The Sullivan Gray Series Box Set

by H. P. Bayne

  “I’m so sorry for what she went through, for what you’ve been through. It’s not fair.”

  “Dez told me about Nate, too, but he didn’t know what happened to him.”

  “He passed away a number of years ago. Natural causes. Died in his sleep, lucky man.”

  “I wish I could have met him.”

  “He would have liked that. You know, I haven’t felt at peace since that night. I’ve always wondered about you, hoped you’d ended up all right somewhere. I’m so glad you found Dez and his family.”

  “Me too,” Sully said. “Listen, I hate to ask it like this, but there really isn’t a good way. You worked at Lockwood when my mother was there. Do you have any idea who my father was?”

  Dez’s heart thudded against his chest wall as he stood slightly behind Sully, wide eyes seeking out Miss Crichton’s as he shook his head from side to side. Thankfully, she looked over, caught the message and its meaning.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “No, I don’t. I wish I could help you.”

  Sully dipped his head, shoulders drooping. “Thanks anyway. And thank you for taking care of Pax.”

  “My pleasure. He’s a joy.”

  That drew a laugh from Sully. “I don’t think anyone’s ever called him that before. He hasn’t liked most people he’s met.”

  “He likes us well enough,” Miss Crichton said, shifting a pointed finger back and forth between herself and Dez.

  “I guess that shouldn’t surprise me,” Sully said. “He likes good people. I guess it’s just that I haven’t had a lot of those in my life the past couple years.”

  “You’ve got them now,” Dez said, thumping Sully on the back. He turned to Miss Crichton. “Listen, the danger’s not passed, it’s just in remission. We’re gonna need you to keep this to yourself, okay?”

  Miss Crichton smiled conspiratorially. “I’m as silent as the grave.”

  Sully shifted his gaze from her to Dez, a raised eyebrow and a grin lightening his features. “Then we’re in real trouble.”

  Dez and Sully took turns showering and changing, then spent a few minutes comparing injuries—another brotherly pastime Dez had missed.

  Once he’d satisfied himself Sully wasn’t seriously hurt and that he’d come through being drugged without any lingering or dangerous side effects, he left Sully and Pax at Miss Crichton’s while he headed to the hospital.

  Lachlan looked better than he had the night before and, although dopy, he was at least conscious.

  “Braddock,” he said. “They let you in, I see.”

  “I’m a likeable guy.”

  “As you know, I love to argue but, if you take after your old man, there’s not much I can say to the contrary.” He lowered his voice. “So, what happened? You find what you need?”

  “I found everything I need.” Dez pulled up a chair and spent the next ten minutes providing an explanation, and a complete one at that. There was no point holding back. Lachlan already suspected Sully was alive and, if Dez didn’t confirm it, Lachlan would devote at least a few minutes of every hour of the rest of his life to proving this theory.

  When the wrap-up was finished, Lachlan was so quiet Dez thought he’d passed out with his eyes open. Finally, he spoke.

  “You’re wondering how I let Luc … Rhona, I mean, get the best of me on this. How I let her pull the wool over my eyes.”

  Dez shrugged, not wanting to take the risk of confirming that out loud.

  Lachlan didn’t need prodding. “If you want to know the truth, I guess I was thinking with my downstairs brain where she was concerned. A divorced man misses certain things, and she was a beautiful, warm, interested body. After that first night, I probably would have believed her if she told me she was the heir to the Romanov dynasty. Interesting she didn’t try the same thing with you.”

  “I guess she could tell it wouldn’t have worked. I’ve pretty much accepted I wear my heart on my sleeve, and it only ever beats for one woman.”

  “You’re a romantic fool, Braddock. But between the two of us, it turns out I was the bigger one. You did some good work here, especially since I kept things pretty cryptic and damn near buggered it up completely.”

  “Thanks. But Eva helped.”

  “Even so. Listen, they tell me I’m not going to be fully functional for a few months. I figure I can do it in two.”

  “Come on. If the doctors want you to—”

  “Shut up. What I’m trying to say is that I’m going to need some help around the office for a while. I’m still just a one-man show there, and I don’t want to risk losing my business if I’m laid up. If clients come calling, I want to be able to take them on. Now, I know you’re unemployed—”

  “How do you know …? Never mind.”

  “Yeah. I’m like God. I know everything. So, what do you say? You want the job or are you enjoying the company on the unemployment line?”

  Dez grinned. “Do I have time to consider?”

  “Screw you.”

  “Damn right, I want the job. When do I start?”

  “How about now? You can start by sneaking me the hell out of here.”

  Lachlan stayed where he was, and Dez went home, finding Sully crashed out on the pullout, Pax next to him.

  Dez guessed his brother hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep—at least none that wasn’t drug-induced—over the past couple of days, so he was inclined to let Sully rest.

  Only it seemed he wasn’t really sleeping.

  “Something you’re not telling me,” Sully mumbled.

  “What?” Dez’s mind turned immediately to Gerhardt and his true relationship to Sully. Dez had wanted to hold onto that information, at least for now, until he had satisfied himself his brother was well enough to process it. Sully was strong, one of the strongest people Dez knew. But he was fragile too. And two years had passed, after all. Two years about which Dez knew nothing at all.

