Falling for the Brother

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Bruce had grabbed her with such force, she could have dropped their child. He might have caught her. He might not. The fact that there’d been that much violent anger in him...

  How could she have forgotten that?

  Was she nuts?

  Miriam had gone into a session with Sara, who’d been called in, as soon as they’d returned to the Stand that afternoon. Lila had suggested Harper have a session, too, if she needed one, but she’d said she was fine. She’d gotten away from Bruce. Wasn’t afraid of him even then.

  No, what she was afraid of was not being in control of her own mind. Bruce had spent so much time convincing her that he adored her, that he’d never hurt them...she’d somehow dismissed the time his fear of losing control had gotten the better of him—the morning she’d taken away all his control of her by leaving.

  He’d shown her, and she hadn’t seen. She’d felt bad for him—knowing how much he loved her. Knowing how much she’d hurt him. Not once, but twice.

  And now...as of that morning...a third time. He’d kept her on the hook by manipulating her heart, taking advantage of her ability to feel compassion, commanding constant sympathy from her as if she was a damned emotional puppet.

  How did she trust her own heart when she knew it could be so easily manipulated? How did she know if what she was feeling was real, or orchestrated by someone else?

  She’d called her parents shortly after she’d returned to the Stand, telling them what had happened. O’Brien and all the Albina police had been notified and were on alert. They’d be putting extra patrols on her parents’ home. Her father had loaded his shotgun, too, he’d told her.

  She’d smiled then, remembering how he’d used that old thing to teach her to shoot—strictly target practice. Remembering their conversation as she closed the bedroom door behind an already-drowsy Brianna, she felt an acute longing to be back home—with her parents—tucked securely into the twin bed she’d had as a child. Wanted to work the fields with them, where you could believe what you saw, where everything followed the rules. Weeds were weeds. They were hardy and determined, and you could dig them up. They’d be back. You’d always be fighting them. But you could always dig them up. You just had to stay diligent.

  Her parents had taught her that lesson before she’d started kindergarten, before she’d ever ventured out into the world.

  She’d been prepared. Had the inner resources, the proper tools, to make it in life.

  She’d been so strong. Physically, but mentally and emotionally, too. So aware. She’d left Bruce when she’d seen that the relationship wasn’t going to be healthy because of his lack of trustworthiness. She’d divorced him.

  But she hadn’t gotten rid of him.

  She’d just never seen that Bruce was a weed.

  And had no idea how to live with the damage his roots had done.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Three Months Later

  MASON STOOD AT the side of the grave, in a three-piece suit and tie, his gaze on the closed casket raised above the hole in the ground. Next to him, close enough that her arm touched his, was Miriam, her hand in Elmer Guthrie’s. They’d had a quiet wedding at the Albina courthouse the month before, and were living in Miriam’s house.

  In three short months Mason had grown truly fond of the man.

  On his other side, not as close as Miriam, Brianna stood holding hands with her mother. In full dress uniform, Harper bent to say something to her daughter, then straightened, her gaze ahead. Behind them, more than a hundred cops stood, fully dressed, their hands crossed and resting in front of them.

  Music played, a flutist behind them, while directly across from him, on the other side of the casket, stood a thirty-year-old blonde woman with three children, huddled together and crying. A host of other family members of hers, many of them known to the Albina police as key players in a drug-trafficking business, stood behind the woman, dressed in suits and ties, their hands crossed and resting in front of them.

  Oh, brother, what have you done?

  Mason’s chin twitched, and he could feel the emotion building up inside him, threatening to break free. He’d loved the guy. From the second his parents had brought him home, he’d loved him. And loved him, still.

  More than a hundred people were standing around that grave because every one of them had cared about and respected the man.

  Bruce had had what he’d always wanted—the love of everyone with whom he came into contact—and it hadn’t been enough.

  He looked across at Emily, Bruce’s secret wife, and the three children, one older than Brianna, two younger—the family he’d lived with on and off since before he’d married Harper. He still couldn’t understand what his brother had been.

  What he’d done.

  Falling in love with a perp, the one he’d really been sleeping with before he married Harper, knowing his family would never accept him living that life, he’d fooled them all. His marriage to Harper had been a cover for his real love. Both times he’d admitted infidelity to her, it had been because he feared he’d been caught out. After the divorce, he’d needed to keep her on the hook so people wouldn’t suspect he really had a thing for a woman in his make-believe life. The nights he’d spent away from home as an undercover cop, he’d spent with Emily. The ones he’d spent with Harper, and later in Gram’s house—Emily had thought he’d been on the road, taking care of family business. Drug business. He’d been able to keep up the pretense, even with her father and brothers, because he’d lived his cover—as a man who had contacts and could let them know what the feds were doing so they could run their business without fear of getting caught.

  And he’d played the department, too. Bringing in bad guys—always enemies of “the family.”

  He’d been a dirty cop. A man who’d loved his real life, a life that everyone thought was just the cover. But a man who’d also deeply loved the family he’d been born into.

