“No,” he said with a laugh. “It’s fine.”
“Do you mind if he comes to the match tomorrow, and maybe we can all hang out and get ice cream or something afterward?” I asked with a cocktail of nerves and hope that I hadn’t felt since I myself was a teen asking out a boy. Such a strange feeling, to want my son’s approval so badly.
He shrugged happily. “Sure.”
“Does it bother you that he’s a recovering addict?”
He shook his head. “Mom, he’s nothing like Dad. We’re cool.” His phone rattled, and he grabbed it. “Oh man, James just got a new cheat code.”
And that was that. He’d moved on. I’d clung to fears of what our life might be like if I ventured down this path again, but Alex was resilient. He’d taken his punches and gotten back up.
I was the one who’d been living in fear. He’d been living his life.
It was time for me to do the same.
Fully. In every way. Not only as a mom, but as a woman too. A woman who was falling hard for a man.
40
Colin
“I owe you, man. The Cristal’s on me,” Rex said, offering his hand to shake as I pulled up to the building at the community college where Rex and Marcus were slated to take the math test. “Wait. I meant the Shirley Temple’s on me.”
I waved him off. “Get out of here. Happy to do it.”
“What are you doing today? You gonna go find the next Google to buy, or go scale the side of a mountain with your Spidey hands?”
“Both,” I said. “Work. Some climbing, a run, then a swim.”
“You’re nuts.”
“You should go with me sometime.”
“Now you’re really crazy,” Rex said, laughing. “But I will cheer your badass self on when the day comes.”
“Or maybe if you score well, you can intern for me, and we can go rock climbing to celebrate.”
He jerked his head back. “Intern like a J-O-B?”
I laughed. “Yes, I pay my interns.”
Rex offered a fist for knocking.
“Excellent,” I said, then looked into the back seat as Marcus grabbed his backpack. The kid had been quiet the whole ride. Then again, Rex tended to occupy the majority of the conversational space in any room. “Good luck, Marcus.”
“Thanks for the ride. I didn’t know till Rex told me this morning that you were picking us up.”
I furrowed my brow for a moment, wondering why it mattered that I was the one picking them up. But I figured Marcus had more important matters on his mind. “Happy to help. You guys will do great.”
Then I went to my office, where Larsen greeted me with a coffee and the sheer excitement of having found a kick-ass start-up.
“Talk to me. Tell me why I want in,” I said as we walked down the hall. And later, as I worked on a term sheet for the first round of funding, the day was made perfect by the photo that landed on my phone. An image of Elle’s legs from the thighs down in her roller derby socks.
Elle: See you tonight. I can’t wait.
I replied from the heart.
Colin: Literally counting down the hours.
41
Elle
The whistle blared loudly that evening, and Janine took off around the track, hell-bent on scoring more points. I joined in with the other blockers, jostling and jockeying against the Resurrection Girls’ efforts to score on the Fishnet Brigade. My quads burned, and my heart beat furiously. My focus narrowed, as it always did during matches, to my mission—protect the jammer and win the game.
On the next lap, I held out a hand for Janine, who gripped it for a few seconds then let go as I sent her shooting faster around the curve. As Janine sped past a Resurrection Girl, an image of Colin popped into my head. I shook it off. I couldn’t think about him now. Couldn’t think about the fact that he wasn’t here. Hadn’t shown up. The match would be over in two minutes. My team was ahead. The point Janine just scored from my assist was more padding on the total.
Maybe by the time we finished he’d be here. He’d show, right? He had to.
A brief burst of frustration powered me around the track, my muscles cursing at me. I didn’t want to believe that the man I was falling for would fail to show up for me and my kid.
The only thing that would hold him back would be—
Oh God. Oh no. Now? Was it happening now?
My wheels slipped out from under me, and I crashed hard onto the sleek wood.
42
Colin
A little earlier in the day
As soon as I heard the rumble of Ryan’s truck, Johnny Cash whimpered and thumped his tail against my floor. “He’s back,” I said to the dog, who wagged his tail even harder. “C’mon, boy. Want to go see Ryan?”
The tail became a propeller, moving so fast it could power a motorboat. I opened my front door, and the border collie took off like a shot, tearing across the lawn to greet his master. I joined the two of them on the sidewalk. “Looks like someone missed you.”
Ryan stood up and gave me a quick hug. “Thanks for watching him. I appreciate it.”
“He’s easy. Welcome back. How was it?”
Ryan cocked his head and seemed to consider the question for a few seconds as he petted his dog. “I’m going to ask her to marry me next week.”
“Guess you had a great time.” I shook my brother’s hand in congratulations and proceeded to pepper him with more questions.
Ryan answered them all then capped it off with a simple truth. “She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
I parked a hand on Ryan’s shoulder and looked him square in the eyes. “She is. And don’t ever forget it.”
“I won’t,” he said, then opened the door of his truck for the dog. An engine rattled down the street, as I patted Johnny Cash goodbye.
“He’s back,” Ryan said in a hiss. “Looks like he knows where we all live. Sophie told me he stopped by my house right before we went to Germany.”
