“Fine, more mellow and maybe more quiet than usual, but good.”

“Well that’s good I guess.”

“You don’t sound so sure about that.”

I shrugged not sure how to explain it. “Rule has never really been a mellow guy.”

“No he hasn’t but maybe you just have given him a reason to be. Maybe he’s happy and has everything he wants so there isn’t a reason to be all angsty and agro all the time anymore.”

I would have been thrilled if I thought she was right but I knew Rule and none of it sat right with how he was. “Maybe.”

She gave me another hug, carful of my chest and ushered us out of the shop. “Don’t get your panties all wadded up over it there is nothing wrong with mellow.”

“Thanks Cora.”

“Anytime now scram so I clean this up before regular business shows up and the guys have to get here and set up.”

Ayden gave me a searching look as we exited into the cold. “How did you get the guard dogs to let you off the leash this morning? Rules has a fit whenever you try and gallivant around without someone on your heels.”

“I told him I had a hair appointment and that you were going with me and wouldn’t let me out of your sight. No guy wants to go spend an hour in a salon, especially a guy like Rule.” She lifted her brows at me when we got to the rental I was currently driving.

“So are we actually going to go get our hair done?”

Since I wasn’t a liar and hated being dishonest with him I had indeed made both of us an appointment to get the works done. “We are, only it’s my treat this time because we have to make a stop first and it’s kinda out of the way.”

“Where at?”

I pulled out onto Colfax and headed to the highway in the direction of Brookside.

“Where are we going?” I knew Ayden was curious but when I woke up this morning and Rule had been so cloyingly polite and kind there were two things that I knew I had to accomplish that day. The first was done and the second, well I wasn’t sure but I felt like the second might end up being even more painful.

“I just need to swing by and see an old friend really quick.”

“In Brookside?”

“Just outside, let me just get through it first and then I’ll explain.” I drove silently through the mountains until we got to the small cemetery on the outskirts of Evergreen listening to The Dawes play melancholy songs that fit my mood the entire way. It looked more like a ranch than a cemetery and I had always thought it was so ironic that Remy was buried so far out of the city on such a quiet piece of land when he had been so buoyant and so full of energy and life. I parked in the visitor’s lot and pulled on a pair of gloves and a hat because I wasn’t sure how long I was going to need and it was even colder up here at a higher elevation than it was in the city.

“I’ll leave the keys so you can run the heater and mess with the radio. I’m not sure how long I’m going to be.”

Ayden’s amber gaze was liquid with sadness and understanding. She gave me a quick one armed hug and shooed me off. “I’ll be fine you take as long as you need. You can spring for a hot stone massage if it takes you too long.”

“Deal.” That’s why I loved this girl.

My boots crunched on the snow as I made my way to the back of the lot where the grave stone sat so cold and sterile, just one more shade of gray on the barren winter landscape. There was a bright spray of red roses lying on top of the stark white plot and it made me smile. Remy loved red, loved things that were vibrant and eye catching, anything that suited his personality. Not caring that the ground was frozen and covered in snow I knelt down and traced his name with a gloved finger. Tears immediately filled my eyes. I moved my hand along to glide over the huge horseshoe both the surviving Archer boys had insisted go on their siblings headstone. Turned upward it was said to keep all the good luck in, Rome liked the symbolism, Rule liked that it was a visual representation that tied the two of them together for eternity.

“Hey handsome. I’m sorry it’s been so long since my last visit but things have been…intense.” I laughed humorously. “I have a feeling if you were here you would be laughing your ass off at everyone and shaking your head at all of us. I miss you so much and every single day I think it would make things so much better if I could just call you, that you would make everything make sense and keep it all together. Doing this is a million times harder without you.” I was crying in earnest now and couldn’t really see the headstone clearly any more. I flattened my palm over his name and concentrated on taking deep breaths in and out. “I’m sleeping with your brother and if you thought I was a silly lovesick fool before you should see me now. I’m freaking out because he’s being too nice. I know, only I would worry about my boyfriend being too nice but we both know Rule and something is up he won’t talk to me about. By the way how weird is it that I’m calling Rule my boyfriend? My heart turns over every time I do it and sometimes I feel like my entire world is in his eyes and yet he still closes me out, still shuts down and makes it so very hard to just love him. If you were here I would make you pull it out of him and he would tell you because he always did.” I sighed and let my head fall forward. “I wish you had told them, Rule and Rome. I wish you had trusted them enough to let them in like you did for me. You’re mother has gone off her rocker because Rule still refuses to be your carbon copy and as a result your family is in tatters. Maybe if everyone knew, if you had tried to let them know everyone deserves to be loved no matter how they choose to live their lives it wouldn’t be like this. Your dad is coming around but still trying to keep Margot out of the loony bin and Rome, poor Rome is just a giant Ping-Pong ball trying to protect everybody and make everything okay but he has no help, he needs you to be the mediator like you always were.”

