Sinful Longing (Sinful Nights, #3)(60)

“Are you worried your dad doesn’t want you to talk to him?”

“I don’t know,” Marcus said, barely audible.

Ryan had no choice but to relent. He didn’t know Luke Carlton well enough to understand how he affected Marcus. But he’d have to work with this wrinkle, not against it.

“Hey, do you want to come over for dinner sometime?” he asked, his voice dry and crackly. It was an awkward request, and he wasn’t honestly sure what to do with it. But Sophie had insisted he ask, so he was doing it.

Marcus’s eyes lit up. “That’d be cool.”

“I’ll make sure to invite the whole crew. Michael, Shan, Brent. We can have Colin and Elle, and Alex, too. If you’d like.”

“I would,” he said with a smile.

He had the sense that Marcus had been missing something his whole life, and it wasn’t his biological mother. It was a connection to the rest of his family. That was easy enough for Ryan to give. He left as a new customer walked in to pay for gas.

*

After the customer left, Marcus dropped his forehead to the register. His heart beat furiously as if he’d been sprinting. His hands were clammy. That was what talking about his dad did to him.

Freaked him the f*ck out. Damn near set off an anxiety attack.

He couldn’t tell his dad that he’d found the Sloans. He just couldn’t take the chance yet. He’d already taken a big enough risk meeting them. But knowing they existed had gnawed at him for years, and he’d longed to know them, especially since he’d never been close with his father.

He didn’t agree with the decisions his father had made. At the same time though, his father had raised him and taken care of him. He’d been a decent enough dad.

His phone buzzed and he looked up. His stepmom had texted. How did you do on your math test? Any results yet? Fingers crossed.

His heartbeat turned more regular as he wrote back. Got ’em earlier today. Aced it!

An emoticon-filled reply landed on his screen. Sundaes at Baskin Robbins to celebrate with the girls?

He replied with a yes, reminding himself that he had to think of her and his sisters. It had been one thing for him to reach out to his family on his mother’s side, but it would be entirely another for him to try to arrange some sort of a reintroduction of Ryan to his father.

Nope. Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t go there. His dad didn’t want to revisit the past. Besides, there were too many people who wanted a piece of his dad, like Stefano’s friends. His father had taught him to fear them. To keep quiet. They were rogue, uncontrollable men.

The bells rang and he raised his face. A hot blonde wearing tight shorts wandered in. She bought a cherry Slushee and started drinking it as he rang her up. Her pretty lips on the straw made him stop thinking about his family for now.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX


“Good thing we don’t have a dog. Or a cat,” Alex said as he pulled up a stool to settle in at the kitchen counter on Monday morning. He shot her a gotcha stare.

Elle quirked up her eyebrows as she served him eggs for his first-day-of-school breakfast. “Why is that a good thing? Because you’d have pet hair on your new T-shirt?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Because if we did, Fido would be all happy right now.” Alex plunked half a pill on the Formica, and her heart leapt like a ballet dancer.

She wanted to kiss the damn pill. “Oh, thank God,” she said, exhaling in relief.

“That we don’t have a pet who nearly ate your Percocet?”

She smiled so broadly she couldn’t contain it. She trembled with relief. “Yes. Exactly. Where did you find it?”

He pointed at the couch. “In between the couch cushions.”

She flashed back to Friday night when she’d hurt her thumb. She’d reached for the bottle to take the second half-pill, but she must have dropped it right before she fell asleep. She grabbed the pill from the counter, tossed it in the sink, and ran water over it, washing it down the drain. Though she’d already chosen to believe Colin hadn’t pilfered it, seeing evidence that he was on a steady path was a relief.

A huge one.

Now if only she could figure out who had texted her. She had no clue, so after she took Alex to school, while waiting in her car until she saw him walk through the front doors and safely inside, she called Colin and told him about “WJ’s” creepy text from Saturday night.

“Come to my office. Let me see the text.”

Twenty minutes later he was studying the message at his desk. Hey, pretty lady. Don’t you be messing around with that new guy. WJ.

“It doesn’t even have my name on it. Is there any chance it was just an error? Maybe it was meant for someone else?” she suggested, as she clasped the hope that she wasn’t the target of some strange stalker, calling her a pretty lady and warning her to stay away from her new man.

“That would be great if it was just a mistake,” he said, but his tone was completely pragmatic and she could tell he didn’t think “oops, that was meant for someone else” was a likely scenario.

Nor did she. “Except I got a strange Facebook comment, too,” she said, then told him about the hazy memory from the other night, including how odd the name was on the post. “It was gone as quickly as it was posted.”