Falling for the Brother

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  She’d had a great childhood, and didn’t take that lightly. Or for granted. She felt a huge responsibility to give Brianna that same sense of purpose, of healthy living and societal contribution.

  “I’m telling you, like I’ve already told you several times today, that if I had any suspicions about Bruce, any knowledge that would be of concern, I’d be calling Captain O’Brien myself.”

  “I don’t think you’re deliberately holding anything back,” Mason said, picking up an onion ring and handing it to her.

  It would be churlish to refuse. She had to accept it. And it would be equally rude just to sit there and hold it or throw it away. Especially with him watching her. She took a bite. Closed her eyes while she chewed.

  He was grinning again when she opened them. “Good, isn’t it?”

  It was good there was only one left on his plate. “Mmm-hmm,” she said and finished the onion ring, then took a sip of beer.

  And promised herself that she’d be heading home within minutes.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MASON WAS BROUGHT up short when he realized he was enjoying himself. He wasn’t there to have a good time. Nor was it appropriate that he do so with his brother’s ex-wife. Particularly when he was investigating that same brother.

  No one would be happier than he would to find that Bruce had never had anything to do with hurting their grandmother. But his gut was telling him Bruce had done this. And it had to stop.

  Period. For Gram. And for Bruce, too.

  “Things aren’t always what they seem.” He was beginning to suspect that these days, with Bruce, they almost never were. It used to be only when he’d tried every other means to get his own way that Bruce would resort to manipulating the truth. But in the past few years, through things Gram had said, he’d caught his brother doing it for seemingly no reason at all—as though he’d been undercover for so long, he’d lost perspective on the difference between lies and truth.

  None of which meant he’d turned violent. Or hurt Gram.

  If Mason was going to find the truth, he needed help. Fast. And Harper, with her ties to Bruce and her current proximity to Gram, was the most obvious choice. Gram had given him a couple of weeks with her agreement to stay at the Stand. Two weeks before she’d insist on going home to Bruce.

  Her hands on the table—Mason didn’t miss the open body language—Harper frowned. “What do you mean, things aren’t always what they seem? You trying to tell me something?”

  He’d been debating, since seeing her again that morning, whether or not he would. Whether or not it was necessary.

  Whether he dared bring up the night that had changed his life forever—and not in a good way.

  He had two weeks.

  “That night I found you crying...”

  The atmosphere around them changed completely. Electricity singed the air he breathed. Leaving an unmistakable stench of acrimony.

  “What?” Harper’s hands were no longer on the table. She’d put on her “cop” face, which she was remarkably good at. He couldn’t read a thing she was thinking.

  Which left him with only the surface beauty he’d never been able to get out of his mind since the first time he’d laid eyes on her. It occurred to him that she might know full well the effect she had on him—especially after he’d noticed the leggings that sculpted legs he could still feel around him if he closed his eyes and allowed it to happen. Noticed the makeup drawing attention to blue eyes that had been haunting him for five long, lonely years...

  She’d been bereft that night, and he’d taken advantage of her. He’d betrayed his own brother. Slept with the woman Bruce was in love with. He was a jerk and he paid the price every single day.

  And here he was with her again, possibly building a case to put his brother in prison. Betraying him in the worst possible way. The irony of it wasn’t lost on him.

  “What about my crying?” Harper’s tone was colder. As if he was a perp she didn’t trust.

  She’d steered away from the latter part of that evening, and he was grateful.

  Curious, too.

  Slightly miffed.

  And yet he didn’t blame her.

  “You’ve said, more than once today, that Bruce owns up to his actions.”

  “That’s right.” Her frown cleared. “And he did that day, too. I told you back then. As soon as he’d slept with that woman, he told me. He’d been pretending to be her guy for over a month. She’d come on to him and would’ve gotten suspicious if he turned her down. He couldn’t risk her feeling rejected and breaking up with him. Almost eight weeks of infiltration into the rent scheme she and her brother were running would’ve gone down the drain and thirty senior citizens would have ended up broke and homeless.”

  Mason had heard a couple of versions of the story. Including the proven fact that Bruce had saved thirty elderly citizens from financial ruin and eventual homelessness when they no longer had the money to pay rent. As, one by one, they had to move into government housing, the brother and sister who owned the building would’ve rented the vacated apartments to other fixed income social security recipients. They would’ve slowly drained their bank accounts, too, with hidden costs and fees, with suddenly broken plumbing, or electrical issues for which their rental agreements held them accountable.

  Bruce had slept with the woman, just like he’d said. But...

  “Bruce started sleeping with her on their second date.”

  Harper shook her head. “He took her on a dinner cruise and was home before eleven.”

  Home to Harper’s apartment? Officially his brother had been living with his father before they were married, while he waited for his and Harper’s house to close.

  “He took her for a picnic on the beach and had sex with her.” Mason lowered his eyes to his plate as he said the words, using the last onion ring to wipe up what was left of the barbecue sauce.

