Lucky This Isn't Real: MacBride Brothers Series St. Patrick's Day Fake Fiance Romance by Jamie Knight (digital e reader .TXT) 📕

“I tried to get him to go into rehab like Gavin suggested last time I talked to him, but he refused and ended up in the hospital. He’s got a real bad blood infection. It’s not looking good. I need to know what to do. Gavin is down as next of kin. The hospital staff won’t listen to me or any of our brothers. We need to decide the next step, and since he’s been ignoring my calls, I decided to come here and talk to him one on one.”

I reached into my purse and got out a fresh tissue, handing it to Eoin, which he took gratefully. I really wanted to give him a hug, but I restrained myself, unsure if he wanted me to.

“Thanks,” he said, blowing his nose noisily.

“He never told me about that,” I said.

He never told me anything.

“I’m not surprised,” Eoin said, pocketing the tissue. “He likes to keep his dark secrets in the past. He’d rather run from them than actually have to face them.”

My stomach somersaulted.

Dark secrets?

“Was he— violent?” I asked, remembering the scars I had seen on Gavin when I was drying him off.

It suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t know the first thing about the man I’d gone to bed with.

“Only when he had to be. You’ve got to understand we’re from a really rough neighborhood in West Belfast. Pretty much every boy over fifteen has at least one scar. It’s considered a sort of rite of passage. Time was it used to be guns and bombs, back when Gavin was a teenager, during the end of The Troubles. We count ourselves kinda lucky that we just gotta put up with the occasional shanking now. Hurts like hellfire, but everyone survives, mostly.”

The kid was young but had done a world of living that I couldn’t even imagine and seemed wise well beyond his years.

“Oh. Um. Well. I was just on my way out. But would you like to come in?” I finally asked. “I’m sorry for being so rude. I just hadn’t known who you were at first. And now I have to dart out.”

“Thanks,” he said and sauntered into the apartment. “And no problem.”

“Eat what you want from the kitchen,” I told him. “Gavin should be back soon. He had an audition.”

I left the apartment and made my way down to get the bus home, fighting the hot rage stirring up inside me. Gavin had many reasons to go to therapy, yet he had acted like he didn’t. Almost as if I was the strange one.

There was a lot he wasn’t telling me.

And why should he?

This was only a fake relationship.

And I guess he really thought of this whole arrangement as make-believe the entire time. Or else he would have shared some details about his life with me. Instead, he had acted as if everything was just fine, and he had even said he had no need for therapy.

I felt like a fool for thinking that Gavin and I could ever be anything other than fake engaged. A real relationship took honesty, and we certainly didn’t have that.

Chapter Thirteen – Maggie

During my bus ride home, terrible images flashed through my mind, of what Gavin’s childhood could have been like. I might have seen too many movies, but I imagined bomb plots and gang fights with knives.

I had heard about what Northern Ireland had been like years ago. We’d learned a little bit about it in school, but everything had happened before I was born. I was so far removed from that part of the world that the events there didn’t seem real.

I remembered reading something about President Clinton helping with a peace agreement. I guessed everyone thought The Troubles were over in the late 90s. Seemed that they weren’t, though, and Gavin had grown up in a country filled with turmoil.

I was really confused, flitting between feeling as if I was falling for him, feeling really bad for him, being really mad at him for lying to me, and realizing that I never really knew him at all.

Not the real him, anyway.

How could he keep such a major part of himself from me?

It was then that I felt the crushing weight of hypocrisy come down on me. My past wasn’t as deep and dark as his, but I wasn’t really open about it, even with my therapist, either. At least not as much as Gavin seemed to think.

Dr. Benoit knew what had happened with Kenny and Raquel, of course. It had been the effects of that whose ordeal that had brought me there to see her, after all. But I meant everything before that. Before my mom married Raquel’s dad.

My dad’s death had gone entirely unsaid, and that was no small matter. I supposed I hadn’t ever really dealt with it.

While I hated that Gavin had lied to me, I couldn’t really blame him for how he grew up and the fact that he wanted to keep that part of himself buried. It wasn’t as if it was his fault.

I just didn’t feel like I could risk a real relationship with him, though.

If he could keep the trauma of growing up a secret, what else might he be willing to hide?

Was he violent?

Eoin hadn’t seemed to think so, but his perspective could have been skewed by how he had grown up.

I needed to talk to someone. I called the one person who would tell me the truth, as hard as the truth might be to hear.

“Hey, girl,” Darcy said as soon as she answered the phone.

“Hey,” I said, with considerably less excitement.

“What’s up, buttercup? You sound a bit