One thing was certain, I didn’t like being compared to her. At. All.

“So you and Heather started dating?”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice gruff. “During our junior year, her father got a job in Virginia, but Heather refused to go with them. So her aunt offered to let her stay with her until she graduated from high school.”

“Did she go to college?”

“For a while, but she flunked out her second semester. Too much partyin’.”

“But you didn’t go to college?”

“My father believed it was a waste of time and money. He thinks life teaches you all you need to know. My mother had to convince him to pay for Max’s college.”

The heir and the spare to the Drummond kingdom. Since Wyatt was the heir, Max had very much been treated like the disposable son. Until he wasn’t.

“Did you and Heather break up when she went to college?”

“Yeah. She said she didn’t want to be tied down, and my father wasn’t all that crazy about her. Heather was much too headstrong to suit him.”

“But you got back together?” I asked.

“Not right away. She went to live with her parents for a couple of years after she left college. Then she came back.” He made a face. “And so did I.”

“You mean you went back to her?”

He nodded. “I was young and stupid. And she had some sort of spell on me.”

Something about the way he said that, or maybe the words he’d chosen, made me feel a little prick of jealousy, mostly because I obviously hadn’t meant that much to him. I told myself he’d known her for years and me only a month, but still…

“What sort of spell?” I asked, proud of myself for not letting my irritation bleed through.

He put the pancakes on another plate and moved the skillet off the burner, staying on the other side of the island as he started doctoring his pancakes. “Nothing magical,” he said with a laugh. “More like she was a master manipulator and she knew how to play me like a fiddle. It didn’t hurt that she was wrapped in a pretty package.”

“Got any photos of her?”

“Nope,” he said, keeping his gaze on his food.

“Come on,” I said. “I don’t believe that. You were taken with her, spent years with her. Surely you have something. A snapshot of you with friends? Homecoming photos?”

He still refused to look at me. “Nope.”

I’d found newspaper articles about her last November when I’d looked up Wyatt’s arrest, but none of them had included any photos. “What about yearbooks?”

“I didn’t bring any of that stuff with me when I moved out. They’re all at my parents’ house.”

I didn’t think marching up to the Drummonds’ front door and asking to see Wyatt’s old yearbooks was a good idea. “So she left after y’all graduated high school, then came back a couple of years later?”

He took a moment. “She came back to see her aunt for a few weeks over the summer when we were twenty. We hooked up, but then she left for what I thought was good. When she came back the next time, I was runnin’ the bar. We got together, but she said she wanted to see other people, so I started datin’ Ruth. What Ruth and I had was nothin’ serious, and truth be told, datin’ someone who works for you is the worst idea ever. In any case, the next thing I know, Heather was wanting me back. I told her I was done bein’ her yo-yo, but she told me she’d done a lot of growin’ up and seeing me with Ruth had made her realize what was important.” He made a face. “She claimed it was me. And fool that I was, I believed her.”

He glanced up at me as though expecting me to reprimand him.

“Who am I to judge?” I said. “I’m the master of playing the fool with men.”

He made another face. “I’m fully aware you count me on that list.”

I did, but admitting it would serve no purpose.

“When we got back together, she started needlin’ me about the bar. She didn’t like that I didn’t flat-out own it, and suggested I try bein’ more assertive with my father. Demand what was mine.” He released a bitter laugh. “What was mine.” He pushed out a sigh. “I had a small house a few blocks from the tavern, and Heather moved some things in even though she never officially lived with me. We were together for about six months before I found out why she’d ended up back in Drum. She’d had an abortion while she was living with her parents, and they found out and disowned her. She couldn’t afford to live alone, so she moved back to Drum, and in with her aunt.”

“And back to you.”

He shrugged, but he didn’t come off as nonchalant as he was trying to act. “Yeah, but she was right. We had done some growing up, and we stuck that time. I think maybe I took her back because I’d dated everyone I was interested in and no one else seemed to fit. For all her issues, I knew what I was getting with her, you know?”

“Yeah.” Sadly, I did. I’d done the same thing with Jake.

“We started gettin’ serious, but she wanted more…or more specifically she wanted me to have more. She wanted me to own the tavern, not just run it for my father.” He shook his head with a wry grin. “She had a way of bolsterin’ a man to do things he might not ordinarily do. So I went to my parents and told them I wanted them to hand over the bar. My father knew right away it had come from Heather and told me she was a gold digger. I admit, I suspected there might be some truth to it, yet I’d already started the battle, I figured I might as well finish it. I told him if he didn’t give it to me, I’d disown the entire family. I should have known better, because he told me fine. I was no longer part of the family. I stopped running the bar, cold turkey, on Heather’s suggestion. Show him how much he needed me. Only he never came crawling to ask me back.”

He pushed out a sigh, and his voice was tight as he said, “Deep down, I think I knew he wouldn’t. Maybe part of me was relieved.” He shrugged again and swallowed, refusing to look at me again. “Maybe I was tired of trying to make the old man happy. But Heather was startin’ to sweat. She saw me as the Drummond heir apparent and she didn’t want to wait for the old man to die for me to get what was comin’ to me. She started pickin’ fights, tellin’ me I hadn’t approached him the right way, that I needed to go back and plead for forgiveness. I was close to crawlin’ back to him just to get Heather to shut up, and then I caught wind that my father had sold my baseball to Earl Cartwright. The one signed by Joe DiMaggio that my grandfather had given me.

“I’d been drinkin’ far more than I should have, feelin’ plenty of regret, and I went to talk to my father. He said he was selling off my things since I considered myself too good for the family, only he wasn’t givin’ me the money. I went home and just got drunker. The next thing I knew, I was drivin’ to the garage and breakin’ in. I got my baseball back, and I drove Heather and me to Balder Mountain State Park, where we drank even more. The next thing I knew, I was arrested for a DUI and breakin’ and enterin’.”

“You must have been pretty hurt by his behavior,” I said quietly. “Every child wants their father to love them.”