The Spark Between Us by Stacy Travis

Chapter Thirty-One

Braden

The judgeson Top Chef would have bowed down and given Sarah a goddamned medal. Sure, I helped her push the ball over the goal line, but it was only an assist. She was as accomplished at hosting as she was at everything else she did.

Which was why it was getting harder and harder to deny what I knew in my heart—I fucking loved her.

I’m in love with her.

What to do about it was a different matter entirely.

The selfish part of me wanted to ask her to stay. She could get a job at the lab and do world-changing work. We could be happy. We could be more than temporary.

After her family left, I’d tell her how I felt. I had to let her know.

Meanwhile, Finn had some questions about the materials used for the deck off my bedroom, so we went upstairs to check it out. He was building something four times the size at his house, and I knew he had a slew of designers and expert builders weighing in, so the exact shade of the redwood seemed like a pretext for something else. I had a feeling I knew what it was.

“So. You and my sister.” He crossed his arms over his chest, but his stern look quickly dissolved to a grin, and I saw the gleam of amusement flicker in his eyes. He didn’t look like a guy about to pound his friend into the pavement.

No, he was going to sit there and enjoy watching me squirm. Finn swirled his Scotch in the glass. It had been stupid to come up here without anything stronger than red wine.

“I know what you said, and I . . .” What? What had I done? Had I resisted? Had I tried to keep my hands off her?

Yeah, for two weeks. And even then, I didn’t try that hard.

Plopping down into one of the blue Adirondack chairs, I leaned my elbows on my knees and bent my forehead into one hand. He could give me shit—that I could handle—but beyond that, none of it was any of his business.

While I continued staring at the floor, trying to come up with the words to explain that Sarah wasn’t another of the many women he’d seen me notch on my belt, a weird sound erupted from my oldest friend. At first, it sounded like he was choking, and my head shot up in fear.

I needn’t have worried for his health.

Finn was laughing his ass off. I stared at him blankly, still unsure he wasn’t having a mental breakdown.

He stopped laughing, took a leisurely sip of his drink, and pointed at me. “You’re so screwed. Does she know?”

“Does she know what?” I wasn’t sure I knew.

I must have looked as lost as I felt because Finn stopped laughing and leveled me with an expression of pure amusement. “Does she know you’re in love with her?”

“I don’t . . . I’m not . . . that’s not what I’m saying.” No time like the present to finish the rest of the wine in my glass. I could hear laughter coming from down below, and I peered over the rail to make sure no one had decided to come outside. The last thing I needed was for someone to overhear our conversation.

Bella dashed into the yard chasing a ball and promptly laid herself down on the grass, mouthing it and rolling onto her back. Someone must have opened the door because the cacophony of voices drifted up to where we sat, but there were too many conversations going on at once for anyone to focus on us.

Finn leaned back in his chair, sipping his Scotch with an amused expression that made it seem like he was enjoying a rollicking good romcom playing somewhere out of sight. “I know. I’m saying it. You’re in love with her. I assume you’re aware of that.”

“I’m just . . . fuck.” What was the point of denying it, especially to a guy who knew me well enough to call bullshit? “Okay, Yes, I love her. And not in a smarmy best-sex-I-ever-had way. The way I feel about her . . . it’s not temporary.”

“It doesn’t look temporary.” He studied me for a moment. “And by the way, please don’t talk about sex and my sister in the same sentence. Even if you do love her.”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“Seriously. Or I will kill you.”

I believed him. “Done. And I need another drink.”

“Yeah, you look a little dehydrated,” Finn said, smirking at the liberal sheen of sweat I now needed to wipe from my brow.

“It’s a warm night.”

Finn coughed “bullshit” into his hand and slapped me on the back.

I pointed to the railings that framed out the deck, running my hand over the smooth wood. “What can I tell you about the materials? Are you thinking redwood?” Anything to shift the conversation someplace else.

Shaking his head, Finn rose to his feet. “I’ve already ordered a cord of maple for my deck, and the design is nearly done. I just wanted to get away from my sisters and the jackasses they’re engaged to so we could talk.”

He started to walk back through the bedroom, but I felt like there was more to say. “Hey. Thanks for being cool about . . . things. I swear, I didn’t mean to fall for her—"

“Dude, Please. You have my blessing. Just keep on making her happy, and it’s all good.”

