The door opened. Footsteps. Please let it be Nurse Hanson with my meds.
“I had to go all the way to the Griz, but I scored us ice cream sandwiches.”
She opened her eyes and just stared at him.
Ty stood in the wan light of the room, holding two sandwiches, grinning at her.
“Get out.” The words surprised even her, but she didn’t pull them back.
His smile fell and he frowned, clearly rattled. “What?”
His fake innocence only raked up the hurt. The betrayal. “Get away from me. I can’t believe I trusted you. You knew all this time who Jess was, and you just stood there and lied to me.”
And if she was wondering if it was true, if she was simply misjudging him, the question died with the ashen hue of his face. “Brette,” he said, his voice low, as if trying to calm her.
“No, I don’t want to hear it. Please just leave.” Her throat burned, her eyes glazed, but she refused to cry in front of him.
He set the ice cream on the table. “No.”
15
“JUST LET ME EXPLAIN.” Ty stood at the foot of Brette’s bed, her wrecked expression like a fist inside him, punching through the layer of hope he’d constructed around himself.
He’d only known her for a few days, and it wasn’t like he was asking her to marry him, but she somehow made him feel like he might be the only hero in the room.
“You, Ty, are a man worth stealing.”
He might have grabbed ahold of those words, hung on to them too tightly, because he could feel them unravel in his grip as he stared at Brette. Her eyes filled and his chest tightened.
“Please, Brette—”
“I said get out.” Her voice shook, though, and she seemed to have lost her previous venom.
He held up his hand. “Okay—yes, I will. But first, let me explain.”
She flicked away the moisture on her face. “I don’t know where you’re going to start. Maybe with the truth about why you’re not flying anymore? Some sort of crash?”
“How—”
“Pete told me. When he brought me flowers.” She folded her hands over her chest, then tilted her head. Glanced at the bouquet of flowers on the table.
Pete had brought her flowers.
Ty could kill the man with his bare hands. “Pete was here.”
“Yeah. He apologized for being a jerk. Which is a lot easier to forgive than lying.”
“Brette, listen, the crash story. I—” He closed his mouth. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Apparently that’s epidemic with you. There I sat, pouring out my history with the Taggerts to you, how they’d destroyed my family, practically killed my parents, and you just . . . you protected her. You sat there as if you didn’t even know who she was. But you do—you were at her engagement party!”
“How did you . . . how do you know that?”
“Seriously? Google.”
He came over to the chair. Sank down. “Listen, I grew up with her. Jess and I used to ski together. And yeah, I am—was—friends with her brother Barron. And her fiancé and I were roommates at Wharton. Jess’s entire life fell apart when she discovered her father’s fraud.”
“Don’t you mean Selene?”
Ty closed his mouth. Blew out a breath. “She’s Jess now. Just Jess. Trying to start her life over.”
“I don’t think she has a right to do that after her father destroyed so many lives.”
“She wasn’t responsible for her father’s actions. She testified against him. Betrayed her entire family. Her mother disowned her, and her brother ripped her apart in the press. Her life was destroyed, and when she left New York, she had nowhere else to go. So she texted me, and I told her to come here. That I’d help her start over.”
“Hide.”
“Rewrite her life. She lost everything—her family, her home, her fiancé—she just needed to be safe.”
“So she came to you.” Brette ground her jaw so tight, it looked like she might break a few molars.
“Yes. She came to me. And I told her I’d protect her.”
“And now you’re dating her. Some protection, Ty.”
“No!” He closed his eyes. Blew out another breath. When he opened his eyes, he put as much truth into them as he could. “We’re not dating. I told you the truth about that. But Jess needs me to . . . well, she has her reasons.”
“Do her reasons have to do with me?”
Ty groaned as he turned and spotted Pete standing in the doorway.
Pete’s expression was so dark that Ty found his feet. Not out of fear, but frankly, he was just a little tired of all of Pete’s posturing.