She turned and walked away. No woman had ever done that to him. Ever. A stunned BJ, his mouth wide open, noticed Quinn off to the side and the way he was holding his phone meant he was recording.
He flipped his brother a double bird, but in his heart, BJ knew he was the one who was fucked.
CHAPTER 16
The meal was outstanding, but BJ had lost his appetite. And that had never happened before. Instead of taking the enormous piles of food as a personal challenge, he held back, watching. If need be, he could stop somewhere for dinner on the way home, and he probably would, but this might be the only decent meal these kids got for a while. They all seemed so thin. Scrubbed and dressed in what he assumed were their best outfits, there was no doubt they were poor. It seemed wrong to take food out of their mouths to satisfy his own gluttony.
Holy shit, that notion was practically painful. What the fuck had she done to him? A knot tied itself in his stomach. He pushed his plate away as if to distance himself from the ideas in his head.
He turned to his brothers. “We’ve eaten and seen the bottom of a few glasses; I say we pile in the limo and get the hell out of here.”
“No can do, BeeJus. The limos split right after they dropped us off—while you were getting that hideous mug of yours photographed. They won’t be back until six, after mass.” Shane grunted.
BJ hung his head in disbelief, then looked around the grounds. “Where’s Riley?”
Knox groaned. “That’s the worst part. He took off with the photographer about half an hour ago. I wish I’d thought to tag along.”
“Hell, Riley gets a little action, and we have to go to mass. Where’s the fairness in that? What a waste of a Saturday. Let’s call a taxi.”
“Tried that, none of them want to come to this neighborhood. I called a few friends, and they all said the same thing. We’re stuck here,” Knox lamented.
Stuck. In a crowd of welfare queens and illegitimate children, one of whom was an incredibly beautiful, sexy woman who had turned everything he knew to be true and correct into a giant question mark.
* * *
Megan paced up and down the church’s main aisle, struggling to calm the raging anger that burned inside her. “What an asshole!” She stopped to cross herself and look up. “Sorry, but I can’t believe some of the things he said to me.”
Stephanie agreed. “No doubt about it, BJ is an asshole.” She made no move to atone for her language. “I’ve known him my entire life, and I love him to pieces, but I’ve never seen him lose it like that. He barely flinched when I threw his favorite book into the pool. Seems you gave as good as you got. What happened?”
BJ reads? Megan took a slow deep breath and let it out. “He spouted all that right-wing crap at me, and I lost it. The dam broke and all the emotions that I’ve kept bottled up exploded. It was like trying to sop up a tidal wave with a beach towel. The words kept coming, and I couldn’t stop them. I suppose I owe him an apology, but he owes me one, too.”
Keeping her emotions in check had been exhausting, especially the frustration of the celibacy forced on her by her husband’s death. Being near BJ her in waves of desire that shocked her. But there were so many other emotions swirling in her, joy, sadness, hurt, anger, confusion. Emotions she had pushed deep inside so she could keep putting one foot in front of the other.
But buried feelings had a way of pushing to the surface and erupting at the most inopportune time. Like today, standing next to an incredibly handsome and sexy man. A wildly attractive man who had some of the most unattractive views imaginable. For a flash, she’d thought about shutting him up with a blistering kiss.
“You know he doesn’t believe half the stuff he said to you.” Deb handed Pete to Megan. “We’re lifelong Republicans, but we’re not bat-shit crazy. We’re embarrassed by the direction the party is headed. I’ll make sure he apologizes to you.”
Megan ruffled Pete’s hair. Breathing in her son’s soft, clean essence calmed her. “The thing of it is, I don’t believe half the stuff I said to him, either. I’m an independent. I’ve probably voted for as many Republicans as Democrats, but his attitude toward people stuck in poverty hurts. We grew up in neighborhoods like this one. Getting out is damn near impossible. Our mother got pregnant with Ethan when she was thirteen; she was barely sixteen when I was born. She had no chance of getting out, so she ran. Left us. I never knew her. I have no idea who our father is, or if we have the same father. No name is listed on either of our birth certificates. Ethan literally prostituted himself to pull us out. If he hadn’t been the man he is, I’d be one of the welfare queens BJ ranted about. It’s not as easy to get out as he seems to think.”
