Good Girls Don't (Donovan Brothers Brewery 1)

Jamie and Eric exchanged a look and the weight of it made her uncomfortable. “Wait, he is divorced, right? You’re not saying he’s married?”

“No,” Eric said, but he stared at Jamie until Jamie finally nodded. And then Eric turned and left the room.

“What’s going on?” Tessa actually felt afraid. She was starting to worry that his ex-wife had been injured in a mysterious accident involving a malfunctioning brake line.

Jamie dropped into a chair and signaled her to join him. Tessa lowered herself carefully down, perching on the very edge of the seat.

“I didn’t want to tell you this.”

She made a hurry-up gesture.

“He married a girl he met in school. I don’t know anything about the marriage, but a few years ago, she got sick.”

“Oh, no!”

“Breast cancer.”

Tessa pressed both her hands to her mouth to smother her gasp. “Did she… But you said he was divorced.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said flatly. “He left her. While she was sick.”

She didn’t respond for a moment. It was just too ridiculous to take in. What kind of man would do that? Not the kind of man who was eaten up with worry over his partner’s pregnancy. “No,” she said simply. “It didn’t happen that way.”

“It did.”

“Jamie, you know him. He’d never do that.”

“Tessa, I know him as a guy I used to party with. We didn’t get into a lot of deep discussions about marriage and morality.”

“Well, it’s not true,” she snapped.

Jamie sighed and pressed his fingers to his temples. “Don’t be one of those girls, Tessa. Please.”

She’d pushed her chair out, but she froze at his words and put her hands flat to the table. “One of what girls?”

“Tessa.” His mouth flattened with disappointment. “Come on. ‘It’s not his baby, he didn’t leave his wife, nobody understands him, he’s really a great guy.’”

Tessa gasped in horror. “I’m not that girl!”

“Good, because we haven’t raised you to put up with being stepped on.”

“Oh, please. You didn’t raise me.”

Now it was Jamie’s turn to look outraged. “Hey, I did my part.”

She could see that she’d hurt his feelings and backtracked. “Okay. You’re great at being a big brother. An obnoxious big brother.”

“Fine,” he snapped. “But it’d better fall under big brother duties to beat the shit out of Luke Asher the next time I see him, because that’s happening.”

Still feeling bad for her careless words, Tessa walked around to the back of his chair to put her arms around him. “No hitting. Stay out of it.” She kissed his cheek as he grumbled. “I need to get to work,” she said, and let him go.

“Wait a minute! What exactly did Kendall say?”

“Shh!” she scolded as she hurried out of the bar area. Tessa rushed to her office and shut the door, then leaned against it with a groan. When had her life started spiraling? Granted, she was always busy with keeping Jamie happy and Eric calm and her work on track and her love life private. But the reward for all that work was supposed to be smooth sailing, not twenty-four-hour insanity.

And now her stomach burned with anxious hurt over Luke. Could she have misread him so badly? He seemed like such a good guy inside that hard exterior. Was that just an act? She hated to admit it, but Jamie had a point. How many women did she know who refused to see the truth that was so evident to everybody else?

One of her best friendships had been ruined because of stupidity over a man. Over Jamie, actually. Her friend Grace had developed a bad habit of falling madly in love with the wrong men. Jamie had only been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d flirted with Grace, as he flirted with everyone, and the girl had tumbled head over heels into stalkerlike love. A few weeks later, when she’d been banned from the brewery for behavior that fell comfortably into the stalking category, she’d finally moved on to a married man who promised he planned to leave his wife soon.