence, the cry of a seagull rang out. Shea’s gaze followed the bird as it soared overhead and then dove, breaking the surface of the water with a riotous splash.

“I never thought it’d happen to us. Divorce.” The beer tasted foul in Shea’s mouth when he tried out the word.

“Is there any chance you can still fix it?”

“For the life of me, I don’t know how.” The center of his chest ached with hollowness. He hadn’t felt so empty since the days following their mom’s death, when they all walked around in a daze. Soulless and beyond hope. A ragged breath shuddered through him. “What the fuck am I going to do?”

“Say you’re sorry and have a shit-ton of makeup sex,” Luke said. “Have you tried that?”

Noah’s head bobbed. “That’s a solid plan.”

“I’ve apologized for things I haven’t even done yet.” While Shea refused to discuss sex with his wife with his brothers, in truth, there wasn’t all that much to discuss. Since he’d moved out, Isobel barely tolerated speaking to him and the chance that an intimate moment might arise between them seemed more remote than their tiny island. “I’ve tried everything I can think of, but nothing ever works.”

“That only means you need to try something different.”

Shea’s gaze shifted to Noah, intrigued.

“Have you tried talking to her?” Noah asked. “Told her how you’re feeling?”

Shea’s lip curled. “Some.”

A frown puckered Luke’s brow. “Define some.”

“Look, I’m not a touchy-feely kind of guy.”

Two expressionless faces stared him down.

Rolling his shoulders, Shea shifted on the bench. “Sometimes I don’t tell her everything.”

Noah scratched his cheek. “You mean like that time you quit your job and didn’t tell her?”

A vivid memory pierced the drunken haze of his mind.

Grief and fury rolled off her in pulsating waves. “Stop lying to me. For once, just tell me the truth.”

The fear nearly overcame him. “I don’t work at the firm anymore.”

“Were you fired?”

“I quit.”

The shadow of betrayal in her eyes gutted him.

“Look,” he said, “we’re going to be okay.”

“I’m pregnant.”

Fear solidified into something rigid and fierce and fiery inside him. Something that whooshed past his eardrums and thrummed in his chest.

Then, as now, Shea’s heart tried to punch out of his chest. Those days after he quit his job at the law firm existed in his memory as an ugly lump of agony. A fuzzy black pit filled with anger and misery over what had happened—what he’d done—which he’d tried to drown with alcohol and self-deception. More alcohol than anything else, really.

Back then, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth, so he said nothing and set about formulating a new plan for their lives. He’d made a plan for them without her input.

A low whistle leaked out of Luke. “Dang, she gave me an earful about that. Like it was my fault or something. Though it wasn’t as bad as the time you bought the pub without telling her.”

Noah’s features twisted with derision. “Seriously?”

“I was going to tell her, but she found out before I got the chance.” Shea held up his hand. “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

“Really? ’Cause it sounds pretty fucking bad,” Luke said.

She’d been through so much and the thought of adding to her stress made Shea’s stomach turn. “She worries.”

“She’s a big girl.” Noah’s voice contained no give.

“She wanted to know what was going on with you.” Luke shrugged his wide shoulders. “Doesn’t seem like too much to ask.”

“Whose side are you on?” Shea asked.

“We’re on your side,” Noah said. “And if you want your wife back, you’re going to have to face some hard truths.”

“You should text her.”

Noah dragged his gaze to Luke. “Are you serious right now? You’re not helping.”

“Hear me out,” Luke said easily. “Emily tells me she can’t get a fair fight unless we slow things down.” Affection thickened his voice when he talked about his wife, Emily.

A stutterer, she sometimes struggled to get words out and Shea could only imagine how she might fare in a rapid-fire argument with his silver-tongued brother.

“At first, I flat-out refused,” Luke continued. “But now… I don’t know. I kinda like it.” A shadow of a smile touched his lips. “Writing it out gives me time to think about what I want to say. About what really matters. I take better care with my words.”

Shea dropped his head. He stared down at the boat decking and recalled all the careless words said between him and Isobel over the years. So many stupid, thoughtless words.