  The family he couldn’t bear to disappoint.

  Emily was why he’d been desperate to marry Harper, even after she’d slept with Mason. Gwen had begun to suspect that he was in too deep with his cover girlfriend, and he’d had to get her off track. It was also why he’d slept with her the night of his bachelor party. To convince her that sex was a moment in time with him—whether with Emily or with her. Sex with Emily meant no more to him than sex with Gwen.

  Emily was where he’d run whenever he got mad and walked out. Emily was where he ran that day he’d left Mason, Gram and Harper in the state park.

  He’d taken her and the kids on an impromptu vacation to Europe. And when he returned, when he’d known that Mason, the FBI and the Albina police were closing in on him, he’d finally told his first wife, the love of his life, Emily, the truth.

  By all accounts she’d stood beside him. The fact that he’d ended up dead in his car the next week could have been attributed to her—she’d certainly had motive—except that Mason had found no evidence whatsoever to prove that she’d had anything to do with his death.

  Perhaps a member of her family had something to do with the close-up gunshot to his head. He’d been playing them for years. Maybe a cop had taken him out. Perhaps it was self-inflicted, as it had been made to appear. Perhaps no one would ever know.

  “Why are those people so sad if Daddy’s in heaven with God?” Brianna’s sweet voice was more than a whisper, but not glaringly loud.

  Mason heard the question with pain in his heart. Saw, out of the corner of his eye, as Harper bent down to speak with her.

  She’d been true to her word. Over the past three months he’d spent a lot of time with Brianna between jobs. Taking her out for dinner, just the two of them. Playing on the beach. He was getting to know his daughter and had never been more thankful for anything in his life.

  Or known such truly happy moments.

  He was Uncle Mason to her
. But there was no doubt in his mind that she loved him.

  He’d seen Harper, too, from a distance. Even when, like now, she was standing so close. They’d spoken. But only about Brianna.

  Even after everything Bruce had done to him, to Harper, to both of them, he stood between them.

  Just as his casket stood between the two sides of his life.

  Bruce had walked a line between good and evil. Law and crime. One foot on each side.

  He’d played them all. His families, his colleagues, his friends.

  And there they all stood, crying real tears, because he was gone.

  * * *

  THE NIGHT THEY buried Bruce, Harper was restless. She’d put Brianna down in her old room, left just as it had always been, at her parents’ house. Brie had been spending every other Saturday night there since she was born and went to sleep with surprising ease.

  “You want to talk?” Mom asked as Harper sighed, put down the book she’d been staring at and got up for a bottle of water. Her father turned down the sound on the news program he’d been watching.

  “I think I’ll go for a walk,” she said, needing to be out with plants that, although they were infested by weeds every single year, still managed to thrive. To produce succulent fruit and vegetables that gave healthy life to the people who ate them. “Will you listen for Brie?”

  “Of course,” her parents answered in unison. And then her mother added, “Keep your phone on.” Harper almost smiled when she heard her father telling her mother that Harper was perfectly capable of keeping herself safe. That they’d taught her well.

  He’d probably gone on to remind her mom that Harper spent her life keeping others safe. That she was the one who dug up the weeds. Just as Harper had heard him do many times before.

  She didn’t feel like that woman, and yet...tonight, she didn’t feel infested anymore, either. Her weed hadn’t been dug up. He’d been buried so deeply in the ground, he’d never see the light of day again. Or breathe fresh air.

  She felt his presence, though. Which was why she’d needed to go to the fields. She didn’t stray far, stayed close enough to the house that the security lights her father had installed kept her on track. For three months, she’d been trying to shake what was left of Bruce’s infestation in her mind. In her heart. And yet...

  The cucumbers were doing well. They were her favorite vegetable, and her parents had a banner crop that year. Weeds didn’t stop them from growing. They took nourishment away, but didn’t kill them.

  Bruce hadn’t killed her, either. She was there. Alive. Living her life. Other than Brianna’s visits with Mason, which weren’t unlike her visits with her own father, Harper’s life had returned to the status quo with which she’d always been happy.

  Status quo.

  There it was again. When had she decided to settle for that? To be okay with just okay?

  Mason seemed fine with it. He’d never asked her for more. Had done everything he’d said he was going to do. Paid child support. In fact, he’d paid four years of back support. He was faithful about the time he spent with his daughter.

  And he asked nothing of Harper. Didn’t try to make suggestions where Brianna’s parenting was concerned. Or try anything else, either.

  Bruce was gone and yet...he still lay there between them. A weed that hadn’t ever been picked. A weed that would always be part of their ground. The previous week, when Harper had submitted the forms to have Bruce’s name taken off Brianna’s birth certificate and have Mason’s added, he’d been grateful. She’d hoped for a hug. Or a look—one of those that said they were connected forever.

  He’d thanked her for sharing Brianna with him, instead, calling the little girl back to the door so he could hug her goodbye.

  Did he need someone to hug that night? He’d said, after the funeral reception at Miriam’s, that he was going home to do some follow-up reports on a case in North Carolina he’d closed the previous week.

