Sadie turned her chin from his hand and muttered a soft “Thanks.” Aiden wasn’t sure if she was completely convinced, but he didn’t mind hanging around to convince her if she’d let him.

“Wine?” she offered.

Hell yes. “Sure,” he said, going for casual.

She pulled a second glass from the cabinet and filled it and handed it to him. Aiden took a sip from his glass as she emptied hers. She frowned at the cork sediment in the bottom like she was reading tea leaves.

“Trey said I wanted the wedding more than I wanted him,” she said. “That I basically neglected him into my sister’s arms.”

Aiden was going to interrupt, but she inhaled to continue and he took it as a hint this was a monologue.

“I mean, I was busy planning the wedding. Our wedding.” She refilled her glass, splashing wine over the rim and onto the counter. Aiden took the bottle from her and finished the pour before topping off his own. The more for him, the less for her, he figured. And she’d had just about enough.

Sadie lifted her glass and studied the pale yellow liquid. “A wedding has a lot of moving parts. You men don’t know this because all you do is show up. In a tuxedo you rent.”

Aiden was married in jeans. In a courthouse. It had been about as romantic as a trip to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. He thought better of correcting her and kept his lips firmly pressed together.

“I wanted to do it right, you know?” she continued. “I wanted to show Trey I would be a good wife. The best wife. And maybe I did get wound around the details, but is that bad, really? Isn’t focus a good thing? Shouldn’t he have been grateful he only had to sign the checks?”

She took another mouthful of wine, pointing a finger at Aiden as she swallowed. “Which, by the way, he says was not the issue. No, no. The issue was that I ignored him. And when I stopped showing up to my family’s house for Sunday dinner, he and Celeste started making out on the patio. Right under Mother’s nose! He actually thanked me for ignoring him so that he could find his beloved Celeste,” she said with a sneer.

It was hard not to laugh. He liked her Trey impression, the way she made him sound like a moron, which, obviously, he was. “I take it you had the displeasure of running into Trey recently?” Aiden asked.

“This morning,” she said, looking for a chair. Aiden lifted off the one he sat on, slid it to her, and retrieved another for himself.

“So Trey…what? Called and unloaded a guilt trip onto your shoulders?”

Sadie snorted. “I wish. Today is my sister’s birthday, and since Celeste always gets what she wants, we had a big, last-minute to-do at the country club.”

Aiden couldn’t imagine how hard it must be for Sadie to be around her fiancé and her sister and play nice. It wasn’t fun to be left for someone else—he knew—and if it had been his brother who Harmony had left him for, Aiden thought he’d probably have fled the country by now.

“I left, but not before Trey followed me out to tell me I was being a bad sister.” The pain in her eyes suggested she agreed. “I keep replaying what he said…” She paused, unshed tears shimmering in her eyes. She was strong, a real suffer-in-silence type. But her control was flagging. She swallowed hard, blinking at the ceiling. When she met Aiden’s eyes, hers were clear. “I think he was right.”

He put a hand on her arm in a show of support. He had so much to say, so many arguments to offer, he didn’t know where to start. He’d never met Celeste but couldn’t imagine Sadie’s younger sister being more remarkable than the woman before him. Sadie was vibrant and challenging and sexy as hell. And if Trey couldn’t see that then his head must have taken up permanent residence in his ass.

“I didn’t congratulate her, you know.” Sadie ran her fingertip along the edge of her glass. “I didn’t hop out of my chair or throw my arms around her. I just sat there and felt sorry for myself.” The tears were back, and finally a few spilled over when she confessed, “I didn’t even see the ultrasound.”

Whoa.

No wonder. Aiden imagined the scene unfolding. A table full of flowers and gifts, family members surrounding the guest of honor, and Celeste announcing she was pregnant. With Sadie’s ex-fiancé’s baby.

“Sadie,” was all he said. Her mouth pulled at the sides as she choked back what he guessed was going to be a sob. Aiden lifted her chin. “Sadie,” he repeated.

She blinked at him, stunned to have shown her real and raw emotions, and swiped her hands over her eyes to erase the evidence. She hopped off her chair so fast, Aiden had to catch it to keep it from falling over. He could almost hear her regrouping, the iron gates sliding down, the moat encircling her, the snapping alligators sliding into its depths…Sadie could shut down her feelings faster than he could say Batten down the hatches.

