Tyler suppressed a yawn. “You could try being less boring.”
“The high school ski team is a coach down. The team is losing more than they’re winning. They want our help.”
“I said less boring.”
His brother ignored him. “I said we’d help out at the school for a couple of sessions. We can talk theory and give a waxing demonstration.”
“Waxing?” Kayla’s eyebrows rose. “We’re still talking skiing, yes? Not grooming?”
Tyler gave her a look. “How long have you lived here?”
“Long enough to know exactly how to wind you up.” Smiling, Kayla made a note on her phone. “Helping the high school team will be good publicity. I can do something with that locally.”
Tyler stared moodily at his feet and waited for them to ask him to do it.
Once, he’d skied alongside the best in the world.
Now he was going to be coaching a losing high school ski team.
Regret ripped through him along with sick disappointment and a yearning that made no sense. What was done was done.
He was about to make a flippant comment about how he’d finally made it to the top, when Jackson said, “We thought Brenna might do it.”
Brenna was the obvious person. She was a PSIA level three coach and a gifted teacher. She was patient with kids and adventurous with expert skiers.
Glancing at her, Tyler noticed the change in her expression and the stiffness of her shoulders. You didn’t have to be an expert in body language to see she didn’t want to do it.
And he knew why.
He waited for her to refuse, but instead she gave a tense smile.
“Of course. Kayla’s right. It will be good publicity and good for our reputation.” She gave the answer Jackson wanted and listened while he outlined details, but there was no sign of the smile that had been evident a few moments earlier. Instead she stared hard out the window and across the
snow-dusted forest to the peaks beyond.
Tyler wondered why his brother hadn’t noticed the lack of enthusiasm in her response and decided Jackson was too caught up with the pressures of keeping the family business afloat to notice small things. Like the rigid set of her shoulders.
He felt a rush of exasperation.
Why didn’t she speak up and say how she felt?
He knew she didn’t want to do it. Unlike most of the women he’d met, he found Brenna easy to read. The expression on her face matched her mood. He knew when she was happy; he knew when she was excited about something; he knew when she was tired and cranky. And he knew when she was unhappy. And she was unhappy now, at the news she’d be coaching the high school team.
And he knew why.
She’d hated school. Like him, she’d considered the whole thing a waste of time. All she’d wanted to do was get out on the mountains and ski as fast as she could. Lessons had got in the way of that. Tyler had felt the same, which was why he sympathized with Jess. He knew exactly how it had felt to be trapped indoors in a classroom, sweating over books that made no sense and were as heavy and dull as old bricks.
But in Brenna’s case, it hadn’t been a love of the mountains or a dislike of algebra that had driven her loathing of school, but something far more insidious and ugly.
She’d been bullied.
On more than one occasion, he and his brothers had tried to find out which kids were making Brenna’s life a misery, but she’d refused to talk about it, and none of them had witnessed anything that had given them clues. It hadn’t helped that she was younger, which meant that they rarely saw her during the school day.
Tyler had wanted to fix it, and it had driven him crazy that she wouldn’t let him.
If it had been one of his brothers, he would have sorted the problem, so he couldn’t see why she wouldn’t let him help.
On one occasion, she’d walked back from school with grazed knees and a cut on her face, her schoolbooks damaged from her encounter with whoever had pushed her in the ditch.