the musical.”
“You were the ones who said we should keep Regan here, not me.”
“Because you were supposed to be finding out what she knows,” Nate reminded him. If his brother was going for the guilt angle, it was working. Gabe had stuck himself between a woman and his family. What the hell kind of mess had he gotten into?
“Maybe I should step in,” Marc said. “She’s working at the hotel. I could use the boss-employee angle. We already know she has a thing for her bosses.”
Gabe glared at Marc out of the corner of his eye. It was a silent warning to shut his pie hole, but instead Marc kicked the footrest of the recliner down and leaned forward, his face going hard. “Maybe I’m a little young for her, though, seeing as she tends to have a thing for older guys.”
Gabe jumped to his feet, his fists curled as he towered over Marc. “Maybe you should shut the hell up.”
Marc stood, moving until they were chest to chest, shoving his kid-brother bullshit all up in Gabe’s face. Marc was five years younger, but he outweighed Gabe by a good twenty pounds and at least two inches. Had ever since he’d turned sixteen.
As a kid, Marc had been a handful. His act-first, think-about-it-later personality intensified after their parents died, landing him in trouble with school and with girls. By the time Marc had graduated and gone off to college, Gabe felt like a middle-aged father. By the time Trey had left the nest, Gabe was done being a parent.
Which was why when Marc said, “Maybe you should start thinking about Abby instead of thinking with your dick,” Gabe lost it.
He was done. Done being a parent. Done sacrificing everything on the chance that it could make his siblings’ lives run a little smoother.
“Maybe Abby needs to grow the fuck up and get over it. And maybe, just maybe, Regan was as much of a victim as our sister.” He grabbed the remote out of Marc’s hand, punched the off button, and threw it across the room. It hit the wall and shattered. “You know what? I’m tired of wasting my time trying to fix this mess.”
At that, all three of his brothers exchanged a look. Gabe didn’t need to be a genius to figure out its meaning. They thought he was in over his head. And they were right.
“You slept with her,” Marc accused.
“No. I did not.”
“But you want to.”
“What I want is to let this woman go on with her life. And for you guys to stay the hell out of my business.”
Already grabbing his keys, Gabe headed for the door. If this was what it felt like to have a sibling meddle in his life, he was cured. ChiChi was right—it was like being smothered.
“My house better be clean and you guys gone when I get home.”
By the time Gabe made it to Regan’s apartment his temper had cooled some, but his guilt had kicked up a few dozen notches. The last time he and his siblings had had a blowout like that was the Christmas when Richard proposed to Abby. Gabe had been the only one not adamantly opposed to the union, and for three weeks leading up to the wedding, not one of his brothers had spoken to him.
“And look how that turned out, genius.”
He’d assumed that it was his brothers being overprotective as usual, but maybe they had sensed what he’d been too blind to see. That Richard had had an agenda from the start.
He flipped his seat forward and leaned into the back of the truck’s cab, pulling out several bags of ornaments and a box of tinfoil.
If he were smart, he would have gone to his office, cooled down while riffling through the piles of paperwork and endless e-mails that he’d been too busy following Regan to deal with, then called his brothers to apologize. But for the first time in a while, he didn’t want to do the smart thing and he didn’t want to babysit his siblings. He wanted to spend a nice evening making tissue-paper snowflakes and decorating a Christmas tree.
With his brother-in-law’s former mistress.
Crap!
Shoving the bag back in the car and telling himself that this was as stupid an idea as kissing Regan had been, Gabe got behind the wheel. He shouldn’t be here. And if she had wanted him there she wouldn’t have cut and run.
Turning the key in the ignition, he flicked on his headlights and everything