Theirs (9 page)

“Holy fuck.” Cash smacked his forehead. He clearly remembered something.

“What?
“
Rusty demanded.

“
It all makes sense now,
”
Cash said more to himself than to the two of them as if he’d found the missing piece of the puzzle.

Alex
shrugged. “Well, do you plan on sharing or is this just a stalling tactic to come up with some bullshit excuse? No, never mind. I’ve had enough. I’m exhausted and I don’t want to hear
any
more
from you two tonight or at all. Everything was going well in my life before you two came back on the scene to complicate matters. Just leave and never come back. There’s nothing you can say or do to convince me to come back to Bradfordville. I’m done with that place and I’m done with you.”

Rusty refused to give up without a fight. “Did you know that when you lie, you blink twice? You’re lying now.”

She blinked twice before saying, “No I’m not.”

Rusty chuckled. “Then answer this one question for me.”

She eyed him warily. “What?”

“
Are you
happy,
Alex?”

Chapter Eight

Cash wanted to know the answer to that question himself. He could tell from the way Alex had suddenly become evasive that she was av
oiding the fact that she still cared. And like his brother, Cash refused to believe that the special bond they had formed no longer mattered to her. It was a real—the kind of love that only came around once in a lifetime.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”
she returned
a little too quick
ly
. “What’s not to be happy about? I have my own place,
a
job I enjoy
,
and friends who don’t judge me.
”

Cash noticed that she’d made a concerted effort not to blink now that she’d been called out on something that was a dead giveaway when she wasn’t being completely honest.
“That’s all fantastic but that doesn’t exactly answer
our
question. Are. You. Happy?”

“Of course
,
I am
.”
This time when she spoke
,
however, Alex didn’t look either of them in the eye.

“Well I haven’t
been
,” Cash replied.
“Rusty either. Not a day or night has gone by when we haven’t wanted to bring you back where you belong—by our sides.
There haven’t been any other women because we meant what we said when told you we loved you.
”

She snorted. “I find that hard to believe. You mean to tell me that your mother didn’t constantly parade suitable women your way?”

Rusty threw his hands up in the air in clear frustration. “Of course she did, but it doesn’t mean we took the bait because none of those women were you. When I was
at
college
,
every time
I would so much as look at another girl, I’d end up comparing her to you and I realized that I’d never be satisfied until I had you. Understand that had we known about what you were going through, we would have protected you. I love you, goddammit and no amount of your denying it will change that.” He pounded his chest for emphasis.

Alex finally raised her head. Her eyes gleamed with the suspicious sheen of tears.
“You come back into my life after all this time and make this declaration like I’m supposed to just jump back into your arms
and everything will be okay?
Well
,
it won’t. What’s in the past was meant to stay there. And even if for
some
reason
I was crazy enough to go along with your plan,
Bradfordville is a small town, what makes you think anything will be different this time around
. It’ll be the same people looking down their nose at me. It’s bad enough that some of them hated me for the color of my skin, but what the hell do you think will happen when the three of us flaunt our relationship around a place like that?
Oh
,
that’s right, nothing will happen to you because I’ll catch all the flack.” By the time she finished her rant, tears streamed down her beautiful face.

If he could
,
Cash
would take her pain and make it his own. He
empathized with how
much she must have suffered
over the years and if he could do it all over again, maybe he would have taken a different approach. But at the time of her
disappearance
,
he and Rusty
had wanted to make sure
they were in a
position t
o prevent
what she’d experienced from
happening again.
“It
’ll
be different this time around. We weren’t there when you
really needed us and for that, I can’t
apologize
enough but I can say it won’t happen again.”

Alex wiped the tears from her face with angry swipes.
“Oh?
What makes you so confident?
There are people out there who still can’t handle the fact that couples of the same sex can be married in this country. What exactly do you think will happen when
people find realize we have some kind of triad relationship going in. You’re simply not dealing
with
reality right now.”

Rusty slammed his fist in his palm.
“I don’t give a fuck what anyone else thinks. You’re making a lot of excuses for why we shouldn’t be together but you haven’t given us the one reason that will make Cash and I get up, walk out that door and never come back.”

