Headed for Trouble (The McKay Family #1) (10 page)

He shifted his gaze to Brannon’s as he tried to push those images away. “A backpack?” Fuck, yeah, she’d had a backpack. One that had been decidedly void of a single bloody condom. If she’d had one, then at least he could have felt her under him that one single time.

Brannon stared at him oddly. Then he grimaced. “If you’re thinking about my sister naked or in any other fashion, I’m going to hurt you.”

“At some point, it may be best for you to just hit me, then, and get it over with,” Ian suggested. “I won’t touch her, but it might take a bit of time for me to stop thinking about seeing her naked.”

Brannon ran his tongue along his teeth, clearly pondering the idea. “How much time?”

Ian patted his pockets and made a show of looking around. “Where’s my phone?”

“Why?”

“I need a calendar. I want to know what date the end of never falls on.”

“Fuck.” Brannon said it miserably and tipped his head back, staring up at the ceiling.

“Tell me about it. You’re not the one who’s resigned himself to blue balls over it.”

Brannon shoved the heel of his hand against his eye. “I never said you couldn’t…” Then he snarled and turned away, storming into the back of the pub.

Ian signaled to Chap. Chap headed over. “Yeah, boss?”

“Can you handle the bar for a bit?”

Chap shrugged and took over behind the bar while Ian headed off after Brannon. He found his friend in the office that had formerly been his. Now it was Ian’s. “I already told you I wasn’t going to—”

“Look, if you want to go out with her and she’s interested, I’m not going to say you can’t, okay? Neve’s a grown-up.” Brannon stood with his hands jammed in his pockets. “This bullshit about being loyal or whatever … it’s just that. Bullshit. She’s my sister and … hell.”

He reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing tight before he turned and faced Ian’s gaze. “We didn’t do a good enough job with her. Ella Sue said something to that effect last night and I didn’t want to hear it, but I’m starting to think…”

“As you said, she’s a grown-up.” Ian folded his arms over his chest. “Whatever happened when she was a child—”

“She was in the car with them,” Brannon said quietly. “She saw them die, was trapped in the car for more than an hour before anybody found them. She watched my mother bleed to death—Dad practically had the top of his head taken off the way the car flipped and hit that tree. She was trapped, alone in the car, Ian. She was only eight.”

Horror and pity welled up in Ian, so thick and strong that he couldn’t think of anything to say.

Turning away, he moved to his desk and braced his hands on it, staring down at the brutally neat surface.

All day, he’d been haunted by images of her from the past night, her mouth swollen from his, her eyes fogged with heat.

Now he saw another image—that of a terrified young child, experiencing an indescribable accident. He knew how she’d looked as a child. After all, he’d spent many an hour at McKay’s Ferry, where she’d grown up. Pictures of the lovely child she’d been were everywhere. No, he could see that lovely, frail child trapped and sobbing.

“What happened?”

“We don’t know. Neve doesn’t even remember that night.” Brannon dropped into a chair. “We thought … we thought if she didn’t remember, she’d do better. People talked about counseling, but we were afraid if there was counseling, she’d remember. We didn’t want her to remember. There were nightmares at first. Bad ones. She’d wake up screaming. She’d climb into bed with me—fuck, I hated it. I was thirteen. I didn’t want my eight-year-old sister climbing into my bed. I put up with it at first, but then I started yelling at her. She stopped doing it, and we found out later she’d been in the family room with the TV on, holding on to Mom and Dad’s pillows. She’d stay down there. Ella Sue came in around five and she’d take Neve to bed, stay with her until she could sleep. Neve fell asleep in school a lot, started to fall behind…”

He stopped for a minute, sighed. Then he looked at Ian. “She got sick about six months after Mom and Dad died, just a bad cold, but Ella Sue told Moira to give her Benadryl at night. Neve was always smart. She figured out real fast that she fell asleep with it, and she talked us into giving her the Benadryl every night. Every fucking night. It was the only way she could sleep without the nightmares. At least that’s what we figured she was doing. She stopped asking for it when she was older, but when she left, we found bottles of it in her room. She’d started buying it herself, took enough that she could get a few hours of sleep. If she woke up with nightmares after that, she’d just stay in her room. Never told us.”