  He’d gone through various scenarios when he’d considered the pain he’d be causing Harper by telling her the truth. He’d weighed that against the need for her to see his brother as he really was. It might change how other things from the past looked to her. Or help her remember events she might not currently consider relevant.

  The decisive factor for him had been the number of times she’d so adamantly told him that Bruce always “owned” his mistakes. Unless he was grossly mistaken, she was a woman who’d want the truth.

  He glanced up to see a mixture of shock and confusion on her beautiful face. She didn’t smile enough.

  The thought came unbidden and he instantly pushed it away. Harper Davidson’s smiles were none of his concern.

  “After...that night—” more accurately, after seeing the look of horror on Harper’s face when she’d woken up in his bed the next morning “—I asked Clark if I could see the files from Bruce’s investigation, to confirm what I already knew, to confirm that he’d had sex on the second date. I was still FBI then and I had concerns about federal monies being misused by the landlord.”

  That had been the official story.

  He’d been checking up on his brother because he’d been hit like a ton of bricks by his brother’s fiancée.

  “Bruce keeps meticulous records when he’s on a job,” Mason reminded her.

  “So...that day he told me...the night before hadn’t been the first time he’d had sex with her. But at least he admitted it. He told me what he’d done before we got married, so I could call it off if...”

  She was still seeing his brother for a better man than Bruce was. Mason was not proud of how much that irked him.

  And yet, he admired her for it, too.

  So much that if he weren’t on the job, if he didn’t have a vision of Gram’s face, her cast, so clearly in his mind, he might have left Harper to her version of truth.

  “He’d had sex with a woman the night before, exac
tly as he told you. It just hadn’t been with that woman.” He tried to keep emotion out of his voice, and yet tempered the words, the tone, the way he would with any other victim deserving of compassion.

  Her mouth fell open. She lifted her beer bottle, seemingly nonchalant, until he noticed her hand trembling.

  She swallowed a gulp of beer, and then, with a nod toward him, asked, “Then who did he have sex with that night a week before we were married, if it wasn’t a perp?”

  Certain that she didn’t want to know, Mason paused, wanting to be elsewhere. Her marriage had ended because Bruce had been unfaithful a second time. He’d blamed both times on cases. What harm did it do to have her continuing to think so? Except that he needed her to see how his brother re-framed truths.

  “His partner.”

  “Gwen? He had sex with Gwen? But...she was at our house all the time the year we were married. She was like a sister to me. And treated Bruce like a brother. There was no way there’d been anything physical between them. I’d have noticed something. A look. Tension. Something...”

  “It only happened that one time before you were married.” He hoped the news softened the blow some. Probably not much. Because his brother had also been sleeping with a perp before he married her, too, just as he said. Just not the night he claimed.

  “It wasn’t like they worked together all that often,” he droned on because he had to fill the silence before he slid around to her side of the booth, plied her with beer and took her in his arms to soothe away the hurt his brother had caused.

  Been there, done that. Never again.

  “They only rode together when he wasn’t on an undercover assignment,” he said.

  She sat up straighter. “He was on an assignment at the time. I know he was, because I was still working at the department.” Her entire demeanor seemed to take on strength. He almost let her have this one.

  “The night he told you he was with the perp... It was the night of his bachelor party.”

  “He didn’t have a bachelor party. I didn’t have a bachelorette weekend, either. We agreed to save our money for...” He knew before her voice faded that she was getting it. Her expression seemed to freeze.

  “She was at his bachelor party. Said she’d been one of his guys longer than most of them and couldn’t not be part of the big send-off.”

  “He slept with Gwen.” It was more statement than question. Mason nodded anyway, taking no pleasure in confirming it.

  After a long swig of beer, elbows on the table, she folded her hands together. “And the perp, he did it with her multiple times.”

  As often as it had taken to get the indictment he’d been after, according to the report. Undercover work gave a cop more leeway, and Bruce took advantage of it. Mason knew his brother well enough to realize Bruce would see his actions as some kind of sacrifice for the job—proving to his superiors that there was nothing he wouldn’t do to bring down the bad guys.

  “I hope to God he wore a condom.”

  Half choking on the swallow of beer he’d taken, Mason put down his mug, motioning to the waiter for one more. “It was a long time ago,” he said. He tried not to think about the woman he’d slept with, the woman sitting across from him—and how much he wanted to do it again.

  Wasn’t going to happen. No matter how everything played out. Bruce was family. And still in love with his ex-wife. His brother had mentioned, more than once, that he was planning to renew his relationship with Harper. Mason wouldn’t take his own happiness at the expense of his brother’s.

  Harper wouldn’t have Mason again anyway, he was certain of that. The memory of that look on her face...a man didn’t forget something like that.

