another slurp of her drink. “Vodka, lime, and soda. And no, you can’t have any.”
“I don’t want any.” He’d like to say all thoughts of alcohol had fled from his mind the moment she had sat down, but they hadn’t. But they had at least been pushed into the background. Hard for them not to be, when he needed all his focus to try and keep up with the firecracker across from him.
“You didn’t get his girlfriend pregnant. You got his ex-girlfriend pregnant. Very different. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not exactly brother-of-the-year material. But there’s worse behavior living in the White House. Possibly in Downing Street too. Though you lot go through Prime Ministers so quickly, I can’t keep up.”
Victor blinked, trying to work out how in the space of a breath they had gone from his philandering to politics.
Lacey seemed to see that he was struggling to join the dots. “My point is that Peter overreacted.” She knocked back the last of her drink and thumped the empty glass onto the table.
“Yes, but that’s just one thing on a long list of things that I’ve done to him. You know this.”
Lacey was, after all, Emelia’s cousin. Which meant she was well versed in the many many ways over the years Victor had stuck the knife into Peter. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes just through circumstance.
Lacey held up her finger. “Just a sec.” She flagged down a passing waitress and ordered a Diet Coke.
“Right.” Her pointer finger remained in the air. “Shall we cover the highlights? You gave Anita drugs the night she died, then lied about being there.” Another finger. “You took up rowing after Peter got injured just to spite him.” Next finger. “You tried to break him and Emelia up.” Another. “He was the person you called to get you out of every scrape you landed in and helped cover it up with your parents.” Thumb. “You have a daughter with his ex-girlfriend. Does that cover the major events?”
Yes and no. “I was a horrible brother. I was a bully, and I made his life miserable for years.”
“Why?” A bowl of chips landed on the table between them. “Want some?” Lacey pushed the basket toward him. “You have to have some. I haven’t eaten fries in years, and I need to be able to tell myself in the morning that I didn’t eat them all.”
Victor was getting whiplash from this conversation, but he obediently took some of the hot potato batons.
“Why were you so awful to him?”
Victor shrugged. He hadn’t known for most of his life what drove the instinctive need to get back at his brother. No one had ever tried to find out. His parents had put it down to a personality clash. Him, the loud attention-demanding son. Peter, the introverted quiet achiever. “It doesn’t matter.”
It had taken him months in rehab to unpack it. Even longer to accept that there was something more complicated behind the enmity between them than the narrative he had been told all his life.
Lacey bunched her hair behind her head, then let it go. It was wavier than it had been at the wedding. More like it had been when they left Minnesota. He liked it. “I’m not going to tell Emelia, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
The thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. “It’s not that. I mean, I haven’t talked about it with Peter.” And never would. Not after tonight. “It’s not a secret. It just feels so …” He racked his brains for the right word. “Small.” Especially considering the havoc it had wrecked across both their lives.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” He watched as Lacey’s eyes darted to the basket of hot chips, and her fingers tightened around her glass. “Or you could just give me the CliffsNotes version.”
“The what?”
“The summary version. You know. Like mine is that I never rely on anyone because I grew up in poverty. My parents not being able to provide taught me I can never depend on anyone.”
He knew that had cost her more than she would ever admit by the way she grabbed a handful of chips out of the basket and basically inhaled them.
He was no-turning-back in love with her. The knowledge slammed into him like a comet. He was in love with her, and he could never tell her. He couldn’t quit his job, because for all he knew, he was about to get hit with a claim for three years