by Rhys Ford
So it came as no surprise to Ivo when the Scout pulled up next to the curb, its passenger window rolled down, and he heard his brother Luke call out his name. Before he could turn around to answer, a deeper, rougher voice boomed out.
“Are you okay? And who’s that?” Bear growled, his rumbling tone deepened with worry and probably lack of sleep. “What’s going on at the shop?”
“Fuck. I forgot.” Guilt pricked through Ivo and he muttered under his breath, “Hell, you’ve got my head turned around.”
He’d texted Bear and was told to wait. There hadn’t even been a discussion with the other detective about how he was going to hang around and his brothers would be there in a little bit so they could block off the broken windows better. Instead, he’d fallen into step behind Ruan without a care in the world. He’d left the shop on shaky ground and walked away, his head swimming in God knew what and happily skipping off to sniff at Ruan’s tail. It was the most irresponsible, stupid thing he’d done in a hell of a long time, and there was no one he could shunt the blame off on. He’d walked away from the broken-into shop and blew off his brothers coming down. Lines of excuses rolled through his thoughts, but he shoved them aside. He knew better. If someone else had pulled the same stunt, he would have ripped them apart.
“I fucked up, Bear. I don’t know what I was thinking. I tightened everything down as best I could, but I totally fucking forgot you were coming down with the plywood.” His hands were rough on his face, callused from yardwork and overwashing after doing tattoos, but the rasp felt kind of good, a bracing shock of sensation anchoring Ivo to the here and now. “I’m sorry. Fuck.”
“Did you leave the shop unlocked?” Bear asked quietly through the window.
“No,” Ivo replied, shaking his head. “The grates are down, and I slid those padding sheets behind the window frames. I locked the front door, but I don’t even remember if I turned off the lights.”
“It’s okay, kid,” his older brother responded. “You and I’ll talk about that later. Who’s that?”
No matter how old he got, Ivo knew he was always going to be the baby. There were times when that came in handy, but mostly it was an irritation. It jerked him back from being a sexual, vibrant man to a little snot-nosed kid who needed Kleenex and spent most of his childhood in the offices of various authority figures. Nothing stripped away the man like the promise of chastisement in an older brother’s voice.
Exhaling a frustrated sigh, Ivo tilted his head back to stare at the dusty overhang above them and said, “This is Detective Nicholls. He—”
“That’s the cop that brought you home that night.” Ivo could hear Bear’s frown through the darkness and appreciated Luke’s continued silence. “Isn’t he also working the case about Mace’s dad? Let me go park the car, and why don’t you meet us up front? I’ll see you by the front door in five minutes.”
“Your brother’s sharp,” Ruan muttered. “I take it coffee is off, then?”
“It’s not only off, it’s been rescheduled as an interrogation. So it’s probably best if you take off,” Ivo responded. “I’ll call you later.”
“I’m more than willing to help you guys lock the shop down.” Ruan grinned at Ivo’s tortured sigh. “What’s the worst that can happen? Your brothers are going to try to beat me up?”
“Worse. They’re going to ask you every question under the sun.” Resigned, Ivo headed back to the front of the shop, not waiting to see if Ruan followed him. “It’s your funeral, Ruan, but if I were you, I would head home and crawl into bed, because that’s what I would rather be doing right now.”
LUCAS MUÑOZ was an enigma, and no matter how Ruan came at him, the lanky Hispanic man slid away. Any hope he had of getting inside information about Ivo withered away when Luke took Ruan’s measure with a single raking glance, then grunted under his breath, turning away to mark off the length they needed for the window break at the front of the shop.
Ivo and Bear towered over Luke, but there was no sign the dark-eyed man was intimidated by his adopted brothers. He stood quietly while the other two bickered about how best to fix the openings, their exasperation growing when another pane grew a thick crack through it when Bear’s elbow hit the window. It was probably compromised by age and trauma, so the brothers collectively decided to brace up the entire front of the shop and replace everything. Luke said nothing through this discussion, but at the end of stating his case, Bear glanced at Luke, who gave him a short nod. After making a satisfied noise, Bear declared the issue done with and they moved on.
