Luke

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“So Dad is out of the picture,” I said conversationally, like this was my everyday reality and not something I should be fucking ashamed to admit. “The problem is, that leaves no one running the body shop. And the body shop makes a profit. So Dad got on one of those shitty prison phones and called me. It’s my job, it turns out, to come home and keep the shop running, keep the money coming in.”

“You?” Emily asked. “Not your brothers?”

I shook my head, stopping at a single light hanging from a wire overhead and taking a left toward town. “Let’s say my brothers aren’t available right now.”

“Why not? Where did they go?”

“Well, let’s see,” I said. “Jace just got out of prison, and he’s in a halfway house in Detroit.”

She leaned forward, jerking against her seat belt, and stared at me. “Jace? Jace went to prison? Are you kidding me?”

“Surprise,” I told her. Jace was the smartest of the four of us—which wasn’t much of a competition, but still. Jace had always been the brother with the brains. The quiet one. “Grand theft auto. Did twenty months. He has to stay in the halfway house as a condition of his parole, at least for the next while. So he can’t come run the shop.”

“Oh my God,” Emily said. And for a second, even though the topic was my awful family life, I felt like I was settling in to something familiar. Emily may not like me—despite all the orgasms eight years ago—but she knew me. She knew my family. She’d grown up in the same place as all of us, gone to the same high school, hung out in the same spots, known the same people. It was a relief, in a way, not to have to explain myself like I would to a stranger. Strangers were all I had known for eight years.

She wasn’t just familiar, she was Emily. I felt a weird ache, watching her and listening to her voice. But I pushed it away and let it go. I’d been letting go of that ache since the last time I saw her.

“Okay,” Emily said, sitting back in her seat again. “Where’s Ryan? Why can’t he take over the shop? Don’t tell me he’s some big league baseball player.”

I grinned at the road. “Don’t follow sports much, huh?”

“I don’t follow sports at all,” Emily said. “You know that, Luke Riggs. So if Ryan is some famous athlete, I have no idea.”

“He isn’t,” I said. This hurt too, another punch in the gut. Ryan was so fucking talented. “He made it to the minor leagues, but he got an injury three months ago. His shoulder. He’s done, at least for now. Maybe forever.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah, well, he also got in a fistfight with another player and broke his nose right in front of the crowd at a game, so he has other problems than his shoulder. He has to follow some kind of treatment, go to meetings or something, or his career is done. He also has a son to take care of.”

“Ryan has a son?”

I nodded. “Dylan. He’s seven. The mother is not in the picture. Ryan didn’t even know Dylan existed until three years ago. It was one of those Surprise, you have a son, see you later situations.”

“Jesus,” Emily said. She sighed. “What about Dex? I think Mom said he’s a cop.”

“Was a cop,” I corrected her. “He did four years on the Detroit PD. He resigned a year ago.”

“Why?”

I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. “That’s a good question. The official line is that the stress was too much for him. The unofficial line is that there were potential charges of corruption coming down the pipe, so it was best to get out while he could do it clean. He’s still in Detroit, doing private security work now.”

Emily was quiet for a second, taking all of this in. “Okay, so he can’t come help with the shop?”

“I asked him,” I said. “His answer was I’m never going back to that town, dipshit, so figure it out by yourself. I’d rather cut off my balls with a rusty saw.”

She cleared her throat, part shock and part laugh. “That’s vivid. But I have to admit I know how he feels.” She glanced at me. “So it’s true. You’re the only one to take over the family business.”

I lifted a hand from the wheel and touched it to the brim of my baseball cap in a salute. “Unemployed, unencumbered, and currently not incarcerated,” I said. “So what are you doing on this road into town with a car full of luggage? I told you mine, now tell me yours.”

I watched from the corner of my eye as she scrubbed a hand over her face. “I’m coming back,” she said. “Like you are. But ugh, my problems are so stupid compared to yours.”

“No one’s problems are stupider than mine. Trust me.”

She shook her head. “Mom is getting a career award, so there’s this big thing happening on Friday. I have to be here for that.”

“That sounds nice,” I said. Emily’s mother was a legend in Westlake, a woman cop who worked in the middle of a boys’ club and never let anyone give her shit. I could say I admired her and actually mean it, but the Westlake PD and the Riggs family had always been on opposite sides. Of everything. I’d spent most of my life seeing cops as the enemy. And I’d long ago devirginized the sweet daughter of Westlake’s most venerated cop.

I guessed Emily’s mother wouldn’t be an admirer of mine.

“She’s happy but she’s freaking out at the same time,” Emily said. “She says it makes her feel old. And Lauren needs a break from running the hair salon for a while, so I got nominated.”

I frowned to myself, trying to dredge up memories. I was pretty sure Emily’s twin sister Lauren had gotten married pretty soon after high school. “You know how to run a hair salon?” I asked Emily.

