The Girl's Got Secrets (Forbidden Men #7)(12)

With a reluctant groan, I slid off my seat. I told myself I was only doing this because he was my boss; he could fire me if I was subordinate. But honestly, I was curious. No matter how certain and afraid I was that starting a brotherly relationship with him would end badly, I wanted to know more about this guy who’d come from the same womb as me. I secretly did ache to have him as family.





It had all started with a stupid song I’d written about my mom and how she’d given up her first child, abandoning the baby boy at the hospital only hours after he was born and then going on to live a miserable life until some *—aka, my father—had beaten her to death. Then I had to go and sing it on stage with my band. And the people who’d heard it just had to tell me it reminded them of Pick because his mom had abandoned him at the hospital when he was born, which led me to wonder if Pick might’ve possibly been that child, and then further led me to do the epically stupid move of mentioning the little coincidence to him. He, in turn, ran off and got a blood test done, and boom...here we were. Fucking blood-related brothers who shared a mother but had different fathers.

After working for him for as many months as I had, I thought I knew him well enough, but now...now I realized I barely knew a damn thing.

Like the fact he was into restoring old muscle cars.

As he led me outside toward a maybe 1970s model blue Mustang with a white stripe running down the hood, I let out a low whistle. “Nice ride.”

“Thanks.” He unlocked my side for me. “It wasn’t even running when I came across it. I traded out the original 302 for a 351 and installed a new heating and air system before I got her purring again.”

I understood basically nothing he’d just said, but I nodded like I did as I climbed into the passenger seat.

“Next, I’m going to work on the interior and paint job.”

Nodding some more, I ran my hand along the tattered seat under me. “I had no idea you knew how to fix up old cars.”

He glanced at me as he started the engine, and damn, I wasn’t a car expert, but even I knew the melody of this one coming to life sounded good. Pick might’ve called it a purr, but to me it was more like a deep satisfied growl, like the sound a guy might make while stretching his muscles on a soft mattress after coming hard and deep inside a soft eager woman.

“Sure. It’s kind of my thing. I worked at a garage right up until I came to own Forbidden.” He canted his head as if he couldn’t believe I didn’t already know that.

I hadn’t. Honestly, it was startling and a little unnerving to learn he’d been a mechanic. His father had been a mechanic. That’s one of the few details I knew about his sperm donor, outside the fact the guy had been killed at nineteen on the same day Pick had been born. That, and my mother had referred to him as Chaz.

Okay, fine. She’d told me plenty about Chaz, the guy she’d considered her one true love, but it’d mostly been shit a seven-year-old boy didn’t want to ever hear about his mom. So I’d blocked most of her sexually explicit stories from my memory banks. The mechanic thing though, I figured Pick might get a kick out of knowing cars were in his genes. If I were him and knew nothing of my origins, I’d want to know.

But for some reason, I didn’t enlighten him. I wasn’t ready to go down that road, too leery where it might lead. However, I knew he was all fired about the brotherly bonding idea. He was ready to travel the shit down that road.

And yep, the first thing he said as he put the car into gear was, “I was thinking maybe we could tell everyone.”

“Hmm?” I played dumb. It was a stupid, useless stall tactic that got me nowhere, but anything to prolong the inevitable sounded good right about now.

He didn’t pretend to think I had no idea what he was talking about. He carried on as if I knew exactly what he meant...since I did. “I mean, I have a feeling everyone pretty much knows already. I told Tink, of course.”

When he glanced at me, I shrugged, completely unsurprised. Tink—aka Eva—was his girlfriend, though most of us called her his wife already. They had one of those rare, close, bonding relationships I’d never seen in play before I’d come to Forbidden. But it was the type where both parties shared everything. So I’d already figured he would’ve informed her.

“And I’m sure she mentioned it to Reese.” Eva’s best friend and first cousin. “Who would’ve blabbed to Mason.” Reese’s fiancé, who also happened to work behind the bar at Forbidden with me. “And you know he probably told—”

“The rest of them,” I finished lamely. Scrubbing my face with my hands, I tried to beat down the panic, since there really was no reason to panic...but I felt panicky anyway. I just couldn’t help it; this shit was beginning to get way too real for me.

“Exactly,” Pick was saying with a shrug. “So, I was thinking why not make it official and public so everyone doesn’t have to keep pretending they don’t know.”

I lifted both hands, horrified to find they were beginning to tremble. “Look, can we just...I don’t know...put off any big announcements for a while?”

Pick’s disappointment came with a five-second pause of silence. I bit the inside of my lip, hating that I’d given him an answer he didn’t want to hear, but hell...I wasn’t ready.