His Greatest Treasure (Greatest Love #4)

Chapter 9

9

OLIVER

Me: The weeds in your grass are hideous.

Ary: Are you offering to pluck them for me, or do you just enjoy pissing me off?

Me: If you mowed the lawn, the weeds would disappear.

Ary: Bye, jackass.

I scowl at my phone, this morning’s conversation with my neighbour not appeasing me by any means. Yeah, my messages could be construed as rude, but it’s impossible not to give in to the urge to piss her off every chance I get. She doesn’t care about her yard, but I do. Only because if hers looks like shit, it makes mine look like shit. Yeah, that’s it.

I’d mow it for her if she asked, which is what I was hoping she’d do. I thought my offer was clear when I texted her telling her how terrible her lawn looked the other day. Instead, she left me on Read.

Me: I’ll mow it next time I do mine.

I send the text and immediately want to unsend it. But there’s no time. As if she’s been sitting there waiting for me to reply, hers comes a beat later.

Ary: No thanks. I’d prefer you pick the weeds by hand.

“What’s your problem, Olliepop?” my cousin Tinsley asks.

The nickname grates, but I ignore it. “If you were a single mom with no support, can you tell me why you wouldn’t want to accept help from someone who has offered multiple times? Are all women so damn stubborn?”

Okay, the multiple times is a stretch, but oh fucking well. I’m guessing about the no-support part yet feel it in my gut that I’m right. Her small rant about her daughter’s father was enough of a giveaway to put together that she’s raising her almost completely on her own.

Tinsley’s best friend, Noah, dips his fingers into the waistband of her shorts, tugging her close to him. The dark possessiveness in his eyes as he tries to flay me open with them would scare me shitless if I hadn’t grown up with the psychopath.

“She’ll never be a single mother. What the fuck kind of question is that?”

I roll my eyes, shrugging off his words. He’s a scary fuck, but he’s family. Even decked out in head-to-toe tattoos, including one that spans the entire expanse of his throat and makes it appear as though it’s been photographed in an X-ray machine, he doesn’t scare me.

“I’m not talking about Tinsley, you brute.”

Jamie shares the same way of thinking I do. “Are we not going to talk about how Noah clearly made his move on her, though?”

“Am I supposed to be shocked or something?” I ask, blinking at the obvious display Noah’s been putting on with Tinsley since they stepped inside his parents’ house .

He’s been pining after her since he was a kid. It’s about damn time he stopped pussyfooting around.

“You’re so boring,” Jamie mutters.

“And the two of you are headache inducing,” Dad says, offering Tinsley a tight, apologetic expression. “Good for you and Noah. You look good together. Always have.”

From Mom’s spot on the arm of Dad’s chair, she slots into the conversation. “He’s right. I love the two of you together so much.”

“I should have taken Maddox up on that bet when we were teens,” Jamie says.

Adalyn comes bouncing into the living room, her purple hair bright. Cooper is following behind, staring at her like it would pain him to look away.

“You should have because you just lost four hundred bucks,” she says to Jamie.

The rest of the family tumbles into the living room, and I stand, too annoyed with Ary to sit and listen to the flurry of conversations that are about to take place. When Maddox and Braxton’s son, Liam, pushes his way through Addie’s legs and runs into Noah’s arms, I use the distraction to slip out.

The Hutton house is the closest thing to a mansion I’ve ever seen. I grew up in a big place, but it was nothing compared to this one. Mom used to bug her brother, Oakley, all the time about it, calling him a show-off every chance she got.

In reality, he’s the furthest thing from it. The house might be massive, but it’s still warm. The generous expanse of land it sits on has seen more Sunday game days than a football stadium, and more than a few of my best memories were made here.

Stepping out onto the front porch, I breathe in the clean air and stare at the tree house standing across the driveway. Jamie and I didn’t climb up there too often—it was more Maddox and Braxton’s thing—but we did every few visits.

The sound of a car engine has me looking down the driveway, squinting to see better through the bright sun. It’s a small car, not one that any of my family members drive.

No, it’s the car that’s been parked in front of Ary’s house for weeks now. The deep blue Ford Focus with the Hot Girls Hit Curbs sticker on the bumper above a deep dent decorated with yellow paint and all four tires curb rashed to utter shit.

My stomach tightens to the point of discomfort. There’s not much room for her to park with everyone else here, but she manages to squeeze in between my Tahoe and Jamie’s Jeep. She’s crooked as all hell, and when she swings her door open, there’s hardly enough room for her to squeeze out without hitting my door with hers.

She takes a look at her park job and winces, worrying her lip before rounding the trunk and helping her daughter out of the back seat.

“Oh,” Nova says, her head swivelling in every direction. “This house is really big.”

Ary steers her down the driveway with a hand on her back. “Yeah, it is.”

“Why is it so big?”

“Because they wanted a big house.”

