Accidental Roots The Series Volume 1: an mm romantic suspense box set

by Elle Keaton

  “How old were you?”

  His jeans were going to be reduced to a single strand of thread at this rate.

  “Fourteen. Sybil found out she was pregnant with Raven, so she was getting a do-over kid anyhow.”

  Weir didn’t have to ask to know Sterling was still haunted by his parents’ actions. His own eyes were wet. Goddamn medication.

  “They told everyone I’d gone to boarding school, which is ironic because they really would send Raven. I took the Greyhound to Seattle. None of my friends could help me. I basically lived on the street for six months. Raven is smarter than me; she’ll go to boarding school if they make her, but I’m afraid it would break her or she’ll run away and I’ll never see her again.”

  Weir had no problem imagining a fourteen-year-old Sterling living on the streets of Seattle. It was a perk of the job: he didn’t have to use his imagination. When people told him he “couldn’t imagine,” he really could. He could imagine worse. Much, much, worse.

  “Hey.” Sterling reached over and wiped his cheek, thumb rough and warm against his cheekbone. “What’s this?”

  Fucking goddamn medication. “Nothing, sorry.” He turned his head away from the touch. It was too much. Another stupid tear escaped his eye before Weir could stop it.

  “It was a long time ago, okay?” Sterling removed his hand, and irrationally, Weir missed it. “I survived to tell the tale.”

  Weir tried reassembling his mental barriers. Unfortunately, his mouth and brain seemed to be working independently of each other.

  “When I was in sixth grade, my dad was arrested for vehicular homicide. He was so drunk, even by the time police got to the scene, he had to be hospitalized to sober up. I guess he was in the hospital for days, detoxing. My mom had already left. She dropped me off at school one day when I was eight or nine and never came home. My dad looked for a while, but gave up and looked in the bottle instead.” He was telling this story; fuck his life.

  “I had no idea where he was. I figured, like my mom, he decided to leave me. I found out later he’d never updated our address, so no one knew to look for me, or where we lived if they had. That he even had a kid. He never said a word. I went to school, most days, but there was no money for food. I hid out in our tiny shit-hole of an apartment, living on dry cereal. Started sneaking into the lunchroom for free breakfast at school. I still hate French toast.”

  Now it was his turn to look at the ceiling. There was a hairline crack in the corner that looked like a lightning bolt.

  “Three weeks before my dad remembered to tell the authorities he had a son. So, yeah. I had been going to school, living on nothing, no money and no idea who to call. I thought he’d left me, too. I expected it. He blamed me for my sister and then my mom leaving. Told me all the time, especially when he was drinking, how everything was my fault. I was resigned to getting kicked out, had a bag packed and everything for when the day came. There was a knock on the door one Saturday morning; I knew it was the apartment manager coming to evict me.

  “I’m not sure who was more surprised, the officers on the other side of the door, or me. Long story short, I went into the foster-care system for a little while but ended up being taken in by Ben Tompkins, one of the responding officers. I worshiped him. The feds busted me hacking into banking websites for fun about a year later.” Weir grinned. It felt crooked and sad. “Needless to say, instead of juvie I was given the choice to use my powers for good or, well… best to use them for good.” Weir shut his eyes, because he didn’t want to see the look of pity in Sterling’s.

  He never understood why Ben took him in. By the time Weir came along, Ben was a forty-five-year-old confirmed bachelor who lived for his job as a police officer. If he wasn’t working, he was volunteering with a variety of youth groups and homeless shelters. He put in overtime providing security at events aimed toward at-risk communities. Weir had asked him once and all Ben had said was, he was paying it forward.

  A cool hand cupped the right side of his neck and chin, thumb caressing his cheek, soothing him. It felt nice. The mattress dipped and rose again as Sterling stood to leave. Weir opened his eyes for a moment before sliding into dreams of his father and Ben Tompkins. Sometimes there was a shadow he thought was his sister, but he couldn’t remember her face, and all the pictures of her were long gone.

