Nate sat forward, rubbed his hands over his face. “No one I guess. I’ll go alone.”
“Don’t say it too loud. The Mackenzie women will hear.”
“Tough luck. I’m done.”
“No more breaking hearts and taking names? Love her, don’t you?”
Beyond feigning ignorance as to whom Gabe was referring, Nate moved his gaze to a spot in the middle distance. “I like her. I like being with her. I think about her when I’m not with her. She’s bossy, and I like that. But...” The fight seeped out of him as the truth seeped in. “Not that I have anything to compare it to.”
“Comparison’s not the point, mate. You don’t love her or you do.”
The sun must have dropped below the horizon because the sensor lights in his office flickered on, casting a cool glow over the room. “Not that it makes any difference. As much as we drive each other crazy...we’d drive each other crazy.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
It was messy, challenging, a fight he couldn’t always win. It was full-on, distracting, time-consuming. It was emotional, painful, exhilarating. It was anything but bad. It was the most fun he’d had his entire adult life.
“Welcome to the club, mate; your pass and monogrammed towel are in the mail,” said Gabe.
“Too bad I spent my last hour with her carefully convincing her there was nothing between us then.”
“Ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”
“So why do I get the feeling I’ve turned up at the opera house a day late and a dollar short?”
Gabe gave Nate a pat on the back and curled him into a bear hug that thumped the breath from his lungs. Then, clearing his throat, pressed to his feet with a speed that belied his size. “You’re coming Saturday.” It wasn’t a question.
“I think the best gift I could give Mae and Clint would be my not coming.”
With a final slap on the cheek, like an old Italian mamma, Gabe left Nate to his misery. To the knowledge that he loved a woman who didn’t love him. Or, by the dawning realisation in her eyes, didn’t love him enough.
He sank his head into his hands and rubbed at his temples. Damn her big brown eyes. She’d turned him soft and then sent him off into the world a great big marshmallow.
Only it didn’t make him feel soft. He felt strong with it. As if he’d been running on quicksand his whole life and now the ground beneath his feet had solidified, letting him slow down, see the world as it happened not as a blur as he chased the future.
Saskia. Sweet, interfering, dogmatic, stubborn, gorgeous Saskia. Who’d lived her life on quicksand too. He wondered if she knew it. If she felt it. If that was what she’d seen in him. A like soul. Her match. His complement.
Yet still she’d walked away.
And he’d let her go.
* * *
It was the night before the wedding and, as Nate tended to do, he leant in the doorway while the women in his life took over his mum’s lounge room—Jasmine with her eyes flicking to her twin boys, playing with his old train set, making sure they weren’t hatching plots for world domination, Hope reading an eBook with her legs hanging over the leg of the couch, Faith flicking channels on the TV so fast it made Nate’s head spin.
When his temple began to throb he did something about it, grabbing the remote out of Faith’s hand and switching off the damn TV.
Faith’s “Hey!” got everyone’s attention.
Good. He had something to say.
They wouldn’t like it. In fact they might all turn on him. But he couldn’t not say it. He’d not said quite enough things the past few days, and it was eating him from the inside out.
“I have a confession.” With that four sets of sharp feminine Mackenzie eyes swung his way.
Jasmine spoke first and, grinning, said, “Do tell, oh, brother mine.”
“It’s about Saskia.”
“I knew it!” Faith said, her squeal near breaking the sound barrier.
Hope, meanwhile, gave him a small smile, a tilt of her head, encouraging him to go on.
“Saskia and I were never actually dating.” No, not exactly true. And this was a time for truth. The idea of anything else made him feel more exhausted than a man with his youth, stamina and ripping good health had a right to feel. “Not in the way we made you believe we were.”
“I don’t understand,” his mother said as she came to sit on the arm of the chair nearest him, her forehead creased with concern, her heart in her eyes.
The threat of emotion swarmed over him, but rather than pressing it back, pretending it didn’t exist, he merely held it at bay, letting it lift and subside like a lunar tide.