My knees were freezing and my pants had long since soaked through. My teeth were chattering and I had quickly learned that super cold weather and nipple piercings were not exactly a great combo.

“I have a crazy ex that is in turn stalking me and harassing me and it’s making my life hell. My parents are convinced I should marry him and move to Cherry Hills, Rule hates him and there’s a good chance if the ex keeps it up is going to murder him and it just makes things that are already complicated and no fun even more awful. I have a sneaky suspicion that if you had been around you would have seen through all Gabe’s polish and shine to the tarnish underneath and I wouldn’t have ever ended up in this situation in the first place. I miss having you protect me from myself, your brother is all about keeping me safe and I think he really honestly cares but he’s so busy keeping me safe from everyone, himself included that I don’t think he sees that I can be my own worst enemy and he keeps talking about messing things up between us and I don’t have the heart to tell him that he can’t ever mess up bad enough to make me stop loving him, but there is a good chance that like everyone else he’s going to see what I have to offer isn’t all that great and want more than I can give. It’s so convoluted and twisted I can’t even believe we got as far as we have.”

I laughed a little, real laughter this time and a couple standing by a grave a few feet away gave me a dirty look.

“I got drunk on my birthday and threw myself at him. I was terrified the entire time he was going to turn me down, to claim that he was taking advantage of me because I was drunk but it happened and I totally gave up the v-card to your twin. Somehow I know you would find that hysterical and never let me live it down. You were right I was always just waiting for him to get with the program and now that he has, well let me just say the program is amazing and I have a hard time seeing a future without it or without him.”

I pressed a kiss to the stiff leather of the glove and placed it on his name. “Every day Rem, every single day something reminds me of you, makes me think of things I want to tell you, makes want to cry because of what happened to you. Every day I miss you and right now when I need you more than I ever I try to make decisions, try to go in a direction that I know would make you proud, would make you smile for me but it’s hard.”

I stayed for a few more minutes until the tears were nothing more than icy trials on my cheeks then climbed to my feet. I rested a hand on the top of the gravestone and said a final goodbye while trying to get my composure back in order. When I got into the car Ayden had hijacked the radio and Lady Antebellum was twanging it up but she turned it all the way down as I got behind the steering wheel and peeled off my gloves.

“Everything okay?”

I nodded and held my frozen hands over the heater, wishing I had one big enough to dry the legs of my jeans. “Yeah it’s just sad. I miss him a lot. We used to talk every single day sometimes for hours and hours. I feel lost without him so much of the time and I think he’s the only one that would make sense of how hard it is to get a handle on Rule. They were very different but still essentially the same at the core, good men with a strong sense of self and loyalty.”

“It’s obvious you cared deeply for him so why didn’t the two of you ever hook up? It seems like it would have been an obvious match.”

I smiled ruefully and headed back toward the city. “Because we didn’t feel that way about each other. He knew I was in love with Rule at times he encouraged it, at times he tried everything to talk me out of it but he knew it and for the most part respected it and he was in love someone else, someone very unlike me. Remy was the life of the party, he had a million friends and everyone wanted to be around him all the time but he was really private when it came to his love life. Rome and Rule burned through girls at a rate that is honestly alarming but Remy played it close to the chest and I think he let people believe we had a thing going for so long because it kept them from asking questions he didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want the comparison to his brother’s and his parents loved me so it was just easier for him to play along than deal with the hassle.”

“That doesn’t seem like it was very fair to you. If he knew you were in love with Rule the whole time why would he purposely let him believe you and he were a couple?”

Rule asked me that same question all the time even though he wasn’t armed with the knowledge that I had been in love with him for so long and I hated that I couldn’t answer it for him. Remy’s secrets weren’t mine to tell even if it strained things between us.

“He had his reasons and at the time I understood them, now I guess I didn’t see how damaging they could be but at the end of the day he saved me from a high school life that would have been miserable and a family that treats me like furniture so I don’t mind suffering for him in the slightest. You would have liked him, everyone did. As moody and difficult as Rule can be, Rem was just the opposite. He was always affable, smiling and happy he just wanted to have a good time and make sure everyone else did too. When he graduated he was supposed to go to California on a football scholarship, he was good, better than good but he turned it down because if he had to play in order to stay in school than that took the fun out of the game for him. Rule moved to Denver with Nash and Remy left with them. The guys went to work in the shop as soon as they had their diplomas, Remy screwed around trying figure out what he wanted to do. Eventually he got hooked up with a high-end event planning company throwing swanky parties and doing black tie events, it was his niche and he never talked about college again. He made good money, loved living in the city, had a great relationship with his brother’s and his family, was involved in a relationship with someone that made him smile and act like a giddy kids, plus I had just moved here for freshman year when he died. It sucked and it totally wasn’t fair, everything was right where he wanted it and he was taken away from it all because of a stupid accident.”