by J. S. Scott
“She worked the day shift, and then she went home. She seemed happy until she stopped back in with Evan to leave you the message that she’d be back. She’s been gone for hours.”
I’d known that. Brooke had traded with one of my part-time employees to get on the morning shift so she could be done before I got home.
I pulled out my cell phone and dialed her number. I got her message machine.
“Fuck!” I cursed. “Why in the hell didn’t she call me?”
“She said she couldn’t reach you.”
I shoved the phone back in my pocket and tried to get a grip for my sister’s sake. “Go on home,” I said in a calmer voice. “I’ll take care of this later.”
“Do you think she’s okay?” Tessa asked.
My sister’s expression was stricken with concern.
Hell, I had to reel in my anger. Tessa hadn’t known what Brooke had been through, nor had she been aware that I was about to make my relationship permanent with Brooke if she’d have me. “I’m sure she’s fine,” I reassured Tessa, knowing that Brooke probably wasn’t fine at all. “Go ahead and cut out. Thanks for covering the place for me.”
Something had happened. Brooke wasn’t a flighty woman. There was no way she just made an impulsive decision to go. Something had caused her to make that decision.
“Are you sure?” she asked hesitantly.
“Go,” I repeated in as tranquil a voice as I could manage.
My sister threw herself into my arms and hugged me as she said, “Call me. I want to know what happened to her.”
I hugged her back. “I’ll call you later.”
As soon as Tessa was gone, I planned on confronting Evan to see what in the hell he’d said to Brooke to make her go flying back to California.
I watched Tessa get safely to her vehicle before I jumped into my own.
A half hour later, I found myself getting no satisfaction from Evan for the second time in the last several months. I’d left last time with no answers. I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it again.
“I don’t get it,” I rasped. “What things did she have to work out with her family?”
Evan was sitting on the couch in his living room, too far away for me to take a swing from my chair across from him. But I could leap over the coffee table between us pretty easily, and I contemplated just how much time it would take me to get there.
He’d been annoyingly closemouthed about Brooke leaving.
“I don’t know if I should tell you about that. It’s her private life.”
“She hasn’t even called me,” I bellowed. “I haven’t had a single fucking word from her. This morning, we had plans for the next several days, and tonight she’s gone? What in the hell happened, Evan? You were there with her. You must know something.”
Previously, I’d liked and respected Evan Sinclair. Right now, not so much. He was stubbornly refusing to give me any information about Brooke or what he’d said to make her go.
“Actually, I know a lot,” he said calmly. “I’m just not at liberty to tell you unless I know it’s going to help her. She needs some time, Liam. She plans on returning to Amesport. She left most of her stuff here.”
“I can’t give her time, because I’m worried as fuck,” I answered tersely.
“Ah, you know about her history,” he surmised.
“I know,” I said irritably. “And I’ve been half out of my mind since the day she told me that she nearly died at the hands of some asshole who had no respect for human life.”
I’d held myself together for Brooke, but I’d wanted to puke my guts out after she’d told me the truth, and I was still feeling protective about her safety. I had no doubt that feeling was never going away.
If the police hadn’t pulled in at exactly the time they had, if they had been even a few seconds later, Brooke would have died.
“You know that the chances of something like that ever happening again are minuscule,” Evan said calmly. “The odds of it happening the first time were pretty slim.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I snapped at him. “All I know is how I feel. She went through hell, and I’m going to make damn sure it never happens again.”
Evan shrugged. “Sometimes we have no control over the events that happen in our lives.”
Rationally, I knew that. My parents had died in a tragic accident, and my sister had gone deaf from an illness. There was no way of knowing those things would happen. Problem was, I wasn’t thinking like a reasonable man.
“I need to know that she’s safe,” I said, feeling so edgy I was ready to jump over the table and strangle Evan until he gave me more information.
“She’s safe,” he answered amiably. “She’s flying in Jared’s jet. She’ll be escorted home. She’s not alone.”
“Why Jared’s jet?” Usually Evan had no problem lending out his. He rarely traveled these days.
He stared at me, examining me like a lab specimen. “Because I had a feeling you’d need mine,” he replied drily.
My temper flared. “You manipulative bastard,” I growled. “You knew I was going to go after her.”
He nodded. “I did figure as much, yes.”
I stood, pissed off that he was manipulating Brooke and me. “What gives you the right to interfere in any of this?” I bellowed. “You’re nobody to her. At least I care about her. For you, she’s just another pawn.”
He stood, his face going from impassive to furious. “She isn’t another pawn,” he corrected. “And I always have my reasons for interfering,” he explained. “In this case, I have every reason. Brooke’s real last name is Sinclair. She’s my sister.”
CHAPTER 13
LIAM
My ass landed back on the chair as I sat down to absorb Evan’s admission. Thoughts raced through my mind, and I tried desperately to understand the bombshell he’d just delivered.
“Does she know?” I asked in a distant, flummoxed tone.
Evan took his previous position on the couch. “She does know now. I had to tell her. Her brothers and sister have known for almost a year. I couldn’t keep the information from her anymore.”
