“That is not fair,” he snapped, rising to his feet. “Everything had changed.”
“Not for you! You’d barely been home in years—”
“I lost my brother!” he cut her off. “I lost my best friend! You think you’re the only one who has grief to manage? You’re not alone in this, Erin. You’re not the only one who misses him.”
He could see her jaw working, teeth grinding beneath the skin. He couldn’t tell if she was searching for words or simply trying to contain her emotions.
“But don’t you see?” she murmured, her voice raspy. “You’d left years ago, you had all this time and distance already. How can you possibly know what it felt like to lose him, without a choice?”
Burke’s tone turned cool, the words low but hard. “But I do know. You forget that I lost both my parents without a choice. And then my brother, too. Without a choice.”
Erin’s jaw clenched tight, and he could tell she was holding back the things she wanted to say. He knew the expression well. It had haunted him for a long time. It was the same countenance she’d worn over the years, during the handful of times he’d come back to town. It was part of the reason he visited so little—it was a look he hated because it only emphasized the distance that had grown between them when they had once been so close.
When she finally spoke, she said nothing more about Gavin but rather warned, “Just don’t get so close to Kitt that you break his heart when you leave.”
With that, she turned on her heel and headed back inside, leaving him to wonder just whose heart she was really worried about him breaking.
THE FIGHT WITH Burke stayed with Erin for days. She spent Sunday night tossing and turning, following their heated exchange, and after running a few errands the next morning, she spent the entire drive back to the B&B voicing her frustration to her car’s empty interior. She cleaned the inn’s bedrooms with unnecessary force, carefully checking the hall before moving on to another room so she didn’t run into Burke as he emerged from the Galway Room.
When she was finally forced to face him as they all sat down to dinner on Monday evening, she kept her tone polite but cool and didn’t engage him in conversation. Aunt Lenora carried the dinnertime dialogue anyway, chattering more than she had in months, about the weather, the influx of summer tourists, local news and the repairs Burke had undertaken on the inn. She praised her great-nephew for the work he’d done, and while Erin knew she should have added her appreciation, she couldn’t bring herself to speak up. She was too busy fuming.
It bothered her that she was still so angry, especially by Wednesday when she didn’t understand why she couldn’t let go of her frustration with her brother-in-law. Why did she care what Burke thought? True, they had once been friends...more perhaps...but those days were long past, and she had convinced herself years ago that none of it had mattered.
Then why did Burke’s presence unnerve her so? And why was she reliving their argument, at least a dozen times a day?
The Moontide had guests arriving on Thursday, and Erin was putting final touches on the upstairs bedrooms when she ran into Burke in the hall.
He’d been working tirelessly all week, doing minor repairs and updates to the house. The Moontide had been around for a long time, and while it had undergone extensive renovations over the years, it had been too long since some necessary upkeep had been done. Erin was impressed with how much Burke had accomplished over the last five days since he’d come to stay. She suspected he was keeping busy to take his mind off his failed wedding, but a small part of her wondered if he was working to avoid her as much as she was trying to avoid him.
When they stumbled across each other in the hall—quite literally, since Erin tripped over the edge of a loose piece of carpet—she fell right into his arms, as he tried to keep her from falling.
“Hey, sorry, I was just getting ready to fix that carpet.”
She was too aware of his arms around her, one hand on her back, the heat of his palm seeping through her shirt and into her skin. She pulled away and righted herself.
“It’s fine.”
She turned to go, and she might have pretended not to hear him calling her name, if his voice hadn’t taken on such a pleading tone.
“Erin.”
She paused, willing herself to keep moving forward. She didn’t want to hear what he had to say. And yet...she did.
“Can we talk?”
She should have told him no. She should have said they had nothing to talk about. He would move on soon enough—there was no point in putting her faith in Burke. He’d already proven it was a lost cause.
But no matter the reasons, she couldn’t convince herself to walk away from him. She turned.
“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
Her agreement must have surprised him because he looked unexpectedly flustered. A small smile stole its way onto her mouth. It was gratifying to put Burke off his guard. Her tiny grin must have soothed his uneasiness because his shoulders relaxed.
“I thought we could talk about what happened on Sunday night.”
“All right,” she agreed. “So talk.”
He drew a deep breath, some of the tension stealing back into his shoulders.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” he said, “for the funeral. And I’m sorry for how long it took me to come back, after Gavin died. It was self-serving and wrong and...” He sighed. “I just couldn’t deal. I couldn’t come back here. As long as I stayed away, nothing had changed. Gavin was still alive. I knew that the minute I set foot in Findlay Roads, I’d know he was really gone. I’d sense it. And then, I’d have to learn to accept it.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “It took you six months. Six months. I needed you here.”
Saying those words triggered some sort of release. Months of pent-up emotion suddenly found their way to the surface, and she began to weep.
“I was alone, Burke. You were the only one—” her breath hitched on a sob “—who could have understood what losing him did to me.”
He didn’t say anything, and she feared she’d pushed him too far. But she couldn’t see through the blur of her own tears. She wouldn’t blame him if he thought her selfish. It had been nearly two years since Gavin’s death, while it had been less than a week since Tessa had left him at the altar. Not the same in terms of grief, but she knew he still had to be smarting from the rejection.
Before she could open her mouth to apologize, she found herself back in his arms. He wrapped them so tightly around her that for a minute, she lost her concentration and couldn’t remember what had set her crying in the first place.
Within seconds, it came back to her and the stability of Burke’s embrace released another flood of tears. This was what she had needed, two years ago. Someone to
