Her Independence Day Read online

  Now we were turning a decent enough profit for the three of us to be financially secure, and Ethan was joining us in the real estate market.

  Jesse was telling us about a potential new client he may have landed. “I had another company inquire about us the other day. They’re transferring a large sum of cash across the island via truck and are concerned about theft. For good reason, I imagine. They were wondering if we could provide two guys to see it transferred securely.”

  “Can’t see why not,” I said.

  “They requested one of us personally.”

  “Of course they did,” Ethan said. “We’re badass.” He got up to grab another beer.

  “They don’t care which one of us?” I asked.

  Jesse shook his head.

  “Tell them we’ll do the job and get them the paperwork. You’ll put it in the records and update the crew on shift that day?”

  “Sure thing,” Jesse said. Then he tipped back on the rear two legs of his chair and sighed. “Either of you spoken to Ash lately, besides on the group chat?”

  Ethan shook his head. “Nope. Not in a little while, at least. Last time I talked to her on the phone, she’d just gotten engaged to Nick.”

  “The jackass,” I said.

  Both of my brothers nodded knowingly, and Ethan chuckled after swallowing a mouthful of beer. “I think she knew none of us would approve. That’s why we found out weeks after the fact.”

  I grunted, and Jesse picked at a loose thread on the hem of his jeans.

  Nick Myles had been the quarterback on the high school football team. We were in the same grade, so I’d been around him plenty to know what sort of guy he was. I doubted he’d changed much over the last twelve years since we’d graduated. It was probably safe to assume he still had anger issues and manipulated women like clockwork, Ashley included.

  When I’d first heard they were dating, I hadn’t been quiet about what I thought about him. My open and negative opinion hadn’t done my relationship with Ashley any good. She took some space from me and my brothers. It had been a brutal punishment when all I’d had were her best interests in mind. She’d stopped calling. She’d even stopped texting.

  Until I called and left an apologetic voicemail asking her to forgive me.

  She immediately did, and it was swept under the rug like it had never happened, which bothered me a little. It was clear as day that the guy wasn’t right for her. He didn’t treat her like the princess my brothers and I knew she was, and he didn’t seem to realize how lucky he was to have a woman like Ashley Rowe on his arm.

  If she was my woman, she’d know what a queen I thought she was. I’d make damn sure she knew it every minute of every day.

  But she wasn’t my woman. She was my ex-stepsister. It still felt strange and taboo, and I’d spent many hours, days, weeks, and months trying to will myself into not being attracted to her anymore. But it was fucking impossible.

  Ashley was the sort of girl you couldn’t put out of your mind just with sheer will.

  Growing up, I’d taken to her immediately. She was a fierce tomboy with a determination to beat me, Jesse, and Ethan at any sport or competition we presented to her. In most cases, she succeeded. She was quick as a whip on her feet and with her mind. Things had been innocent back then. Everything was like we were on the same level, playing the same games and the same positions and not thinking anything of it.

  And then she turned eighteen, and everything changed.

  She blossomed into a beautiful woman, and I fell for her. Hard. It was no secret that Ethan and Jesse suffered the same torture as me. She’d captured our hearts, and every girl we’d ever tried to date had paled in comparison to her.

  Nobody was Ashley Rowe. Our Ashley.

  My Ashley.

  “What are you thinking about, Dean?” Jesse asked, pulling me from my thoughts.

  “Ash,” I said simply.

  Jesse nodded. “She’s been on my mind all damn week. I got caught up thinking about those care packages she used to send us during SEAL combat training. Remember those?”

  I grinned at the memory of boxes packed with care. She’d lined them in cloth that somehow smelled like her floral perfume and filled them to the brim with homemade goodies, letters, and sometimes pictures. “Who could forget those?”

  Ethan nodded. “She kept me going with those scones of hers.”

  “The cranberry white chocolate ones?” Jesse asked.

  “Don’t fucking say it out loud. My mouth is already watering.” Ethan laughed as he patted his stomach.