Stephanie winced. “You know he doesn’t like the term prostitute.”
“Yeah, I know, but what else do you call trading sex for financial gain? He likes to say he never took cash, but they gave him free use of a credit card. Money is money. And illegal, immoral activities are sometimes the only way out of this misery.”
“You’re right about one thing,” Deb admitted. “My boys did win the sperm lottery, but the egg was pretty good, too. None of them have a clue what people in neighborhoods like this deal with. I think that’s about to change.”
CHAPTER 17
BJ paced back and forth in front of the fireplace in his dad’s study, staring down at the antique Oriental carpet that had come with the house more than thirty years ago. By the time he was done venting, he might owe his dad a new rug.
At times like this, the old man drove him crazy, but at the end of the day, BJ knew the man loved him. He knew BS wouldn’t let anyone hurt him. His dad would always be there for him. Megan had never had that. She didn’t know the name of the man who had donated half of her DNA.
He raked his hand through his hair and rested it on the back of his neck. His anger rose. He knew his anger was misplaced, but he blasted the closest target. “What the hell do you mean we have to go back there again this Saturday? I have plans!”
Plans that didn’t include returning to that neighborhood, and especially that church. If BJ had to attend mass, he preferred it neat and clean, by the numbers, involving little more than muscle memory, and lasting less than an hour. All of the things that little slice of Socialism was not. He’d been compelled to sit through mass, held hostage by the lack of transportation. Forced to tune out the words of the homily that continued the assault on his core beliefs, which included very little of what the good brothers had tried to pound into his head for thirteen long, arduous years. And he’d had to do it all sitting next to Megan as his last official act as Kegan’s godfather.
Last official act for the day, anyway. An obnoxious little voice tickling the back of his brain told him he was now part of something more than he was prepared to handle, something that had nothing to do with Kegan. Whatever that something was, he could only nibble at the edges. Anything more, he couldn’t handle.
What he needed to think about was why he was so pissed off. He wasn’t sure. It was a relatively new experience for him. He almost never lost his cool. But now that he had, what was he supposed to do with these unfamiliar emotions? Where should he direct them? Not at Megan. None of this was her fault.
Why did one question always seem to lead to another, harder question? Like exactly who was he angry with? Truth be told, he was angry with himself, and he’d done a pretty good job of beating himself up the past few days over the hurt he’d read in her eyes after his blunder. He was going to have to find a way to make it up to her. If she ever let him talk to her again. And he wanted to talk to her again. And touch her. And feel her soft hair on his face. And that’s what he had to avoid. Lust he could handle, but this wasn’t lust. He refused to give it a name because the name it demanded scared him beyond words.
Not even the heat of the temper he felt building in his dad concerned him as much as his own unfocused feelings. Anger had never been a stranger to the old man. He’d never had a problem blasting whoever was closest. BJ braced himself
for the explosion he knew was coming.
BS crossed his arms over his chest. “I had plans, too, but I canceled them. You will cancel yours.”
Retreat! Retreat! Not a chance. He had to do something with this anger. “Last time I checked, I was thirty-three years old,” BJ reminded him. “I’ve been on my own almost ten years now. You can’t order me to pile into the back of the minivan and expect me to do it anymore.”
“By the time I was thirty-three, Shane was on the way!” Brian shot back.
The good old “by the time I was your age” speech. BJ hated it. So he was still unattached, big deal. He planned to stay that way. Except for sex, women didn’t interest him. They were too self-absorbed, had nothing better to talk about except their yappy little rat dogs or the latest celebrity gossip. They spent their days in the gym or shopping or having lunch with their girlfriends. If you could call the green stuff they pushed around their plate without eating anything a proper lunch. They looked good on his arm and felt great in his bed but bored him to no end. Right? Aw, hell, another question.