“Yeah, but why? Don’t they get lost?”

“I’m sure they know where they’re going, honey.”

“How? A map?”

“You’ll flatter the Huttons if you tell them their house should have a map made for it,” I say, my voice cutting through the air.

Nova’s the first to look at me, her head cocked, mouth twisted innocently. I can’t say I expected to see her here. Either of them. Their surprise presence doesn’t make sense. I’m immediately on the defensive.

Ary reads my expression quickly, a warning flashing in her stare. “I had a terrible feeling you’d be here today.”

“This is my uncle’s house, after all.”

“Is it?” she asks, her tone dripping with enough sarcasm to confuse me. “I had no idea. ”

I suck back my irritation with a glance at Nova. “Who invited you here?”

“Why, scared I followed you?”

“Unlikely. I’d have noticed your terrible driving if you were behind me. Probably have a piece of your front bumper attached to my SUV.”

“My mom is a good driver. She’s better than my mormor,” Nova says sternly.

The term is unfamiliar to me, and it must show.

Ary ruffles Nova’s hair and says, “Her grandmother.”

“Right.”

Nova tips her chin back and stares me down. “She’s in Sweden.”

“Sweden?” Something tingles in my brain. A thought I can’t quite latch onto. “Is she visiting?”

Ary starts ushering Nova up to the steps, and I furrow my brows, trying to dissect the look on her face. Annoyed and nervous. A weird mix.

Nova stares at me the entire time up the porch steps, almost daring me to be the one to break the staring contest first.

“No. My mormor lives in Sweden. So did my mom,” she explains.

That tingle grows and grows, becoming impossible to ignore. My eyes bulge when a fragment of a memory slips loose.

“No way she gives you even a double look, Olliepop. She’s way out of your league,” Maddox says with a deep laugh.

We’re sitting on the hood of Cooper’s car, the moon high and sky clear of clouds. It’s summer break for me, but Maddox and Cooper have already graduated high school. At least they still hang out with me, even if I am only sixteen and they’re twenty and twenty-two.

“Not to mention, you’re not even eighteen yet. She’s dating men, Oliver, not teenage boys,” Cooper adds.

I shrug off their concern. “I’m a man. Don’t patronize me. I’ve got big plans for my life. Impressive ones that she won’t be able to dismiss. ”

“Damn right you’ve got big plans. That’s fucking great, man. But she’s twenty. Not to mention, her father would beat you to a bloody pulp if you got involved with his daughter,” Maddox says.

Their doubt was expected. They’ve known about my crush on Avery since I first started having one the last time she visited Vancouver. She was eighteen, and I was fourteen. I’d kept it to myself then, not daring to tell her about it. But now, I’m sixteen. I’ve grown a lot these past two years. I’m ready for her to know that I want her now. Plus, her father’s already threatened to beat me up for looking at her too much, so I have nothing to lose now.

Two years is a long time to not see her even once face to face. But she lives in Sweden, and her family has visited less and less over the past few years. Now might be my last chance to tell her how I feel. I can only stalk her social media accounts and send boring texts so many times without being considered a creep.

Cooper pats my back and hands me a bottle of Coke. The two of them still won’t let me drink. Pricks.

“Well, my dad said they get here tomorrow. Are you going to do it right away?”

I nod. “The sooner, the better.”

“It’s your funeral,” Maddox says.

I remember that night and the next as clear as day. Avery and her family showed up at Cooper’s father’s house with her Swedish boyfriend in tow. His presence was a very unwelcome one. It only took one look at him for my crush on Avery to shrivel and die.

It was easy enough to block her on social media and pretend she didn’t exist after she went back to Sweden and, as far as I knew, stayed there for good. Nobody brought her whereabouts up, knowing I didn’t want to hear a word about anything involving her, and I never asked, content on not knowing.

Obviously, I missed something very crucial, considering she’s now standing right in front of me, no longer the quiet girl with box-dyed black hair and too much eyeliner that used to make the blue in her eyes bright enough to blind. She doesn’t have the bull ring in her nose or the ball piercing at the end of her tongue. Her face has slimmed out as she’s aged, along with her entire figure.

I feel like an outright idiot to have bought the name she fed me and not caught the small birthmark on her left eyelid. She’s grown up, matured in a way that’s halted my ability to recognize her.

“Are you going to be sick?” Nova asks, poking me hard in the stomach.

Avery— not Ary—ushers her daughter toward the door, sweeping her gaze over me, a hint of sadness there and gone in a flash. “If he is, we best get a move on so we aren’t in the splash zone.”

“Yeah, that would be gross.”

I stare at the daughter I never knew Avery had as something hot and unforgiving flares in my chest. Regret is a brutal bastard that makes me feel like the world’s biggest douchebag for not recognizing one of my childhood friends on sight. Or at all.

This family dinner just got a lot more awkward.