  Jesse leaned forward to rest the front legs of his chair on the ground again. “I miss those. Tempting to go back in the field just to get them again. It’s been what, almost a year since we saw her last?”

  “Since she came back last summer, I think,” Ethan interjected. He polished off his beer, pried the tab off the top of the can, and dropped it inside to shake it around. “Before she was engaged.”

  Jesse stared at the table from beneath his permanently brooding dark eyebrows. “Fucking Nick Myles.”

  “Fucking Nick Myles is right,” I muttered.

  “Maybe he’s a better dude now?” Ethan suggested. “Maybe he treats her well and makes her happy. We can hope for that, right?”

  “Of course we can,” I said.

  “But we know better,” Jesse added after a few seconds of quiet. He was right. We did know better.

  3

  Jesse

  Ethan had the passenger seat of my black F-150 leaned back almost all the way by the time we were at the end of Dean’s street and taking a right to make our way back to my place. A good country rock tune filled the cab. Ethan’s foot was tapping along to the beat on my floor mat, and his fingers were drumming a pattern on his knee. He’d had enough beers to be feeling good but not enough to be singing along at the top of his lungs like he usually did at a pitch that annoyed the hell out of me. “Dean was quiet tonight,” he said after a few minutes of quiet driving.

  I nodded and cracked my window open a bit to get some fresh air. “He was. I think he’s anxious about seeing Ash. Things were a bit tense between them after he first found out about Nick, and they haven’t really seen each other much.”

  “They’ve still been in touch, though. And they seem normal on the group chat.”

  “In person is always different.”

  Ethan shrugged. “Yeah. I guess. Glad it’s not me who blew his top and told her how much of a piece of shit her fiancé was.”

  I didn’t say anything. I regretted not piping up when my brother had. Dean had a keen sense of right and wrong, and everything in his eyes was black and white. He never hesitated to call things as he saw them, and when he told Ashley she was marrying an arrogant bastard who only cared about himself, she didn’t like it. But maybe if she’d heard it from me and Ethan as well and we softened the blow a bit, she wouldn’t be preparing to walk down the aisle to be married to a man that would believe he owned her.

  “It’s gonna be rough having her back in town for a while,” Ethan said.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, come on. You know why.” Ethan chuckled.

  “Enlighten me.”

  He clasped his hands behind his head, and even though I didn’t look over at him, I knew he was looking at me. I could feel his eyes on me. I also knew he was smiling. “It’ll be rough because just standing in the same room with her has been suffocating since she turned eighteen. Don’t play dumb, Jesse. We’re all in the same fucking, pathetic, sinking boat.”

  I knew what my baby brother was saying. I just didn’t want to come out with it.

  Ethan sighed. “But I suppose our souls are destined to suffer. A punishment for something we did in our past life maybe.”

  “Please tell me you don’t believe that.”

  “No, I don’t. But it sure as hell feels like punishment. Doesn’t it?”

  I paused for a moment and then nodded. “Yes.”

  “She’s just so god damn
sexy,” Ethan groaned, running his hands down his face. “It’s criminal. Fucking dad marrying Anne. If the two of them had stayed well enough away from each other, then we wouldn’t be in this predicament. We could have her. It wouldn’t be wrong, or weird, or—what’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Taboo.”

  “Yeah. Taboo. It’s bullshit. I mean, we’re not related. She’s not our sister. She hasn’t felt like our sister since she was, like, seventeen years old. She feels like a friend. A really hot, friend who when you see her for the first time in a while makes you feel like you’re setting foot in the sunlight for the first time in ages.”

  “My brother, the poet.”

  “Shut up, Jesse.”

  I shot him a crooked grin. “You’re not alone. “

  “I know. It eats at Dean, too. You can see it all over him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you, too?”

  Oh God yes. Ashley Rowe had been a thorn in my side for ages. But she was the best kind of thorn, and if I couldn’t have her, I’d live my entire life suffering at her hand. Not because she was trying to be cruel but because she had no idea what she did to me.