“Besides,” Brian continued. “This is your mother’s deal. She’s convinced the board of Clausen Charities to fund the renovation project. It’s a family thing, and you’re a part of the family, so you will be there.”
“Family? You’re going to pull the family card on me? Since when have we ever been a family with Mom’s half of the gene pool?”
His dad opened his mouth to answer, stopped, and tilted his head to one side. After a long pause, he threw up his arms, shrugged his shoulders, and turned away.
BJ understood exactly what his dad wasn’t saying. If they’d ever been a family, it was long before BJ had been born. His mother’s family consisted of two people: her brother Robert’s widow, Lilian, and their son, William. BS never referred to either of them by name; “your cousin” or “your aunt” was as close as he’d ever been willing to come. Thirty-six years of marriage and five sons hadn’t earned his dad a spot in the Clausen family, and their status was iffy at best. Good enough for a group photo at the company’s annual Christmas party, but not much else. Their mother held their proxies and voted their stock. As long as there was an electronic transfer in his bank account by the fifteenth of the month, he couldn’t care less about his Clausen family.
Ditto for the Tobins. They didn’t much like his mother either, or his dad for that matter, but at least they were cordial. Usually. That trust fund disbursement came in the form of an old-fashioned paper check, and as long as it didn’t bounce, he was good.
Cast adrift by their biological families for reasons BJ had never fully understood, his parents had set out to form an extended family of their own to compensate which had resulted in a gang of misfits and outcasts from other wealthy families. By her association with Steppie through Ethan, Megan was now part of that extended family. A sister of sorts. There was nothing brotherly about the way BJ felt about her.
But how did she feel about him? Something told him Megan wasn’t interested. That had never happened to him. It hurt his ego, and that meant she had to be conquered. He would have her in his bed, and soon. He’d cut his spring lady loose early so he didn’t have to take her to Steppie’s wedding, which meant he had a slot to fill. After all, it was getting close to time to pick his summer lady. He had to fit Megan in before his self-imposed deadline.
Angry rumblings told BJ the dadcano was about to erupt. BJ didn’t have the slightest idea what BS had been rambling on about. He turned to assess the threat. Crimson on the red scale, no danger yet. He knew he should back off before the old man hit wine on the How Mad Is Dad meter, but he had some steam of his own to blow off. “To hell with the Clausens. I’m a Tobin,” BJ reminded him.
Legally, that was true, but the five Tobin brothers were definitely their mother’s sons. It was almost as if their father had only contributed two genes: the Y chromosome and that damned blood allergy.
BJ’s simple statement did the trick. He watched the old man’s anger cool. Bomb diffused, stand down.
“I thank you for your loyalty, son. It pains me to say this, but you’re as much a Clausen as you are a Tobin. I hate them more than you do, and they hate us, but we’ll do this for your mother because we all love one Clausen. Be worthy.”
And there it was. BJ was wondering how long it would take his father to go there. Every time he attempted to go off the reservation, the Tobin family mantra yanked him back. Be worthy. BS had pounded those simple words into his sons’ heads as soon as they’d been old enough to understand. Carrying BJ had nearly killed his mother twice. It was his responsibility to live up to her pain and sacrifice. To be worthy.
It was a responsibility he took deadly seriously.
It’s not like BJ was a mama’s boy. It was more like he understood the hell she’d gone through while pregnant with him. How she’d fought and sacrificed to keep him inside of her long enough to give him a fighting chance outside of her, not the least of which was the weeks spent flat on her back in a sterile hospital room with tubes for nutrition and hydration to battle the severe morning sickness that had lasted every minute of every day for her entire pregnancy. With nothing much else to do, she’d turned to prayer, making promise after promise.
