Bittersweet (Redemption #3) - Jessica Prince Page 0,21
death by Satan himself in here.”
Rolling my eyes, I grabbed the little remote off the kitchen counter and hit the button to kill the music. “Did I just imagine that whole conversation where I handed you that key and was all, ‘hey big bro, this is just for emergencies, so please don’t use it to barge in whenever the hell you feel like it’? Because I could’ve sworn that really happened.”
“I heard what I thought were the sounds of you being brutally murdered. That constitutes an emergency, right? How was I supposed to know you were such a godawful singer?”
I curled my lips between my teeth, biting down to keep the words I’d been swallowing for the past few months from spewing out, mainly that he would have known had he been in my life long enough to find out anything about me. Instead, he’d bailed out when I was only eight years old.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved my brother with all my heart, but as much as I loved having him in my life on a regular basis now, his return had brought up old resentments I hadn’t realized were lingering beneath the surface.
When Jensen had shown up out of the blue a few months back, rocking my world to its foundation, Cannon had called Stone. My brother packed his shit, hopped on his bike, and made the trek from San Francisco to Redemption to have my back, and I loved him dearly for it, but with having my back came an overwhelming protective streak that tended to grate on my nerves. Gavin “Stone” Hendrix took overprotective to extremes, causing us to lock horns more often than not because he felt it was his right to have a say in how I lived my life. I disagreed. After so many years of only having him through phone calls and emails, I felt he’d lost all right to boss me around.
Now, every time he made a comment like that, I was reminded of just how little he knew me and how much hurt I was still harboring since he left. But hashing up all those feelings wouldn’t do any good. As it was, my brother was only visiting. I had no idea when he’d leave to go back to San Francisco so I didn’t want to risk tarnishing any of the time we had left together.
“Not that I don’t love your company, but are you here for a reason? You know, besides to be a general pain in my ass?”
“Can’t a brother just want to spend some time with his little sis every once and a while, squirt?” he asked, using the nickname he knew I hated.
“Ugh!” I groaned, dropping my head back dramatically. “For the love of God, please stop calling me that!”
He crossed his long, thick, ink-covered arms over his barrel chest. “Not my fault you’re so damn tiny.”
“I’m not tiny,” I countered on a scowl. “Five seven is above average for a woman in this country. You’re just freakishly big.”
That wasn’t an exaggeration. Growing up, Stone had always been the biggest kid in school by a lot, and he’d only gotten bigger over the years. Standing six and a half feet tall, his long body packed solid with muscle everywhere, he was a powerhouse of a man. Uncle Scooter was nothing to sneeze at, but as the years passed, it became obvious that my big brother must have favored the man who helped make him—not that any of us knew who that man was.
“Says you, squirt.”
“Says science, Gavin,” I drew out exaggeratedly.
His smile instantly fell into a harsh frown at my use of his legal name. No one had called him Gavin in years. It wasn’t necessarily that he hated the name. After all, I’d made it my son’s middle name in homage to him, but it was the name our mom had christened him with, and he didn’t want any reminder of that woman, not that I blamed him.
The nickname had come into existence not only because of his size, but also because of his tendency to glower at everything and everyone who so much as looked in his direction. Gavin Hendrix was hard as stone, at least to those people on the outside. The few of us he let in knew the truth. He was just a big teddy bear.
“Fine,” he grunted, that scowl of his in full effect, even though it never worked on me. “Truce?”