  Her body, her smile, and those damn hazel eyes of hers were kryptonite to me. Standing too close to her would give me the biggest hard-on, and sometimes, I would have to flee in order to spare her the embarrassment of having a stepbrother who couldn’t control his sex drive around her.

  But now we weren’t stepsiblings. We were just us.

  I parked the truck, and Ethan and I got out. We crossed the lobby and rode the elevator up to the top floor where I let us into my condo.

  It wasn’t a big place by any means, but it did the trick for what I needed. It had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and an open-concept living, dining, and kitchen area. The colors were dark and moody, which I liked because it matched my insides, and the windows opened up onto a view of a golf course, which was pleasant and quiet.

  I’d missed the quiet while being in the field.

  I shrugged out of my jacket as Ethan shuffled through the kitchen to collapse face first on my sofa. He groaned loudly, his feet dangling off the edge, and I rolled my eyes. “Just go to bed.”

  “Too far.”

  Ethan was twenty-seven and only two years younger than me, but sometimes, it felt like there were decades between us.

  I slapped him on the back of the head as I cut through the living room to go to my bedroom. He groaned and cursed at me, but his words were muffled in the sofa cushions. Then he popped his head up. “Are you going to bed already?”

  “I was planning on it, yes.”

  “Dude. It’s fucking early. Let’s crack another cold one.”

  I paused in the doorway to my bedroom. I had two options. Option one was to lay in bed staring at my spackled ceiling, thinking naughty things about Ashley until I eventually passed out and dreamed the same things. Or I could postpone the torture, have a drink or two with my brother, and therefore fall asleep faster when I eventually did make it to my bed. It was an easy decision.

  I went back to the kitchen and yanked the fridge door open. I grabbed us each a bottle of beer and popped the tab off, and then we both went out to the small balcony off the living room, put our feet up on the railing, and stared out across the now very dark golf course.

  “Do you think it would still be weird?” Ethan asked after a few minutes.

  I didn’t need to ask what he was referring to. I knew he was asking about Ashley. “I don’t know, to be honest. I think it depends on her.”

  “Okay, let me rephrase. Do you think she would think it’s weird?”

  “That we’re into her?”

  “Yeah,” Ethan said.

  “Ash is a smart girl. She probably already knows. And…” I trailed off, choosing not to say what I was thinking. Ethan didn’t catch it, and I held on to the thought that I suspected Ashley had a thing for us, too. Our relationship with her had always been flirty. Even our group chat could get a little steamy. God forbid anyone saw the things we messaged her.

  “I wonder if things would be different now that Dad and Anne aren’t together anymore. I wonder if she’d still have chosen Nick.”

  I looked over at my brother. I’d been wondering the same thing since Anne left my father when she found out he was cheating on her. I was still pissed at him for ruining things. I was pissed at him for a lot, but that was the most recent on the list. “If she wasn’t with Nick when they split up, you mean?”

  Ethan nodded.

  “So, in other words, you’re asking if I think she’d be with one of us instead?”

  Ethan shook his head. “No, I’m asking if you think she’d be with me. I’m the best looking, after all.”

  “And the only one crashing at someone else’s place.”

  “Hey, low blow,” Ethan said, but he was laughing. “I just think I’m the most practical choice for her. You know, we’re closer in age, and—and—”

  “That’s all you’ve got on Dean and me, man. Age. As for your looks, aside from some slight height differences and the gray at Dean’s temples, we look like fucking triplets. Besides, this is all theoretical bullshit. There’s no sense wasting your time thinking about it. She’s marrying Nick. Ash is a big girl, and if that’s who she’s choosing, we need to respect that.”

  “Course we do. But I don’t have to agree with it. And I can fantasize about things being different. About having her to myself.”

  I laughed. “You wouldn’t have her to yourself.”

  “What are you implying?”

  I smirked and finished my beer. “You’re not the only one who wants her.”

  “You and Dean aren’t competition,” Ethan said slyly.