  “I’m sure he wore a condom,” he said now, needing to arrive at the truth about Bruce, get Gram settled and get out of town. “But if you’d caught an STI from him, you’d have known long before now.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.” Harper stood, grabbed her purse. “Listen, I have to go home,” she said. “Kelsey from next door came over to stay with Brianna while I’m gone, and it’s a school night for her. I promised I’d be back no later than ten.”

  It was quarter to. She lived about three minutes away. He’d purposely checked on his drive in. But he nodded. “I’ll be in touch in the morning,” he told her. Because he needed her help.

  She nodded. Reached for her wallet.

  “I’ve got this,” Mason said. “I’m going to order a soda to go and then head home.”

  “You’re going back to Albina?”

  If he said he’d rather not, would she offer him a night on her couch? He wanted to know. Badly.

  “I’ll be home by midnight,” he told her, figuring the drive would do him good.

  He had work to do.

  And very little time to get it done.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BRUCE HAD SLEPT with Gwen. In the larger scheme of things that mattered not at all. Miriam’s injuries were what mattered. Brianna’s well-being, too.

  It wasn’t like she and Bruce were still married, or even had feelings for each other, except mutual respect where raising their daughter was concerned.

  And there was little reason for shock where his infidelity was concerned. It wasn’t like he’d been faithful after he’d “come clean” the first time about the night he’d slept with another woman. He’d promised her then it had been a one-time thing. The only time. He’d said work had gotten away from him.

  She hadn’t stuck around long enough to hear anything else. Devastated in a way she’d never experienced before, feeling such an overwhelming chaos of emotions that were new to her undramatic life, she’d taken off. She’d ended up at the beach where she’d run until her calves ached. And then kept on running.

  She’d trusted Bruce. With her heart. With her life. The idea that he’d been unfaithful to her—and a week before their wedding—she hadn’t known how to cope. With all the crap that cops saw on the job, they had to be able to trust each other. Implicitly. And when a cop was the man you loved, your partner in life... His disloyalty had been unfathomable to her.

  And still...she’d loved him.

  By the time Mason had found her, her calves had given out. She’d been sitting on the beach with her head on her knees sobbing so hard her ribs hurt.

  Now, sitting in the same position on her living room floor sometime after eleven, Harper picked up the phone.

  “Yeah?” Not surprisingly he answered on the first ring. He’d still be driving.

  “How did you find me that night?” Back then, she’d given no thought to the way he’d shown up on the beach. She’d been too far gone to question much of anything at that point.

  But during the years since, she’d wondered a million times, with no one to ask. Her night with Mason was the one subject she and Bruce couldn’t handle. And never, ever mentioned. As time passed, and her relationship with Bruce ended, Mason’s sudden appearance that long-ago night had seemed to take on new meaning.

  Almost as though he’d been led to her...

  “Bruce.”

  She shook her head, confused. “What?”

  “He called me, completely distraught. He knew you wouldn’t talk to him and said he’d never seen you so upset. Truth is my little brother was scared to death. He told me that you liked to jog on the beach. I knew where you’d been when you left him, went to the closest beach access, saw your car and followed the female-sized tennis shoe footprints.”

  “Bruce sent you.”

  He’d been on an errand for her brother and then he’d taken her to bed.

  “Yep.”

  “No wonder he was...no wonder he acted like he did when he found out what we’d done.”

  “I didn’t expect you to tell him.”

  “You didn’t know me well enough.” And yet, it felt as though he had. That night... She’
d probably built it up into way more than it had been. For one night she’d felt...cherished. As if she had absolutely no reason to worry about anything.

  It was a result of the amount of alcohol she’d consumed. She knew that.

  “For what it’s worth, I’ve spent every day and night since regretting what I did to him,” Mason said in a low voice. “And to you.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  “You were hurting beyond belief, he’d just been unfaithful to you and you thought your relationship was over.” He paused. “I don’t think you did anything wrong.”

  “I came on to you.”

  “I should never have responded.”

  “As I recall, you didn’t.”

  “The facts contradict your recollection.”

  “You watched over me all night, never left my side, made sure I was safe. You even took me home with you, all the while managing to avoid my attempts to get you to do more. Even after we got to your place, you gave me the bed and went to sleep on the couch,” she told him. Yeah, some details of that night were hazy, like how many bars they’d actually visited and what time they made it back to his place—in a cab. She remembered that much. Actually, some of her memories were completely clear.

  Like the way she’d felt, leaving his bed dressed only in one of his T-shirts, and going out to the living room to convince him to come to the bed with her.

  “I shared the bed with you.” His tone was droll. “In the end, that’s all that mattered.”

  She disagreed, but didn’t see how belaboring the point was going to get them anywhere. They couldn’t go back. And they weren’t going forward, either.

  “You’re positive Bruce was with Gwen that night?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was only one way he could’ve been positive. He’d seen them together.

  “Because you were at the party, too, weren’t you? You knew he left with her.”

  “Yep.”