“So I chose Ray and Susan,” he said, quietly enough that I had to strain to hear him. “Two days after the judge named maintained their guardianship, she was dead. Drug overdose.”
“Oh, God,” I breathed out, more to myself than to him. A few tears welled up and fell down my cheeks before I could stop them. “Oh God, Brandon.”
As if finally realizing that I was still there, Brandon stopped and turned to look at me in surprise. He lifted both hands to cradle my face and forced me to look up into his fathomless blue eyes while he wiped away the remnants of my tears with his thumbs.
“Skylar, listen to me,” he said, in a calm tone, his slight Boston accent the only remaining sign of his distress. I wondered how his voice could be so even after telling me all of that. “Are you listening?”
I could barely speak, so I just nodded. He sighed.
“I know what it sounds like. Math kid from Southie, deadbeat parents, in and out of foster care. Rescued by an MIT professor. I sound like that damn movie, just fast-forwarded a few years.” He gave me a crooked smile and rolled his eyes. “I even got a Skylar, don’t I? But baby, I dealt with all of this shit a long time ago, and honestly, I got it pretty good in the end.”
“But Ray—” I started to protest, thinking of that oddly cold man in his office piled with papers. The man who was clearly more concerned with a paper full of equations than the man he’d help raise.
“Ray was fine,” Brand cut me off gently. “He gave me the chance to make something of myself, and I took it. Some people in the old neighborhood, they couldn’t handle that. So I just said fuck ‘em, and I don’t waste my time there anymore.” He breathed out, a slow steady breath as he released my face. “I’m okay, Skylar, really. Do you remember what I said?”
I screwed my forehead up, momentarily confused. It couldn’t be as simple as that, not after what had happened with his mother. Brandon clearly had issues he hadn’t dealt with properly. But before I could say anything, he pressed his forehead to mine and hummed as we breathed in each other’s scents.
“I don’t need to be fixed, Skylar,” he reminded me softly. “Please understand that.”
I didn’t. I was screwed up enough from my relationship with my mother; I couldn’t imagine anyone could be truly okay after all of the hardship he’d endured as a kid, even if it was more than twenty years ago now. Could a person ever really get over being betrayed by a parent? I wasn’t so sure.
But I nodded my head anyway to show him that I had at least heard what he said. I could see his deep desire to please others, as well the guilt from his decisions in his own self-interest. These things now pushed him to go so over the top trying to make others happy. Well, at least the others he cared about. The thought brought an unexpected smile to my lips, and Brandon cocked his head in question.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
I stood up on my tiptoes and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “I just realized something. You like me, Brandon Sterling. You like me a lot.”
His mouth quirked up in another crooked smile, and his eyes shined brightly with pleasure.
“Well, I’m glad that’s finally getting through,” he murmured. He leaned down and pressed his lips onto mine, grasping me in a soft, sweet kiss that, while lacking the frenzy of our other encounters, was just as potent. When he pulled back, he kept his nose against mine.
I wanted to kiss him again, but he straightened up and tugged me down a path that led across a wide expanse of grass. I looked across the street, and realized that we had walked all the way from the North End through most of the Commons. I had been so engrossed with his stories that I hadn’t even noticed where we were.
“Will you come in?” he said, gesturing at the familiar gray stone house where I had already spent one memorable night. “There’s one more thing I’d like to show you.”
The look of boyish hope on his face made it clear that there was no ulterior motive behind the request. Even if there were, my answer probably would have been the same.
“Lead on, sir,” I said, and held out my hand.
~
Chapter 22
We were met by a stark gust of warm, inviting air when we stepped through the large double doors of Brandon’s house, a stark contrast to the increasingly frigid air we’d been walking around in for the past few hours. Right down to the time (it was nearing midnight), it looked exactly the same as I remembered: the same impeccably clean surfaces, the same plush carpeting and glossy floors, the same warm lighting and crackling fireplace.