  Sully didn’t look at Dez but sighed out one word, a question called out into the semi-dark of the apartment. “Mom?”

  Dez breathed out his own sigh. His brother talked in his sleep sometimes, and Dez had never been so relieved to hear it.

  Sully had settled himself into his old spot next to the wall, leaving a space for Dez. Once he’d shooed Pax out of it, Dez settled in and pulled his grandmother’s quilt over his legs. He closed his eyes, then thought better of it, turning to Pax on the area rug next to him.

  “If this jerk so much as gets up to take a leak, you’d damn well better let me know.”

  Pax’s mouth dropped open and his tongue protruded to the left as his tail gave two solid thumps against the floor.

  “I’ll try to take that as a yes.” Dez turned back over and eyed Sully one last time before closing his eyes to await a sleep that didn’t feel too far away. For the moment, his world was turning in the right direction, and that was a welcome and unexpected change.

  He thought better of things, reached out and closed a hand over Sully’s wrist. If his brother tried to get up in the night, Dez would know.

  He was surprised by the quietly spoken reassurance from next to him. “I’m not going anywhere, Dez. I promise.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “I mean it. You’re going to need my help for Aiden.”

  The mention of his brother’s name at the end of a long and emotionally draining day put a lump in Dez’s throat, particularly since it had been spoken by his other brother, the one he’d succeeded in saving. And right now, in this moment anyway, that was enough.

  “You okay, D?”

  Dez smiled into the darkness, certain his brother would hear it in his voice. “Yeah, Sull. I am now.”

  Copyright © 2019 by H.P. Bayne/Bayne Independent Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations
in a book review.

  Cover art by Fiona Jayde Media with image from innervision/depositphotos.com

  1

  A mixture of cloud and light pollution concealed the spray of stars in the night sky.

  Occasionally, when the atmosphere was right and the air still, the sound of a car horn or a siren could be heard somewhere in the distance.

  The ground was cold and hard, the sleeping bag insufficient to block either. And the whining hum of mosquitos formed a constant promise of being eaten alive the moment sleep precluded the maintenance of the fire.

  It was the closest to heaven Sullivan Gray had been in more than two years.

  On one side of him lay his slumbering dog, Pax, emitting a groan as he stretched his large, black body along the ground. A grumble from Sully’s other side had him turning his head from the cradle of his folded hands to study his brother Dez Braddock, shifting in his sleeping bag.

  “Getting too old for this.”

  Sully felt the smile form at Dez’s deep, gruff voice, welcomed his own amusement as an old friend with whom he was becoming reacquainted after a long absence. “What’s wrong?” Then, recalling the injury his brother was nursing, he added, “Your rib?”

  “Nah, not that. Feels like I’ve got a rock in my back. No matter which way I move, I can’t get away from it.”

  “Want to trade places? I don’t mind.”

  “No, you need your sleep. Forget it. It’ll keep me awake to stoke the fire.”

  “Next time, you won’t forget the tent.”

  Sully’s verbal slap led to a physical though equally lighthearted one from his brother. In their childhood and teens, the move would have sparked a wrestling match and repeated warnings from their father to watch they didn’t roll into the fire. The bouts didn’t last long, not when Dez—older by three years and larger by half a foot and a solid wall of muscle—was involved. Sully didn’t have the energy or the inclination at the moment. Tonight was about peace, quiet and healing—all difficult to achieve with his big brother on top of him, whaling away.

  With Sully not playing, Dez limited his response to a comeback, such as it was. “You’re a smart ass…. Hey, I was trying to remember. When was the last time we were here?”

  Sully had shut his eyes and now cracked one open to peer at Dez. “The last time? You brought me here after Dad’s memorial, remember?”

  Calm slipped from Dez’s features, jaw visibly clenching, muscles tightening in his face. “That’s not what I meant. I was talking about before everything.”

  Sully recognized his error too late. Before everything, as in when their father Flynn was still alive, when Sully had not yet been an unwilling patient at Lockwood Psychiatric Hospital, and when Dez’s personal and professional life was still on solid ground.

  He cleared his throat and answered the question Dez had really been asking. “You had just finished police college and were about to officially start with the KRPD. Dad wanted to celebrate, and this was our idea of a good time.”

  Dez swatted at a mosquito that had broken through the campfire’s smoky barrier. “What were we thinking?”

  It had been said in fun, but the tone didn’t match what ordinarily should have come alongside one of Dez’s goofy laughs.

  “I didn’t mean to bring that up, Dez. I’m sorry.”

  So much history swam below the surface, but Sully couldn’t say a whole lot. How did you tell a guy his once-beloved uncle was behind so many bad things, the kinds of things that would put him in prison for the rest of his life? At the end of the day, Sully knew two things: He was Dez’s brother in every sense of the word but blood. And Dez, if ever forced to choose between Sully and anyone else, would pick Sully every time. Whether or not his protectiveness stemmed from the childhood death of Dez’s brother Aiden, he didn’t know. But Dez had stood by his side since the Braddocks had taken Sully in as a foster child at age seven.

