I shook my head, closing my eyes. “She doesn’t want to invade my privacy. And she wants us to date in secret.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“She’s focused on what this means for my privacy. She’s worried I’ll have no privacy; that I’ll be giving up too much. So she wants us to hide our relationship.”
“And you’re not worried about that? About your privacy?”
“God, no.” I opened my eyes, my words forceful. “I don’t care about that. I’d gladly give up my privacy if I could be with her, but not when my past is going to—”
“Tarnish her image, yes. I know,” Cletus finished for me, waving my words away, a frown etched into his features.
“And it’s not just hurting her career. You saw that photo Darrell sent. You read his note. Do you think our father is just going to leave us in peace?”
“No,” Billy answered honestly for both him and Cletus. “He’ll try to exploit the hell out of you. He’ll try blackmail; he’ll try everything.”
“Don’t you worry about Darrell Winston.” Again Cletus waved this concern away. “I can deal with Darrell Winston. Forget about him. I got him under control.”
“How can I be sure?” I pressed my brother. “This is Sienna. I can’t take any chances.”
“Jethro Whitman Winston,” Cletus’s eyes were flinty and stern, “you’re going to have to trust me. Let it go.”
We glared at each other. I didn’t know if I could let it go.
But then he ground out, “Have I ever let you down? Have I ever failed to keep a promise? I’m telling you. Let. Me. Deal. With. It.”
I gritted my teeth. Cletus was right. He was sneaky and sinister, mean even, but his word was sacred. In the end, his meanness was why I ultimately trusted him to deal with Darrell.
“You need to focus your attention back to your woman, how you’re going to make this right.”
“Maybe we should just date in secret,” I said, but the same visceral rejection as before drummed outward from my chest to my fingertips, making my skin and lungs burn.
“Don’t do that,” Billy said, shaking his head emphatically. “Do it in public, or don’t do it at all. Don’t hide what you have. The lies will destroy you and her. It’ll turn what’s beautiful between you ugly.”
I glared at Billy, surprised by his words, and hating how wise and true they were. But I was desperate and grasping at straws. We stood in the relative silence of the forest. I heard nothing, saw nothing, because I felt nothing but hopelessness.
Billy was the first to move, to break the stillness of the moment. He removed his dress shirt, tossing it over the branch of a nearby tree. His eyes skated over my dirty, sweaty clothes. Then he removed his undershirt.
Crossing to the axe, he picked it up and offered it to me.
“Here,” he said. “Take it.”
I glanced at the axe handle then at my brother. “What are you doing?”
He shrugged, but I saw a glimmer of something like sympathy buried deep in his eyes. “We’ll take turns. And when the tree comes down, I’ll help you drag it to the pit, cut it into sections.”
I swallowed. My eyes stung and my lungs labored as though I were surrounded on all sides by smoke. I was suffocating.
My voice was rough, gravelly as I asked, “Why?”
“Because you’re my brother,” he said, as though it were obvious. “And you need my help.”
CHAPTER 30
“I am free, and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka
~Sienna~
My heart wasn’t working correctly.
First of all, it hurt. Especially when I breathed. Or sat. Or stood. Or walked.
And also, it was thumping oddly, skipping beats, pumping blood either too fast or too slow.
It was broken.
“Sienna?” Dave called, knocking on my bedroom door.
My room, the master suite, was on the third floor and the guys were staying on the main level. The entire second floor was taken up with a viewing room/entertainment area/bar combination that looked over the lake. Most of the ceiling in my room was comprised of a massive skylight. The night sky and stars were my nightly view and the windows tinted automatically during the day to shield the space from the sun.
I ignored Dave and continued to stare at the sky. I’d been doing this since Jethro dropped me off.
That’s not true. At first, just after he left, I’d spent several minutes calling him all kinds of names, in both English and Mexican Spanish. I’d slammed some doors. I’d brushed my teeth with vigor. And I’d started on the Smash-Girl script, deciding she would initially grow red and angry because all men were fools.