“We huh? I take it from your use of the word, and that sassy little post on your Facebook page, that lover boy isn’t a cheating bastard after all?” he scoffed, and this time I did groan.
Nothing was ever simple with my brothers. Nothing ever stopped short of a full-blown interrogation.
When all that shit had gone down with Stephen, I’d had to force each of my brothers to swear on their lives that they wouldn’t get involved. I needed their support emotionally – what I did not require, was the specific set of skills that they each possessed. Not every girl had a hacker, a boxer and a race car/stunt driver for brothers. The three of them together screamed trouble. The celebrity status of Stephen Miles wouldn’t have protected him for even a fraction of a second against those three.
I took a deep breath and braced myself. “Yes, we,” I confirmed. “My boyfriend, Parker – as I’m sure you’re already aware, and I have been having some problems that I need your help with, and yes, you’re correct in your assumption that he is not a cheating bastard.”
He chuckled down the line. “Oh, I’m aware of the situation alright, short-stuff. The only reason I wasn’t onto it sooner was because I had a date last night.”
“Ooooh, and who was the lucky lady?” I asked sarcastically.
“Her name was Billie, and to be honest she was a little dull.”
I laughed at his frankness.
“Anyway… she’s only just left, so I’m kinda late to the game.”
“She only just left?” I cried. “You just told me she was dull?”
“She was,” he agreed. “But surprisingly, I was okay with her being dull… in my bed… all night long... we didn’t do much talking to be fair.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“You love me,” he boasted.
“Out of obligation,” I mumbled.
I heard him tapping away on his keyboard, our banter clearly not getting in the way of his work.
“Are you going to tell me what the hell you’re doing?” I demanded.
He chuckled. “Calm your tits.”
I took another deep breath and rolled my neck. I glanced at Parker who was listening to my end of our exchange with delight. Siblings ribbing one another was funny if you weren’t stuck in the middle of it.
“Put him on speaker, babe?” Parker asked.
I hit the speaker button. “You’re on speaker with me and Parker,” I informed Tyler.
“What? No Hannah banana?”
“I got banished to the couch!” Han hollered out to him, obviously still within ear shot. “They think we’re bad news together.”
Ty chuckled. “They’re not wrong there, princess.”
Parker shot me a ‘what’s that about?’ look at Ty’s use of the term ‘princess’, but I just laughed and shook my head. It wasn’t meant as a term of endearment – if anything, it was a dig at Hannah’s diva tendencies.
“So, I’m on the line with ‘I’m a Teen’ magazine’s sexiest bachelor am I?” Tyler prompted.
Parker laughed loudly. “If the shoe fits…”
“So, what’s the deal with this cosy little picture? Because if you’re screwing my sister around, I’ll end you,” Ty threatened.
Well that went from zero to one hundred reeeeaaaal quick.
“Whhhhyyy?” I moaned as I covered my eyes, my face blushing scarlet. “Why couldn’t I have had sisters?”
Why do brothers have to be so embarrassing?
I peeked over at Parker, expecting him to look shocked, or surprised, or pissed off… or anything other than thoroughly amused like he was right now.
He grinned a massive, genuine grin at me – obviously enjoying my embarrassment.
“Trust me, man, I’d never intentionally do anything to hurt her,” he reassured my brother, with his eyes firmly locked on mine. “But regardless, I respect the warning; you wouldn’t be a very good protector if I didn’t feel the threat loud and clear.”
The line went silent for a moment.
“He sounds alright, Lotte.”
“He can still hear you,” I replied.
“I know,” Ty answered, and I could hear the smile in his voice.
Parker chuckled – not at all fazed by Tyler’s attempt at being the staunch guardian.
I rubbed my temples. When I woke up this morning, I had not been expecting a family meet and greet. “Can we just get back to it?” I begged.
“Already on it,” Ty promised. “So, I assumed you would want to know where it came from?”
“Yes,” I breathed. “That would be great.”
“So, I’ve tracked its path through social media, and the first person to post it was a… Shelley Corbett from HDN news, but I can see you’ve already figured that much out yourself…”
“Yeah.” I nodded as I listened. We had.
“Can you hack her emails?” I asked, before laughing at the ludicrous question I’d just asked. “Who am I kidding? You’re already doing it, aren’t you?”
He chuckled. “So, I hacked into her work account – which might I add, needs a serious firewall update.”
“Ty…”
He was so easily distracted when it came to all that computer mumbo jumbo.
“Sorry… so she received the image about a half hour before she posted it online. The server’s scrambled from the sender’s end, so I’m just tracing it back to the original source through a series of channels. But don’t worry, whoever sent this doesn’t have anywhere near enough of a clue to keep me out.”
He tapped away a few more times.
“And there we go,” he announced triumphantly, even though this was nothing more than child’s play to him.
“Who was it?” I demanded.
“You’ll have to give me a minute to look around, but the I.P. address is located in… Paris?” He sounded confused. “Do you even know anyone in Paris?”