She slid her tongue across her lower lip. “And what’s that?”

“Tell us that you’re no longer in love with us and we’ll leave,” Cash answered before Rusty could.

Alex raised her chin. “I...I don’t…” She lowered her
lashes
.

“Can’t say it
,
can you
,
because you still love us don’t you?” Rusty prompted.

Abruptly, Alex pushed away from the table and stood up. Wrapping her arms around her body
,
she turned her back to them. “Don’t do this to me. Please. I can’t handle this again.”

Rusty and Cash were both on their feet and stood on either side of her.

Alex moved away. “I can’t think properly when the two of you are standing beside me.
I’ve
finally got my life in order and carved a
niche
for myself here. I no longer cry myself to sleep reliving how an entire town seemed to turn on me because I dared to love the chosen
sons
. Both of them. And through it all, I
hadn’t
heard from either of you. If you would have come to me sooner,
maybe we could have worked things out. But now I just don’t see how we can.
My own grandmother disowned me
,
so you don’t get to use her as an excuse because I doubt she wants to see me as you’ve
stated
. I can’t go back there.”
This time
,
when the tears came she broke into loud body-shaking sobs.

Cash’s heart broke for her. He cursed himself for letting her suffer along.
Unable to stand by while the woman he loved was in distress,
Cash walked around the table and
pulled her into his arms, his torso flush with her back. She stiffened as he rested his forehead against the crook of her neck. “Please don’t cry, Alex. I can’t stand to see you cry, baby.”

Though he’d only wanted to comfort her, his words seemed to have the opposite effect because Alex
cried even harder than before. “I thought I was over you. Why did you have to come back into my life now? Why?”

Cash
wrapped his arms around her waist and held on tight.

Rusty
knelt before her and placed his head against her stomach. “Sweetheart, you’re breaking my heart. We didn’t come here to hurt you.”

“Where…were…you…? I needed you.” She managed to get out in between her sobs.
“Just because you were away on some campus tour it doesn’t negate the fact that you never returned my calls, never answered my emails. Never even looked for me.”

Cash kissed the top of her head.
“
That’s not exactly true, Alex.
If we had known
what our mother was up to
, we wouldn’t have allowed any of that to happen but by the time we found out it was too late. You were gone, but
we didn’t totally abando
n you.”

She
hiccupped
.
“What are you talking about?”

Rusty lifted his head until his lips were a
n
inch away from her ear. “
When we got home that weekend, the first place we went was to the
diner
because we figured you’d be working. We couldn’t wait to see you. I had so much to share with you about what I’d seen on campus. But when we were told you’d quit and hadn’t been back since, we knew something was wrong.”

“But why didn’t you call me?”

“We did. You never answered and that worried the hell out of us.
When neither one of us heard from you
, we went to your house
.
Miss Ida Mae
said you’d left and
weren’t
coming back but she didn’t
know where you’d gone. She said something about you running off
. She didn’t
even
have a forwarding address
which we found odd
. We knew you had a
few weeks
before you were supposed to take off for school but it didn’t make sense
that
you wouldn’t let us know,” Rusty explained.

Cash sh
uddered when he remembered the
day when they’d found
she’d left.
He had never been so scared in his life worrying that something had happened to Alex. What if she’d been hurt or kidnapped?
Several
scenarios had flashed through their minds, after
all
,
it wasn’t like her to simply just take off without a single word of explanation. “It’s true Alex.
When we came home it seemed like you’d just up and vanished. None of the people we asked knew of your whereabouts. We figured you might have left for your college campus early so we drove hours to reach you. We tore that town apart searching for you, asking around. Not a single sign of you. When we came back
home
we even went to the police station to file a missing person’s report but it was one of the deputies who suggested you’d run away because of all the town gossip.”

“It was then we figured that someone must have found out about us. Then we started to pay attention to what people around town were saying and it confirmed our worst
suspicions
. Some of the guys we used to hang around us, thought it was funny and joked about it with us.
It goes without saying that
someone walked away with a broken nose. We then went back to Miss Ida Mae’s house and she looked guilty as hell, she wouldn’t even look us in the eyes. She mumbled something about talking to our mother. And finally, that led to the confrontation with our mother who didn’t seem the least bit sorry over your departure.
She
admitted that a concerned friend had come forward with some inf
ormation about the three of us and that
there were pictures.
”

“But we had been so careful,” Alex pointed out.

