Her stomach curled into a tight, uncomfortable knot.
There were so many things she wished she’d said and done differently. Things her grown-up self would have told her teenage self as well as her tormenters.
“I wasn’t that interested in studying.”
“We both know that wasn’t why you hated the place.”
She flushed, unsettled that he knew her so well. Her school days had been a miserable time. That whole period of her life would have been miserable had it not been for the O’Neil brothers, Tyler in particular.
“Why are we talking about this? It’s long since over and done with.”
“There you go again—avoidance. When it’s something difficult, you duck. Hide. Who was it? I want to know.”
“Who was what?”
“Who gave you a hard time?”
He’d asked her the same question repeatedly over the years, and she’d never given him an answer. “Why are you bringing that up now? It was a long time ago.”
“Exactly. So you might as well tell me.”
His persistence exasperated her. “It was no one.”
“You fell in the ditch by yourself?” He put his fingers under her chin and tilted her face to him. “Jackson and I had a few suspicions. Was it Mark Webster? Tina Robson? Those two caused most of the trouble in your grade.”
“It wasn’t them.” She tried to ignore the way his hand felt against her skin. “I was clumsy, that’s all.”
“Honey, you skied with me, and most of the time you kept up. There were moments when you were almost better on that hill than I was.”
“Almost? Arrogance isn’t attractive, Tyler.” But she’d seen the gleam in his eyes and knew he was playing with her.
“Neither is evasion.” A smile that was altogether too attractive flickered at the corner of his mouth. “You’re never going to tell me, are you?”
“No. It’s behind me and anyway, I don’t need you protecting me.”
“Cameron Foster?”
“Tyler, stop!”
“If you’d told me who it was, I would have pushed them in the ditch.”
She knew that was the truth. Tyler O’Neil had spent more time in the principal’s office than he had in the classroom. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. You were in enough trouble without me being responsible for more. Look, I appreciate you volunteering to take that class, but you don’t need to. I can do it. We both know you’d hate it. Why would you want to put yourself through that?”
“Because it’s you.”
Her heart pumped a little faster. Hope, that thing she kept ruthlessly suppressed, flickered to life inside her. “What’s that supposed to mean? Why would you do it for me?”
He frowned, as if he thought it was a strange question. “Because I care about you. Because we’ve been friends since you could walk.”
Friends.
She felt a thud of something inside her and recognized it as disappointment.
How could she possibly be disappointed about something that had been her reality forever? She should be grateful for his friendship. It was greedy of her to want more, but still she did want more. She wanted it all. She wanted the whole fantasy.
But that was all it was ever going to be, of course.
A fantasy.
Tyler gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Stop looking so sick. I’m taking that class and that’s final. If it makes you feel better, you can buy me a bottle of whiskey for Christmas to numb the agony.”
“I already bought your Christmas present.”
“You did? What is it?”
“A box set of chick flicks for you to watch with Jess. I thought it would help you bond.”
He groaned. “You had better be joking. But talking of Jess, I need your help. She is desperate to ski.”
Like father, like daughter.
It was bittersweet, because she’d longed for that very thing—the man and the child. Home. Family. Snow Crystal. Officially being an O’Neil. She didn’t know if it was because she was old-fashioned, or because she’d known right from the start that the only man she wanted in her life was Tyler. She hadn’t needed to meet hundreds of other men to know he was the one.
But he didn’t want that. And he certainly didn’t want it with her.
She forced herself to focus on the topic of Jess. “She skis with you. There is no better training than that.”
“It’s all she wants to do. She’s falling behind with her schoolwork. Not concentrating in class.” He dragged his hand over his jaw. “How am I supposed to handle that? I try and tell her to do her homework, but I never did mine, so does that make me a hypocrite? Do I tell her to do as I say or do as I did? I don’t know. I can’t stop thinking about last winter when I tried holding her back. Look how that turned out.”
“She was pushing you. Testing you. You worked through it.”
“She ran away!”
“You found her almost right away.”
“But not before she’d given us all a heart attack.”
Brenna thought about the night Jess had gone missing. “I suppose you have to set boundaries.”
“You ignored the boundaries. So did I. How do I enforce them with my daughter?”
Seeing him question himself was a novel experience. Tyler was fearless and confident. Both qualities were an essential part of a sport that demanded total precision. He’d never had any doubts about what he wanted out of life, and she found his attempts to adapt to living with a teenage daughter endearing. Suspecting that endearing wasn’t an adjective he’d thank her for, she kept it to herself.
“Why would you be messing it up? You made it clear from the moment Janet sent her here that she was loved and wanted. That’s the most important thing.”
Jess hadn’t revealed much about the years she’d spent with her mother in Chicago, but she’d said enough to make Brenna, who had always considered herself to be even-tempered, hope she never came face-to-face with Janet ever again.
“Loving her isn’t enough though, is it? I’m worried I’m a lousy father. That’s the truth.” He took a deep breath and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I haven’t admitted that to anyone but you.”
Her heart felt as if it were being squeezed. “You’re a good father. How can you doubt that?”
“I didn’t manage to keep her when she was born, did I?”
“Not because you didn’t try.” She knew how hard the O’Neils had fought to keep baby Jess. Knew what losing had done to them. “Why are you thinking about that now when it was all so long ago?”
“Because she mentioned it earlier.”
“The custody battle?”
“The fact she was an accident. Janet obviously said something to her. I’m worried we’ve screwed her up.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think she’s screwed up, but if she’s been affected by her childhood then you’re not responsible for that. You weren’t the one telling her those things.”