“I said no,” Gray said firmly, voice flat.
Kenna stared at him. “What-the-fuck-ever,” she finally said, and stormed out, probably to hole up in her room like the hermit she’d become.
“Gray,” Penny said softly.
“No, Pen,” Gray said tightly. “She earned that money with her own blood, sweat, and tears. She’s not using it to bail us out of the mess our asshole dad left us in.”
“But he’s her dad, too, and she wants to be one of you.”
“She is one of us,” Gray said. “She’s our baby sister and we protect her, not use her.” He looked at Aidan and Hud. “Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Aidan said, and reached out for Lily’s hand. She smiled at him and nodded.
“Agreed,” Hud said just as easily.
Kenna had been a professional snowboarder from the age of fifteen to last year, when she’d crashed and burned, both physically and metaphorically.
She still wasn’t on the people train and had been hiding out here at Cedar Ridge, pouting, playing Candy Crush on her tablet, refusing to answer her phone to any of her old contacts.
When she’d first come home again, Gray had talked her into locking up her winnings and sponsorship loot. He’d deposited it for her—long-term investments—so that she wouldn’t be further weighed down by her own ruthless, self-destructive streak.
It’d been nearly a year now and she was no longer walking around like she might kill the first person to look at her wrong, but she was far from back on track. None of them could stomach the idea of using her money to save their hides when the day could very well come when she might need it.
Gray got a text, something about a computer problem. Shortly after that, Aidan got a search and rescue call. And then Hud got his own call as well, someone on duty at the police station had gotten sick and Hud was needed for the graveyard shift.
And so, on went the week.
By the time Friday came around, he was done in. But that night he worked another cop shift and no sooner had he started than an alarm came in for a burglary call. An eighty-year-old man had called 9-1-1 claiming someone was in his kitchen eating his brand-new raspberry tarts. And he’d been right. There’d been someone in his kitchen eating his raspberry tarts—a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound bear roughly the size of a VW Bug, sitting at the guy’s kitchen island, calm as you please.
Bears were more common than traffic accidents in Cedar Ridge.
The next call was from the local drug store. Three reportedly armed suspects had gotten into the ceiling vents, working their way toward the safe. Unfortunately for them, they’d fallen through the ceiling tiles. Hud and two other units arrived just as the suspects were stirring, writhing on the ground, moaning in pain.
They were teenagers, not armed—although they were drunk—and dressed as superheroes. One of them had gotten the brilliant idea to rob the store. Not for cash.
Nope, the geniuses had wanted candy.It was three in the morning before Hud got home. Assuming no one else needed him, he had two whole hours of sleep ahead of him. He fell into his bed, and as often happened when he was exhausted, he dreamed badly.
“What did you just say to me?” Hud asked Jacob, standing nose-to-nose with him immediately after high school graduation.
“You heard me.”
“I couldn’t have heard you correctly,” Hud said to his identical twin, the one person on the face of the planet who knew him inside and out. “I couldn’t have heard that you’re out of here. I couldn’t have heard that you’re already packed and we leave tonight.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” Jacob asked. “It was always our plan. Go see the world.”
“‘What’s wrong with that?’” Hud repeated, shocked. “Are you kidding me? What isn’t wrong with that? What about Mom? Or the fact that for the past six years since we first came here—with nothing!—we actually have a roof over our heads and food when we need it, food we didn’t have to beg, borrow, or steal. We have family now, Jacob. People who care about us. There’s no reason to go.”
Jacob shook his head, frustrated, pissed. “I get all that. And they’ve been really good to us but, Hud, staying was never the plan. Leaving was. Always. Travel the world, see shit… Have you forgotten? Maybe with life being so easy here, you like being fat and lazy.”
Hud managed a laugh at that. They were still both so lanky and thin that people were always trying to shove food down their throats. And as for lazy, neither of them would know what to do with a day off. “Mom’s here,” he said again. “She can’t go. And we can’t just leave her. We’re all she has.”
Jacob closed his eyes and then opened them, and when he did they were full of pain. “We’ll send all our money back to her, everything we earn. But listen to me, Hud, and know that this kills me every bit as much as it does you—she knows, she’s always known, that we wanted to leave. She doesn’t expect us to stay. She loves it here. And hell, man, half the time she doesn’t even know whether we’re with her or not.” He stopped and in a move that was identical to the one Hud made when he was the most frustrated or unsettled, Jacob scrubbed a hand down his face. “She’ll be okay here,” he said. “Here more than anywhere else.”
Hud knew that. He did. And he’d absolutely made plans with Jacob to do this, but that had been before. Before they’d met Gray and Aidan, and Char, and then Kenna. Before they’d all become true family in a way they’d never had before. They’d had their mom, yes, but the mother/son bond had always been tenuous, dependent on the day of the week and whether Carrie had her feet based in reality or in the clouds. The fact was that they’d raised her, not the other way around, and here in Cedar Ridge, for the first time in their lives, they truly had someone, several someones, at their backs.
No matter what.
At least that’s how Hud felt. But Jacob had never really settled in here, had never allowed himself to get to know the rest of their family. He’d kept himself apart and that had driven a wedge between the twins that Hud had never imagined happening. “We have family here,” he repeated, wanting Jacob to get it. Needing him to. “Jacob, we don’t have to leave like we thought we would.”
“We’ve had family before,” Jacob said stubbornly. “Never made any difference to us.”
“If you’re referring to Dad,” Hud said, “be careful cuz he’s not the best example. But hey, if you want to be like him and split, fine. Do it.”
Jacob narrowed his eyes, temper lit. “What does that mean?”
Hud’s temper matched. “You want out? Then go, man.” He shoved Jacob back a step. “Get the hell out. Just like he did. Who needs you?”
Jacob stared at him for a long beat. “Apparently not you. And if that’s how you feel, preferring them over me, your own flesh and blood, then fuck you, I’m gone.”
“Fine!”
“Fine!” Jacob echoed.
And then, sick to his stomach, had come the words Hud didn’t even know could be strung together in a sentence, words born of frustration and a stupid teenage bad ’tude. “If you go,” he said, “we’re no longer brothers.”