She had succeeded, but barely. And she’d kept each and every one of those promises. Her fierce love for BJ and his brothers still had the power to awe him. He knew he’d nearly killed her twice. He knew he’d nearly died twice himself during his six-week stay in the world’s foremost pediatric intensive care unit. He knew that if this cool cat had nine lives, he’d used four of them by the time he was two months old. And he also knew he was not about to sacrifice one of his remaining lives tethered to the same woman.
No, he would be worthy of his mother’s love, no matter what he had to sacrifice. Except for the daughter-in-law and grandchildren he knew she craved. That he couldn’t do. Not for her. Not for anyone. That part of him was broken.
CHAPTER 18
Megan let herself into Ethan’s office. “You summoned me, Your Majesty?” she teased. She knelt next to her son and kissed his forehead. Pete’s little head snuggled against a plush horse’s head and his tiny hand clenched the horse’s ear. She adjusted the brown spotted attached blanket over him. “Where did you find a horsie nap mat? Now I’ll never get him back into his butterfly one.”
Ethan kept his eyes glued to the pile of papers on his desk. “One of the many superpowers that comes with being the world’s greatest uncle.” He looked up and smiled when she giggled. “Online, where else do I shop? Take the horsie and leave the butterfly for Kegan.”
Megan’s hand clutched her heart and her eyes grew wide with mock horror. “What? A hand-me-down for your precious little princess?”
A casual observer would have passed the comment off as gentle ribbing between siblings, but they both knew there was more behind the jest than either of them was comfortable admitting, including a fair amount of pain and humiliation. Too many years of barely serviceable clothes they had been forced to wear, and little else as they’d bounced from foster home to foster home, had left deep wounds.
Ethan sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Leave it. I’ll take it with me to St. Al’s this weekend, which is what we need to talk about.”
Megan got up off the floor and settled into one of the chairs across the desk from her brother. “We got another sponsor for the renovation project?”
“We did, and you’ll never guess who.”
“I give.”
“Clausen Charities.”
Megan stared at him and shrugged her shoulders. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“Clausen as in Debra Clausen-Tobin. She owns half of Clausen Construction. After seeing what we’ve started there, she wants to be a part of it. Something about a sperm lottery. I don’t suppose you’d care to enlighten me about that?”
Oh crap. Ethan was trying to pretend he still thought she was a virgin and shouldn’t know about things like spe
rm. Some things were never going to change. “I told you about my little, uh, disagreement with BJ.”
“Apparently not all of it.” Ethan leaned back in his massive executive chair and crossed his orangutan arms over his chest.
Megan was no longer intimidated by this little “I’m your big brother, and I know what’s best for you.” game. She mimicked his actions. “I might have accused him of being a little luckier than most in the pick-your-parents contest.”
He nodded. “So, this is Deb’s way of showing her sons how the other ninety-nine percent lives.”
“Considering how much money they have, it’s amazing they’re as normal as they are. I haven’t seen them use hundred-dollar bills as toilet paper or anything, but I figured they’d be... I don’t know, snobbier, I guess.”
“That’s all on Deb. She’s an amazing woman. She has the faith to move mountains and did her best to teach her sons that. Too bad she failed.”
Yeah, Megan had figured that out by the way they’d all groused about having to attend mass. At one point, she’d scooted away from BJ, convinced a stray lightning bolt was about to reduce him to ash and she would become collateral damage.
Yet another strike against him. At least that’s what her brain told her. But the rest of her wasn’t listening.
“Will all of the Tobins be there?” she asked with as much disinterest as she could muster.
Ethan rolled his eyes. “It’s going to be a real family affair, I’m told. Stephanie says all of the boys are grumbling because they’ve been ordered to attend. Do me a favor and make peace with BJ. This could be the beginning of a great partnership. We could do so much good for the neighborhood and the kids there. Give them some of the things we never had.”
Fly Boy: A Friends to Lovers Standalone Romance (Tobin Tribe Book 2) Page 7