  She couldn’t picture him there, home alone, doing paperwork, on the night his brother was buried.

  Walking along a second row of cucumbers, noticing the numbers and sizes of vegetables on the vines, she thought about the night Bruce had sent Mason to find her. The way Mason had done exactly as his brother had asked, in spite of the fact that Bruce had been unfaithful the night before.

  Mason had been a victim of Bruce’s, too. Whether he knew it or not.

  Was that why he hadn’t contacted Harper after they’d spent the night together?

  Why he’d let five years of silence fall between them? Because Bruce had manipulated him into thinking it was what Harper wanted.

  Shaking but not cold, Harper wrapped her arms around herself. Turned to walk back up the same row, seeing the house in the distance. Her vehicle out front.

  Bruce was buried. Gone.

  Unless she and Mason let him continue to manipulate them.

  The only way he could still come between Harper and Mason was if they let him.

  Heart pounding, she sped up, at a full run by the time she got to the back door. Inside, she grabbed her purse. “I’m going out for a while,” she told her parents. “I’ll have my cell on.”

  They nodded. Her mother looked worried, told her to be careful, and her dad turned up the volume on the TV.

  * * *

  SHE’D BEEN PLANNING to drive to his house, but parked before she got to the road that would lead her there. He wouldn’t be home. But she had a pretty good idea where he’d be.

  Where she would’ve gone if she hadn’t had Brianna to care for, feed and put to bed.

  In jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, she wasn’t really dressed for October on a northern California beach, but not even her tennis shoes in the sand slowed her down.

  She hadn’t brought a light with her, but she knew where she was going, had the moon to guide her, her cell phone in her back pocket and her gun to keep her safe.

  No one else was out that night, and for a second she stood still, breathing in the ocean air, feeling the cool breeze on hot cheeks, listening to the sound of a gentle tide. If she was right, he’d be about a quarter mile up the beach to the right. There was an embankment there, one that would shield you from most of the cold, provide a support for your back and keep you somewhat sheltered from peering eyes.

  She knew because it was the same place she’d chosen the night her life had fallen apart. For the first time.

  Four years earlier had been the second time.

  Three months ago had been the third.

  She wasn’t going to let it happen a fourth.

  She saw him while she was still several yards away, and had a feeling, from the turn of his head, that he’d seen her first. He wasn’t standing, but he hadn’t tried to leave, either.

  “Hey.” She walked up. Stood there looking at him still in his dress clothes, shiny black shoes and all, sitting in the sand. He’d lost the tie. His shirt was undone a couple of buttons, as though he’d been too hot.

  “Mind if I sit down?” she asked.

  He motioned at the sand.

  “You did everything you could do for him,” she said, not bothering with small talk. There was nothing small about this moment.

  Chin jutting out, he nodded, facing the ocean. The moonlight left a streak of light across the bridge of his nose. The rest of his face was in shadow.

  “He was a master, Mason. He had the ability to do great things. But he was also human. And weak. And his weak side pulled him down as much as his good side lifted him up.”

  She’d spent some time with Sara over the past couple of months, mostly just to talk. To check her own mind. To be certain, absolutely certain, that she wasn’t fooling herself.

  He was looking at her now, and she felt encouraged.

  She was pretty sure she knew some of what he was feeling—some of the same struggles she
’d faced. She’d been a little ahead of him, maybe, in that she’d been strong enough to pull away, at least in part, four years before Bruce’s final reckoning.

  “He was gifted with the ability to motivate people, to get them to do as he needed them to do. We couldn’t fight that,” she said. “Just like we wouldn’t be able to play the piano like Mozart. Or be immune to the beauty of his music.” She’d come up with that analogy on her own, but had run it by Sara.

  Wanting to reach for Mason’s hand, she settled for holding his gaze. He was looking at her again. Tears sprang to her eyes. “He was a master manipulator who preyed on, or fed off, what was good and pure in people. Their open hearts. Their trust. Their compassion. And he was so successful because he truly cared about the people he manipulated. He truly needed our love. The only way we could have guarded against that would have been not to care. Not to love. Not to trust. And I’m not just talking about him, but everyone. Because we couldn’t have known that he had a rotten spot at his core. He had the uncanny ability to make the people around him blind to that. We don’t want to be deaf to music like Mozart’s,” she finished, giving him the decision she’d made for her own life.

  Wondering if it would work for him, too.

  “I saw the rotten core,” he told her. “And I did nothing.” His voice was soft in the night. It sounded dry, as if he’d been sitting there for hours.

  “You did everything, Mason. You saw the bad, but you also saw the good. And hoped the good would win out. Everything he asked and needed from you, you gave him, along with your hope. You kept him sane enough to live over thirty years of life, doing some really great things, while he wrestled with the demon side of himself. Think about it. He never killed anyone. Never hit anyone. If not for Miriam’s frail bones, we might not have known, even now, about the double life he’d led.”