So all that time, the months that Brooke had been here, she hadn’t realized that Evan was related to her? I shook my head, still not quite ready to believe that my Brooke was actually a Sinclair. “How?” That one word was all I could get to leave my mouth.
“She would have already known, had the shooting at the bank not occurred before Noah and I could tell all my siblings. But we’d barely discovered the truth when the incident occurred. Brooke was in an understandable amount of pain, and we didn’t want her to have to deal with anything else.”
“I didn’t know her last name was Sinclair.” Brooke had always gone by the last name of Langley.
“Langley was her fictional last name,” Evan said with a nod. “She’s always been a Sinclair. She assumed that our shared last name was coincidence. It’s not uncommon.”
I’d never asked Brooke if her last name was real. It had never been a priority. “How did your sister end up on the West Coast? I don’t get it.”
“Most people don’t,” Evan stated evenly. “It’s a long story,” he warned.
“I have time,” I rumbled. “I need to know. If I’m going to California, I want to know exactly what to expect.”
Evan leaned back on the couch. “I told you the truth because I know you care about her. If you didn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
I waited impatiently for him to continue. I was going to get everything I could out of him before I tried to figure out what was happening with Brooke. I took some comfort from the fact that she was safe, but not nearly enough for my liking. And now I was worried about her state of mind.
“Although it was never common knowledge, my father was an abusive bastard,” Evan shared. “When I was young, he took it upon himself to train me to be his heir. They were painful lessons, but his lessons weren’t always physical, although more often than not,
those sessions were physical abuse. One thing he always tried to use while he was attempting to break me was the existence of another family, his family, and how it would have been so much better if those kids had been his real heirs. Recently, I found out from Noah that they really didn’t know our father that well. He came for a few days every so often. They saw him for a few minutes and then he left with their mother for a day or two. It seems he used the information to taunt me. He never really knew his other children at all.”
I was incredulous. “All of Brooke’s brothers and sisters are yours, too?”
He nodded before he continued. “Half siblings,” he corrected. “We all share the same father. When he died, I went through all of his possessions to try to find out their identity. All I found were a couple of pictures, something that I assumed Brooke’s mother gave to my father. I had nowhere to search. I wasn’t even certain they were US citizens. My father traveled internationally.”
“So what did you do?”
“At the time of my father’s death, I put a portion of his money aside, hoping that I’d eventually discover who they were. I was hoping they’d come to me.”
I looked at him sharply. “And they did?”
He shook his head. “Not intentionally. But when DNA and ancestry sites developed, I put a sample of my own DNA on every website I could find. It took a long time, but I finally got a match.”
“Noah?” I guessed.
“Jade,” he corrected. “Brooke’s sister has some impressive primitive-survival skills, and she was curious to know if she had any Native American blood, since she knew very little about her father. She didn’t find any Native American ancestors, but she found me. I matched her as a half sibling. We discovered each other right before the robbery at the bank. I didn’t have the chance to talk to anybody except Noah and Jade before it happened.”
“So Brooke was kept in the dark and shipped over to the East Coast?” I growled, hating the fact that her family had played God and hidden everything for almost a year.
“Do you think that’s what I wanted to do?” Evan snapped. “Brooke had been through hell. There was no way I could drop all of this on her.”
“So I take it she has a significant inheritance.” I had to admit it had been pretty damn nice of Evan to recognize them as possible heirs, even though he didn’t have to. But I was still pissed off at him.
“Do you care?” Evan asked as he stared intently at me.
“No. I have more money than we’d ever need.”
Evan rose. “I think I could use a drink. Can I get you anything?”
“Beer, if you have one,” I answered distractedly. I didn’t indulge very often, but tonight seemed as good as any to break my usual abstinence.
I leaned back in my chair, my entire body tense from absorbing Evan’s information.
He was back quickly, handing me a bottle of beer while he drank something that looked slightly stronger. He started to speak again as he took a seat. “Like I said, I was in a bad situation,” he said in a husky voice. “I wanted to tell Brooke, but I didn’t want to impede her recovery from something that most people will never have to see.”
“I get that,” I grudgingly admitted. “I guess what doesn’t make sense is the fact that they never knew who their father was.”
Evan shrugged. “Maybe their mother planned to tell them someday, and she got sick. On the other hand, I wouldn’t blame her if she never mentioned it. Her children were under the assumption that he was dead, which he was, but she never told them that the marriage she’d thought was legal was invalid. My father married Brooke’s mother in Vegas. He was probably drunk, and he must have known the marriage was illegal, but he was a pretty heavy drinker. I’m assuming he thought he would never get caught, and he didn’t care.”
“Did Brooke’s mother ever know?”
Evan nodded. “As far as I can gather from Noah, she found out when my father died. He said she cried a lot, but she was angry, too. I’m assuming she discovered that my father was already married and had a family. If she hadn’t learned that, she never would have let go of finding her supposed husband. My guess is that she found him after his death, and then discovered that he had a legal wife and other children.”
