29. Hudson

Chapter Twenty-Nine

HUDSON

Later that day, I was hanging out with Parker after a workout. Because he was that kind of friend, I found myself thinking maybe I should ask his opinion.

“I’m curious about something,” I began.

“What’s that?”

“Do you ever imagine yourself getting serious with someone?”

“Well, if Beck has his way, I’ll fall in love and get married because marriage is the best thing ever,” Parker offered dryly.

I snorted. “True story. But, I’m serious. I’ve always kind of thought it wasn’t for me because my past is a little messy and I don’t have a single role model for a good relationship.”

Parker studied me. “I get it. We’re kind of in the same boat there. I don’t know. I know you’re a good man and a really good friend. You could also be a good boyfriend or husband, I guess.”

He fell quiet, but I sensed he wanted to say something else, so I prompted, “What is it?”

“My sister.”

“What about her?”

“We met. I haven’t talked about it because it’s pretty fresh. It’s kind of crazy because her mom and our dad reconnected. They got back together. If you can believe it.” He rolled his eyes. “They’re all happy about it. I like my sister. I think we could actually be decent siblings.”

“Wow.” I nodded slowly. “I’m happy for you. Where is she?”

“Turns out she lives here. She moved here a couple of months ago, a little bit before me.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

Parker shook his head. “Nope. She’s here.”

“I’m really happy for you.”

“Enough about me, tell me who you’re falling in love with,” Parker said bluntly with an exaggerated brow waggle.

It felt as if he kicked my heart over. “What the hell do you mean?”

“Maybe it’s been a minute since we hung out, but I know you pretty well. You’re asking me because you’re worried about your feelings for someone.”

I stared at him and let out a sigh. “I didn’t expect her. She, uh—” I cleared my throat. “So the place I live, it’s kind of a duplex. There’s a shared space between the two apartments. She lives in the upstairs apartment. Her name is Stella.”

Parker was lounging on the couch, completely relaxed. As soon as I said Stella’s name, he sat up abruptly, his feet landing flat on the floor. “Stella?”

“Yeah, what’s wrong?”

“Last name Lancaster?” he pressed.

“Yeah?”

Parker closed his eyes, leaning his head back before he leveled his gaze with mine again. “That’s my sister.”

“No way.” I shook my head, as if that would change the situation.

“Paralegal, just finished law school, studying for the bar, works for Blackthorne Law here in town,” he recited the details about Stella.

“Oh, my God,” I said slowly.

Parker narrowed his eyes. “You’d better not hurt her.”

I held both hands up in surrender. “Dude, I’m talking to you about her because I’m pretty sure I’m in love with her.”

I was scrambling inside. I was terrified to be in love with anyone. And yet, I was falling in love with Stella and my heart had zero doubts.

“Fuck!” Parker ran his fingers through his hair as he stared back at me. “Does Stella know?”

“Does Stella know what?”

“That you’re in love with her. Have you told her your whole story?” he demanded.

I dropped my head forward into my hands, feeling my ragged sigh filter through my fingers. When I lifted my head again, I didn’t even have to say anything.

Parker knew the answer. “You’d better tell her.”

“I will. Look, I didn’t plan this. Stella told me she didn’t want to get serious. I’ll tell her, but that’s probably the end of it. She’s gonna fucking hate me.”

My friend shook his head. “She knows my story.”

I drew in a slow breath, steeling myself mentally as I nodded. “I’ll talk to her.”

When I arrived home and saw Stella’s car there, my anticipation for her kept humming along inside. But now, it was mingled with a subtle anxiety and almost dread. I wasn’t ashamed of my past. A lot of feelings about the trouble I had gotten into were linked to my father. I knew perfectly well that he had struggled to straighten his life up in part due to how many people judged him for his mistakes. I was deeply proud of him now. By no means was his life perfect, but he’d made some actual changes. He was trying to do the right thing.

I wasn’t sure how to address this with Stella. In my heart, I knew most of my anxiety around this was because I was in love with her. It was one thing to break our rule about not sleeping in the same bed, but it was something else altogether to fall in love with her. I could run straight toward a fire in the wilderness, but the idea of bearing my heart was terrifying, and I wanted to run away from it.

