Saying Yes To The Dress!: The Wedding Planner's Big Day / Married for Their Miracle Baby / The Cowboy's Convenient Bride

He cleared his throat. “It was me or foster care, so—” He rolled his shoulders.

“I think that’s the bravest thing I ever heard,” she said.

“No, it wasn’t,” he said fiercely. “Brave is when you have a choice. I didn’t have any choice.”

“You did,” she insisted, as fierce as him. “You did have a choice and you chose love.”

That word inserted into any conversation between them should have stopped it cold. But it didn’t. In fact, it felt as if more of the wall around everything he held inside crumbled, as if her words were a wrecking ball seeking the weakest point in that dam.

“I love my brother,” he said. “I just don’t know if he knows how much I do.”

“He can’t be that big a fool,” Becky said.

“I managed to finish out my year in high school and then I found a job on a construction crew. I was tired all the time. And I never seemed to be able to make enough money. Joe sure wasn’t wearing the designer clothes the rest of the kids had. I got mad if he asked. That’s why he probably doesn’t have a clue how I feel about him.”

Becky’s hand was squeezing his with unbelievable strength. It was as if her strength—who could have ever guessed this tiny woman beside him held so much strength?—was passing between them, right through the skin of her hand into his, entering his bloodstream.

“I put one foot in front of the other,” Drew told her. “I did my best to raise my brother. But I was so scared of messing up that I think I was way too strict with him. I thought if I let him know how much I cared about him he would perceive it as weakness and I would lose control. Of him. Of life.

“I’d already seen what happened when I was not in control.”

“Did you feel responsible for the death of your parents?” she asked. He could hear that she was startled by the question.

“I guess I asked myself, over and over, what I could have done. And the answer seemed to be, ‘Never let anyone you love out of your sight. Never let go.’ Most days, I felt as if I was hanging on by a thread.

“When he was a teen? I was not affectionate. I was like Genghis Khan, riding roughshod over the troops. The default answer to almost everything he wanted to do was no. When I did loosen the reins a bit, he had to check in with me. He had a curfew. I sucked, and he let me know it.”

“Sucked?” she said, indignant.

“Yeah, we both agreed on that. Not that I let him know I agreed with him in the you-suck department.”

“Then you were both wrong. What you did was noble,” she said quietly. “The fact that you think you did it imperfectly does not make it less noble.”

“Noble!” he snapped, wanting to show only annoyance and not vulnerability. “There’s nothing noble about acting on necessity.”

But she was having none of it. “It’s even noble that you saw it as a necessity, not a choice.”

“Whatever,” he said. He suddenly disliked himself. He felt as if he was a small dog yapping and yapping and yapping at the postman. He sat up. She sat up, too. He folded his arms over his chest, a shield.

“Given that early struggle, you seem to have done well for yourself.”

“A man I worked for gave me a break,” Drew admitted, even though he had ordered himself to stop talking. “He was a developer. He told me I could have a lot in one of his subdivisions and put up a house on spec. I didn’t have to pay for the lot until the house sold. It was the beginning of an amazing journey, but looking back, I think my drive to succeed also made me emotionally unavailable to my brother.”

“You feel totally responsible for him, still.”

Drew sighed, dragged a hand through his sun-dried hair. “I’m sure it’s because of how I raised him that we are in this predicament we’re in now, him marrying a girl I know nothing about, who may be using him. And you. And all of us.”

“I don’t see that as your fault.”

“If I worked my ass off, I could feed him,” he heard himself volunteering. “I could keep the roof over his head. I could get his books for school. I even managed to get him through college. But—”

“But what?”

“I could not teach him about finding a good relationship.” Drew’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. It felt as if every single word he had said had been circling around this essential truth.

“I missed them so much, my mom and dad. They could have showed him what he should be looking for. They were so stable. My mom was a teacher, my dad was a postal worker. Ordinary people, and yet they elevated the ordinary.

“I didn’t know what I had when I had it. I didn’t know what it was to wake up to my dad downstairs, making coffee for my mom, delivering it to her every morning. He sang a song while he delivered it. An old Irish folk song. They were always laughing and teasing each other. We were never rich but our house was full. The smell of cookies, the sound of them arguing good-naturedly about where to put the Christmas tree, my mom reading stories. I loved those stories way after I was too old for them. I used to find some excuse to hang out when she was reading to Joe at night. How could I hope to give any of that kind of love to my poor orphaned baby brother? When even thinking about all we had lost felt as if it would undermine the little bit of control that I was holding over my world? Instead, the environment I raised Joe in was so devoid of affection that he’s gotten involved with Allie out of his sheer desperation to be loved.”

“Maybe he longs for your family as much as you do.”

“It’s not that I didn’t love him,” Drew admitted gruffly. “I just didn’t know how to say that to him.”