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and helping him
up. “I didn’t intend to come at you this strong. I’m just a bit pissed.”
    “No shit.”
    James lifted his shirt and cleaned the sweat off his face
with it. “The situation is getting worse.”
    “You mean Tate, right?”
    For all his easygoing and laid-back attitude, his little
brother was very observant. As a matter of fact, he was the only one who had
noticed Tate tensing whenever his aunt tried running wedding details by her.
Under different circumstances, Cole would have noticed too, but nowadays
Christy had him tied up in so many knots he hardly knew which way was loose.
    “Yeah, she’s freaking out about the wedding and trying to
hide it from me.”
    Well, she was trying to conceal it from everyone, not that
he gave a shit about that. She was a very reserved, fiercely independent person
and had all the right in the world to her privacy, just not from him.
    Max shrugged. “For the record, I would be freaking out too
if I had to marry you.”
    “Fuck off.”
    His little brother’s lips twitched. “Just saying, man.”
    “I found my woman on the verge of a breakdown yesterday
after spending the morning running wedding errands. Which is actually nothing
new, as I’ve been finding her like this for a while already. The worst part of
it? She tries to put up a front for my benefit. I went to the bridal shop
earlier because I knew she was going to be in a bad shape. She was barely
breathing, her face a mess from crying, and she has the gall to tell me she’s
got something in her eye. How stupid do I look to you?”
    Max cocked his eyebrow. “Really? Do you want me to answer?”
    He’d walked into that one all by himself. “Never mind,”
James said.
    She’d never been able to hide shit from him, much less now that
she was wrung so tight and her acting skills were slipping fast. Not to mention
she was running out of excuses. Credible ones, that is.
    “Even when it’s too blatant to deny she’s freaked out, she
comes up with the shittiest excuses ever. The other day I caught her crying her
eyes out on the deck, and guess what she said.”
    Max looked at him expectantly.
    “Cat allergy.”
    “You don’t have a cat.”
    “Exactly.”
    Max laughed. “Sucky liar.”
    “Yep.” What was going to be next? Honey, I wasn’t crying. I was just sweating profusely through my
eyeballs? Please. Most times he felt like throttling some sense into her.
Still, she was trying so hard to keep her anguish from him. It gnawed at his
soul.
    “She loves you,” Max stated. “No fucking clue why, but she
does. The problem is she’s hurting.”
    “I know.”
    His woman was a fighter, but she was grieving, and this
wedding was bringing all those feelings to the surface. She’d always wanted a
big ceremony in her parents’ backyard—her family around her, her father walking
her down the aisle, giving her away. Her brother standing beside her. James
would gladly bust his ass to give Tate everything, but that wasn’t within his
power.
    She was in pain, and instead of coming to him for help, she
was pretending everything was okay.
    Even though James didn’t approve of her crazy ways, Elle was
doing a great job at distracting Tate, and he loved his future sister-in-law
for it because if his woman was still struggling, Elle was doing much worse,
never mind what she let others see or what she herself believed.
    Max walked to the bench and opened a bottle of water. “You
just need to talk to her.”
    Right. Easier said than done.
    He’d tried talking to Tate, asking whenever he saw her
withdrawn or sad, but she always played her moods down. She was just tired or
stressed from work, nothing for him to worry about. Yada yada. The second he
insisted and brought up the wedding, she shut down or changed the subject.
She’d even started using sex to distract him. Which he, being a man, didn’t
have anything against. At all. Still, not very conducive to solving their
current impasse.
    “It started small, but