Brannon got up and started to pace. “She started getting in trouble in middle school. Kids called her a freak—she didn’t always manage to stay awake, cut school sometimes. Moira would yell, scold her … Neve would promise to do better, and she would for a few weeks, sometimes a month, and it would start all over again. Ella Sue tried to reprimand her sometimes, but Neve would just start crying and Ella Sue could never hold up against Neve crying.” Brannon stopped, looking at something only he could see. “None of us could. She didn’t cry for months after they died. We went out to see them on Mom’s birthday, though, and that was when she started to cry—she threw herself at the grave.”

Brannon’s jaw flexed.

Ian closed his eyes.

“They’re buried in the family vault at the cemetery—she pushed her arms through the iron bars … we had to call the groundskeeper to open the damn doors. She wouldn’t let go. She cried … for hours. Made herself sick.” He shook his head. “Anytime she started crying after that, we just remembered that day. We forgot how to say no.”

He swore then, hard, ugly, and low. “Son of a
bitch
,” he finished. He moved across the floor and jerked up the window, all but tearing at it as he fought to get it up. Brannon shoved his head outside like he’d die if he didn’t get air.

“Bran…”

“What in the fuck did we do?”

“You did the best you could,” Ian said quietly.

“And what good does that do for a little girl who conned her brother and sister into drugging her just so she could get a few hours of sleep?” Brannon demanded. “What good does that do for the kid who cried herself sick, clinging to her parents’ tomb?”

“You were thirteen when they died.” Ian didn’t know what to say here, what he
could
say. “Moira was the oldest of you, but fuck, she was all of eighteen, had barely started university, hadn’t she? And she took over the business for your father on top of that. You were still a child, Bran and Moira … God love her, she wasn’t ready to take over and be a mum.” He stopped and then asked, roughly, “Why didn’t they name somebody a guardian?”

Brannon turned and looked at him. Then he shook his head. “They did. But he’d ended up dying himself just a few weeks before—a heart attack. I know Mom and Dad had spent a lot of nights talking about what they’d do with me and Neve … they thought they had time.”

Blowing out a sigh, Brannon said quietly, “Things were bad the year she left. I think she was trying to settle down. Her grades came up—a
lot
. She’d aced her SATs—had scholarship offers from six or seven colleges. She wanted to go to NYU, though Moira kept trying to talk her out of it. Neve wasn’t going for it. Moira said she belonged here and Neve laughed. Then she said something about the board meetings and the business—if she belonged here, then we’d let her in on the business more. We both laughed at her. It just got worse from there. She kept her grades up, did better at school … got in less trouble, but there were … other problems.”

He headed to the door and opened it. “Neve wasn’t the only one who messed up. Maybe she didn’t reach out, but then again, we didn’t do much, either. And we were supposed to be the older ones—more mature. So if you’re that attracted to Neve and you’re avoiding it out of some misplaced loyalty to me, then you’re being an idiot.” Brannon went to shut the door, then he scowled and looked back. “And you didn’t answer me about the backpack.”

Ian scratched at his chin through his beard. “Aye. She had a backpack. Didn’t let it out of her sight even once. Didn’t want to let it go, truth be told.”

“Fuck.” Brannon looked at the floor for a long, long moment and then he strode away.

*   *   *

“Is that it?” Neve accepted Gideon’s card with the report number written neatly across the top.

“Yep.” He leaned against his desk. “Officially. Unofficially…”

Neve looked away.

“
Unofficially
,” he continued, “how about you tell me what’s going on? What’s with the backpack? What’s up between you and Brannon? You and Moira? What are these problems you mentioned?”

“So you have hours?” she quipped. Rising from the chair where she’d been sitting, she moved to the window and stared outside. Brannon’s Bugatti hadn’t moved. That car of his was hard to miss. Her gut clenched just thinking about climbing back in it with him, dealing with the car ride home.

He hadn’t believed her about the backpack. Not that she’d even mentioned what was in it.

