Stay Vertical (The Bare Bones MC #2)(11)

He turned to me. “I heard you were here.” He came for me with wide open arms. I wanted to scream and run away when he wrapped them around me, but instead I stood frozen like a statue, barely daring to breathe in his scent of sweat and exhaust fumes.

“Little June,” he murmured in my ear. “I haven’t seen you since, well, since you went away to college.” Thank God he drew back and held me at arm’s length to look at me.

“Well,” I breathed. “I’m not here for a good reason.”

He made a serious face out of respect. “I know. I heard. Are you doing all right behind that diagnosis? I mean, she’s your mother and all.”

That was Ford’s way of saying that Ingrid was knitting with only one needle. I briefly wondered if Ford was at all concerned that it ran in the family. He did just have a daughter with Maddy. “Oh, you know. We were never that close. Thank God I never relied on her for much. Her death won’t deprive me of anything. It’s just the…getting there that’ll be the hard part.”

Ford had wandered behind his desk and was fingering some papers, already tuning out my talk about Ingrid. He probably knew it was a sore spot with Madison, and I doubt they ever brought up Ingrid’s name at all. I didn’t want to babble on, so I started stammering some crap congratulating them on their wedding. I was hugely relieved when a big clattering in the inner hallway took the attention off of me.

Big men’s voices boomed out. All three of us stiffened, then quick as a whip, Ford snatched a pistol from where it had been secreted in his jeans waistband, underneath his leather cut. It sounded as though one man had busted through the heavy metal door at the end of the wing that led to the parking lot, and a few men were arguing with him, trying to get him to leave. Lots of hoarse, passionate yelling ensued—lots of “f*ckers!” and “motherf*ckers!”

Holding out his hand in the “stay” position toward me and Maddy, Ford took three long strides to the open door and braced himself against it, just popping his head out briefly to see what the tussle was. By the confused look on his face, I surmised he didn’t know the intruder.

Ford gazed down at his office floor, then back into the hallway. Then back at his office floor, his brows knitted. It was clear he was undecided what to do about the intruder. Maddy and I exchanged shrugs, and one voice rose above the others.

“Listen, motherf*ckers! My name is Lytton and I’m here to see my f*cking brother!”

“Ford doesn’t have a brother, motherf*cker!” the tough construction or biker guy yelled back.

“Who is that?” Maddy finally asked.

Apparently the guy—Lytton—was no threat, for Ford was sticking his pistol back into his jeans by the time Lytton busted through the knot of men and gained entrance to Ford’s office.

I was frankly surprised how mildly Ford reacted to a presumed stranger busting into his inner sanctum. He allowed this pissed-off, fuming giant of a man to back him up against the door. Ford looked more mystified than angry when the guy poked him in the chest with a forefinger. A guy with waist-length hair who looked like his craggy face should be on an Aztec pyramid—I remembered him as Tuzigoot—grabbed the stranger’s shoulder, yelling,

“Boss! I told this f*cker you didn’t have any f*cking brother. You want us to take him out?”

“No, hold it,” Ford said. Ford did wrench Lytton’s finger away from his chest, tossing it aside like a grenade, and he got himself away from the irate guy, walking farther into his office. But he didn’t tell Lytton to get lost, or to f*ck off, or anything like that.

Lytton poked the air. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you, *,” he roared.

It was then that I noticed—Ford and Lytton did bear more than a slight resemblance to each other. Lytton’s shoulder tattoo of a stylized eagle even resembled Ford’s shoulder ink of his club’s skull and bones. Of course Lytton didn’t wear a cut, but his figure was the same fine, muscular, long-limbed beauty of Ford.

Lytton had the same aquiline Roman nose with the same bump in the middle. The same full, lush lips, bowed as though an angel had pressed her finger beneath his nose. The same satiny black brows. You almost had to blink twice to make sure you weren’t looking into a mirror.

Lytton wore the plaid shirt with the rolled-up sleeves that could be the mark of any engineer or worker. His Nikes told that he could have even been a computer nerd, like so many of the boys I had grown up with. But the way he yelled was anything but nerdly. He had power and passion and enormous conviction of his words when he bellowed,

“You lying, sleazy motherf*cker! You knew I was your brother this entire f*cking time and you couldn’t be bothered to slink on down to the res and mingle with the rest of us dirt worshippers and tomahawk chuckers!”

Ford held his hands up, palms toward Lytton. “Wait, just wait one f*cking second here. I’ve never seen you before in my f*cking life.”

“Of course you haven’t! Because when you found out we had the same father, you refused to f*cking acknowledge me so you could get his entire f*cking inheritance!”

There was a brief silence then. You could practically hear everyone in the room—and rubbernecking out in the hallway—gasping in shock.

Lytton even stood still, panting, his arms hanging at his sides. The vein in his temple throbbed with emotion.