“You mean everything to me, baby. Everything. I’m so sorry I missed the wedding. I’ll never forgive myself. I’ll never stop trying to make it up to you, I swear.”
Jacob hadn’t stopped repeating the same phrases he’d first said to me in the lobby, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that with every repeat, they sounded less and less sincere. I wanted to believe him. I wanted so badly to believe him, but I couldn’t ignore what had happened. I couldn’t ignore the past, and I couldn’t ignore the warnings going off in my head, questions as to what he’d been doing to miss what should have been one of the biggest days of our lives.
I couldn’t ignore the way I felt.
I’d been doing that for years, and it had done me no favors.
As evidenced by the one person I was thinking about right now—and it wasn’t the one with his arms around me, his mouth close to my ear as he repeated his promises and apologies again and again.
Matt.
Where was he?
Where had he gone?
What did he think?
Matt. Always Matt. I was so exhausted by my secret thoughts of Matt that I felt ancient inside, like my conscience had lived an eternity while my body wasn’t even thirty.
“Please, let me make it up to you. Let me make this right, baby. There’s nothing you and me can’t get through, I know it.” Jacob’s mouth moved lower, tasting my throat, making me stiffen. “We’re meant to be together.”
The way he touched me, the way his mouth moved against me, the way his hands felt . . . why did it all feel so wrong now? For years, I’d known nothing but his touch, and now, it felt uninvited. Unwanted. It felt wrong.
All I could do was compare it to the way Matt’s touch felt—how his hands had moved over me, his lips touched me, his body fit against mine.
“Jacob, stop.” My voice sounded small, insignificant.
When his hands kept pressing into me, pushing me farther into the corner of the elevator until I felt like all of the oxygen had been drained from the car, I pushed him away. Harder than I’d intended. He staggered back into the opposite corner, looking at me like he didn’t recognize me.
“You’ve been drinking. And I’m not going to have this conversation with you until you’re sober.”
He’d recovered and was already making his way back to me. “Who said anything about talking?”
A slow smile pulled at one side of his mouth. I remembered a time when my heart would do crazy, erratic things whenever I saw that smile aimed my way. Now, it made me sad. Sad for what had been, what could have been, and everything that had been lost.
“I’ve missed you, Cora. I need to feel close to you.”
My fingers tightened around the handrail. “You didn’t show up to our wedding. The event we’d been planning for a year, the one that five hundred people attended. I’m not okay with turning my head and forgetting it ever happened. So don’t even think about it.” I pushed his hand away when it went to form around my waist.
His eyes flashed, his face turning red. “Yeah, and I’ve already apologized for that a million times. I’ve promised you I’m going to spend the rest of my life making it up to you. What more do you want from me?”
When the elevator doors opened, I couldn’t move fast enough. Jacob followed me, half a footstep behind, waiting for me to say something. Waiting for me to forgive him the way I had a thousand times before. It wasn’t happening. Not this time. Not until he disproved my theory for why he’d missed our wedding.
“Cora, stop.”
I didn’t.
“Baby, please.”
No way.
“Enough.” With that, his arms roped around me and he pushed me up against the hall wall, fitting himself against me so I couldn’t move, let alone keep walking away from him.
Jacob and I had fought like crazy over the course of ten years together, but it had never gotten physical. He’d never exerted his physical force over me like he was now, and it made me go blind with anger. Partly because he was using his strength to mold me to his will, and partly because I wasn’t strong enough to fight back. Like Matt, Jacob was big and took care of his body. He was strong, fast, and he knew it.
I’d never felt more like a puppet than I did right there, shoved against some hotel wall by the man I was supposed to marry yesterday.
“Cora, I’m sorry. I just need you to stop and listen to me for a minute. I need you to slow down and hear me out.” His breath was hot against my cheek and smelled of Jacob’s favorite brand of scotch. I was used to the smell of it on his breath. More used to it than I was its absence. “Let me make it up to you. Let me explain. Let me. . .” His mouth was on my neck again, more frantic this time, his hands moving with the same kind of urgency.
“Jacob, enough.” Without warning, I elbowed him in the stomach as hard as I could. Which wasn’t all that hard since he had me pinned so tightly against the wall. Still, it sent him back a few steps so I could turn around and back away.
One hand was covering his stomach where I’d just elbowed him, his light eyes so dark they couldn’t have possibly still been blue. “This is about him, isn’t it? You let that fucker touch you and make you feel good, and now you can’t stand a real man’s touch anymore?”
My mouth fell open. “Jacob—”
“You got your wish, didn’t you? You finally got a chance to see what my brother was like in bed. Was it good? Could he make you feel better than me? Did you like the feel of his cock in your mouth better than mine?”