It was a telling exchange. The body language of the brothers shifted the way Ivo presented himself. The cockiness was there and he seemed calmer in some ways, but there was a dash of sullenness to his demeanor, a bit of an aggravated pout on his face when Bear pointed out he would have to change his shoes.
Ruan also noticed the eldest brother had been introduced to him as Barrett Jackson rather than the nickname the brothers used between them.
There was no reason for him to stay and help, and he bit his tongue when Luke assured Ruan they had Ivo’s back and he could go home. He did get a bit of a reaction—a lifting of Luke’s dark eyebrows—when he glibly responded he was there for the duration.
In all of his years as a detective, he’d never once run across a family quite like Ivo’s.
The brothers each had their place but deferred to Bear. There was definitely a pecking order, going from oldest to youngest, but there was delicate care given to Ivo by the other two. He didn’t become a child. Ivo was still very much a man, but they handled him differently than they did each other. It was evident in small things they did—the nonchalant way Bear retrieved a pair of Converses from somewhere in the stall and pressed them against his youngest brother’s stomach while walking by seemed like a wrapped-up-neat package of an argument they’d had a million times before with the same outcome every single time. It was done without malice or comment, although Ruan caught the tightening of Ivo’s gaze and the barest hint of a grumble when he sighed.
Luke was different. He touched Ivo’s shoulder and lower back when he leaned over and whispered into Ivo’s ear as he sat down on a bench to change his shoes. Whatever the rangy, cautious man said got a husky laugh out of Ivo, and the smile on Luke’s face was beatific, brightening the shadows in his eyes.
There was no doubt in Ruan’s mind about how the brothers felt toward their youngest. He was cherished and definitely their favorite. It said something about the man he’d become. Ruan found a flicker of something distasteful at the back of his brain, recognizing it for what it was—envy.
There were definitely fucked-up things in Ivo’s life, or at least there had been. Those ghosts lingered, rattling their chains and stalking Ivo’s every move, but they didn’t seem to burden him, not like Ruan’s did. It all could’ve been just smoke and mirrors with Ivo being able to put up a better front than most, but deep down inside, Ruan didn’t think that was true.
In a lot of ways, Ivo apparently had his shit more together than Ruan did, and he was amused to discover it kind of pissed him off.
He shouldn’t have been having thought-provoking epiphanies after a long day’s work, then a violent confrontation, but the universe and God obviously had different plans. It was hard to admit he’d dismissed Ivo as frivolous, given the evidence in front of him. He’d taken in the arrogance, dappled hair, and in-your-face presence as the byproducts of a coddled existence. Instead, he got a good long hard look at a man raised with the freedom to explore by men who probably took more than a few kicks in the teeth. With his brothers, Ivo pushed less, but he also seemed safe, sliding into a space made for him and confident he could take on the world.
It really pissed Ruan off.
Luke probably heard him chuckling, because he stopped pulling at the tape measure Ruan held in his hands and looked up with intense confusion. Glancing down at the piece of paper with numbers scribbled all over it, he said, “Am I getting something wrong? What’s so funny?”
That was kind of a sink-or-swim moment. He and Ivo weren’t in a relationship, not by any means, and they’d shared nothing more than a dinner, a deep searing kiss, and a late-night knife fight amid glass shards, but Ruan recognized there was something there, something he ached for. The man staring at him from across a sheet of plywood was someone important to Ivo, and Ruan would have to deal with that relationship if ever he took a step forward with the complicated tattoo artist.
Taking a deep breath, Ruan went all in, rolling out a gruff honesty as he said, “I was just thinking about your baby brother and how I thought he was probably just a spoiled brat.”
Luke’s snort was loud enough to make an elephant jealous. “You said thought. So not so much now?”
