His Brother's Bride

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Hearing herself speak, Laurel felt ridiculous. She was weeping for a character in a movie, after all, but for her, the emotions the woman felt were very, very real.

  Damaging.

  “And you feel like her?”

  “I just know how she feels.”

  It felt so odd, talking like this. It wasn’t something she did. Had three and a half years of grief humbled her this much?

  Or was there something about this man? Scott had changed. He’d developed an awareness and emotional maturity he’d never had before, and she felt herself opening up to him.

  “You never spoke about your biological parents.” He broke into her thoughts. “Do you have any idea who they were, or what happened to them?”

  The question was unexpected. It was not the kind of thing he’d ever asked before when they’d had their long discussions about life.

  It also wasn’t a question she answered. In the past, this was where she sidestepped, prevaricated. But something pushed her forward.

  “It wasn’t a classic unwed pregnancy, or even a teen pregnancy.” Her instincts were screaming at her to stop before it was too late.

  “My mom and dad were married.” She’d never even told Paul this stuff. “My father never wanted children. Neither, from what I gleaned, did my mother. I must have been a huge mistake.”

  Scott moved. Staring at the bedspread, she braced herself for whatever he was going to say.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “My father wanted my mother to have an abortion, but she didn’t believe in them. They were going to give me up for adoption, but at the last minute, she decided to keep me.”

  How many times in her life had she wished her mother had done the kind thing and allowed her to go to a real home? To be taken in by people who wanted a new baby, who would raise her and love her all of her life?

  “Apparently I cried a lot.” Some things didn’t change, Laurel thought with self-deprecation as she wiped her nose. “My father couldn’t stand the sound.”

  A noise came from Scott’s bed—a cross between a snort and a cough. Laurel couldn’t look at him.

  She was flying all over the place inside herself. Afraid. Jumbled. And far too needy. More than anything she hated being needy.

  “My mom and dad were very much in love,” she said quietly, the words accompanied by a deep pressure in her chest. “The only time they ever fought was about me.”

  Scott moved again. He must have sat up, because in her peripheral vision she could see his jeans-covered legs against the side of the bed, reaching down toward the floor.

  “He finally gave her an ultimatum. Either I went, or he had to. He’d tried to accept me, because my mother thought it was their duty, but he just couldn’t take my constant whining.” She hadn’t meant to whine. She hadn’t even really known what whining was. “She chose him.”

  Tears dripped slowly down cheeks that were already stiff and salty. She’d long since given up wiping them away.

  And she knew now why she’d never told this story before. Hearing it out loud made it that much more humiliating.

  “She took me to the police, told them that she couldn’t raise me, that she was afraid she was going to hurt me. I was placed in a foster home that very night and never saw her again.”

  The mattress she was lying on depressed, and her body tilted slightly sideways. She could see Scott’s hip as he sat down, his arm as he leaned back against the headboard. For one hallucinatory second she thought he’d read her mind. That he was going to pull her up against him, offer his shoulder and let her cry.

  Even the sure knowledge that it would be out of pity didn’t make her any less determined to accept the invitation. She was a beggar. She’d take anything.

  He reached for her hand.

  “How do you know all this?” he asked softly.

  “What does it matter?”

  “I just can’t believe someone would be cruel enough to tell a child that her mother dropped her off and left her.”

  The child he was talking about sounded so pathetic it made her sick. That was her. She made herself sick.

  Talking about her past had been the absolute worst decision she’d ever made.

  “No one told me.” She tried to get angry, or at least to pretend she didn’t care. “I was there. I heard them talking. Fighting. Many times. I heard what he said. What my mother said. And I was standing there holding her hand when she took me in to leave me with the authorities.”

  Just as Scott was holding her hand now.

  “How old were you?”

  “Four, almost five.”

  She heard him suck in a breath and waited for his response. But there was only silence.

  “I was too old to be readily adopted. Most families want babies they can name and raise the way they feel best right from the beginning.”

  Laurel watched the movie credits scroll up the television screen, and then listened to the pervading silence. She could feel Scott’s hand still holding hers.

  “She had to pry my fingers loose to leave me there.”

  He covered their locked grip with his free hand.

  “They should have been sent to jail,” he said at last.

  There’d been a time when she might have agreed with him. But not anymore. She didn’t care what happened to them. It didn’t matter. They no longer mattered.

  What hurt so unbearably was that they’d robbed her of any chance of belonging. Ever. She’d never have aunts and uncles and cousins. Never be surrounded by people of whom she was a part, people who accepted her simply because she was family. There was no inner circle she had the right to a place in. She was never going to have anyone tell funny stories about the dumb things she did as a kid, or pull out embarrassing childhood pictures; she was never going to have anyone who’d loved her through all the stages of growing up.

