The Player and the Pixie(95)

My brother’s eyes softened and he gave me a small smile. “Stop being sorry. You’re not a bad person. I’m just worried about you.”

I nodded, pressing my lips together and firming my chin to keep it from wobbling. We stood apart from each other, my big brother—my hero—and me.

The disappointment.

The embarrassment.

I was so tired of being the embarrassment.

Speaking of . . .

“Is Sean okay?” I asked hesitantly.

Ronan let out a mirthless laugh, his gaze losing some of its softness as he began pacing again. “Yes, he’s fine.”

“He wasn’t arrested?”

“No.”

“Oh, good. That’s good,” I said, relief setting in. I’d been so worried.

On one hand, I was amazed by the way he’d stepped in and tried to divert the blame away from me. On the other hand, I was irritated with how he’d stepped in and diverted the blame away from me.

I’d stolen the overpriced balls. The blame rested on my shoulders. I needed to take responsibility for my actions. So, yes, I was glad he hadn’t been arrested for my fecking everything up.

When Ronan finally stopped stomping around like an angry bull, he asked, “Start from the beginning, tell me how all this . . . business between you and Cassidy . . . Tell me how it came about.”

I shrugged, unable to maintain eye contact for very long. My attention kept flittering about the room like a manic wasp.

“I’m waiting, Lucy,” Ronan lifted his voice.

I wiped at my eyes, glancing at the carpet. “We first met at a party for the rugby team. I thought he was awful,” I told him honestly.

“Right. So how do you go from thinking he’s awful to looking at him with big googly eyes?” he asked with a wild hand gesture.

I scowled a little. “I don’t look at him with googly eyes. I look at him with normal eyes.”

Ronan gave me an arched brow and that big-brother stare that said I was stalling. I sighed and shifted in place.

“Fine. I guess it started properly when we bumped into each other in town one day. He asked me to dinner. I thought he was taking the piss. He wasn’t. I said yes. Things progressed from there.”

“So this is the dinner you told me about? Why did you say yes?”

“Fine. Okay, he kind of blackmailed me into it. He saw me take some eyeshadow, shoplift, and used it as leverage. But, honestly? I would have gone either way.”

Ronan’s eyes widened as though I’d just told him Santa Claus and Genghis Khan had been having a torrid love affair since the twelfth century.

“Oh God, Ronan, come on.” I rolled my eyes, feeling marginally better now we were engaging in normal brother and sister bickering. “Even you must see how gorgeous he is. It was going out to dinner once. At least, that’s what I thought. And then he said something rude and I threw my drink in his face and left.”

This news seemed to settle him somewhat.

“Good.” He nodded once. “That’s good. So how do you go from throwing your drink in his face to googly eyes?”

I released a giant exhale and sat heavily on the couch, studying my fingers as I answered. “It’s complicated. I knew going out with him was wrong and that it would anger you. I told him we could be friends and nothing more. He never told anyone about my shoplifting problem. And at first I thought he and I were friends, or becoming friends. I was doing him a favor, helping him out. But we just have this thing between us that’s hard to ignore. A draw.”

“You were drawn to him?”

“Yes,” I answered simply. “Didn’t you feel the same way when you first met Annie? Like even though you knew pursuing her was going to be whole lot of trouble you could do without, you couldn’t help doing it anyway?”

Now he only looked at me, his expression inscrutable. He folded his arms, and his lips pulled into a firm line as he admitted grudgingly, “I might have.”

A few moments of silence elapsed before Ronan spoke again. “The thing you have to understand here, Lucy, is that Annie and Sean are two very different people. Annie is lovely and fundamentally kind. Whereas Sean is a selfish, spoiled brat. Sure, he might toy with the idea of caring for your safety, but when it comes down to it, the thrill of a new relationship is going to fade and he’s going to realize how much hard work it is. I don’t want to see you invest in a man who’s going to flake out on you in the long run.”

“You know he never actually slept with Brona, right?”

Ronan exhaled heavily. “He said something to that effect downstairs, yes.”

“So you should also know he’s not the spoiled brat he likes to lead everybody to believe. It’s like a defense mechanism. If he pushes people away from the start, he doesn’t have to worry about being rejected later.”