“I know a few… but none with a death wish,” Parker chimed in. It didn’t matter who he knew – I already had my answer.
My blood boiled. “I only know one person that would do this,” I ground out.
“And there it is,” he confirmed. “The image came in, and went out again… we’re in the right place.”
“Hack him,” I demanded, full-blown rage taking over.
“Ah ‘hack’ his what?” he asked, his voice excited at the prospect, even though he obviously didn’t approve of my use of the term ‘hack’.
“Everything,” I hissed. “His whole damn life.”
“Consider it done,” he replied as he hit his keys a few more times.
“God this guy watches a lot of porn.” He chuckled.
I was seething, Parker approached me and tugged gently on my arm in question, but I was too mad to speak. I just shook my head at him.
“Woah… it looks like the wifey likes to pose in the nude…” He whistled low. “Or is this one the wife?”
“Ty!” I snapped.
“Sorry,” he replied quickly. “Maybe if you’d just tell me whose fucking computer I was in, I could spend less time snooping around, and more time destroying his life.”
He made a valid point.
“Stephen Miles,” I announced, my tone laced with venom. “So, I really hope you’re not exaggerating when you say you can ruin him.”
Parker growled deep in his throat from behind me, and I spun around to face him. He looked wild. There was this feral look in his eyes that I’d never seen before, and I knew that if we were to set him and Stephen loose in a cage right now, there would be absolutely no contest – Parker would rip him limb from limb.
“Motherfucker!” He slammed his fist down on the dining table. “I’ll kill him,” he ground out.
“Consider it done,” Ty replied in an airily calm voice. The darkness in his tone caused my skin to break out in goose bumps. “He can kiss his career goodbye.” He chuckled humourlessly. “His bank accounts are now frozen, the nude pictures of his side pieces have been made public…”
I�
�d never been more grateful for my brother’s skills and efficiency than I was in this moment.
He tapped away on his keyboard. “Every fucking last thing he has, I’ll take it from him, Charlotte,” he promised me.
This was why I loved my brothers. They might have been a total pain the ass most of the time, but they’d do anything for me –Tyler especially.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
There wasn’t one ounce of guilt in me for doing this right now. I should have let my brothers take care of him when he’d messed with me the first time, but I hadn’t.
I’d thought of myself as the bigger person, and I’d done things the noble way as Hannah and I had slogged our way back. The boys didn’t know how hard it had been for us. I hated the thought of them giving up anything to help me – so I simply didn’t tell them how rough things had gotten.
“Put lover boy on the phone and go take a minute,” Tyler instructed me, and for once in my life I was happy to do what I was told.
Parker held his hand out for the phone and I gladly passed it to him.
I was exhausted.
I’d thought that Stephen was out of my life forever, yet, here he was, making some kind of last ditch attempt to fuck with me. But worse than that, he’d fucked with Parker, and that shit wasn’t okay with me.
“That god damn prick,” Hannah cussed as I joined her and Jasper in the living room.
“If that brother of yours doesn’t ruin him thoroughly enough, Park will finish the job, you know that, right?” Jasper stated as he watched his friend talking with the phone up to his ear now. “He’s been looking for an excuse to bring the pain to that bastard, and fucking with you is about the worst thing he could have done.”
I nodded in acknowledgement at the truth in Jasper’s words. I had no doubt that Parker was the kind of man that protected what was his. And luckily enough for me, I was his now.
Parker spoke down the phone to Ty for a few minutes and then handed it back to me; he sat down next to me in the seat and pulled me into his lap.
“All good, Ty?” I asked with my eyes closed.
I was bone tired. I breathed in Parker’s scent and felt myself start to relax.
He placed soft kisses to the top of my head.
“Oh, I’m good alright,” Tyler replied enthusiastically. “I’ve been dying to take this prick down for years.”
I had to laugh a little at that. Now I just had to let Louis give him the beat down and Floyd drive the getaway vehicle, and I’d have three very happy brothers.
“Just make sure you don’t get caught,” I told him, unable to switch off my sisterly worrying.
Now it was his turn to laugh. “I appreciate your concern, short-stuff, but I’m already out, and he could spend the rest of his life trying to figure out who hit him, and he still wouldn’t come close.”
“Thank you, Ty.”
“No problem, sweetheart,” he replied genuinely.
There was still something bugging me about this whole situation.
“Where’d he get that picture, Ty?”
I was assuming that he’d discovered I’d finally met someone new, and this was his attempt to hurt me… but it still didn’t explain where he’d gotten that photo from in the first place.
“I haven’t looked into it yet, I’ll let you know when I have the name, shouldn’t be more than half an hour, okay?”
I breathed out deeply.
“Are you alright?” he asked softly.
“I’ll be fine. You’ve taken care of the karma, and I’ve got Parker and Hannah here to look after me.”
“And me,” Jasper chimed in, pretending to be offended by his exclusion.
I laughed. “And Jasper,” I amended.
“I’m glad you’re not alone.”
Parker had started raking his fingers through my hair now, and I hummed appreciatively.