When he glanced up, Noah chewed the side of his thumb while his features crowded with an intense scowl. Then he straightened and leveled Shea with a black look, like a doctor delivering a fatal diagnosis.

“The way I see it, you’ve got two choices.” He ticked off the first option with his index finger. “One, you can let her go on that date.”

“She already went on the date,” Luke said helpfully. “Good ol’ Coop. Cooper Eugene Spence.” He overenunciated each word.

A growl built in Shea’s throat.

“Then let her go out with the next guy, and the next one after that,” Noah said. “Let her go on as many dates as she wants.”

Shea took a long, desperate pull from his beer to hide the gnashing of his teeth.

“If Isobel’s got it in her head that she wants to move on, then let her see what’s out there waiting for her.” A calculating gleam winked in Noah’s chocolate chip-colored eyes. “Wouldn’t you rather it be with a guy like Cooper Spence than, say, someone like you?”

Incredulous, Shea’s gaze swung to Luke.

Luke lifted one shoulder. “He makes a fair point.”

Shea’s heart convulsed painfully in his chest. “I don’t think I can do that.”

Noah’s tone turned conspiratorial. “Any chance Cooper wore the bow tie?”

That tugged a reluctant smile from Shea. “Aye, that he did.”

Noah took a self-congratulatory nip from his beer bottle. “You know, you might want to educate Isobel on a few other realities as well.”

“What realities?” Shea demanded.

“I overheard Amber Jessop asking you out again the other night. Maybe you should take her up on the offer.” One corner of Noah’s mouth lifted in a half smile. “And let Isobel see you doing it.”

Pride filled Luke’s expression. “Aren’t you the devious bastard?”

“Amber Jessop?” Shea spat the woman’s name. “Now you’re just fucking with me, right?”

Noah’s bark of laughter carried across the marina. “Okay, maybe not her. But how about any of the other half-dozen women on this island clamoring for your attention?”

“I’m not interested in any other women.”

“I’m not suggesting you start up anything serious.”

“That’s good, because I’m married.”

Noah dropped his chin and fixed Shea with a look. “For how much longer?”

A nasty curse erupted from Shea.

Noah pressed his advantage. “All I’m saying is would it be the worst thing in the world if Isobel thought—mistakenly, of course—that you were ready to move on, too? Maybe she’d even be a little jealous.”

“There it is.” Luke raised his beer. “Makeup sex.”

Shea struggled to focus on just one of Noah’s faces. “You’re twisted.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s not a compliment.”

“Do you want your wife back or not?”

Shea drank a mouthful of bitter beer rather than repeat himself. “You said I had two choices. What’s the other option?”

With the speed of a flipped switch, Noah grew suddenly serious. “Fight for her.”

An eerie quiet fell over the marina. The light in Noah’s dark eyes took on a lethal glint and lifted the hairs on the back of Shea’s neck.

“It’s a life-or-death battle, as you well know.” Emotion rode the edge of his words. “There are no rules. No gentlemen’s agreement. No mercy. Fight, and don’t stop fighting until the last breath has left your body.”

A nauseating concoction of alcohol and fear swirled in Shea’s gut. Hopelessness dragged at him. “I’ve been fighting all my life.”

“This time is different.”

“This time, you have us.”

Shea had no idea what his brothers meant, but hours later, as the sweet relief of unconsciousness tried to claim him, one last cogent thought floated through his mind.

Noah was right. If he was going to get his wife back, he couldn’t keep doing what he’d always done and hope for a different outcome. He had to try something else. Something he’d never done before.

No more playing by the rules. He had to do something totally unexpected. Something she would not anticipate him doing and would therefore struggle to defend against.

He had to stop fighting.

What he wanted to do was storm over to the house and demand to know why and when she’d stopped loving him. He wanted to make her say the words out loud and straight to his face, because maybe then his hemorrhaging heart would accept it was the end for them.

Which was the reason why he couldn’t go anywhere near her. Not yet.

He’d wait until he was stronger, and sober, and if he was right, he wouldn’t have to go to her at all.

She’d come to him.