  She’d had no one gather around her for her high school graduation, celebrating her victory, claiming it as part of their own. Claiming her. No one to run to when Paul had died.

  Mostly she was okay with that. She was used to it now. But sometimes, like tonight, watching Lucy, she could feel all the old pain so acutely.

  “It’s really okay,” she said aloud. “I’m healthy. I have no financial worries and a career I love. To a lot of people, I have the perfect life. I don’t know why the family thing matters to me so much, and honestly, most of the time I don’t even think about it. I’m incredibly thankful for what I do have. It’s just that sometimes, like tonight, I get overwhelmed with the fact that no matter how much I do, it will never be enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “Just like Lucy tonight, watching through the window when the family was all gathered around the bed, I’m always going to be on the outside looking in.” She sat up and turned to face him. “And I’m okay with that,” she said. And meant it. “It’s just sometimes when I’ve all but forgotten and it hits me fresh, I have to take a second to get used to the idea all over again.”

  Scott’s blue eyes burned with an intense light as he held her gaze. “You are not on the outside,” he said, the words almost a whisper as they caught in his throat.

  She shook her head, needing to look away. She had no idea why she didn’t. “Of course I am,” she said. “I can be the nicest person, I can give everything I have to give, do kind things for people every waking moment, but none of that’s going to make me belong to them. I realized that a long time ago. And other than moments like tonight, I’m fine.”

  “I’m sure you are,” he said, and sounded as though he meant it. “But you have not always been on the outside. I know this for a fact, because it was my inner circle you occupied.”

  She sat there, hardly breathing, wondering if he’d just made that up.

  “The minute
you walked in the door at our house all those years ago, you belonged. Immediately and unconditionally. That kind of thing doesn’t change. You became family to me then, Laurel. And you always will be.”

  She continued to meet his gaze, even when her eyes filled with tears. Then she smiled.

  “Thank you.”

  “You don’t have to thank me,” he said firmly. “You filled a very important place in our lives. The day you walked in our door, you made the lives of all three Hunter men better. We needed you far more than you ever needed us.”

  They’d needed her, too.

  Laurel liked that.

  A lot.

  She’d never known. She’d never realized she had a place to fill or the ability to fill it. All her life she’d viewed herself as the recipient of kindhearted charity. And even that had been a huge blessing to her.

  “When Mom died, she took all the beauty in our lives with her. The ability to appreciate a painting, to care about flowers on the table, matching dishes and proper silverware. She took everything fragile and gentle from our lives. And you brought all that back to us.”

  She tried to read the expression in his eyes. “Really?”

  “Really.” He didn’t blink.

  “You aren’t just saying that to make me feel better? Because you don’t need to, you know. I really am okay.”

  “I’m not just saying that.” He held her shoulders, turned her to face him. “Most men don’t bother with the delicate things in life, Laurel. We don’t have the ability to see the need for them. But we crave them just the same.”

  “Any woman could have done the same thing for you.”

  “No,” he said without hesitation. “Any woman could have put flowers on our table, but only you could bring the lilacs.”

  She didn’t understand.

  “It was your heart, your sensitivity, your ability to love Paul, to love all of us, that hooked us. And whenever you left, the scent of lilacs lingered behind, reminding us that you were always there for us, a part of us.”

  “But...”

  He put a finger to her lips.

  “It was you, Laurel, no one else. Your quiet reserve, your sense of humor, your occasional and completely unpredictable bursts of spontaneity, your gentleness with Dad when he got tired and cranky—everything that was you made us happy.”

  It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her before.

  She laid her head against his chest. He let her keep it there.

  It was just as comforting as she’d imagined. She didn’t need to cry anymore.

  “I know what you mean, though,” he said after a time. “When Mom died, so did all the funny stories of what we were like as little guys, the loving reminders of who we were, where we’d come from, the assurance that we’d always be together in one way or another.”

  Tilting her head on his chest, Laurel gazed up at him. She should feel very strange being this intimate with Scott, but all she could think about was the way he was looking at her, as if the sight of her was all he ever wanted. And his lips. They were so close to her.

  Excitingly close.

  Her heart started to race, her stomach to curl with heady desire as she raised her head and brought her mouth to his. Emotionally drained, she didn’t think. She just acted.

  His mouth was warm, not really responding, but not pulling away. He wasn’t rejecting her. Still without thought, she opened her mouth to him and exploded with desire, with hunger as he answered her invitation with the aggression of a very hungry man.

  Pushing her back against the pillows, he took her mouth completely, joining them in a passion-drugged kiss that refuted any familial relationship they might have shared. There was no innocence in the exchange as their tongues danced and mated, retreated and returned to mate again.