No one in her family cared to dig any deeper than the false surface she projected. It was easier for her mother and Celeste and Trey to write Sadie off as shallow and selfish and continue living their lives. They were the selfish ones, not Sadie.

Telling her that wouldn’t crack her defenses and Aiden was running out of time. The first night he met her he’d accidentally lured her out from behind her stone walls. All it had taken was a confession of his own.

He happened to have a doozy.

“I feel like I could have done more to save my mom’s life.” Wow. Saying that out loud hurt more than he’d thought. It worked, though. Sadie stopped fidgeting with the belt on her dress and watched him instead. “When my brothers and sister found out I’d moved her to Oregon,” he continued, “they were pissed.”

Sadie gripped the back of her empty chair.

“Mom was convinced the center we moved her into would save her life. Angel, Landon, and Evan tried to convince me to get her back into chemo.” He shook his head, remembering arguing with them in private, or via text, fighting with them as hard as he fought to keep their arguing a secret from Mom. “Mom didn’t want to have chemo. I refused to hound her about it. I figured she was where she wanted to be, and she seemed a little stronger, definitely more hopeful. “And seeing the hope in her eyes…” He blinked back tears of his own. “I just…I couldn’t take it away from her, you know?”

Sadie rested a hand on Aiden’s shoulder, her attention completely on him. Selfish, my ass. If she could see her face, she’d never for a second see herself as anything less than the radiant, supportive woman comforting him right now.

“When it was obvious she wasn’t going to recover…” He swallowed, felt like a bowling ball was lodged in his esophagus. “I brought her home.” And then his mother, his beautiful, strong, amazing mother, lost her fight.

“She lived ten more days,” Aiden said, feeling the pain of losing her spread across his chest like wildfire. “Landon, Angel, and Evan had barely had time to come home and visit before she passed.” They still held it against him.

“I should have made her get chemo,” Aiden said. He’d thought it a thousand times—a million times—since the funeral, but this was the first time he admitted it aloud. And hearing it now…God. He could hear the truth in his words.

He’d been thinking lately how he hadn’t really fought for her. Sure, he’d sat in waiting rooms for acupuncturists, nutritionists, and even a hypnotist. He’d scheduled her appointments, pushed her thinning body around in a wheelchair; he’d filled out her paperwork and written checks and reported back to Dad. But he hadn’t fought. Not for her.

“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he told Sadie. “But all I did was sit around…and wait for her die.”

He was suddenly seeing things so clearly from his siblings’ points of view. Whoever came up with the saying “the truth hurts” deserved an award for that golden nugget of accuracy. The truth did hurt, and right now it was slashing at his insides like Freddy Krueger.

Sadie put a palm over his forearm, and when Aiden tilted his chin down, a tear splashed onto the top of her hand.

*  *  *

Vulnerability was not Sadie’s forte. If asked, anyone she knew would say she was as stoic as a Viking ship in gale force winds in the middle of a raging sea storm. And yet, Aiden had been here no more than ten minutes and she’d opened her case of secrets and laid them out like prized jewels.

Here you go, have a look at all my shit.

Like the last time she and Aiden had entered the bubble of safety that was her apartment, Sadie shared her unfiltered, uncensored feelings. And yes, she may have been lubricated with a glass of California white, but the moment he’d touched her face and complimented the hell out of her, she’d remembered that Aiden was a strong wall on which to lay her burdens.

When she’d first met Aiden, hot-handed, dead-sexy-smile, two-hundred-pounds-of-delicious-golden-muscle Aiden, he’d been to hell and back. Now he’d been to hell and back, and returned for one more round trip with frequent flyer miles. And he was still clawing his way out of the depths. Not that he’d burden anyone with the crap he hauled around with him. No, he was too busy making everyone else feel better about themselves.

But Sadie didn’t have a problem coming to his rescue the way he’d come to hers. She kept her palm firmly on his arm and watched the single drop of salt water trickle off her hand.

“Aiden.” Despite the silent promise she’d made herself not to cry again, her emotions teetered on a needle-thin point. “You did exactly what your mother wanted. In spite of what everyone else said. You were the strong one. You did the right thing.”