that waiting room that Ryder had been inside Reese. She’d tasted sweet, and he’d had her spread wide and open on his dorm room bed. He’d held her still against his mouth, his hands cupping her ass, his tongue so deep inside that sweet, wet pussy. Then, he’d flipped her over, desperate to be inside her, and taken Reese from behind, gripping that round, firm ass, his arm around her waist as he fucked her. The phone call had interrupted them—his mother’s panicked voice, his father screaming at someone in the background.
They’d dressed and hurried to the hospital. Ryder sat with his family and Reese, waiting for news, holding her hand as the surgeons worked on his sister. He could still feel her on his dick, still smelled of her perfume. There was still the faintest scent of sweat and sex lingering on his skin. And then the doctors came, and the news that followed, and the disclosure that Reese had kept a secret, shattered his life in seconds.
Fucking liar.
You couldn’t wrap that loss behind a first dance memory. It didn’t work. In Ryder’s mind, Reese was still responsible, or at least culpable, for his sister’s death.
6.
REESE
COLLEGE WAS EUPHORIC. It had not been a time of confusion and uncertainty. For Reese, it had been about hope and challenge and the endless horizon. She’d dreamt dreams that were boundless and certain to her eighteen-year-old self. She’d dreamt them with Rhiannon as they lay laughing on a patchwork quilt, the stars glinting overhead on her parents’ rooftop deck.
“When we’re thirty,” Rhiannon had promised, “we’ll live next door to each other. You’ll be the first lady kicker in the NFL, and you’ll do that for a while, but then you’ll retire so you can get married…” She’d cleared her throat when Reese shook her head and quickly amended. “Or, you’ll just have lots of sex with whoever you want, though, God, hopefully not my gross brother, and I’ll live vicariously through your exploits, watching out of my kitchen window as I sip coffee in the morning with my kids or my husband and you kick some Greek god out of your house at six a.m.”
“Why won’t you be doing the same? With the Greek and other kinds of gods?”
“Because,” she’d said through a sigh. Reese had known the answer before Rhiannon spoke it. “I’ll be married to Luke. He’s all the Greek god I’ll ever need.”
Luke Ford had been it for Rhiannon, but he had also been the end.
In Reese’s dreams, Rhiannon was still a kid—eyes light and wide, always, like she didn’t want to miss a thing that moved around her. She had fire and spirit and so much passion for living. Reese admired her. Most times, she wanted to be Rhiannon. Every day since the last time Reese saw her, she dreamt of her. She kept a small picture of the two of them on her bedside table and one on the mantel in the front room. It was from junior year. A carnival in Raleigh, the summer Reese had finally managed to catch Ryder’s attention.
“Just because my brother follows you around like a puppy now,” Rhiannon had told Reese as they swung on the Ferris wheel, looking down on Luke and Ryder waiting for the girls, “doesn’t mean you can forget me.”
“Never,” she’d told Rhiannon. “Eres mi hermana…you’re my sister.”
The ride had ended, and Rhiannon pulled Reese away from the guys, and they’d spent fifteen minutes in a photobooth making faces at each other as the camera snapped.
You’re my sister.
When sisters made promises, they got kept. No matter who wanted the truth.
“I’m sorry. We did everything we could.”
Sweat pooled around Reese’s neck and down her back like melting wax. The dreams came frequently, but not so much that she could not distract herself from their occurring. Today, however, they wouldn’t be ignored. Neither would the memory of Rhiannon’s death.
“That’s not possible.” It had been the only thing Ryder had been able to say when the doctors explained. “She’d never. She wasn’t…” Then realization must have struck him—the reality that his kid sister hadn’t been a kid for a long time.
“Ry,” Reese had tried, and the look he’d given her, that raw, angry look changed everything. He didn’t see the woman he loved, the woman he’d just been inside of. Just then, Ryder seemed to see only the girl who’d kept the truth of his sister’s pregnancy from him.