Tear them apart.
“Our new PA?” Gus parrots, his eyes casting over to Jasper’s as they frequently seem to do when they need to have an unspoken twin conversation that no one else will understand.
“Yeah,” I soldier on. “She’s young. Just turned twenty, but she’s smart. Was in college before life turned shitty for her and she had to leave. Anyway, she’s been working two jobs to make ends meet and with her broken arm…” I shrug. What am I doing?
The right thing.
“Anyway, she needs a job, is hardworking, and we need a PA. Especially with us taking on those tour dates. It just seems to work.”
That’s when three sets of us fly up past my right shoulder toward the window overlooking the driveway. This one is not as tinted as the ones facing the front, and I don’t have to look to know Maia’s standing there. Their expressions say it all.
Henry gasps. Jasper takes a step back. Gus curses.
“She looks like…”
“But she’s not,” I tell Henry, who stares in stunned amazement. “She’s different. The hair is the same color and her face shape and nose too. But everything else is different. She’s tall for one. Curvy, not petite. Her eyes are dark brown, not blue. Her hair is straight, not curly—”
“And for someone you just met last night, you’re already cataloging pretty hard all the differences between her and Amy,” Jasper cuts me off with a well-placed narrowed glare. “Keith. What the fuck are you doing?”
“She’s not her,” I spit out defensively. “That’s not why I did any of this.”
Well, not entirely. Helping her the way I did in the hospital might have started that way. And a lot of my chronic guilt might have spurred me on after that. But by that point it was about her, not how she looks.
He stares me down with troubled eyes. “You can’t bring her back. You can’t save her. This girl. Are you sure about this girl? I mean, for the right reasons?”
“She’s not her,” I repeat emphatically because I’m not sure about anything except that.
I want to say that I am. I want to say that I’m positive. That all this rush of blood and adrenaline and desperation are from Maia and nothing else.
And I have to wonder if her hair was brown instead of blonde and her nose was a different shape, would I even consider anything else? All I know is that it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. She would still be here, and I would still be helping her.
“This girl pushes my every freaking button. She’s feisty and angry and doesn’t take my shit. I mean it, I think she’d be a great PA for us,” I finish with, refocusing the conversation on where it belongs.
“Does she know she looks like…”
“Amy,” I supply for Gus, saying her name out loud for the first time in… I don’t know how long. Since that night, maybe.
All their eyes turn wider than saucers at that. Sympathy for me etched all over them. I suffered the way no one ever should after Amy died. I was as haunted as a man could ever be. My pain was savage. It owned me. Still does.
“Yes. I told her she looks like a girl I was once with. Well, she figured it out after a few prying questions, but that’s semantics.”
“Keith…” My name stretches tragically from Gus’s lips, hanging in the air like the foul stench of grief.
“She looks like her,” I admit. “Sort of. But they’re so different. Everything about them is. I swear y’all would have done exactly what I did. If it had been one of my sisters, or Naomi or Viola…” I let that hang, hoping they get it already and back off a bit on this.
I’m tired of explaining it.
I’m tired of repeating myself.
I have a woman who I don’t know staying with me. It doesn’t make sense. I paid for her car and her hospital bills. I scooped her up and took her out of her home and brought her to mine. Now I’m trying to give her this job.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
All I know is that I don’t want to stop, and I don’t want to analyze all the finer details that might add up to me being just a bit crazy. Isn’t that what Maia said this was? Crazy?
“Is this job coming from your dick, your heart, or your brain?” Henry pushes out. His voice strung between agony and fear.
My brothers are worried about me, and we wouldn’t be us if we didn’t do this straight up and outright. I throw my hands up helplessly but that has to be good enough for them.
I need them. I need this. And they know it.
They were all there with me after Amy died. They stuck by my side and held me up and my face over the toilet as I lost myself in alcohol, drugs, and faceless women. The women came later, after the drugs and alcohol were no longer enough, and were what put my face over the toilet. It took me years until I could be with one without it making me physically ill.
I still don’t look them in the eyes. Not one.
“Okay,” Gus states. “I’m in with her then. I’d like to meet her first. Have a conversation. But if you tell me she’s our new PA and right for the job then she’s our new PA.”
Jasper hums in agreement because if I say she’s it, he’s cool with it. That’s how our dynamic works.
Henry is still posturing. “If she works for us, you can’t stick your dick in her.”
I want to punch him flat out. Right here and now. “I’m not,” I grit out in a tone that does not hide my ire.
He grins. Laughs a little. “But you want to.”
“Shut up, asshole.”
He laughs harder. “Well then. Are you going to finally invite us in to meet our new assistant?”
“I haven’t mentioned the job to her yet.”
“Actually, you just did,” she says from right behind me. I seriously should have seen that one coming.
9
Keith
* * *
I turn around and practically growl out once again. The woman really does make me a caveman. She’s wearing a simple black dress, one that drapes loosely over her bra-less breasts before cinching to her narrow waist and then flowing down to her bare feet. Her hair is down, and her face is shiny and beautiful.
But her breasts… her perfect bra-less breasts.
I’m assuming she could not put on a bra one-handed but come on.
I whip back around, ready to kill all, but the guys aren’t even looking at her chest. None of them are, not even Henry, who is the only other single one of us. I should have known better but when you’re met with a woman who resembles the love child of Kate Upton and Brooklyn Decker, her face is just one of the treasures that hold you captive.
She shifts in my direction, her cheeks pinking up as she takes in my chest. The color darkens further as she scrolls down me before her eyes meet the ground. It’s only just now I realize I never put a shirt on when I ran down for the bell. Shit. No wonder the guys were teasing me. Making sure this wasn’t about sex because it probably looks like that’s exactly what we’ve been doing.
She clears her throat, forcing her gaze back up, most definitely avoiding me.
Sauntering toward us, her broken arm is held up high on her body, her other hand holding it protectively against her. She stops beside me, a world of space between us as a smirk quirks up her full, pink lips.