“You have a fetish for fireplaces, don’t you?” I asked as Brandon helped me remove my coat and draped it on a rack next to the door. “Your office and here. They’re always lit.”
He shrugged. “I was cold a lot as a kid,” he replied as if it was just a personal preference.
Oh. Another image of a small, shivering blond boy flashed through mind, shivering in the snow outside some dilapidated row house. Shaking the image away, I looked to the familiar warm interior of his living room.
“So does it always look like this when you come home?”
He glanced around. “Like what?”
I followed his glance and gestured at the inviting living room, with its lively fire and the couch piled with plush throw blankets. I wanted to jump into them, preferably with Brandon. Maybe naked. Hmm...
“Oh, just waiting for you to curl up with hot chocolate in the window and watch the snow fall. You know, like it’s waiting for you to live here.”
“I do live here.” He chuckled. “I guess so. I don’t do a lot of curling up in window sills.” He peered up and down his large frame, and then back to me with a smirk. “Maybe I redo the windows with extra-large bays so I can experience the pleasure.”
“Maybe you should,” I joked.
“But really,” he said, “this place can feel like a tomb when everything is shut down. So I pay Ana well to keep it alight, so to speak.”
He surveyed his living room, checking that all his things were in their proper places, plush and inviting should he actually decide to spend some time with them. Who’d have thought that big Brandon Sterling was afraid of the dark? Again, I had to shake the small, chilled child. As much as I enjoyed—mostly—his proclamations in the stairwell, I didn’t want him to feel like he always had to have sex to ward off pity. More than that, I didn’t want him to think I pitied him at all.
Brandon pulled my gloves off for me and set them on the small console by the door. Then he took one of my hands in his and brought it to his lips with a shy smile.
“I’m glad you’re here, Red,” he said softly, and pulled me close to him. “You look good in my house.”
I blushed, thankful for the dim lighting. “Do I?”
He leaned over and smacked a big kiss on my lips. “Definitely. That was the first thing I thought when I walked in and found you sitting on my windowsill like you owned the place. It wasn’t just that this unbelievably beautiful woman had magically appeared in my living room. I just remember feeling like it was Deja vu—like you were always supposed to be there. I thought, it’s crazy, I don’t even know this girl, but I don’t want her to leave.”
His words made my response catch in my throat. Then I thought of something.
“Wait. Were you really unable to get me a car that night?”
Brandon grinned sheepishly. “Of course not. But it was the best excuse I could come up with to get you to stay.”
How did he manage to disarm me like this with just a few phrases? His vulnerability was both contagious and intoxicating. We stood there a moment, our arms wrapped tightly about each other, until he gave me a quick, tight embrace and released me, breaking the brief spell.
“Come on, Red. There’s something else I want to show you.”
Somewhat woeful to abandon the promise of the warm living room, I followed him up three flights of stairs, peeking around briefly at each landing as he gave me a brief tour. This place was even more enormous than I though
t. The second floor, where I had stayed, boasted two other guest rooms with en suite bathrooms. I caught a glimpse of what looked to be his enormous bedroom on the third floor, along with two other doors. One opened into a lot of bookshelves—probably an equally enormous office—and through the other I caught the workings of a home gym. Well, that explained his physique.
The top floor opened up onto a massive loft that appeared to function as a rec room. In one corner was an enormous entertainment system in front of the biggest sectional couch I had ever seen. Behind that was a large wet bar stocked with a variety of glassware hanging from dark wooden racks, framed by a variety of neon beer signs for PBR and Guinness, among others. In the middle of the room was a polished pool table, and on the other side of that was a ping-pong table. It was the ultimate bachelor space, although something about the room made it look like it hadn’t been used in a while.
“Did you want to watch a movie or something?” I asked.
I wasn’t sure why a rec room was so important to show me, but I’d heard worse excuses to get a girl to stick around. I just hoped that Brandon didn’t really think he had to use lines like that to get me to stay the night with him. Maybe this was just his way of telling me that he didn’t really like craft beer as much as he claimed.
