Trouble (Orsen Brothers #1) Read Free Page A

few moments prior she had been laughing, bent over the edge of an elderly couples booth refilling their coffee. I watched her through the unwashed glass as I finished off my smoke. She spoke enthusiastically and without restraint, using her hands to help her illustrate whatever story she was telling.
    Sometimes I wondered how she did it. How she made people fall in love with her without even trying. But that was as good of a representation as any. She didn’t just talk. She described. She immersed you in whatever it was she was saying and more than anything, she made you feel important for listening.
    With an elongated sigh, she shook her hand free from mine and stepped away from me, sliding a plate of food to a waiting patron at the end of the counter. I settled into an empty seat a few feet away from him and shrugged off my wet jacket. “I missed you,” I told her as she passed me, “I didn't realize that was a crime.”
    She paused in front of me with the pot of coffee raised just above her breastbone; agitation etching it’s way across her face. Time hadn’t changed a damn thing about her. She was still every bit as beautiful as she was the day that I left. "It’s not,” she retorted, “you just have a funny way of showing it.”
    It seemed like an ironic twist of fate, that this time she was the one left waiting for me. For a decade I was her rock; the person she laughed and cried and vented to; the one who got her through every rough patch; and the one whose arms she “accidently” fell asleep in every other night. I was there for her—always—even when she didn’t want me to be. Until a day came when I no longer could be. She was happy with Liam—at least it seemed like it—and my presence was only complicating things.
    Part of loving someone is letting them go when it’s necessary.
    A dark curl fell lose from her bun and curved around her jawbone. She kept her gaze trained on mine and her eyebrows shot up expectantly as two topaz orbs pierced me for an explanation. The problem was I didn’t have one to give. At least not one she wanted to hear. I reached for her hand again but she slapped me away.
    “Four years,” she grated out through clenched teeth, looking over her shoulder to make sure none of her customers were listening. “I never thought I’d see you again and now you just…”
    She shook her head at me and laughed stoically.
    I still caught myself staring at old dates on calendars sometimes; trying to remember a time when we were still a possibility. But a relationship was a two-way street and there were always too many variables keeping us apart. Wrong place, wrong time; it was the usual tragic story.
    “I know,” I said quietly, “and I’m sorry…”
    “Are you?” she retorted, “Jesus, Anders. I needed you and you fucked off. You couldn’t have at least written me?”
    “I tried to,” I told her. “I wrote you every week for two years. Liam took the—”
    “No,” she interrupted, shaking her head in disbelief. “He wouldn’t do that.”
    “Yeah well...” I cleared my throat and shrugged. “He did.”
    She stared at me with her lips slightly parted. “It doesn’t change anything,” she said after awhile, “letters or not you still left.”
    “I know…”
    “Do you?” she questioned, leaning into me as her voice cracked. “Because I don’t really think you do. ”
    A customer called out to her for a refill and she obliged without finishing her sentence, shoving past me and pouring the last of the lukewarm liquid into his mug. His gaze lingered on her buttocks as she walked away and he whistled through his teeth, slapping palms with the man seated across from him. I scratched my jaw with my middle finger and kept my eyes trained on them both as they chuckled.
    “So…new job huh?” I spoke up, turning my attention back to her. She was a diamond in the rough here but I didn’t tell her so. She always hated metaphors.
    “Yeah well…I have bills to