Razed (Barnes Brothers #2)(74)

He sighed and pulled her close.

She didn’t resist, mainly because she wasn’t sure if she had the strength to pull away.

“If I had to be honest, I only remember the names of a couple of them.” His mouth—that beautiful mouth and now she could remember the way it had been split open time after time after time—twisted in a self-deprecating smirk. “I was jumped the first time by a couple jerks when I was coming home from school. I was in sixth grade. Decided I was going to sneak to a park and take some pictures—wanted to impress a girl. It was the day I caught the owl. Mom was at the studio with Zach and Seb. Dad was working, and the twins were in the after-school group they always went to. I spent about thirty minutes at the park, grabbed some shots—that owl—and headed back. I was two blocks from home when one of them nailed me with a rock. I crashed my bike. Before I could get up, they were on top of me.”

Keelie blinked, then shook her head. “A couple of kids jumped you . . . and you took pictures. Why?”

“So I’d remember. Every time I saw them, I wanted to remember what they’d done.” He shrugged. “You know those goofy kid movies where they show the kid daydreaming about turning into a superspy or something, coming back and taking out everybody who was ever mean to him? That was me. I had this super-cool TV-star little brother. And I was the gawky geek in glasses who’d just gotten jumped riding home on his bike. I wanted to remember what a wimp I was, who’d done it . . . because I wouldn’t be that way forever and I didn’t want to forget it.”

She reached up, touched her fingertips to the black frames. “I don’t see anything gawky here.”

“You didn’t know me twenty-five years ago.” He brushed a kiss over her forehead. “Anyway, I had really good grudge mojo. I bet you know what that is like.”

Keelie lowered her lashes, fought the urge to pull away and hide.

He saw too much. Way too much.

Yeah, she carried a grudge very well. Unwilling to think about it, she glanced back at the computer, resting her head on his chest. “That big guy in the pictures . . . was he one of them?”

“Nah. Just another bully. I didn’t even meet him until high school. Those two, Rick and Rodney, were the bane of my sixth-grade year, but that was the worst of it. I worried more that they’d go after my brothers. Once, they actually were messing with Zach and I went after them—something snapped. I knocked two of Rick’s teeth out and Rodney had to pull me off. They moved away that summer. Was the happiest day of my life.”

“I bet.” Feeling helpless and angry, she reached up to touch him, then stopped, curling her hand into a fist. “How did your folks handle it?”

A shutter fell across his eyes. “They never found out.”

As he pulled back, her jaw fell open.

“What?”

He crossed the floor and picked up his laptop. Over his shoulder, he looked at her. “You heard me. That was the only time they ever did any real damage. I was the first one to get home and I locked myself in my room. Mom got home with Zach and Seb. Seb was still a baby so he was there with her all the time. Dad showed up a little while later with the twins. Zach comes to get me about dinner and I picked a fight with him, let him catch me in the eye.”

Keelie pinched the bridge of her nose. “You’re telling me that you let your brother take the fall?”

“No. I’m the one who got in trouble.” He met her stare levelly, his mouth quirked up in the faintest of smiles. “I elbowed him in the gut and called him a *, told him to leave me alone. He was getting razzed all the time about being on the show and some of his friends had been teasing him. It was the exact thing to set him off. He shoved me back and I turned around to hit him in the stomach. That was all it took. He laid into me and I didn’t bother to fight back. Mom walked in and pulled him off me.”

She stared, speechless, as he walked across the floor and put his laptop up. Finally, her brain remembered how to make words and she was able to sputter out, “Why would you do that? You should have told them about those little *s.”

For a moment, he stood there. Light shone in the glass windows behind him, casting him into shadow as he stared down at the floor. Finally, he turned and came toward her.

“I can give you a lot of reasons. I was embarrassed. I was afraid if they got in trouble, they’d do it again. Or that they might go after Zach—or worse, Trey and Travis.” His expression was serious, his eyes grim. “I could tell you that Mom was sick a lot that year—she’d miscarried.”

Shock slammed into her and she fumbled for anything to say to him but he didn’t even pause.

“It was a girl.” He brushed her hair back. “They’d always wanted another child and Mom had hoped for a daughter. This was a girl, and she miscarried. She couldn’t stop bleeding. They had to do a hysterectomy. She never did get the little girl she wanted.”

Curling her hand over Zane’s wrist, she held on. “That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t want to know.”

“Oh, I know that.” A mocking smile curled his lips. “I know full well if I were to tell them now, they’d hand me my ass. But I still don’t want to tell them. I hid it. All of it.”

“How could you hide the fact that you came home with a black eye, and bruises all over you? How do you hide that?”