The Bachelor Contract(57)

Bentley dumped water over his head and cursed. “It was hot as hell in there.”

“Behold!” Grandfather held out his arms to Brant. “Your future, should you choose not to take your head out of your ass. Hell.” He pointed to the tent. “But I think the real thing is a lot hotter.”

“Yeah, I’m going to have to pass.” Brant tried turning around but Cole blocked his every move. “Seriously, man?”

“You need all the help you can get, and you need people who actually put up with you on your side. I don’t count since I’m still on her team.”

“I like him,” Bentley piped up.

Brock patted the wooden seat next to him.

“You may enter the circle.” Grandfather spread his arms wide. “How’s the resort business? Nadine says you’ve managed this place quite well.”

“Let’s talk business later.” Cole eyed Brant.

With a grimace, Brant sat next to his grandfather and waited. The flames licked higher and higher, and with the intensity of the heat, Brant wanted nothing more than to back away.

He hated fires. Nothing good ever came from fires. They burned. They destroyed.

“So what brings you out here, then?” Grandfather interrupted Brant’s dark thoughts. Already Brant wanted to bolt; each flame licked higher and higher, reminding him of things he’d rather forget. “So far, the Zen program has been quite enlightening. We spent the last half hour in meditation sweating our asses off and came out here for a quick break before going back in.”

“You go right ahead,” Brock grumbled.

“Actually,” Cole said, glowered in Brant’s direction, “I need your help, all of you.”

Brant wasn’t entirely sure he liked where this conversation was going or the way his grandfather’s eyes twinkled at the request.

“Oh?” Grandfather rubbed his hands together. “Anything. Name it.”

“Brant”—Cole said his name with a hiss—“is trying to learn how to properly woo a lady.”

“Oh, dear God.”

“Whoosh.” Bentley swiped his hand in the air. “Oh look, the floodgates of hell just opened. Run along, Grandfather—”

“Shut up and let an old man speak, Bentley.” Grandfather hesitated a minute then started smiling. Brant wasn’t sure if he should plug his ears or make a run for it. Judging by Brock’s and Bentley’s matching nervous expressions, he’d be smart to do both. “You live by example—and use words if you must.”

Brock spit out his water.

Bentley’s jaw dropped.

And Brant couldn’t look away from his grandfather if he tried. “What did you just say?”

“Actions always speak louder than words.” Grandfather chugged out of his water bottle and placed it back on the wooden stump. “Words have the power to hurt, people remember words first, you can’t take them back. But actions, well, actions can be excused, justified, that’s why they call it a knee-jerk reaction. So, my advice, if you really want to stop being yourself”—there the snide remark was—“you need to prove to her that your actions mean something. Words are easy, actions are hard.”

“Like his head,” Bentley just had to add.

“And if actions aren’t enough?” Brant asked. “Then what?”

Grandfather frowned. “Then you’re doing it wrong.”

Brock chuckled and shrugged in Brant’s direction. “The man has a point.”

Cole’s smug grin wasn’t helping, either.

A flame hissed in Brant’s direction. He jerked backward and nearly fell off the log.

“Son…” Grandfather stared into the orange flames. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

There it was, the pain, burning through his chest, demanding to be dealt with. “You knew there was a fire.”

“Yes. I knew there was a fire. I also had no idea that your wife was nearly killed in it or that she lost her sight because of it. The minute you separated, you told me that I finally got my way. That the universe was against you just like your own family.”

Brant sucked in a painful breath of air. Those words. He’d said those words. To his own grandfather. They had been spoken out of pain, regret, hatred for the cards he’d been dealt. “And you turned into a different man. A man, I don’t even think you recognized anymore.”

“Because it was easier,” Brant found himself saying. “Ignoring the past, walking away, doing the easy thing that I wrongly assumed she wanted me to do. She said things”—he quickly glanced at Cole and then back at the ground—“things that at the time made me so angry, so sick to my stomach, so…broken, that I didn’t think I had any other choice. I thought if I stopped hurting her, it would stop hurting me. We’d already lost so much, I was holding on by a thread and then the thread snapped. I walked away. I did the easy thing, the thing that hurt less, or at least I thought it would hurt less. When you get cut you stop the bleeding. That was my way of stopping the bleeding. I just didn’t know at the time that every single day was a new cut, a new reminder of the past, and you can’t run from it. It’s exhausting, and eventually it catches up to you even when you’re as careful as I’ve been.”