What did it matter? A bunch of letters. So she’d poured her heart and soul out. So she’d found some … sense of self as she wrote them. Whether or not she had the letters didn’t change that simple fact, and whether or not she had them didn’t change the fact that she’d come home.

She was going to fix things with her family—or try anyway.

Looking back at Gideon, she took a slow, steadying breath, and then she nodded. “Okay. But this stays between us for now. I have to tell Bran and Moira some of it—I don’t know what I’ll tell them. But just don’t … whatever I tell you, keep it to yourself, okay?”

*   *   *

It was almost impossible to sum up the entirety of the past ten years of her life in anything remotely short and sweet. Actually, there was nothing
sweet
about it, although the two years in New York hadn’t completely sucked. College at NYU had been fun—sort of. She’d had to bust her ass, and for a while, she’d had to hire a tutor, not that she’d mentioned that to anybody—not then, or now.

There had been a few modeling contracts, and a few of them had been
sweet,
but she glossed over them. When Gideon probed more—asking about the jobs and why she’d hadn’t pursued it—Neve just shrugged it away. She could have told him she’d had a serious chance there, that there had even been times when she’d been forced to turn jobs down, because always at the back of her mind had been the knowledge that she was at NYU for one reason—to prove herself. She hadn’t planned on letting anything get in the way of that.

Then something, no, some
body
had.

William Clyde. William, with his so sexy British accent, clear blue eyes, and blond hair that he wore just a little too long, had knocked her off her feet.

He’d started showing up to meet her at the end of her classes or to take her to lunch. She had to admit, she’d kind of loved the envious looks from some of her friends on campus when they caught sight of him, or when he introduced himself and paused to take a hand, press a kiss to the back of it.

This elegant man was
hers
.

He would take her out to all the posh New York City restaurants that Moira would mention that she had frequented while meeting this guy from the board or discussing a buyout from a company. Always business, her big sister. She might be doing business at the best French restaurant in New York, but Neve had a sexy Englishman buying her dessert and hand-feeding it to her at the same damn place.

They’d been going out for nearly three months the first time she slept with him. It had been her first time and she’d cried through it, but he’d held her afterward and told her how much he loved her, how much he treasured her—she was
his
and he’d never let her go.

Never.

“I moved to London with him,” she said softly, skirting around the intimate details, moving back to the window so she didn’t have to look at Gideon now. “I figured I could go to school anywhere, and he had friends in the fashion industry—that was how we’d met anyway. And I did land some jobs there, good ones. Bigger contracts, even a couple of national ones. For a while, things were nothing but a blur of classes and jobs and … him. When I wasn’t working or going to school, we traveled. I got to do all the things I’d always wanted. Things that…”

She stopped, swallowing the words down now.

She’d hurled the ugly accusations at Moira and Brannon that day and she’d hated herself for a long time. She was done blaming other people. “Anyway. I’d wanted to see the world. William made sure I did. I was so completely under his spell,” she murmured. “I never even saw it. Not until it was too late.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked back at Gideon, saw that he had settled in his chair at some point since she’d started to talk. She had no idea how much time had passed. Her throat was dry. A look out the window showed that all the cars—save for Brannon’s Bugatti—were gone, and new ones had taken up the spaces in front of the pub just down Magnolia. “The only jobs I took were his. I’d changed my major to suit him. I’d planned on majoring in business. How could I actually figure out how to fit into the McKay family without knowing how business shit worked?”

“Neve, you
are
a McKay—you already fit in,” Gideon said softly.

She just stared at him for a long time and then looked away. “I ended up pursuing a degree in fine arts. Never graduated but I can tell you all about paintings and artists that bore the shit out of me. It made him happy, though, seeing me learn all these things he thought a
refined lady
should know. And as long as I made William happy, I’d have somebody who loved me.”

With her back to Gideon, she didn’t see the way he closed his eyes, couldn’t see the way his hands tightened into fists under the table.

“I sent a Christmas card home. I was twenty-one. I hadn’t spent a Christmas at home in three years.… I sent a card to you, and one to Brannon and Moira.” She flicked him a look, a faint smile on her face. “I had Hannah Parker figure out where you were. I called her off and on for a while.”