  Thirteen

  Raven arrived just after five, as promised. Sterling installed her in the second upstairs bedroom, with strict instructions not to fuck up. They both knew what he meant. Sterling had given up a great deal of himself in order to be a part of Raven’s life, to make sure she was safe and knew she was loved.

  Maybe he had been the one who had impressed on her, not the other way around. When he finally met her he was so lonely and starved for unconditional affection that any handouts were welcome. Having a mini version of himself launch herself at him, nearly knocking him over in her enthusiasm, had broken through any protective barriers he might have put up.

  Maybe it was because her affection had been pure, simple. After all, he owed his parents nothing. It wasn’t them who found him and brought him back to Skagit. They never would have made the effort. If he had disappeared and never returned, neither one of them would have raised an eyebrow.

  Ironically, one of the youth pastors from his parents’ church found him. He’d been sitting with a group of other homeless kids on the “Ave” in Seattle’s University District. A tribe of teens banded together for safety. Although even those kids stole from each other, and worse. Todd Cottrell had been minding his own business, strolling down the sidewalk one afternoon, and spotted Sterling sitting there with his hand out and a hand-lettered cardboard sign next to him.

  Todd had done a double-take that would have been funny in any other, less tragic, situation. Sterling was dirty, no less filthy than the rest of the kids he was hanging around with. His dark hair was longer than it had ever been. He had even grown a few inches, but Todd still recognized him. He had recognized Todd, too, certain he would keep walking past their group like so many others had. Or stop to heckle them and scream invective, tell them they were going to hell. He hadn’t meant for the spark of hope to flare inside him, that his parents had sent someone for him. Maybe Todd had seen the flare of hope, but he hadn’t been sent by anyone.

  Sterling still found it ironic that the church his parents had so fervently believed in was ultimately the one that brought him home to Skagit. Todd had pulled strings and called in favors to find Sterling a safe place to live. Todd had even visited Sterling’s parents, trying to change their minds. His father’s mind. In the end, in exchange for Sterling staying quiet about what they had done, he was given enough money to rent a tiny studio and access to his college fund when he graduated high school. He never touched the fund. It felt too much like a bribe, a way for his father to try and control him again. His parents had changed churches.

  The deal infuriated Todd, but to Sterling it had felt like victory. The only place his father felt anything was with his wallet. Raven had come later. A whirlwind three-year-old who laid eyes on her brother for the first time while she and Sybil were out shopping. Sterling had been nearly eighteen, caught off guard by the sight of his mother and the sister he had never met. Sybil must have been off-balance too, because when Raven asked who he was she had responded with, “This is your brother, Sterling.”

  If Sybil chose to claim that Raven was so persistent and stubborn that she absolutely had to see Sterling once a week, well, Sterling wasn’t strong enough to deny he missed having family. Missed being hugged and told he was a good boy. Missed lying on the couch watching TV and drawing in his sketchbook. Missed the illusion of being loved.

  Raven learned early she had both her mom and her brother wrapped around her little finger. Which was why she was staying in Micah’s upstairs guest room for the foreseeable future.

  So far so good.

  Since Raven had moved in, things had gone surprisingly smoothly. They had found a routine that
worked. She was up and off to school in the morning and home in the afternoon. If she stayed out, she called or texted Sterling to let him know. It had been years since Sterling had more than an evening or two off each week. Now he only worked two evenings, although he went in to do paperwork during the day and work on the business plan for the loan he was applying for.

  The missing liquor had been returned. Not having to fire someone was a weight off his shoulders. His life felt oddly regular. Even Weir was behaving. Mostly he was sleeping, or bitching about being sleepy, or whining about physical therapy but going anyway. In Sterling’s mind that was behaving.