I took a deep breath and then let it out, wondering how in the hell that had to feel. Finding out that you’d borne your husband that many kids, and he wasn’t really your husband. “It had to have been hard for her,” I said sympathetically.
“I’m sure it was,” Evan agreed. “I just wish she had come to me.”
He sounded truly regretful, and I had to give him credit for his sense of responsibility. “Most billionaire families wouldn’t have talked to her,” I pointed out.
“The Sinclairs aren’t most families,” he answered. “My father didn’t define this family. His children do. All of them.”
My respect for Evan grew as I realized that he felt just as responsible for his half siblings as he did for his full-blooded sister and brothers. “Brooke said she grew up poor.”
“She did. I think my father probably gave her mother enough money in cash, when he saw her, to keep the family afloat. But once he died, the money stopped.”
“So he lived like a billionaire while half of his kids lived barely above poverty level?”
Evan nodded sharply. “After he died, they had nothing. Brooke’s mom really had no skills. She was young when he married her, and she died early from breast cancer. All she did was work, according to Noah. Until . . . she died.”
“What a miserable fucking life,” I cursed. “For all of them.”
“Strangely, all of them turned out to be decent human beings,” Evan informed me. “They worked hard to have a better life. They had to have been taught that by their mother. It certainly didn’t come from my father. In fact, I see very little similarity between any of them and my father.”
“They’re close because they helped each other,” I added.
Evan had a ghost of a smile on his face as he said, “They’re actually rather extraordinary.”
I noted that he looked pretty damn proud of the bastard Sinclairs, but I was more interested in what had happened to Brooke. “So why did Brooke have to go?”
“I’m afraid she’s a little suspicious of my motives. I’m not sure if it’s because she doesn’t trust me, or she was worried her whole family had changed while she was here in Amesport.”
“Have they?” I questioned.
“Not for the most part. I admit that I had to give them all some time to digest the information, but we eventually saw eye to eye. It wasn’t our fault, but it sure as hell wasn’t theirs, either. The people responsible are dead, and we were all victims of circumstance. My siblings and I had the money, but all of us put up with our father’s abuse. Brooke’s family had an actual bond that money could never take away, but they struggled because they were poor. I’m not sure which was worse or better. It’s taken years for my sister and brothers to be this close. Brooke’s siblings have never known what it’s like to not protect each other.”
“So all of them are suddenly wealthy?” That had to be a shock for the California Sinclairs.
“Billionaires,” Evan said. “I worked their share of the inheritance as hard as I did my own. They all received over a billion dollars once I’d separated the funds.”
I’d been raised in a middle-class family, and I still wasn’t used to being a millionaire. I could only imagine how Brooke and her siblings must feel.
“Did they all accept it?” I asked curiously.
“Not right away. It took them a while to realize they were entitled to it. They were heirs, even though their mother’s marriage to my father wasn’t legal. He was already married with children when he decided to become a bigamist, but they’re all blood children.”
“Are you sure there are no more families?”
Evan took a drink from his glass and swallowed before he answered, “As sure as I can be. I think by now, I’d probably know. The
pictures I saw were definitely of Noah, Seth, and Aiden. They verified it.”
“What kind of person does something like that?” I wondered aloud.
“You never knew my father,” Evan replied drily. “Be glad you didn’t. He should have never been a father at all. He was not only psychotic, but a sadist as well. Life wasn’t easy in our household, and every one of us lived in fear of his tirades. It was a relief for us when he was out of town.”
“Do Hope and your brothers know?” I asked, wondering if anyone except Evan had been informed.
“Not yet. I couldn’t risk any of them slipping up with Brooke, but we’re getting together over the weekend. I’ll tell them when they’re all here. I can happily say that I doubt a single one of them will have anything but love to give to our half siblings.”
Evan sounded proud of that, and I couldn’t blame him. I knew he was right. Xander would love having more family, and I was willing to bet that Hope would want to meet her newfound sisters and other family. The only Sinclair sister had been outnumbered for years. “Hope will love Brooke,” I said without thinking.
“I know she will,” Evan drawled. “She’ll finally have females on her side.”
“I think it will destroy Brooke that all of her family kept this from her,” I warned.
“She’ll eventually understand that we were put in a bad situation. It was either lie, or dump all of this on her when she couldn’t emotionally handle any more. None of us liked lying to her or keeping things from her.”
“So did she go back to California to check on her family?”
“More like confront them,” he explained. “She had plenty of choice words for me, and I’m sure she has many left for her family. She’s angry. And obviously hurt. Everything has changed in Citrus Beach. I think she needed to see if everyone was still the same.”
“Changed . . . how?”
Evan threw back the rest of his drink before he answered, “Her siblings started putting their money to work months ago. Noah left his computer-programming job to pursue his own business. He’d developed a dating app that’s actually quite clever. Now he finally has the resources to launch his own ideas. Seth and Aiden left their regular jobs, too. Seth was in construction, and Aiden fished commercially. They’re doing start-ups in their fields of interest now. Jade can do much more than work for other people now that she’s earned her doctorate. Owen is still in his residency, but he no longer has to worry about how to pay his student loans.”
