Brothers of Paradise Series

“Yes,” I whisper. “I should have done it years ago, but I didn’t… manage to.”

Her low voice is fierce. “Good. And he’d better hope he never comes here, or I’ll pay you back for Billy tenfold.”

A broken half-chuckle escapes me. “Thanks, Lily.”

“Stay here, okay? For as long as you want. Your mom must be ecstatic to have you back, and so are the rest of us.” Her hand tightens around mine until it’s almost painful, and I can’t stop the tears from flowing down my cheeks. It’s years of regret, finally acknowledged.

“I love you, you know,” I say. My voice wobbles. “Even when I didn’t speak to you for years. Even when I couldn’t answer your texts out of guilt, and fear, and… disgust over who I’d become.”

She puts an arm around me, and I marvel at the way the roles have reversed. How we’re grown up and yet still the exact same, and perhaps that’s all there ever is, in friendships that are more like family.

“Stay in Paradise,” she murmurs. “Stay here. Okay?”

I nod, unable to find my words.

We stay there for a long time, until the sun dips behind the horizon, and it’s late when I finally make it back to my house. Empty plates in the kitchen are evidence of yet another pancake dinner. Emma is getting spoiled and she deserves every single minute of it. From the stairs, I hear a murmured voice. My mother is reading a bedtime story.

I do their dishes and walk up to join them. My legs feel heavy, my heart sore, like it’s taken more exercise today than it has in years. And yet my head feels crystal clear.

Mom looks up when I enter Emma’s bedroom. She softly closes the book and looks back down at my daughter, who’s struggling to keep her eyes open.

“Want to do the rest?”

“Sure. Thank you.”

She puts a hand on my shoulder. “My pleasure, honey.”

Emma smiles when she sees me. It’s the sleepy, half-here-and-half-gone kind of smile only small children are capable of. “Mommy,” she whispers.

I smooth my hand over her hair. Her eyes flutter as she struggles against the pull of sleep.

“Sweetheart,” I murmur, “what do you think of this town? Do you like it?”

Emma’s eyes open in a valiant effort. “Yes.”

“Do you want to stay here?”

“Yes,” Emma says again. Her eyes close for good this time, her next words barely audible. “Can we?”

“I’ll try,” I murmur, smoothing a thumb over her feathery eyebrow. “Mom will do her best.”

JAMIE

I’ve never used dumbbells this heavy before. I have to take a deep breath before I can lift them up, resting them on my shoulders.

“That’s it,” Parker says. He’s watching from his recline on the bench, the bar above him resting on the metal. “Back straight too.”

I squat down. The first is easy. The fifth is not.

“That’s it. Don’t let your body drift too far in front of your knees.”

“A lot of instructions,” I huff out. Another squat. “Maybe you should”-another squat-“focus on your bar. It’s looking”-a deep breath-“very immobile.”

He grins at me. If he still thinks about that night in the rain last week, the impulsive kiss on my part and his profuse, embarrassing apology, he doesn’t let it show.

“Feeling strong today, James?”

To my surprise, the answer is yes. The mornings spent in his gym have re-awakened the pitiful muscle mass I have. It’s also given me a win every time I left his garage sweaty and alive.

I take another deep breath and start with lunges. “Just lift your bar, Marchand.”

He chuckles and reaches for it. It’s loaded with eight times the weight I can handle on chest presses. He’d showed them to me earlier, and I’d protested that I didn’t need to do that exercise. Why do I need to work my pecs? My punishment was a five-minute lecture about the importance of core and upper-body strength.

Parker grunts quietly as he works through his set. From the safety across the gym, doing my lunges, I watch him without shame.

He’s his usual self. Ignoring the kiss, just like I’d asked him to. We’re back on a territory we both know how to navigate. And yet the feeling of his lips on mine is burned into my mind, impossible to forget.

My eyes drift over his arms and his long body stretched out on the bench. When he’s done, he does what he always does, lifting the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his face. I watch the strong stomach and the lines that rise and fall with his heavy breathing. It’s a body that’s built for the strength necessary to sail, to work, to live an active life, and not to impress. No vanity muscle.

His eyes meet mine across the garage. “Done with your set?”

I nod and put the dumbbells back in the weight rack. My hands feel tingly. “Yes. I think so.”

He reaches for his water bottle. “You’ve gotten stronger,” he tells me.

“It hardly feels that way,” I say, “when I’m sore all the time.”

There’s a flash of light in his eyes, there and gone, that tells me he heard something else in my words. A flush creeps up my neck at the innuendo.

“Right,” he says, and shifts from one foot to the other.

Mirroring him, I reach for my own water bottle. It feels oppressively hot in here. “You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I do.” He clears his throat. “I take it your conversation went well? With my sister.”

“We both survived it, at any rate.”

He chuckles. “That means it went great.”All content © N/.ôvel/Dr/ama.Org.

“It did, yeah.”

Parker raises an eyebrow. “Did she manage to get more answers out of you?”

I turn, gathering up my phone, water bottle, and keys. “Oh, I told her everything and swore her to secrecy.”

“Damn it,” he says, voice rough. “I’ll get it out of you eventually.”

“What do you think my secrets are, anyway?” I ask. His curiosity is flattering, and overwhelming, and I can feel his lips on mine again. How they’d burned.