When I walked into the kitchen a few minutes later, taking longer than I usually would to shrug out of my jacket and put my boots in the tray by the door, Stella was rinsing a glass in the sink. Her blond curls were pulled up in a messy ponytail. I wanted to walk up behind her and smooth my hands down her sides and nuzzle her neck. I loved how she always smelled a little sweet.

“Hey,” I said. Even I noticed that my voice sounded strange, almost stilted.

She set the glass in the rack beside the sink and dried her hands on a dish towel. Her lips curled in a smile and my heart tripped and stumbled. Fuck me. This woman, so sweet and independent. She was everything I’d never expected and so much more.

Stella read the room instantly. “Is everything okay?” Her eyes searched my face.

It didn’t surprise me, not even a little, that she knew something was weighing on me. I let my breath out in an abrupt gust. “You know how I mentioned I had a good friend who moved here?”

Her brows rose up. “Uh-huh.”

“Well, it turns out he’s your brother, or I guess your half-brother.”

“Parker?” Her voice squeaked on the second syllable.

“Yeah.”

Her eyes went wide as she lowered her hands, absently tossing the dish towel onto the counter. “What… how… did this…?” Her questions kept starting and stopping.

I pressed my tongue in my cheek as I cocked my head to the side, letting out a wondering chuckle. What I said next shocked me.

“Parker was one of my closest friends in high school. We met in detention. I was afraid to tell you because I thought you might judge me, what with you being in law school and everything.” I made the sign of the cross in front of my chest. “I’m not the most religious guy, but you need to know I’m not lying. I haven’t gotten in any trouble since then. I promise. Just like Parker, I had a dad who didn’t make the best decisions and I got pulled into it. It’s not my dad’s fault, but it didn’t help.”

My words came out rapidly, each one sharp. I felt as if I was punctuating all my old feelings as I spoke. When I finished, I felt a sense of huge relief. Maybe my heart would crack if I lost Stella over this, but it wasn’t as if I’d ever had her to begin with.

She was completely silent. I didn’t know how long it was before she spoke, but each second felt like forever. She slowly tipped her head to the side, her eyes warm. “I wouldn’t hold that against someone.”

It felt as if my heart clapped, the sound loud inside my head. My shoulders sagged as I let out a deep breath. I rested a hand on the counter beside me as I dipped my head and sucked in another gulp of air. “Well, that’s a relief,” I said when I lifted my head.

Her lips teased a little at the corners. “I hope you wouldn’t think I was that harsh and judgmental.”

“If my past belonged to anyone other than me, I wouldn’t think you would be. I don’t exactly think clearly about my own mistakes.”

Her chin dipped in acknowledgment. “I understand that.” After a beat, uncertainty darted through her eyes. “We don’t talk much about ourselves with each other.”

“No, we don’t,” I agreed.

As our eyes connected across the distance between us, it felt as if something shimmied to life. I had become accustomed to the feeling of intimacy I experienced when we were together. That feeling was connected to our fiery hot encounters and the aftermath of being twined together.

This, here and now, was linked to that intimacy, but it ran deeper. The acknowledgment of how we tried to keep things to the surface made it so very obvious that something else had flourished, something beyond our control.

My heart thumped several rounding kicks in my chest, my ribs reverberating from the force.

Stella cleared her throat. “I understand more than you could imagine about having a parent whose life is messy. As you probably know from Parker, I don’t remember my dad because he wasn’t around. What I knew about him was that he was in and out of jail a lot. That wasn’t the kind of chaos I had in my life, but my mom—” Stella’s eyes contained a sense of resignation and love. “I love my mom. So much. But she never had good judgment about men and my dad was just one of a long string of not great guys. I originally wanted to go to law school for the money. I desperately didn’t want to be scraping by and relying on a man, or anyone else, to bail me out. After I started law school, I realized it mattered because I could maybe help people. Something like that.” Her lips twisted to the side with a self-deprecating smile. “All of that to say, I understand. When your childhood is a little bumpy, you eventually figure out that you just don’t know anyone’s whole story.”