“Maybe a little bit,” Ruan admitted, adjusting the tape measure when Luke tried to straighten out its angle. “I don’t know how much he’s told you, but—”
“Ivo tells me a lot. I know about you. Well, at least about that night you brought him home,” he commented, his attention back on the piece of paper, scribbling something in the corner with a pencil he’d sharpened with a knife. “It’s kind of weird to have you pop back up, but sometimes life does some stupid crazy things. But then, so does Ivo. So, if he wants to get involved with a cop, he’s going to do just that, because you might’ve been just walking by when all of this shit happened, but you didn’t have to hang around. That tells me something is going on.”
“Is this where you threaten to break my legs if I hurt him?” Ruan teased, but from Luke’s calculating glance, it didn’t seem like any of the humor settled. “Because I get it. He’s your baby brother, and that’s pretty much standard operating procedure.”
“You’re a cop. I’m in the business of trying to get kids off the streets and out of homes where they’re in danger.” The pencil stopped its scribbling, and Luke rested his hands against the plywood. “Ivo came out of that world. He came out of that kind of shithole, and we spent a lot of time and energy washing its filth off of him. I don’t know what’s going on between the two of you, but no, I don’t want him to get hurt. Not by you. Not by anyone.”
“I don’t know what’s between us. Being honest with you, I don’t know,” Ruan replied. “But I think no matter what happens, he’ll be okay. He’s pretty strong. He doesn’t back down, which sometimes is a detriment, but he’s not weak. I’ve seen him take a lot and just keep going.”
“That’s what you think.” The sound of Ivo’s laughter coming from the front of the shop was as bright as the lights chasing away every shadow in the corners of the long front room. A ghost of a smile teased Luke’s mouth, but it never took hold, much like the banter Ruan tried to lay down. “Just because he looks strong, doesn’t mean you’ve got to test him until he breaks.”
“That’s the last thing I want.” He was on a precipice, one he hadn’t seen before he took a wrong step someplace in the conversation. Ruan had no idea how to get back to safe ground, and it didn’t seem like Luke Muñoz was going to help him. “I just want to get to know him. See where things go. You okay with that at least?”
“Ivo’s going to do what he’s going to do. He always has. Of all of us, he fought the hardest to come home. He did everything he could to break loose of the system, and if there’s one thing he learned growing up, it’s that if he hammers away at something long enough, it’s going to give way. He’s got a lot of fight in him, and for the longest time, that’s all he knew. That’s not what I want for my baby brother.” Luke picked up his pencil again, a not-so-subtle hint their conversation was going to come to a fast, hard end. “I know what you deal with on a day-to-day basis, and that’s not something I want Ivo to come home to. Ever. So before you think about getting into anything with my brother, I’m just going to tell you to wash your hands and feet before you get near him. Because if I find one speck of dirt left on his soul from what you’ve dragged home, we’re just going to skip over the threatening part and get right down to business.”
“I SWEAR to God, every time I sweep up a piece of glass, five more appear,” Ivo complained to Bear’s back. “Where the fuck is this all coming from? You only broke one other window, and I’d already cleaned up most of the first one.”
“You call that cleaned up? There was still glass in the frame.” His brawny brother turned, blocking out most of the light coming from the work lamp they’d anchored to the outer wall, giving them a better view of the sidewalk. “Help me knock out the rest of it so it’ll be easier to take the window out.”
Ivo set the broom aside and hunted down the work gloves and safety glasses Bear brought with him from the house. Demo was an all-too-familiar thing for them. Years of renovating the Craftsman monstrosity Bear bought on a foreclosure sale meant learning how to install a toilet and tear down wallpaper. They all had things they were good at, but Ivo enjoyed demo nearly as much as he loved painting.
“What? No sledgehammer?” he teased Bear when his brother retrieved a small rubber mallet from the tool duffel bag sitting near the shop’s front door. “Don’t trust me?”
“Why would I trust you? You’re the reason we had to get a beam put up to support the first floor because you took out that wall between the living room and the kitchen,” Bear shot back, handing over the mallet. “Try not to break my foot this time.”
“Mace was the asshole who handed me that cinder block,” Ivo reminded him. “I was a skinny shrimp. He looks like the body double for a large green guy you’ve got to coax down by telling him the sun is setting. Of course I was going to drop it. He lobbed it over at me like it was a fucking basketball.”