“I thought so too,” Cash agreed, “but apparently not careful enough. The only person who would have had pictures of us was Tabitha.
She swore she had deleted
those pictures, but like the idiots we were we believed her. She was such a nonentity to us that we didn’t even consider the lengths she’d go to get revenge for Rusty rejecting her. She must have seen
us hanging out together in town even though the meeting was innocent enough. I guess she didn’t like to see us together in any capacity.”

Rusty grimaced. “I’m so glad I never touched her in any romantic way.
She wanted to be intimate, but the thought of touching her literally made me ill.
Do you know we ran into that bitch and she had the nerve to brag about what she did? I have been raised to never lay a hand on a woman and that was the only thing that saved her life that day because I literally wanted to kill her. Thankfully Cash was with me or I actually might have wrung her neck. Besides, she was the least of our problems at that time. We had to find you.
”

Alex
sniffed
. “So what then?”

Rusty
got on his feet and cupped her face between his palms. “We dipped into our savings and hired a detective
to search for you. We figured they have better luck at finding you than we did
. He reported to us that you were living in a youth hostel close to the college you were to attend.
I don’t know how we missed that place when we went there on our own. Maybe because it was one town over and we didn’t think of going there, but we were so thankful to know you were safe. Could you tell us how you came to be there?”

“Well, when my grandmother kicked me out, I only had a half hour to pack my belonging and get out. I had a lot of things I’d purchased to take with me that I had to leave behind. I stayed in the motel that night because I couldn’t leave town without going
to
the bank
so that I could
withdraw my savings. I was going to need it to find cheap lodging because I wouldn’t be allowed to move into the dorm for some weeks. I got my money and bought a bus ticket. I learned about the youth hostel when I
arrived
at
my destination and I stayed there for about a week until I saw a flyer for a room that was closer to campus
and it was in a safe area.”

Cash relinquished his hold and turned her around until she faced him. “Finding that room wasn’t a coincidence, Alex.”

Her eyes grew big. “What are you talking about?”

Cash gently wiped away the tracks of her tears with his thumb. “
As luck would have it, one of our father’s old
fraternit
y brothers lived in the area so
we called in a favor to get him to help you find a place until you could move to the dorms on campus. He knew someone who rented out rooms in their house to college students on the cheap. That mysteriou
s flyer you found advertising that room you wound up in,
came from the guy we hired.
Since the PI’s report, w
e’ve known exactly where you’ve been all along, making sure you were okay. So you see, we never really left you. It’s how we knew how to find you, how we’ve
always
known how to find you.”

“But
,
I contacted you both.
I called
and
I sent you emails and neither one of you responded.
I gave up trying when I got a response saying your phones were out of service. I figured you blocked my number.
”

“
We would never do that you. It wasn’t until we began this discussion did I
realize
what actually happened and why we didn’t answer our phones
.
Neither
one of us could figure out why that was, but then
I
remembered around that time, we
had switched service providers
where
we got
a
cell
phone and internet service in one package
.
Our emails changed and we weren’t able to keep our old
phone
numbers. We did that before leaving town and didn’t get a chance to tell you.
In all the fuss of
Rusty getting ready to go off to college and me
deciding to take a few summer courses, we completely forgot to give you the new ones.
But we did call you.
”

She
gasped
. “
If you had new numbers
it’s
no wonder I never answered your calls. I had a serious crappy cell phone plan at the time
and I didn’t want to waste my minutes answering calls from unknown numbers. I got quite a few of them around that time and didn’t think for a second that they could be you.”

Rusty frowned. “But we left messages.”

Alex sighed. “Along with the fact that I had a shitty plan, I had an equally shitty phone. I couldn’t retrieve my messages for some reason. Remember? You two used to tease me about it, and even said you’d buy me another one but being Miss Independent I wouldn’t let you.”

“Holy shit, man. We really could have save
d
each other a lot of
h
eartache
s
if it weren’t for
this simple misunderstanding,” Cash groaned.