  His hand slid down her neck and over her shoulder, leaving a trail of tingling desire in its wake. Her breasts ached for him, her nipples hard and wanting. She was breathing so hard she almost choked, unable to take enough air into her lungs to sustain life.

  Starved for his touch, she couldn’t think, couldn’t choose. She could only respond. And beg silently for more.

  And keep begging until there would finally be enough.

  His hand cupped her breast and Laurel almost passed out with the intensity of her desire for him, her need to have him all over her. In her. Knowing her as intimately as it was possible for one human to know another. And to still want her even then.

  “You are so beautiful....”

  His words penetrated the hazy fog that cocooned her, striking a chord that wasn’t right. She’d heard those words before—many times—while making love.

  Laurel had only had one lover in her life, one man who’d touched her this way. Who’d said those words to her.

  And it hadn’t been Scott.

  With a sob, she wrenched away from him, horrified by what she’d done.

  “I’m so sorry,” she choked, tears bursting forth. She’d just come on to her lover’s little brother.

  One glance at Scott was all it took to make her shame complete. His eyes were wide, his mouth pinched. He must have thought he was looking at a woman he didn’t know at all.

  “I think you better go,” she said, amazed she could get the words out clearly.

  He left without a single word, and wrenching sobs exploded from Laurel’s chest.

  What had she done? God in heaven, what had she just done?

  * * *

  “SCOTT?”

  Lying in his briefs, the covers pulled halfway up his thighs, Scott held the hotel phone to his ear.

  “Yeah?”

  He’d known who was calling the second he’d heard the ring.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No.” He’d been lying in the dark for more than an hour, wondering how to repair the damage he’d done.

  “I can’t sleep, either.”

  Even now, in spite of the mess they were in, Laurel’s voice brought him peace.

  “I...”

  “You...”

  They both started at once.

  “Go ahead,” he said. He had no idea what he’d been about to say.

  “I feel terrible about what happened.”

  “I know.”

  “The thing is, I need you, Scott.”

  He swallowed. Those weren’t the words he’d expected to hear.

  “These past days, I’ve found something I’d forgotten I had, something I can’t bear to lose again. You’re the best friend I have in the world. You’re my history.”

  “And you’re mine.”

  “So, can we just forget what happened tonight?”

  Never. “Of course.”

  “And things won’t be weird between us in the morning?”

  “No,” he said, wondering how he was ever going to keep his word, but determined to do so. “We won’t let them be.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re friends?”

  He stared wearily at the shadow the light from the window was making on the ceiling. “Of course.”

  Silence hung on the line.

  “I don’t want to hang up,” she finally said. He wasn’t sure if she was laughing—or crying.

  “We can talk awhile if you like.” It wasn’t as if he would be getting to sleep anytime soon.

  “Can I ask you something?” There was an odd tone to her voice.

  He braced himself. “Yeah.”

  “Why do you think we did...what we did...tonight?”

  How in the hell did he answer that one? How could she even ask?

  “I mean, I love Paul,” she said. “And you’re in love with some other woman. Do you think it was just what we
talked about yesterday?”

  The day before seemed so long ago, he could hardly remember it. “What’s that?”

  “About seeking solace? Do you think that’s what happened tonight?”

  For her. “Probably.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It doesn’t have to be.” But it was. So bad. Laurel didn’t know what had really happened three and a half years ago. Or what had happened tonight, either.

  “Is it wrong?”

  More wrong than she’d ever know. “No. Not unless you let it be.”

  “No,” she said, though her voice was a little hesitant. “No, I’m not going to make it into a big deal.”

  “Good.”

  “So we’re okay?”

  “We’re okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “You get some sleep.”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  “I will. See you in the morning.” He couldn’t hang up, didn’t want to be left alone in the darkness to fight his demons.

  “Okay.” Her voice was sleepy sounding, and Scott’s body responded all over again, growing hard where it had no business being hard.

  If he couldn’t control his body’s reactions, at least he could control how he responded to them.

  And where Laurel was concerned, that meant doing absolutely nothing. Ever again.

  He owed it to her. To himself.

  And to the brother he’d killed, as well.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SCOTT AND LAUREL WERE at breakfast—plain bagels with raspberry cream cheese—when Officer Bill Murphy, Dennis Arnett’s parole officer, called. He’d just arrived at work to find Scott’s message. Though he was under no obligation to do so, he agreed to meet with Scott later that morning.

  “So do you think he’s going to tell us everything he knows about Dennis?” Laurel asked.

  Nodding, Scott watched her take a bite of her bagel—and remembered how those lips had tasted the night before.

  God, he ached. Now that he’d had a taste of what he’d been craving all these years, how was he ever going to survive being this close to Laurel without touching her?