He flipped his gaze over the room briefly. “Oh, no, although we can if you want. This is mostly shit I set up for friends. I—ah—don’t really come up here that much.”
The way his voice shifted ever so slightly on the word “friends” made me wonder if he was talking about his friends from the old neighborhood. Right down to the neon Sam Adams sign hanging from the wall over the wet bar and the row of vintage video games lined neatly behind the ping pong table, the room was pretty much designed as college kid’s ultimate hang out. It was the kind of place I could imagine any twenty-one-year-old putting together for his friends to come over and watch the game. Except, I thought, Brandon was thirty-seven.
“Do you still talk to your friends from Dorchester?” I asked him.
He glanced back at me sharply. “No. I told you, I don’t really go down there anymore.”
“Yeah, but that’s because you said the people you want to see left. Do you ever see them, now that you don’t live there either? This looks like the kind of place they’d like.”
“Why, because they're just blue-collar? Because they’re from the bad side of town?”
I frowned. “What? No! I wasn’t implying that at all! I just meant this looks like a guys’ hangout spot, what with the beer and the pool and the games and stuff.”
His shoulders relaxed, and the dark look that had flashed through his eyes just a moment before dissipated. “Fuck. I’m sorry, Red. I just…no, I don’t really see them. It’s a sensitive subject.”
“Yeah, I see that.”
He rubbed his fingers through his hair and grimaced. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “This isn’t what I wanted to show you anyway. Come on.”
Before I could ask him more, Brandon tugged me across the room toward a spiral staircase behind the pool table. At first I resisted the urge to pinch his perfectly shaped ass as he climbed the stairs ahead of me, but upon second thought, I decided he would do the same thing to me, so I reached up and made a nice grab.
He hopped in surprise, but delivered me a mischievous grin in response. “Like what you see, Ms. Crosby?”
I batted my eyelashes at him. “I don’t know what you mean. It was just there, asking for it. What do they say to women? That we really shouldn’t wear such revealing clothes, or else we’re asking for it?”
He looked down at his jeans, which were the opposite of revealing, and waggled his eyebrows in a way that made me burst out laughing. “You better watch out, Red. I give as good as I get.”
“Promise?” I asked as I chased him up the rest of the stairs.
He opened the door at the top into a small room that was completely constructed of glass. At the far side was a small door that led out onto a deck covering the entire roof of the townhouse. I gawked at the view of the Commons visible just over the ledge, but also at the beautiful garden set up around the various amenities. Most of the potted plants were either empty or covered with plastic to protect against the Boston winter weather, but that didn’t detract from the outdoor lounge area, the covered barbecue area, or the cedar-planked hot tub built directly into the roof.
I turned to him. “Is this an excuse to go skinny dipping?” I asked with a nod toward the hot tub. “Because I’m not gonna lie. I’m a sucker for jets.”
Another crooked smile melted my insides.
“I’ll remember that,” Brandon said. “Maybe after I show you what’s in here.”
I turned around observe the room I was actually in as Brandon leaned down to turn on the space heater in the corner. Unlike the rest of his pristine house, this room was somewhat of a mess. Long wood worktables bordered two of the glass walls, and were partially lined with perforated plywood from which hung various tools—those that weren’t scattered over the tabletops, anyway. Various other small, half-built contraptions littered the tables as well, while a few larger power tools and other unidentifiable equipment took up the rest of the space in the small area.
I leaned down to inspect one small contraption that had several multi-colored wires sticking out from it.
“This reminds me of one of those cars we had to build in my high school Physics class,” I said.
“This is my lab,” Brandon said. “It’s where I tinker around with various ideas I have.”
I stood up. “You’re an inventor too? Like Thomas Edison, huh?”
It was hard to tell on his tanned features, but I think he blushed at the comparison.
