“Hey, Analise, come here!” Gavin called from the kitchen. “I want to show you something on my iPad.”
I tilted my head. “Go ahead. I’m gonna go get the mail.”
She left the room with a smile, but I saw the hint of regret in her eyes—probably worried that she’d shared too much. As I let myself out the front door, my head was spinning.
“What the fuck was that?” I breathed.
Just as I said it, Archer’s truck parked in the driveway, his gaze on me as I pulled the mail from the mailbox.
As he hopped out of the truck, I kept circling and circling around what she’d said, the urgency with which she’d said it. My steps slowed until I stopped halfway up the driveway.
Archer adjusted the hat on his head, concern etched on his face.
I stared up at him, my heart racing. It would be so much easier to keep my mouth shut. So much easier to let him take his sister and leave my house and keep a safe, healthy, professional distance between us when I saw him again at the shelter.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
It was the sound of his voice that did it. Low enough to send a pleasant shiver down my spine. Sure enough to unlock the self-preservation that I usually held so tightly in check.
“It was her, wasn’t it?” I asked.
His brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Your sister was the one driving that night, wasn’t she?”
Chapter Fourteen
Archer
Fuck.
Fuck.
My brain could do a lot of things—read a defense in seconds, adjust a route when a lineman was barreling down on me, memorize a playbook week after week—but in moments like this, when an emotional tsunami held me by the scruff of my neck, my cognitive function sputtered to an ungodly slow crawl.
Maybe if my heart wouldn’t clench painfully every time she looked at me, I’d have the ability to speak. But standing in her driveway, the setting sun catching on those wild red strands of hair that always seemed to fall around her face, it was very much like she’d reached her fist inside me and was squeezing my throat until it closed.
“I—” My voice was dry and rusty when I tried to say something, anything, and her eyes flickered with a look I couldn’t define. I cleared my throat, staring at a point just over her shoulder to see if that helped. “I—”
Then she took a step closer, and when a breeze picked up behind her, hitting me straight in the face, God, I could smell her.
Remi didn’t smell like perfume or a bed of wildflowers. It was a light, clean scent that made my mouth water.Shemade my mouth water.
Even as I tried to avoid eye contact, she refused to let me, adjusting her stance so that she was in front of me again. Her eyes looked bluer tonight. Less green. How?
“Was she driving the car?” she asked again.
My jaw clenched tight, and I gave her a pleading look. “Remi,” I warned. “Please ...”
“Oh my God,” she whispered, her hands covering her mouth for a moment. “She was.”
“Please,” I begged. Maybe Evanses didn’t humble themselves, but I’d beg this woman without a second thought. For many things, probably. But right now, I’d beg for her silence. And hopefully, I’d get her understanding. “You cannot tell anyone.”
“Archer, you could’ve gone to jail!” It seemed that her processing skills had slowed as well, because she blinked rapidly as she stared up into my face, seemingly unaware that the space between us had shrunk to almost nothing. “Everyone thinks you ... you were drunk and behind the wheel. Why would you let them think that? Was she drinking?”
“No.”
The gruff answer landed like a slap, and she straightened, swallowing quickly. “Okay. So why ...why?”