  I laughed again. If it came down to it and only one of us could have her, it would be Dean. There was no doubt in my mind. He was the best of us and the only one who in my mind deserved her. There was no other man on St. Simmons with integrity to match my older brother’s. He was good to his core. Ethan and I were good guys, but even we couldn’t match up with Dean in that category. We all shared the same dark hair and dark eyes and had roughly the same width across the shoulders and hips, but that’s where the similarities ended.

  “If this is all just theoretical,” I said slowly.

  “Yes?” Ethan encouraged.

  “Maybe she’d want more than just one of us.”

  Ethan blinked. “We’ve shared before.”

  I nodded. It was true. We had, and we weren’t jealous people. And Ashley was, well, Ashley. Our priority would always be to give her whatever she wanted or needed to be happy. And if she wanted all of us, then by all that is good on this earth, she could have all of us.

  4

  Ashley

  Lulu was out for her morning jog when I went out to the Beetle and got in. I put the roof down, cranked the stereo, and basked in the sun in the driveway for a couple minutes. It felt good to let the sun kiss my shoulders and feel it warm my skin, chasing the fatigue of the morning away. I’d always been more of a night person than a morning person, but there was something about the sun around eight o’clock that was incredibly satisfying. It was peaceful. Serene.

  I sat in her car for a few more minutes, just listening to music and sunbathing. Then I reversed out of the driveway and set off toward my mother’s new house. My phone spoke the directions at me through the blue tooth. I hadn’t been to my mother’s new place, and I was shocked to find it on the beach, right up against the ocean like a beach house in a teenage drama show or a rom-com set in the Hampton’s.

  I turned the car off and stared at the sprawling ranch with my mouth hanging open. “Holy shit,” I breathed after a couple minutes. “Holy. Fucking. Shit.”

  The house was stunning. It was beautifully landscaped, and the bright blue siding matched the ocean in the backdrop. The white sand brought out the colors of all the flowers in the gardens. I got out of the car and walked up the drive to the massive glass front door. I knocked and gath
ered my jaw from the welcome mat.

  The door was answered by a young woman with dark hair and friendly eyes. She gave me a tight-lipped smile but didn’t say anything.

  I stood there like an idiot for a second before saying, “Uh, hi. I’m here to see my mom?”

  The woman nodded and invited me in with a wave of her hand. Then she bustled off across the foyer, which was grand and beautiful, and when I looked up, I discovered it would be lit at night by an extravagant crystal chandelier. The young woman gestured for me to follow her through a living room that was decorated like an interior design spread. Then we went out through a set of French patio doors, and I found myself standing on a wooden wraparound deck above the sand and overlooking the beach.

  My mother was sitting in a lounger with her book and a mimosa. She wore a wide-brimmed sunhat and sunglasses with jewels along the arms. Her blonde hair was blonder than I remembered. She was wearing a black pantsuit, and her toes and fingernails were painted bright pink.

  I walked over and cleared my throat.

  She looked up sharply, slapped her book closed, and pulled her sunglasses down her nose to look at me over the brim. “Oh my goodness, Ashley!” She sprang to her feet and threw her arms around my shoulders.

  She looked different than the last time I’d seen her. I was pretty sure her lips had been plumped, and her forehead had been botoxed. There were fewer wrinkles around her eyes, more length to her eyelashes, and a healthy glow to her cheeks.

  She smelled the same, though. Like sunscreen and cucumbers and mint. Like Mom.

  I hugged her tightly, and we twisted back and forth like how we always used to. She pushed me away to get a good look at me and cupped my cheeks in her hands. “You get more and more beautiful every time I see you, baby girl.”

  “Thanks, Mom. So do you. You look great. And this house! What the hell?”

  “Don’t curse, sweetheart,” my mother said, draping an arm over my shoulder and turning to look up at the back of the house. “I did pretty well for myself in the divorce. Ian never should have slept with that little—” She shut her mouth and looked over at me. “I don’t have time for that kind of negativity anymore. What’s past is passed. Would you like a mimosa?”