I furrowed my brow and was about to ask Who’s back? When I heard a familiar-sounding “Hey.”
“What’s the deal?” Ryan said, and I nearly stumbled when I turned and saw who my brother was addressing. “My fiancée told me you stopped by my house the other week. Just man up and tell us what this is about.”
Shit. I had told Ryan about Marcus and the Protectors, but I’d had no idea that the kid had stopped by Ryan’s house before. What the hell?
“Marcus?” I asked, trying to figure out why he was here, and how he knew where I lived. Was he here to share his math results? But then why had he gone to Ryan’s house the other week?
Ryan turned to me. “You know this kid?”
I simply nodded. I tried to form words, but I wasn’t even sure what to say. I was used to assessing situations, but this one had me perplexed.
Marcus cut in. “I want to talk to both of you,” he said, a touch of nervousness in his voice. “We all have something in common.”
“What are you talking about? And why are you here?” Ryan demanded of Marcus, then to me, he said, “Who is he?”
I was about to say what I knew—I know him from the center, I drove him to his math test this morning, he’s friends with Rex, Elle knows him, he’s a member of the Protectors—but all those words crumbled to dust when Marcus spoke next.
“My name is Marcus. I was born seventeen years ago at the Stella McLaren Federal Women’s Correctional Center. My mother is Dora Prince. I’m your brother.”
All the sound in the universe was vacuumed up. My heart stopped, my brain short-circuited, and the ground began to sway.
43
Colin
I was frozen, but I wasn’t cold. My breath didn’t fit in my chest. My skin was two sizes too small.
“Who—” I started, but got stuck on the question. “Who is your father?” I managed to ask, the words thin and tentative as I tried to make sense of the way north had become south, and how up was now down, and who the hell this kid’s dad was
. Had our mother been knocked up courtesy of Stefano? That thought churned my stomach. Or did we share the same dad? But if Marcus had been born to Thomas Paige, we would surely have known about his existence, because the prison would have turned the baby over to Thomas Paige’s parents to raise—my grandparents.
Which meant . . .
My blood went cold.
“My father is Luke Carlton,” Marcus supplied.
The name of my mother’s lover.
I was ice.
My mother had not only cheated on my dad, she’d gotten pregnant from the affair. And that was the least of her crimes.
I didn’t speak right away. I tried to process this news, tried to find my voice. When I did, all I could say was the obvious. “So she was pregnant when she went to prison?” I asked, the words tasting like gravel.
“I guess she had to have been,” Marcus said. The three of us stood in our places like actors on our marks, no one moving at all.
“Pregnant? She was actually pregnant?” I asked again, as if repeating the facts would assemble them into a neat, orderly package.
But before Marcus could respond, I turned to Ryan. “Can you believe this?” I said to him, holding my hands out wide. I’d barely batted an eye when the detective had told me last that my mother had been dealing drugs.
But this—this was something else entirely. This was the true bombshell.
I had another brother. One who was fourteen years younger. One I’d never known existed.
This was a meteor crashing into my backyard, slamming a crater in the earth. This was me standing over it, trying to figure out what to do with that gaping maw in the ground.
“No. This is insane, even for her,” Ryan said, the look in his eyes mirroring mine.
I snapped my gaze back to Marcus, who was rubbing a hand over his chin, a gesture that I often did too. I flinched at that one small shared trait. “I can’t believe she was pregnant that whole time when everything went down. Her arrest. The trial. And she hid the pregnancy through all of that?”
“It sounds like it,” Marcus said. “We had to keep a lot of things quiet. My dad didn’t want me mentioning it to anyone. Judging from things he told me later, I had the impression that my mom was scared of word getting out that she was pregnant.” His early nerves seemed to have evaporated, replaced by something that sounded like relief. He straightened his spine, standing taller. He still wasn’t as tall as Ryan or I though. Perhaps the height genes among the Sloan men had come from our father. Somehow this small detail mattered to me—mattered because I’d loved my dad. Because I missed my dad.
“When were you born?”
Marcus gave us his birthday. Three months after our mom went to prison. Which meant she would have been six months pregnant when she was locked up. I tried to remember how she’d looked then, during the trial and her arrest. She wore baggy clothes, if memory served. As a seamstress, she’d have known how to make the right outfits to hide a growing belly. And, none of us had visited her during that first year, grandparents’ orders. The thought of her planning a whole deception hit me like a sledgehammer.
“Holy shit.”
There were no other words for this situation. Just none. I backed up, reaching for a railing, a tree, something to hold on to.
Nothing was behind me—only sidewalk, yard, and the utter surprise of our foursome becoming a fivesome. I grabbed Ryan’s shoulder, and my older brother steadied me as the news started to register as real.
My own mother had methodically hidden her fifth child, keeping him secret as the tsunami now rocked our family.
44
Colin
I was one of five, not one of four.
And none of us had a clue.
