As he headed for the door, he could hear her choked voice say after him, “For the record, Graham, right now, you’re the one walking away. Again.”
The moment the door slammed shut between them, he heard her burst into tears. Graham stopped in the hall, shaking with anger and the desire to turn around, to go back in and fix this. He didn’t want to fight with her, but it was clear Zoey didn’t understand. And as much as he cared about her, this vacation romance had to end sometime. If walking away and ending this pain for both of them made him an alphahole, then so be it. In the meantime, Graham had something he needed to do.
He had to see some men about a girl with a scratch on her arm.
Chapter 16
There was a certain amount of visceral satisfaction in taking a really big chainsaw and attacking an even bigger stump of wood with it. Graham didn’t know what he was carving or if he was simply hacking out chunks at random, but for once, he didn’t care. Tired of standing around, unwilling to take chances, Graham was ready to do this or be done.
The irony of that train of thought wasn’t lost on him, but it sure did piss him off.
Wood chips were flying when a pickup pulled into the drive and a massive figure stepped out of it. Graham ignored his visitor in favor of a vertical cut along the grain of the wood in front of him. If it split, he didn’t care about that either.
It was only eight o’clock in the morning, but Easton had a six-pack in his hand. Dropping the beer on the ground next to his boot, Easton settled down in a lawn chair, cracking open a beer, content to wait in silence.
The log had been reduced by more than half its size before the chainsaw sputtered to a stop, gas tank empty.
Graham had been carving so long, his hands had grown numb from the vibrations. Flexing them to regain feeling, he set the chainsaw on the ground next to the stump.
“You all right?” Easton nodded toward Graham’s hands.
“Getting arthritis in my old age.”
Easton snorted, stretching an arm out with a beer, waggling the bottle at him. “If I wanted to drink alone, I would have stayed at home and watched a game.”
“It isn’t even noon.” Graham declined the offer, not caring how surly he sounded. “With Ash and your dad there, you’re never alone.”
“Dad went to visit Grandma in the home. And Ash has a date today, some guy from Whittier.”
Dropping down into a second chair, Graham sighed. “Well, that’s disturbing.”
“The date or the Whittier part?”
“The idea she’s capable of having the kinds of romantic emotions that lead to her actually going on a date. Want to go kill him?”
Raising an eyebrow at Graham’s tone, Easton drained his beer and opened another. “Like you killed those guys last night?”
Graham grunted sourly. He hadn’t killed anyone, but between the two of them, Easton and Graham had put some very serious regret into the people who had messed with Lana. In his frustration, Graham’d had difficulty restraining himself. Easton, however, had been the epitome of cool, calm collectedness.
It was beyond annoying.
“You want to talk about her?”
“Nope.”
Graham stared at the stump. Nothing. It looked like nothing but a busted-up, mangled mess. “The irony of this project isn’t just annoying, it’s becoming prophetic. Remind me to become a hermit.”
There was nothing much to say to that, so Easton didn’t. Instead, he looked up at the sky.
“Storm’s coming in this afternoon. Gonna be a bad one.”
“And?”
“And I saw your woman this morning. I went to the big house to see Jax before he leaves. She looked like she was having a tough time of it.”
Grunting, Graham finally reached for a beer, popping it open on the arm of his lawn chair. “Zoey’s not my woman. And it ended last night, whatever it was. Or wasn’t. Can we talk about something else?”
“She still planning on that ATV tour?”
Apparently, they couldn’t.
“She wouldn’t go out in that. Zoey’s not an idiot.”
“She went out with you.”
Frowning, Graham took a long pull of his beer. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re the idiot. You knew what you were doing.” Easton leveled a look at him. “When you walked over to her in Rick’s, you knew exactly the kind of mess you were stepping in. Punishing her for it now, when things are exactly how you knew they’d be, is cruel.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched, but Graham said nothing.
Settling deeper in his chair, Easton scratched a thumbnail under the condensation-softened label. “I suppose picking a fight with her was a lot easier than sticking around until the end. This way, it’s on her.”
“If you’re trying to be an ass, you’re succeeding.”
Easton didn’t even blink at the acid in Graham’s tone.
“Man up. If you care about her, then don’t let her go home feeling bad. It’s not like you can go find her next week and apologize.”
“East, buddy, I want to show you something.” Pulling his cell phone out of his pocket, Graham smacked it down on the arm of his lawn chair a little too hard. “It’s this new technology that somehow manages to connect people all across the world. All you have to do is pick it up and make the call.”
“You plan on making that call?”
They both knew he wouldn’t.
“The storm’s going to be real bad.” Easton looked up at the sky as the first streaks of lightning flashed in the distance. “They’ll cancel the tour.”
Of course they would. And like Graham, it would just be one more disappointment for her.
* * *
Zoey had always known ending things with Graham would hurt. How could it not? Whatever this was, it was real. Temporary, maybe, but always real.
Zoey really, truly loved him. Of all the ways she’d thought they would say goodbye, a blowout in her hotel room was not anywhere close to the plan. Instead of bittersweet, there was only bitter tears and pain.
Mostly, there was just pain.
Throughout the worst, Lana stayed by her side. Between the ice cream for breakfast for Zoey and a massive Bloody Mary for Lana, they decided men in general weren’t worth half the amount of annoyance they caused. They plotted the havoc they would wreak on the people who had messed with Lana and spent more than the recommended time in the steam room, sweating away the night before. And not a bit of it did any good, beyond increasing her blood sugar and opening her pores, because there wasn’t an indulgence in the world as good as having Graham Barnett smiling down on her, his hands in her hair, his lips pressing soft kisses along her skin. Seeing Easton and Jax in the lobby had been awkward and awful, both men giving her sympathetic looks that only made her feel worse.