  Sterling was reluctantly learning to cook a few things while Weir sat at the kitchen table and directed. The three of them spent several evenings binge-watching TV shows Raven insisted they had to see. Sterling didn’t own a TV, so any show was new to him. Weir confessed he was normally too busy and generally relaxed in different ways. Raven had not seen the accompanying eyebrow waggle, thankfully, or Sterling would have melted into the couch. He didn’t need his sister anywhere near his sex life.

  Weir and Raven tried to teach him how to play an online video game they were both into. Well, at least Weir knew which game Raven was talking about. Overlord, overmatch, overdrawn, something like that. The twentieth time Sterling died and they had to restart the game, he threw the controller onto the couch and declared himself done. He’d never really had any interest in video games before he’d been kicked out; afterward it had been a matter of survival. He had no bandwidth for that stuff.

  Weir and Raven surprised him. With Weir being reserved and, by necessity, closed off about his work, Sterling hadn’t expected the two of them to have much in common. Sterling loved his sister, but she could be hard to take. Opinionated, headstrong, and intelligent, she often talked above people, inadvertently making them feel less than adequate. She met her match in Weir.

  The problem her teachers had with her was that she continued to be a straight-A student. One who skipped, slept in class, argued facts… and was usually right, would never concede a point. After all, why should she? It had to drive them crazy: to have her miss class, but still ace the tests? Needless to say, she was not popular.

  He returned from the Loft one afternoon, having spent several hours doing receipts and catching up on the books, to find them both in Micah’s bedroom. Raven was sitting cross-legged on the bed with her laptop open. They were good-naturedly arguing about something, Sterling didn’t know what. Weir grabbed her laptop and spun it around so it faced him, typed rapidly—gibberish, as far as Sterling knew—hit enter, and spun it back around.

  “See? That’s what you were missing. You have to be way more careful. It’s one thing to remember everything you see, but that doesn’t help when what you were looking at was wrong in the first place. Admit it, I was right.”

  Raven looked chagrined. She stared down at the screen, dark brows furrowed like the wings of the bird she was named after, trying to find something there to prove Weir wrong.

  “Fine, you were right. What else can you teach me?”

  The memory of what Weir had confessed to him the first afternoon out of the hospital floated back to him. Neither one of them noticed him standing in the doorway. The identical guilty looks on their faces when he interjected, “Hell, no,” should have amused him. But they didn’t. “No way. Are you teaching my sister how to hack? She’s in enough trouble as it is.”

  Weir raised a palm and hurried to explain. “Uh, no, she’s already got the basics down.” Seeming to realize that didn’t sound any better, Weir tried again. “I mean, she already knew this stuff. And I’ve given her the fed lecture. But seriously, Sterling, her brains are wasted here. Did you know she has an eidetic memory?”

  “What?”

  “Used to be called photographic memory, but that doesn’t really exist. Eidetic memory means Raven has an extraordinary ability to remember facts. That’s what got us started on coding. I swear that’s all we were doing, working on code.”

  “How’d you figure it out?” Sterling had wondered about his sister’s amazing recall.

  “I gave her complicated lines of code, with errors I inserted into them, and she replicated them… exactly.”

  Boy, he looked smug. Raven looked both pissed and pleased, which ended up making her look constipated.

  “Come on, gimme a break, I’m not going to lead her to a life of crime.”

  “No,” Sterling responded, “she’s fully capable of heading that way herself.”

  “Hey!” Raven objected. Weir snickered and leaned back into the pillows.

  Raven hopped off the bed and came around to give Sterling a tight hug. “Thank you, big brother, for letting me stay with you.”

  He leaned back from her hug, looking down at her face, so much like his own. “What have you done now?” This kind of distraction was reserved for when she knew she had crossed a line.

  “I didn’t skip school!” Sterling looked at her, eyebrows raised. “They sent me home. I argued with Mrs. Patterson, and she sent me to the office again. Ms. McMillian said I had been trouble enough and told me to sign myself out and leave.” Raven looked hurt and leaned back into him, hugging him tighter.