“That is enough!” I hadn’t meant to shout—we’d probably already gotten all of this floor’s attention already—but I couldn’t help it. “How dare you turn this around on me! You were the one who started this whole sequence of events. Matt was the one who stepped in to try to help, and here you are, accusing me like I planned all of this.”
Jacob’s chest was rising and falling quickly, his shirt twisted and his eyes wild. “So you did fuck him?”
My eyes narrowed. That was all he cared about. If I did or didn’t sleep with his twin brother. “I’m not having this conversation with you when you’ve been drinking. So sober up and come find me. Then we can talk.”
I’d been planning to head back to my room to change since Jacob had suggested going on a walk to talk, but now that that talk wasn’t going to happen, I wasn’t going anywhere close to my room. Not with Jacob looking at me the way he was now—like he couldn’t decide if he’d rather hit me or screw me.
“Where are you going?” His voice was quieter, the notes of anger gone.
“Out.” I was halfway back to the elevators.
Punching the down button, I kept checking down the hall to make sure he wasn’t coming after me. He wasn’t. He was frozen to the wall where he’d staggered back, his head hanging and his expression blank.
His head lifted, his eyes finding mine. “I love you.”
I glanced away. I knew from experience I caved whenever he became the brooding, self-loathing version he was evolving into now. “Then start showing it.”
The elevator doors opened right then, and I lunged inside, punching the first floor button. After the doors closed, I undid my heels and took them off. I was still planning on going for a walk—alone. I needed to figure out what was going on. Inside my head. Inside my heart. I needed to, once and for all, confront the feelings I had for them both and decide who I belonged with, if either of them.
If either of them even wanted me when all was said and done, because I couldn’t be with Jacob without telling him about Matt. And I couldn’t be with Matt without confronting the reality that I’d been with his brother for years.
When the doors opened on the first floor, I slipped out and left through one of the side hotel doors that put me closest to the beach. Sand between my toes, ocean waves crashing beside me—it sounded like the perfect way to work out years of repressed feelings.
I loved Jacob. I knew that. But I wasn’t sure it was the kind of love that one should have for the person they planned to spend their whole life with. I loved the person he was when he wasn’t drinking, and I had come to fear who he was when he had been.
It was quiet everywhere tonight; that probably had to do with the storm coming. Or possibly coming, because no one seemed to know for sure if it would hit us or not. The lack of a crowd made for that much better of a walk. I needed time alone with my thoughts to attempt to untangle the web I’d spun in the years since I’d met the Adams brothers. I was no longer sure who I felt what for, that’s how interwoven they’d become.
Only a few steps onto the beach, I recognized a familiar laugh. Instantly, I felt my smile forming and all of the heaviness inside me start to lift.
Matt. He was close by. Maybe I could talk this whole mess out with him and he could provide some clarity. For years I’d gone to him when I needed someone to talk to, although this might not be the ideal topic to discuss with him since it had to do with him. And my feelings for him.
My feet moved faster. I could no longer hear his laughter, but I felt his presence. Up ahead, the hotel’s beach bar was glowing, but unlike earlier today, it was mostly empty. A handful of people were scattered around at the stools, but all I saw was him. It was kind of amusing to see Matt pressed up against the counter of some cheesy beach bar—so not his scene—but that was when I noticed he wasn’t alone.
Not alone at all.
There was a woman on the stool next to him, but really, she was as close to him as she could get before she was on his lap. My feet stopped moving as an ache spread from my chest. Her hands were all over him, and he was doing nothing to push her away. Her head was close to his, and the two of them looked at each other in a way . . . that I was not going to let myself think about.
Between them on the counter was a half-empty bottle of something, and after Matt poured some of it into his glass, he slid it in front of her. She drained it in one drink, her eyebrow lifting at him right after.
I didn’t see what happened next. I couldn’t stay to watch. Instead, I turned and ran in the opposite direction, as quickly as I could in the soft sand while wearing a dress not designed for jogging.
It wasn’t until I tasted the saltiness on my lips that I realized I’d started crying. Over what I’d seen, over what was about to happen, over this whole damn mess.
I shouldn’t even be so upset that I’d just caught him with some other woman—I had no claim to him. We were friends. He’d done what he had at the wedding because of that. He’d done what we had that night because we’d both been tipsy, I’d been all over him, and he was a red-blooded man. I might have thought he was Jacob . . . but now I wasn’t even so sure of that.
Did I really believe last night that he was Jacob? Or did I know the truth inside me?
Even that I couldn’t make sense of anymore.
Facing the fact that I felt like I didn’t know a goddamned thing anymore brought on a fresh flood of tears that dropped me to the sand. I was tired of running. Tired of burying my feelings.
I wasn’t taking another step until I confronted the harshest reality of all—was I in love with Jacob or his brother?