Sinful Longing (Sinful Nights, #3)(46)

Ryan turned to Colin. “You know him?”

He simply nodded. He tried to form words, but he wasn’t even sure what to say. He was used to assessing situations, but this one had him perplexed.

Marcus cut in. “I want to talk to both of you,” he said, a touch of nervousness in his voice. “We all have something in common.”

“Why are you here?” Ryan demanded of Marcus, then to Colin, he said, “Who is he?”

Colin was about to say what he knew—I drove him to his math test, he’s friends with Rex, Elle knows him, he’s a member of the Protectors—but all those words crumbled to dust when Marcus spoke next.

“My name is Marcus. I was born seventeen years ago at the Stella McLaren Federal Women’s Correctional Center. My mother is Dora Prince. I’m your brother.”

All the sound in the universe was vacuumed up. His heart stopped, his brain short circuited, and the ground began to sway.





CHAPTER TWENTY


He was frozen, but he wasn’t cold. His breath didn’t fit in his chest. His skin was two sizes too small.

“Who—” he started, but got stuck on the question. “Who is your father?” Colin managed to say, the words thin and tentative as he tried to make sense of the way north had become south, and down was now up, and who the hell this kid’s dad was. Had their mother been knocked up courtesy of Stefano? That thought churned his stomach. Or did they share the same dad? But if Marcus had been born to Thomas Paige, he and his other siblings would surely have known about his existence, because the prison would have turned the baby over to Thomas Paige’s parents to raise – Colin’s grandparents.

Which meant…

“My father is Luke Carlton,” Marcus supplied, and Colin blew out a long stream of air. His mother had not only cheated on his dad, she’d gotten pregnant from the affair. Course, that was the least of her crimes.

“So she was pregnant when she went to prison?” he asked, the words tasting like chalk.

“I guess she had to have been,” Marcus said from his post on the sidewalk. The three of them stood in their places like actors on their marks.

“Pregnant? She was f*cking pregnant?” he asked again, as if repeating the facts would assemble them into a neat, orderly package.

But before Marcus could respond, Colin turned to his other brother. Ryan’s jaw was open. He hadn’t moved. He didn’t blink. “Can you believe this?” he said to Ryan, holding his hands out wide. He’d barely batted an eye when the detective had told him last week that Dora had been dealing drugs.

But this—this was something else entirely. This was the true bombshell.

He had another brother. One who was fourteen years younger. One he’d never known existed.

This was a meteor crashing into his backyard, slamming a crater in the earth. This was him standing over it, trying to figure out what to do with that gaping maw in the ground.

“No. This is insane, even for her,” Ryan said, the look in his eyes mirroring Colin’s.

He snapped his gaze back to Marcus, who rubbed a hand over his chin, a gesture that Colin did often, too. He flinched at that one small, shared trait. “I can’t believe she was pregnant that whole time, as all the shit went down. And she hid the pregnancy through all of that?”

“My dad told me she didn’t want anyone to know. She was scared of it getting out,” Marcus said. His early nerves seemed to have evaporated, replaced by something that sounded like relief. He straightened his spine, standing taller. He still wasn’t as tall as Colin or Ryan, though. Perhaps, the height genes among the Sloan men had come from their father. Somehow, this small detail mattered to Colin—mattered because he’d loved his dad. Because he missed his dad.

“When did Luke tell you that?” Colin asked, using Marcus’s dad’s first name.

“When I was older. I think ten or eleven.”

“When were you born?”

Marcus gave them his birthday. Three months after their mom went to prison. Which meant she would have been six months pregnant when she was locked up. Colin tried to remember how she’d looked then, during the trial and her arrest. She wore baggy clothes, if his memory served. A seamstress, she’d have known how to make the right outfits to hide a growing belly. The thought of her planning a whole deception hit him like a sledgehammer.

“Holy shit.”

There were no other words for this situation. Just none. He backed up, reaching for a railing, a tree, something to hold on to.

Nothing was behind him—only sidewalk, yard, and the utter surprise of the foursome becoming a fivesome. He grabbed Ryan’s shoulder, and his older brother steadied him, as the news started to register as real.

His own mother had methodically hid her fifth child, keeping him secret as the tsunami rocked their family.

Five.

He was one of five, not one of four.

And none of them had a clue.

He started traveling back in time, trying to add up the facts and make some sense of this latest machination of their mother’s. “So she was pregnant when she was arrested,” he said, thinking out loud, taking a minute to process the absolute f*cking weirdness of that detail. “And she was clearly pregnant when she was sentenced and went to prison.” His brain kicked back into gear and started reconnecting the parts to the whole. And as he lined up the pieces, his jaw nearly dropped with one cold, stark realization. He brought his hand to his mouth, started to speak, but his voice was vacant. Then he found words again, managing a bare whisper as he turned to Ryan.