Falling for the Brother

She hadn’t stuck around long enough to hear anything else. Devastated in a way she’d never experienced before, feeling such an overwhelming chaos of emotions that were new to her undramatic life, she’d taken off. She’d ended up at the beach where she’d run until her calves ached. And then kept on running.

She’d trusted Bruce. With her heart. With her life. The idea that he’d been unfaithful to her—and a week before their wedding—she hadn’t known how to cope. With all the crap that cops saw on the job, they had to be able to trust each other. Implicitly. And when a cop was the man you loved, your partner in life… His disloyalty had been unfathomable to her.

And still…she’d loved him.

By the time Mason had found her, her calves had given out. She’d been sitting on the beach with her head on her knees sobbing so hard her ribs hurt.

Now, sitting in the same position on her living room floor sometime after eleven, Harper picked up the phone.

“Yeah?” Not surprisingly he answered on the first ring. He’d still be driving.

“How did you find me that night?” Back then, she’d given no thought to the way he’d shown up on the beach. She’d been too far gone to question much of anything at that point.

But during the years since, she’d wondered a million times, with no one to ask. Her night with Mason was the one subject she and Bruce couldn’t handle. And never, ever mentioned. As time passed, and her relationship with Bruce ended, Mason’s sudden appearance that long-ago night had seemed to take on new meaning.

Almost as though he’d been led to her…

“Bruce.”

She shook her head, confused. “What?”

“He called me, completely distraught. He knew you wouldn’t talk to him and said he’d never seen you so upset. Truth is my little brother was scared to death. He told me that you liked to jog on the beach. I knew where you’d been when you left him, went to the closest beach access, saw your car and followed the female-sized tennis shoe footprints.”

“Bruce sent you.”

He’d been on an errand for her brother and then he’d taken her to bed.

“Yep.”

“No wonder he was…no wonder he acted like he did when he found out what we’d done.”

“I didn’t expect you to tell him.”

“You didn’t know me well enough.” And yet, it felt as though he had. That night… She’d probably built it up into way more than it had been. For one night she’d felt…cherished. As if she had absolutely no reason to worry about anything.

It was a result of the amount of alcohol she’d consumed. She knew that.

“For what it’s worth, I’ve spent every day and night since regretting what I did to him,” Mason said in a low voice. “And to you.”

“I feel the same way.”

“You were hurting beyond belief, he’d just been unfaithful to you and you thought your relationship was over.” He paused. “I don’t think you did anything wrong.”

“I came on to you.”

“I should never have responded.”

“As I recall, you didn’t.”

“The facts contradict your recollection.”

“You watched over me all night, never left my side, made sure I was safe. You even took me home with you, all the while managing to avoid my attempts to get you to do more. Even after we got to your place, you gave me the bed and went to sleep on the couch,” she told him. Yeah, some details of that night were hazy, like how many bars they’d actually visited and what time they made it back to his place—in a cab. She remembered that much. Actually, some of her memories were completely clear.

Like the way she’d felt, leaving his bed dressed only in one of his T-shirts, and going out to the living room to convince him to come to the bed with her.

“I shared the bed with you.” His tone was droll. “In the end, that’s all that mattered.”

She disagreed, but didn’t see how belaboring the point was going to get them anywhere. They couldn’t go back. And they weren’t going forward, either.

“You’re positive Bruce was with Gwen that night?”