“Ah, not quite,” he said. “But I like to mess around with things.”
He leaned around me to pick up the contraption I was looking at, and touched the wires gingerly. “This one works with sonar technology to monitor heat waves in a baby’s bedroom. I’m trying to get it to identify the living being in the crib and monitor its temperature and possibly other vitals. You know, for SIDS and stuff like that. I think one day if I can get the right prototype together, I could probably produce it for a mass market.”
I set the project down and turned to him with my arms crossed.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, counselor, but this looks a lot like engineering. Electrical engineering, to be precise.”
He folded his arms across his chest, mirroring my posture, and pressed his lips together as if to say, “Yeah, so what?”
“I thought you didn’t like engineering,” I said.
“I never said that. If you recall, I said they did a lot of cool stuff.”
“You said you didn’t want to waste your life, and I quote, ‘fiddling with wires’,” I retorted. I picked up the small device and held it up. “These look like wires to me.”
He stared at the device until I put it down again, then continued to stare at me, like we were playing some demented game of owl. The guy gave me a run for my money in the stubbornness department, that was the truth.
Finally, his poker face cracked a smile, and he sighed. “I was fifteen,” he said. “And like most fifteen-year-old boys, a complete idiot. Can I show you the rest?”
“There’s more?”
I was speechless as he moved the next few contraptions and proceeded to give me several other multi-million dollar ideas, one after another. When he was finished, he looked sheepishly to where I stood next to him, completely dumbfounded by this man’s brilliance. I mean, knowing someone graduated at age eighteen from MIT and seeing the actual products of their genius are two different things.
“Brandon,” I said slowly. I reached out to touch the edge of the last semi-prototype, some kind of sonar device that might one day regulate sea life populations. “Why don’t you just fund a lab? From what you said, you have the money to hire a whole bunch of engineers to put these ideas into motion, don’t you?”
He looked around and shrugg
ed. “It’s just a hobby. And…I don’t know…I guess I like to know that I did it all myself. Without extra help from money or other people or connections. Business is business. This is more where I get some peace of mind, you know?”
“Has your foster dad—I mean, Ray—seen this? It looks like something he’d probably like.”
He shook his head. “No, he doesn’t really have the time.”
“Oh,” I said, looking around at the multiple experiments in progress. He was like a mad scientist, only minus the crazy and the puffy gray hair and plus a whole lot of gorgeous. Plus a major lawyer. Plus a shark on the market. How many other personalities was Brandon Sterling hiding? “This must impress a lot of people.”
“I’ve never brought anyone up here before,” he murmured, suddenly very interesting in picking at a few wires on one of the works in progress.
I watched him, unsure of what to say. I knew this was his way of introducing me further into his world, but I didn’t realize just how far he wanted to take me. In one evening he’d brought me to meet the man who raised him, and with whom he obviously had a difficult and contentious relationship, had told me uncountable fragments about his life and hobbies, and then opened the recesses of his heart in showing me his workshop. More than any of the other places I had seen tonight, this place, with its awkward, messy, and utterly brilliant labors of love, was Brandon.
“Ah, so I have a question for you,” he said, toying with wires between his hands and interrupting my train of thought.
“What’s that?” I asked, trying to put him at ease.
“What we did…ah…earlier tonight…”
I flushed. It was obvious he wasn’t talking about eating pizza.
“You, ah, liked it, didn’t you?”
Now I was positive that the color of my face probably matched my hair. I bit my lower lip, but he looked up to hold my gaze.
“I…yes,” I mumbled. “I did.”
“That’s what I thought.” His gaze, at first nervous, softened visibly, and he smiled. “You don’t need to be shy about it. I just wanted to make sure. Some girls say they want to just be taken like that because they think it’s going to be some kind of Fifty Shades shit, one light slap on the ass and they’re coming five times in a row. But really, they just want hearts and flowers and that’s about it.”
Legally Yours (Spitfire Book 1) Page 23