* * *

An hour later,the long table Sarah had painstakingly set was a demolished mess of half-full wine glasses, plates with scraps of chicken piccata, and four different kinds of sourdough sliced up for dipping in olive oil.

No one could eat another bite, and even the peonies looked limp and exhausted. But not Sarah’s family. They were primed and ready for a raucous game of running charades.

“Okay, okay, let me explain,” Sarah said, standing at the head of the table. “It’s like regular charades where you have to act out a TV show or movie or book or whatever, except we’re doing it in teams, and each time your team guesses correctly, you have run over to me and get the next word to act out.”

The game fit Sarah’s personality perfectly. She liked control, so she came up with all the word clues, and she didn’t like being the center of attention so she wouldn’t have to act anything out herself.

“So if the movie was Sixteen Candles I might do this.” She mimed blowing out candles on a birthday cake and acted out some other ridiculousness to demonstrate the number sixteen. “Everyone got it?”

And the games began.

The whole thing was a giant clusterfuck because Becca guessed so loudly that the other team could hear her from across the yard and using her guesses to help them. And Finn was such a perfectionist that he kept starting to act something out, and then he’s come up with a better way to do it.

I laughed my ass off for about an hour straight and felt pretty pleased when their mom correctly guessed my charade for Dead Poet’s Society. “That was a hard one,” I admitted, impressed she’d nailed it based on my charade of a dead guy reading a book.

“Braden, but you and I, we’re—” She pointed two fingers at her eyes and then at me.

“Seriously, I thought the movie was Death by Book or something,” Cherry trilled.

Every so often I’d lock eyes with Sarah across the yard and find it impossible not to smile at her.

Where did we stand? I couldn’t have said for certain, but if Finn was right, this was more than temporary. She had to feel it too.

A bit later, things were quieting down, and I started cleaning up the table, taking a few stray glasses into the house. I hadn’t realized Sarah had gone into the kitchen with Isla until I reached the patio door and heard them talking.

“I miss our hikes,” Isla was saying.

“Oh, I need a hike badly,” Sarah said. “We’ll be able to do it soon. When I get back to the real world.”

“Perfect. I’m holding you to it.”

I turned and went back outside, still holding the glasses. I left them on the table and went over to pour some of that Scotch Finn had been drinking. I needed something more potent than wine.

“When I get back to the real world.” She actually said those words. Her time in Carolwood was still a vacation from her real life, a little suspended animation that allowed her to indulge in a fling with a fireman.

While I’d been wringing my hands and sweating over telling Finn the way things were between us, explaining that I wasn’t just messing around, admitting that I was falling in love with her, Sarah was planning to go hiking as soon as she got back from fantasy land.

As it should be.

Sarah dreamed of being a tenured professor. She’d worked for ten years, studying her way through a PhD program and working her tail off on the tenure track. What seemed like a deviation from her path wasn’t a deviation at all—it was proof she deserved to get the tenured position she wanted. Everything she’d done had followed her plan—she’d told me that the first night she was here.

The only thing that didn’t fit into her plan was me.

Of course this was only temporary. Brilliant scientists on the tenure track with plans for how their lives will unfold don’t give up their dreams to live with guys who give them great orgasms.

“Hey, are you okay?” Finn asked, as I took a long sip of the Scotch. I usually didn’t drink this shit, and it burned my throat going down.

“Yeah. Great.”

I was an idiot.

Finn didn’t press me for details, but from his look, he sensed something was up. “We’ll talk later, okay?” He nodded and clapped me on the back. “Whatever it is, I’m here for you, you know that.”

Sarah and Isla came out of the house right then, and I watched her laugh at something Isla said. She was so beautiful, made even more so by the presence of her family. Even though she said they drove her crazy, they lifted her up—I could see that.

In the time she’d been here, I’d narrowed her world and it wasn’t her reality, not the one she should have.

I couldn’t keep her here, waylaying her from doing something fabulous with her life back in Berkeley. If she stayed, she might continue to enjoy herself for a while, but eventually, she’d resent the deviation from her goals.

A woman like her deserved to have everything, much more than I could give her.

So even if it killed me, I had to let her go.