“I have a business degree,” she said, stiffening up straight in her seat. “I think I can handle it.”

Of course. She’d gone to college. “A business degree,” I said. “I always pictured you going off and being a big shot in some big company, wearing a skirt and heels every day.”

“If you must know, I actually did that for a while. And yet here I am, coming back home in a broken-down car,” she said. “You always knew how to make a girl feel good, Luke.”

I always did know how to make a girl feel good. Especially her. “It’s a compliment,” I said.

“Really? It didn’t sound like one. It sounded like you’re pointing out what a failure I am.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re right,” I said. “You’re in Westlake to see your mother and help your sister, so your life is over. You should just throw yourself off the Six Point bridge and end it now.”

“You are such an asshole,” she said, her voice rising. “I’m talking about my career being in the toilet here. Why did I ever put up with you eight years ago?”

“You know why,” I said.

“Do not,” she said, raising one index finger imperiously. “Do. Not. Bring that up. That did. Not. Happen.”

I scratched a lazy thumb over my temple, just below the brim of my baseball cap. “Emily,” I said slowly, like she was missing an important point. “It didn’t happen, like, fifty times.”

“I’m not listening,” she said, taking that imperious index finger and pointing it at her ear, jabbing it. “I’m not. I can’t hear you.”

This was Emily in high school: smart, hot, and very fucking opinionated. The kind of girl sixteen-year-old guys didn’t know what to do with, so behind her back they called her stuck-up and crazy. They said things like She’s hot, but she’d be hotter if she wasn’t such a bitch.

To her face, they didn’t dare. They went after easier prey. Because they didn’t know how to handle a girl so confident, so full of herself, that she didn’t need their good opinion for two fucking seconds.

Me, I never understood that. Maybe it was my upbringing, but I never wanted soft and easy. I never wanted sweetness and light. I wanted a girl who could lose her shit and give me a tongue-lashing. It was fun then, and damn, it was fun now.

And I knew how to handle Emily. I had the secret. She may have been wild, but she always got sweet after I made her come.

Worked for me.

“Okay fine,” I said, waving away her pointing finger like a fly. “We’ll change the subject. You staying at your parents’ place?”

“Yes,” she said. “For now.”

We had entered Westlake, and we were approaching Emily’s neighborhood. Which, of course, was on the right side of the railroad tracks, so it was a neighborhood of well-kept middle-class houses, with nice gardens and big trees, where decent people lived.

In the seat next to me, I saw Emily stiffen, her body going tense. I glanced at her, at her profile staring straight ahead, and in that second I knew exactly what she was thinking. What had made her go from annoyed to suddenly self-conscious.

She was in my car, with me, and her family was going to see it.

It came as a surprise, the sting of that. I should have been used to it. Hell, if she’d asked me, I would have told her not to be seen with a Riggs brother. And still, that straight-ahead gaze, that set of her shoulders that said she was about to be embarrassed—I felt the blood go hot up the back of my neck.

Welcome home, Riggs. Good old Westlake.

This place never changed. Not in eight years. Not for a fucking second.

Well, fuck it.

“Just tell them I’m an Uber driver,” I said as I drove up her street. There were cars in the driveway of her parents’ house, which meant that at least one person was definitely home.

“It isn’t that,” she said, the words coming out of her mouth automatically, followed by a pause so long that I knew the words were a lie.

“Right,” I said. I pulled to a stop next to the curb in front of her parents’ house. There was no motion in the windows, but that didn’t mean no one was looking. I opened my door and got out of the car.

Emily scrambled to follow, getting out as I opened the door to the back seat. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Getting your bags,” I said. I pulled them out one by one, dropping them on the sidewalk. I didn’t razz her about how heavy they were. I didn’t say anything. The silence fell hard, like a fog. I watched from under the brim of my cap as she glanced uneasily between the house and the growing pile of her bags.

“Luke,” she said finally, when I dropped the last bag on the pile.

Too little, too late. I already got the message. For a little while it had seemed like things might be different, that now we could act like normal people after all this time. But we couldn’t. At least, she couldn’t.

I shouldn’t be in this neighborhood. I shouldn’t be talking to Emily Parker, just like eight years ago. We were too far apart, and we always would be.

Fuck if I knew why that hurt, but it did.

So I shut down.

I closed the backseat door and leaned a hand on the roof of my Charger. “We’re done,” I told her. “Have a nice life.”

“Luke,” she said again.

“Tell them we ran into each other by chance. It’s the truth. Maybe they’ll believe it. And say hi to the Westlake PD for me.”

She didn’t answer. She just stood there, looking awkward and beautiful and maybe a little ashamed. But she didn’t say anything else.

So I got in my car and drove off, leaving her standing on the sidewalk.