“Tell that to my toes. Just be careful,” Bear warned, picking up the broom. “I’ll sweep as you go. Once we’re done out here, we’ll go back and do a final sweep with wet cloths. I don’t want anybody to pick up anything in their foot. We’ll do the inside, then get those boards up. You going to be following us home, or did you make other plans?”
It never failed to amaze Ivo how Bear could always circle back around to the one piece of conversation Ivo fought so hard to hide from. It probably had to do with the fact that Ivo came into the family after Bear had just survived three teenaged boys going through puberty and was fully equipped to deal with anything Ivo could throw at him. Nothing fazed his older brother, just like nothing threw him off the hunt once he got a whiff of something to chase. Bear chose his battles wisely, usually only picking at the pieces of Ivo’s life he wanted his family to ignore.
And if there was anything Ivo wanted Bear to ignore right now, it was Ruan Nicholls.
Ivo opened his mouth, about to spin Bear away from the topic of the detective, when his older brother shook his head and said, “I saw the two of you kissing. So, how about if you swallow those lies sitting on your tongue and cough up a little bit of the truth.”
Bashing out glass seemed a cathartic way to destroy something while being dragged through a conversation he really didn’t want to have. Leaning over the window opening, Ivo tapped carefully against the shards of glass still embedded in the frame. “I’m an adult now. In case you’ve forgotten.”
“Really?” Bear’s eyebrow lifted up, and he scratched at his beard with his thumb and leaned on the broom. “Because here I am thinking an adult wouldn’t of walked away from the shop and left it open like you did.”
Ivo’s stomach clenched and he swallowed his retort. “Okay. I deserved that, but it wasn’t like I went far, and there were still cops here. It wasn’t like anybody could get in and—”
“You know what that sounds like, right?” Bear murmured.
Ivo stopped tapping on the glass and closed his eyes, taking a moment. Exhaling the heat he held in his stomach, he glanced back at his brother. “Yeah, sounds like excuses.”
“I’m not beating you up for walking away from the shop—”
“Really?” Ivo lobbed the word back at Bear, mimicking his tone. “Because it sure as fuck feels like it.”
“I’m not. You’ve had a couple of really long d
ays and got into it tonight. I’m not going to lie to you and say I wasn’t scared when I got your call. I don’t like the idea of you being down here by yourself, and before you jump down my throat, I want to tell you I don’t like the idea of any of us being down here at two in the morning.” Bear slid the safety glasses off his face, his eyes reddened and damp. “If you’d left the shop wide fucking open and came home safe, I’d be okay with that. Everything inside there could be replaced. Everything but you.
“But a lot of that has to do with me wanting to protect you, and I understand that. It’s hard sometimes to remember you’re not that little kid anymore. My first instinct is always going to be to hold you up and catch you when you fall. We’ve been doing it for so long that it’s habit,” Bear continued. “You’ve been doing really well these past few years, and I guess—”
“You’re waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop?” Ivo snorted, bitterness in his belly finally burning the back of his throat. “It’s been a long time since I’ve… felt that bad. Tonight was just me fucking up. I’m going to own that. I don’t see what that has to do with Ruan. He’s a pretty decent guy who kind of pulled my ass out of the fire tonight, if I’m going to continue this whole honesty thing.”
“Have you been seeing him? How close are you?” Bear’s pale blue eyes narrowed, his face screwed up in a scowl. “How long have you been dating a cop?”
“We’re not dating. At least not yet. I don’t even know how to fucking date. We had dinner once and nothing happened other than me getting heartburn from Singapore noodles, and I’d only seen him two times before then. Remember? He brought me home that night. Tonight, he was actually going for a walk and ended up down here at the right time. He doesn’t live that far away.” Ivo tsked. “What do you care that he’s a cop? Mace is a fireman. Ruan’s a detective. So he carries a gun and tries to figure out who’s a murderer. At least he doesn’t run into burning buildings.”