I started traveling back in time, trying to add up the facts and make some sense of this latest machination of our mother’s. “So she was pregnant when she was arrested,” I said, thinking out loud, taking a minute to process the absolute fucking weirdness of that detail. “And she was clearly pregnant when she was sentenced and went to prison.” My brain kicked back into gear and started reconnecting the parts to the whole. And as I lined up the pieces, my jaw nearly dropped with one cold, stark realization. I brought my hand to my mouth, starting to speak, but my voice was vacant. Then I found words again, managing a bare whisper as I turned to Ryan.
“She was pregnant when Stefano pulled the trigger.” And the corollary to that hit me like a harsh smack in the back of the head. Motivation. “Was that why she did it? Was that her motive?” I shifted my gaze to Marcus. “Did it have something to do with you?”
Marcus held up both hands as if in surrender. “I have no idea. I wasn’t even born.”
I didn’t mean to imply that Marcus was the motivation for the murder, but even so, it had to have played a role in our mother’s thinking. She probably wanted the life insurance money so she could run away with her lover and her unborn child.
I spun to face Ryan, who looked like a madman still—like this new wrinkle was rattling him to the core.
“Do you think this had anything to do with it?”
“I think what the hell. That’s what I think,” Ryan said, clenching and unclenching his fists. “I seriously cannot believe that she hid a pregnancy. But then, this is the woman who buried names of her accomplices, along with a goddamn drug-dealing route, in a dog jacket sewing pattern. That woman could hide anything. She’s like a squirrel hiding nuts.”
“She must have killed it in hide-and-seek,” Marcus said softly, and a sliver of a smile formed on his lips. I glanced at Ryan, our eyes locking, sharing the realization that Marcus had just made a joke about our mother. Our mother.
All of ours.
One and the same. The green-eyed, husband-murdering, drug-dealing, cheater of a woman who had slept with this kid’s father while she’d been married to my dad.
Such a twisted, sordid tale. Dateline would have a field day with this new development.
Marcus took a sheet of paper from his jeans pocket and unfolded it. “I brought this. I wasn’t sure if you guys would believe me. But here it is,” he said, then handed over a birth certificate. With steady hands, I held the paper and read every detail, Ryan by my side, peering at the document too. From the state of Nevada. Marcus Carlton’s birth certificate. The mother’s name was Dora Prince. The father’s was Luke Carlton. The date was three months after our mother became inmate #347-921.
In black and white.
“Have you always known? That she was your mom? Or did Luke try to keep that from you?” I asked as I handed it back and studied Marcus’s face, looking for clues, for the family resemblance. Michael, Ryan, and I had plenty of differences, but we all looked like brothers.
Did Marcus fit the mold? He had the same eyes as me. The same square jawline. I saw shades of myself in this boy, and it was odd to be looking at him in this new light.
“He wouldn’t have been able to. Even if my dad and stepmom had wanted to hide it, they wouldn’t have had much luck. My stepmom is from Vietnam. We look nothing alike.”
“Ah, got it,” I said, speeding onto the next questions. There were so many they were piling up, but I desperately wanted to make sense of this. “So there was no hiding that you weren’t her biological kid. And you knew who your biological mom was, but Luke swore you to secrecy when you were younger?”
Marcus nodded. “Exactly. He didn’t want to hide my birth story from me, partly because he needed us to lie low for a while. That’s what he told me when I was in grade school. He told me they’d been threatened. That’s why he left Las Vegas in the first place with me after I was born. He said once she went to prison, my mom and dad were warned that I’d be hurt. So we had to get out of town.” He paused, drawing a breath. “And I guess you guys too.”
Ryan flinched. “He said that? That we would all be hurt?”
Marcus held up his hands. “I don’t know every detail. But my dad said that it was too dangerous for us to stay in Vegas so he moved to San Di
ego with me, and met my stepmom there.”
Ryan dropped a hand on my shoulder and exhaled, hard. His words came out dry and crackly. “You know what she said to me the other week? The last time I was there?”
“When she finally confessed to you?”
Ryan nodded. “She said, ‘They told me they’d hurt you all. They told me they’d come after my babies if I said a word.’ I bet it was TJ and Kenny who said that.”
The hair on my arms stood on end as the full meaning registered. “Do you think she meant all of us?” I tipped my chin at Marcus.
But Ryan didn’t answer. Marcus did. “That’s what she’s told me too.”
“She? You’ve seen her? You’ve met her?” Ryan asked, then stopped himself, halting the conversation. “I gotta get Johnny Cash out of the car. Let’s go inside.”
A few minutes later, I let my older brother, the dog, and my younger brother into my house.
Younger brother.
The fact still didn’t compute. “You go see her?” I asked the boy who had once just been another kid at the center trying to rise above. Now he was my flesh and blood.
“I have before. A few times. Look, it’s not like I have some deep relationship with her,” he said, his tone somewhat apologetic. “Obviously she never raised me. I’m closer to my stepmom. But I visited a few times. My dad used to take me when I was a lot younger, and then he dropped me off when I still wanted to see her. He knew it was important for me to go, and I wanted to know who my mother was.”
My Sinful Longing (Sinful Men Book 3) Page 15