  The last thing Sully wanted was to put Dez in a position to have to choose—particularly when there was still so much he’d kept hidden. What if, after hearing all the secrets, Dez decided neither of them deserved a place in his life anymore. Of all the possible outcomes from the revelation of concealed facts, the undeniable worst would be losing the support and love of the only people he’d ever known as family.

  The more blatant outcome wouldn’t be much better. Any confrontation between Dez and Lowell over the older man’s crimes was bound to end with one of the two Braddock men dead and the other in prison. Sully could live with Lowell in either of those positions; he couldn’t face a world in which Dez met either fate.

  Sully had been waiting for Dez to let him have it since his return, but the few times the conversation had headed that way, his brother had bitten back his anger and veered off onto other topics. Sully was surprised when Dez dove into another subject they’d been avoiding.

  “I still need to figure out how to help Aiden.”

  The topic was a hard one, even though Dez had been just eight when his little brother died. The fact Aiden had been breaking their parents’ rules when he’d gone down to Kettle-Arm Creek didn’t matter. As far as Dez was concerned, the drowning was his fault.

  Sully knew he could end, or at least alleviate, Dez’s guilt, but dreaded what he could set into motion if he did. The chain of events could destroy his brother—or alienate Sully by revealing how much he’d known or suspected all along. While he’d attained proof two years ago of Lowell’s crime, Sully had seen Aiden off and on for years. And he didn’t see ghosts unless someone’s criminal act had created them.

  The added problem remained the difference between Sully and Lowell’s circumstances. Even if his immediate family believed him, Sully had no proof to offer police, nothing but his own word. As of now, he no longer existed. And if he chose to leave hiding, to go forward with what he knew, it would be his word against Lowell’s. He suspected few would accept the word of a scruffy young man with a diagnosed, albeit inaccurate, mental illness over that of a wealthy and respected businessman.

  The best Sully could hope for now was an admission from Lowell, one that would end with justice rather than vengeance. All he had to do was figure out a way to get there without causing Dez even more pain or costing himself his family.

  Sully decided the best defence, for now, was in offence. “I know. I want that too. I’ll figure it out, all right? But you need to understand he doesn’t come around much. I’ve really only ever seen him a few times in my entire life. I’ll look for him again, next time I’m at the acreage. Might be a bit complicated though.”

  “You really need to tell Mom you’re still alive. I feel like I’m lying to her.”

  “I never meant to put you in that position.”

  “Because you never meant for me to find out. Don’t get me wrong, bro. I’d rather feel guilty keeping your secret than go on believing you’re dead. I just don’t think it’s right, that’s all.”

  It wasn’t right, no more right than having gone two years keeping the truth from Dez. But there was a reason for it, one more thing he had to hold to himself. Mara Braddock had, after all, signed off next to Lowell on Sully’s involuntary committal. Sully loved his adoptive mother, and he knew she’d tried to do right by him. He even knew she probably regretted it. But nothing could change her actions and what they had led to.

  Dez’s voice cut into his thoughts, abnormally quiet as he put unexpected words to Sully’s thoughts. “You can trust her, you know. She feels guilty about what happened to you, about the part she played in it. Hey, I’m not blameless, either. I didn’t sign anything, but I didn’t exactly fight it. I took the coward’s way out. I didn’t want to be around when it happened, so I ran. Mom was the one who had to make the hard decision. We all recognize now it wasn’t the right one, but we were at the end of our ropes. You have to know that, Sull.”

  “I don’t blame you. I understand what you went through because of what was happening to me. And I get Mom did what she did because she was scared for
me. But there are people I don’t want to find out about me, that I’m still around. The more people I let in, the bigger the risk it’ll get back to the wrong ones.”

  “Like Lowell.” Dez hadn’t asked, he’d stated. Sully thought he was doing a good job biting back his surprise until Dez added to his observation. “Come on, man. It’s obvious you blame him for putting you in there.”

  “I don’t want to put you in the middle of anything. You two are close.”

  “We were close. Like I told you before, a lot’s changed. You’re not the only one who’s pissed with Lowell over how all of that was handled. I told him what happened to you before Lockwood, with the possession and all that, and he thinks it was part of some mental illness. He still believes Lockwood was the best place for you. He thinks he was doing the right thing, but he’s wrong. I know it. So does Mom. I need you to think about letting her in. That way Eva and I can tell Kayleigh.”

  Sully’s niece. Initially, the plan had been to let her into the secret. In the end, Sully, Dez and Eva had agreed asking a seven-year-old to guard something like that, particularly from other members of her family, wasn’t a fair burden to impose. Sully and Kayleigh had always been close, and she was one of the chief reasons he wanted to find a way out of this situation, to be able to return to the world as he was, rather than ghosting through the streets, concealed beneath a hood, a beard and a mane of overgrown hair.

  But that time wasn’t now.

  It really wasn’t now.

  Pax came awake with a start, lifting his head with a deep warning growl directed at a spot in the darkness on the other side of the fire.

  “Bear?” Dez asked, hands scrabbling at his backpack for what Sully suspected was bear spray or some other weapon.

  It wouldn’t be necessary. “It’s not a wild animal. But I don’t think you’re going to like it any better.”