“No, you don’t,” I said slowly. Hope was unfurling inside of me. And yet, I wasn’t ready to face what my heart was hoping for.

She cleared her throat again. “I’m not used to having an older brother. How did this even come up with Parker?”

“Honestly, this –” I paused, unsure of how to put my thoughts and feelings into words. “Thing between us—” I gestured back and forth. What the hell? You’re calling it a thing. I ignored my asshole of a mental critic and forged on. “I started to talk to Parker about it. He connected the dots and realized it was you.”

“What is this thing ?” she pressed.

We stared at each other. All the while the air felt as if it was filled with a shower of sparks—emotions, intimacy, and the fierce desire that bound us together—all flickering around us. “I don’t know. Uh, and we haven’t even talked about whether we’re telling anyone about us. If I’d any clue who Parker was to you, I wouldn’t have said anything.”

Stella shrugged. “It’s okay. He is my brother, but he’s new to me. Was he all awkward about it?”

I let out a dry chuckle. “He warned me not to hurt you.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “Are you serious?” Her tone was disbelieving.

“Yup, that’s what he said.”

Her cheeks flushed pink and she let out a wondering laugh. “Well, that seems a little ridiculous.”

“If I had a little sister, I would feel protective,” I offered.

While this whole thing had come about because I didn’t know what to do with the feelings that were burgeoning by the second inside of me, I felt a little defensive that Parker would feel the need to warn me. I had no fucking clue how to do a serious relationship. I’d certainly never hurt Stella knowingly, but what if I couldn’t be the man she needed? What if it didn’t even matter? What if she didn’t feel the way I did?

After a long moment, she shrugged again. “I’ll talk to him. I don’t need an overprotective older brother. Nobody, much less my brand new to me brother, has any say in my love life.”

At the word “love”, I wanted to grab it out of the air and hold it close, to tuck it inside my heart.

“I guess I should ask if we are trying to keep this a secret. Janet suspects something,” I said.

Stella’s laugh sputtered out. “Of course she does. I love Janet, but she notices everything.”

I turned to look out the window. With it being deep into winter, it was already almost fully dark. The moon was high in the sky with the stars bright in the darkness.

When I brought my gaze back to hers, uncertainty was flickering in her eyes. She curled her hand around the hem of her shirt and rubbed it between her fingers nervously.

I wanted to step close and wrap her in my arms. I didn’t need to know why she was nervous, I simply wanted to make that feeling dissipate for her, to will it away.

Maybe she had only given me a slice of her story in this moment, but it felt as if she’d opened a door into her heart, into understanding her in a way I hadn’t before.

While I couldn’t fully grasp it this moment, the enormity of what had happened for me wasn’t lost. When it came to relationships, I kept things on the surface. Always. Until now.

Stella’s hand dropped away from the hem of her shirt as she lifted her chin. “We don’t have to keep this a secret. But what are we doing?” She closed her eyes, letting out a soft laugh. “We set ground rules, and now I don’t know what to think.”

My lips twisted to the side with a wry smile. “We broke one of those rules on the very first night,” I pointed out.

Her lips pressed together before another laugh filtered out. “We did. What is this?” she whispered.

My emotions felt visceral. This feeling between us was gathering force, like the air before a storm. I thought of winter in Alaska and the way you could smell snow coming before it fell. The more potent the storm, the stronger that subtle scent was in the air. It was difficult to describe to someone who’d never experienced it. This feeling was like that for me.

If someone had tried to describe intimacy before I felt it, I wouldn’t have understood. It wasn’t words. Words went with it, just as actions went with it, but it was the feeling itself that shaped everything.

When it flickered to life between us, it felt as if cords were binding us, stitching us, tighter and tighter together. I took a slow breath as I tried to collect my thoughts into something sensible. What I eventually said felt inadequate.

“I don’t really know. I don’t want this to stop.”

We stepped toward each other at the same time, two forces striking metal and sparks leaping into the air. I was lost in her eyes. Her lips parted as she looked up at me, her hand falling to my chest. Her touch was warm. My heart kicked forward against it.

The moment stretched between us, burning hot, until I cupped her cheek and bent to claim her mouth.