“He seems like a pretty cool guy, short-stuff.”
“He is.”
“Didn’t think I’d find anyone that could hate Stephen as much as me and dumb and dumber, but I was wrong.”
Dumb and dumber was what the boys all referred to each other as. It didn’t matter if it was Floyd talking about Tyler and Louis, or Tyler talking about Louis and Floyd, or Louis talking about Tyler and Floyd. It was always ‘dumb and dumber’, and it drove me crazy.
“Anyway, I’ll let you go; I’ve got shit to do.”
“Thanks, Ty, I really owe you.”
He snorted a noise of disagreement before mumbling “Love you.”
“I love you too.”
“All the pics are gone,” Jasper stated, looking totally bewildered.
“Oh shit!” Parker leaned forward in excitement. “I forgot to tell you…” He turned to face me. “Your brother has been working on this new thing where he can just block an image.” He frowned at his lame attempt at explaining it. “He tried to enlighten me with how he did it… but it went way over my head. He somehow does a search of it on the entire web and then it gets blocked.” He shrugged.
I giggled. Parker obviously had about as much of an understanding of computer programming as I did.
“Yeah… I don’t know what he did.” He chuckled. “But they’re gone. All of them. He said he can’t do shit about people taking screen shots or anything that has gone to print already, but every single copy of that image that’s on the web, or goes on the web, just disappears… like it ceases to exist.”
“It’s like magic,” J replied.
“That’s what I said,” Parker agreed.
I was willing to bet that this ‘magic trick’ of Ty’s wasn’t all that new. When Stephen had gone to the media back then, it had been surprisingly contained – the whole world had still heard, but publicly, it had died down fairly quickly. I had always had a feeling that Tyler had a hand in that. The real problem back then had been the lies that Stephen had spread personally within the industry… and unfortunately there was no easy way to stop someone talking – not legally anyway.
“We should have called him right at the start. That hacking was badass,” Parker mused as he slung his arm over my shoulders and tugged me into him. “I want to meet him, legs.”
“You should meet Louis and Floyd too, if you really want to get the full effect of the threatening threesome,” Hannah offered helpfully.
Parker raised his eyebrows at me. “The threatening threesome?” he prompted.
I giggled. “Yeah… they’re kind of like action men that never run out of battery power.”
“Do I even want to ask what the other two do for a living?” Parker asked, looking slightly concerned.
I winced. “Only if you’re not going to be intimidated by hearing that they’re a professional boxer and a stunt driver respectively.”
His eyes widened.
“Actually, I think Floyd’s more into that Formula whatever it’s called these days…” I thought aloud.
“Your brother is Louis ‘The Destroyer’ Watson?” Jasper demanded, leaning forward in his chair in anticipation of my answer.
“Well that doesn’t sound very pleasant.” I frowned. “But yeah… that’ll be him.”
“Well I’ll be damned.” Jasper shook his head in what looked like bewilderment.
“You a boxing fan, Jasp?” I prompted.
Parker tugged gently on the strand of my hair that he was playing with. “Jasper gets hard for that shit.” He grinned. “Never seen him as excited as when he’s watching two men brawling.”
“I get extra hard when ‘The Destroyer’ comes on,” Jasper piped up, not in the least bit fazed by the shade being thrown his way.
“Urrrgghh,” I groaned. “That was too much information… I feel sick.”
I slipped out from under Parker’s arm. “I’ll just be in the bathroom throwing up if anybody needs me.”
Jasper laughed. “Sorry, Lots. It was just a joke.”
I headed for the bathroom. I didn’t really need to vomit, but I did need to pee.
“This is so cool,” Parker replied enthusiastically, obviously impressed with my brothers’ antics.
I rolled my eyes and grinned.
Trust the adrenaline-junky rock star to be impressed.
“You know, there was news of a gold heist in Rio a few years back… word on the street was the getaway driver was the best in the business – and guess who happened to be holidaying there at exactly that time…”
I laughed. Hannah loved to speculate about my brother’s extra-curricular activities. In this particular case, I was pretty sure she was right on the money, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.
None of the boys were exactly known for their sense of right and wrong.
They must have inherited something from our parents after all.
But what they were known for was being smart, loyal and loving… and that was more than enough to make them my heroes.
Even though I’ll never tell them that.
My phone dinged with an incoming message as I walked back into the living room.
“That’s probably Ty with the source,” I called to Parker as I headed to the kitchen for a glass of water. “Can you check it?”
“Janelle Conrad,” he called back. “That’s all it says.”
I wracked my brain for a few moments, but came up empty. I didn’t know a single person by the name of Janelle.
I joined the others in the living room and took my phone from Parker to look at the message myself.
“Does anyone recognise that name?”
Jasper shook his head, Hannah shrugged and Parker replied. “No.”
“Well who the hell is she then?” I demanded.
“Google her,” Jasper suggested.
Hannah rolled her eyes at him. “Just get Ty to find out. Save us all some time.”
I ignored Hannah, instead taking Jasper’s advice.
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