The words swam before him. Mental health break.
They thought he was going nuts.
And given that he'd spent the night trying to fuck his sister-in-law's brains out, but making love to her instead, maybe he had.
“The Big Sur cabin is open this time of year. It's yours. A few weeks on the ocean is going to work wonders for you. I'm sure of it.”
Thirty minutes later, Luke was still fuming. There’s nothing wrong with my mental health, he thought as he burned up the road beneath his tires, driving Highway 1 south too fast considering his lack of sleep. And yet, he was completely off kilter, utterly unprepared for the weeks that stretched before him.
With every mile he covered, Eileen's parting words came at him: “You don’t have to save everyone, Luke. Nobody can. And that’s okay.”
But she was wrong.
He did.
Because he hadn't been able to save the one person he'd loved the most.
Chapter Nine
Janica rang Lily's doorbell, but knowing the neighborhood was so safe they rarely locked the front door, she didn't wait for anyone to let her in.
Violet, Lily's four year-old daughter, came barreling around the corner. “Auntie Jan!” She tackled Janica in a bear hug around her legs, then yelled, “You're it,” and ran away as fast as her small legs could take her.
Janica grinned. Damn, she loved that kid. A perfect cross between Lily's soft beauty and Travis's ridiculously masculine good looks, Violet was a stunner. Better still, she was funny. And bright as the sun.
Lily was kneeling in the kitchen with full grocery bags all around her feet as she consoled her crying son. Sam was almost two-and-a-half and about a hundred times more sensitive than his big sister. He was also crazy cute. Cover-of-a-kid's-magazine cute.
Hoping to distract him from whatever was the matter, Janica called out, “Sammy!”
His eyes still wet, he looked up from his mother's shoulder and in an instant his wobbling cheeks shifted into a wide smile.
“Hey, baby boy,” she said as Lily gratefully moved aside to let her pick him up.
Happily going into her arms, he made a stern face. “I'm not a baby.”
“I know,” she said. “You're a big boy.” She pretended she was going to drop under his weight. “A huge boy. Have you been eating bricks again?”
“That would make my teeth break, silly!” he crowed, happy to let her know just how wrong she was, just like his father—and his uncle—were so happy to do all the time.
Carson men. They were all alike.
Too damn cute to stay away from, but completely and utterly full of themselves.
“You're it! You're it!” Violet yelled as she ran by.
“Okay. I'm just going to tell Sammy a secret first,” Janica said.
Violet's eyes got really big. Forgetting all about her game of tag, she ran over. “What is it?”
“I need to talk to your mommy for a few minutes and then when we're done I'm taking everyone for cupcakes.”
Lily's little boy all but jumped out of her arms to do a happy cupcake dance with his sister.
“I want to go right now!” he demanded.
Carson boys and their demands.
Come here.
I want you naked.
Get on your knees.
Use your mouth.
She shivered at the still-potent memories of the previous night and Lily looked at her with concern.
“Jan, honey, are you okay?”
Working to push Luke out of her head for five seconds, Janica smiled at the kids and pointed to the clock on the kitchen wall. “When the little arm is pointing at the 6, we'll go. Violet, you know how to tell time, don't you?”
Violet puffed up her chest. “Of course I do.” And then she grabbed her brother's arm and said, “Let's go play bakery in my room until it's time to go. You can make me cupcakes and I can eat them.”
Stepping over grocery bags, Lily hugged her quickly, then pulled her over to one of the bar stools tucked under the granite-topped island.
“What's wrong?”
Oh crap. Why had she come here? What was she thinking? Lily was going to kill her. Or Luke. Either way, her big sister was going to be worried sick over the whole situation.
But the thing was, even though Janica knew all those things, she had to talk to someone about what had happened. She needed her best friend. Who just so happened to be Luke's best friend too.
“Something happened last night.”
Lily's worried look morphed into pure fear. “Are you okay?”
Janica wanted to nod, tried to say yes, but the truth was she wasn't sure she actually was okay. Luke had rocked her world so hard she hadn't just seen stars, she'd actually felt like a human kaleidoscope shifting form again and again, from formations of pinks to purples and reds, yellows and oranges, blues and greens. Her orgasm had gone on and on as if it would never end, one easily turning to two beneath his beautifully out-of-control onslaught. And for a moment she'd felt special. Cherished.
But then he'd left, at least as cold as he'd ever been to her.
Colder, even.
“Oh my God, Jan, if someone hurt you we need to go to the pol—”
Janica quickly cut her off. “No, it's nothing like that.” She paused, took a deep breath, knew she needed to spit it out already before Lily had the chief of police on the line.
“Luke came over.”
Lily frowned. “Luke came over?”
Janica nodded.
Lily cocked her head to the side, still clearly confused by what Luke had to do with anything. And then, suddenly, her eyes went big.
“Luke came over,” Lily said again, more slowly this time, as if her brain was too busy working out the ramifications of everything to be able to change the words into anything else.
Jumping straight over the inevitable question—did you sleep with him?—Janica gave her sister the answer with another nod.
At which point Lily's eyes grew even huger and her cheeks flushed, her mouth opening and shutting a couple of times without any words coming out.
Janica was glad for her sister's loss for words because it meant that she could spit out the rest of it as quickly as possible.
“The thing is, apart from the obvious, I did something really stupid.”
Shaking herself out of her shock, Lily put her warm hands over Janica's cold ones. “Okay, so you slept with Luke. I know it's a big deal. A huge deal. But that doesn't mean it was stupid, Jan.”
If only sex was all there was to it.
I love you, Luke. I love you so much.
How could she have said those things to him?
How could she have even thought them?
Or dared to feel them in the first place?