  Why were the school administrators such Luddites? Why couldn’t they see what Sterling did? That his sister was a vibrant, passionate young woman who was going places. She would leave Skagit in the dust. When she was successful they would all want to claim her; Sterling hoped she told them to go to hell.

  “What were you arguing about?”

  “Animal welfare.” Ah yes, her Achilles heel.

  He gave her another squeeze and tugged her thick, long dark braid before steering her out of the room. He turned back to Weir, who looked better every day. The worst of his bruises had faded to a yellow-green tinge. The scrapes and nicks from the road rash were no longer red and irritated-looking. The bags under his eyes had completely disappeared.

  “I really wasn’t teaching her anything she didn’t already know.”

  Sterling sighed, “I know. Sorry. I’m glad you get along.” He’d been worried she would drive Weir crazy.

  “No, man, she’s pretty cool.”

  The SkPD came by a few times to follow up on Weir’s accident, but it was pretty clear they had no leads. The last time Weir had pissed them off. Sterling would be surprised if they returned anytime soon.

  And so it went for a few more days. Sterling was impressed that the makeshift household was holding up under the pressure of a housebound federal agent and an impulsive teenager. He should have known better.

  Raven’s car was in front of the house when he got back from a trip to the grocery store. He’d hurried back after getting a dropped call from Weir. He never called Sterling. And now Raven was home on an afternoon when she wasn’t expected. He was going to kill her if she’d managed to finally get expelled from school.

  Heaving the grocery bags out of the back of his car, he walked as quickly as he could toward the house. The front door was slightly ajar, which also freaked him out. Skagit wasn’t exactly Detroit or St. Louis, but people shouldn’t leave their front doors open where anyone could walk in.

  “Hello?” he called out. “Why’s the door open?” Only the creaky silence of the house answered him. He dropped the bags on the floor, starting to panic a little. “Hello?” he called louder, “Where are you guys?”

  “Sterling! I think he broke something!” Raven shrieked from upstairs.

  Sterling’s life flashed before his eyes. Literally. The sound of his sister’s hysterical voice had him taking the stairs in three bounds, his heart in his throat.

  Weir was lying in a crumpled heap at the top of the stairs, Raven standing in the doorway to her room, hands covering her face.

  “Jesus fuck, what happened?” Falling to his knees next to Weir, heart pounding hard enough to break his rib cage, Sterling reached out a shaky hand to brush the too-long hair off Weir’s face. Gingerly, he ran his hands down Weir’s ches
t and along his right leg. “Motherfucker, what the fucking hell was he thinking coming up here? Jesus Christ, Raven, where’s your phone? Call 911. God fucking dammit!”

  Raven was suspiciously quiet, not moving to get her phone. Weir’s shoulders started shaking. Sterling glanced at her, then over at Weir again. Open, laughing brown eyes were watching him.

  “April Fool!” they yelled, before collapsing into giggles.

  Fourteen

  After the April Fool’s joke—which was really fucking funny—he and Sterling were a little rocky for a day or so, but he seemed to have been forgiven now. It had been a brilliant prank, and one day Sterling would admit it.

  Three days later, Sterling had the closing shift at the Loft. He chauffeured Weir to his physical therapy and back before leaving for the rest of the day. Weir finally felt like he was making real progress. At his last appointment Dr. Mortimer had said his leg was healing well, that he was lucky it had been a simple fracture and not something worse. His arm was taking longer, but that had been a pretty nasty compound fracture, so a longer recovery time was expected.

  On the way out of St. Joe’s they had run into Joey, who, of course, had been effusive and exclaimed over how improved Weir looked. Weir figured the last time Joey had seen him he had been pretty banged up, but still it was nice to hear. He’d definitely noticed a chill in the air between Joey and Sterling and wondered out loud what that was about. When he asked Sterling on the way to his car, he had muttered something about “ancient history.”

  Injured or not, he was getting restless. It had been three weeks since he had looked at his files. He pulled out his work laptop and logged on to see what was happening with the cases he had been working on. Sammy Ferreira immediately noticed his presence online.