Chapter 2
HUNTER
The hotel room was mid-range, but the bed was bolted to the wall and didn’t squeak so I counted it as a win.
The stack of crisp bills on the table beside my cell phone, another win, and the force of my orgasm as I shot long and hot stripes of cum across another man’s chest, the biggest boon of all.
He groaned, reaching up and smearing my load into his skin, and I carefully tucked my still-hard cock back into my pants before I’d even finished emptying onto him.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
The app said his name was John, but I found that to be highly unlikely and also unoriginal.
“Thank you?”
John groaned and dragged the mess of my cum down his stomach. “Thank you, Sir.”
I hummed, giving John one final look before grabbing my phone and the cash, pocketing them both.
There was no kissing between us, no kindness, no goodbye.
That wasn’t what either of us were interested in, though if I were being honest, I wasn’t interested in him at all.
John wanted someone to degrade him, and I wanted someplace to come that wasn’t my hand.
Finn was the one who’d suggested it, unintentionally of course.
He’d probably be furious with me if he knew I was having sex with strangers for money, even angrier if he found out I hadn’t told him about it.
The whole thing had started on accident too.
Finn had told me I was acting a little more high-strung than usual, and he’d stolen my phone and set me up on one of those hookup apps I’d never had the time for.
I didn’t even pay attention to what he put on my profile until I got the first message three days later.
Unintentionally or otherwise, my brother had painted me out to be a dominant man looking for a once-off. High-powered attorney looking 4$ a quick, fun night. No strings and no obligations. I like to be in charge of everything in my life, the bedroom isn’t an exception.
After the fact, I realized the dollar sign must have been a typo, but it meant something to the first man who’d reached out.
He said his name was Steve, and he looked like a Steve, and he offered me two hundred dollars to jerk off while he sat on his hands.
I didn’t need the money, but growing up in the Covington house had instilled many fundamental ideas in my brain.
The first of which being never walk away from money, so…
And that was how I’d accidentally become an escort. A dominant escort.
My brothers were none the wiser, though Finn said to me the week after he set me up on the app, “You seem less stressed.”
And I’d told him I was. We’d never talked about it again.
I walked out of the hotel without a second look back and headed for my car. As soon as I was in the driver’s seat and the car was on, my phone lit up through the Bluetooth, an incoming call from my half-brother, Andrew.
“Hello?” I said, backing out of the parking spot to drive across town to Finn’s house.
“Hey. It’s Andrew.”
“I know it’s you. I have caller ID,” I said, and he laughed nervously on the other end of the line, the sound filling my car. “What’s up?”
“I was just calling to see how things had gone since dinner.”
“Like usual.”
“Have they said anything about me?”
I sighed, turning right and heading west.
My father was a piece of shit in every possible way, but he was also the most fertile—and promiscuous—man on the planet apparently.
My four half-brothers and I were proof of that.
Marshall was the oldest, four years older than me and Finn, fourteen years older than Smith.
The four of us had been raised together—for the most part.
Smith arrived as an angry teenager long after Marshall was out of the house, but his presence always loomed over the three of us.
My oldest brother was the patriarch our family deserved, and it was only a matter of time until Willem Covington kicked the bucket and gave the title up.
Recently, we’d been made aware of a fifth brother, smack in between me and Smith in age.
Andrew. His mother had done a commendable job of keeping Andrew away from all things Covington, but her will had included the truth of his lineage, so after she passed, he searched me out and the rest was quickly becoming history.
Andrew lived in San Diego, two hours away from us, and he’d very recently made the drive up to LA on a Friday for dinner and introductions.
The meeting had gone well. Everyone seemed to like him, though Smith was the most hesitant when it came to opening up his arms. I didn’t blame him either.
Smith was barely twenty-five, and he’d only been in our lives for ten or eleven years.
Any change to the status quo would have been sickening to me at his age too.
“No one has said anything good or bad,” I told him. “Smith is leery, but he’s like a golden retriever trapped in the body of a black cat. He’ll warm up to you.”
“And Finn? Marshall?”
“Marshall is level-headed and sees the whole thing logistically. He’s fine. Finn is—”
“Kind of an asshole,” Andrew interrupted.
“My favorite brother,” I corrected, though it might have been a lie. I liked all my brothers equally and for different reasons, but Finn and I were closest in age and closest in everything else too.
“Sorry.”
“He can be a prick,” I conceded, but it’s just his humor. “They’ll all warm up to you; I’m sure of it. We’ve just had a lot going on lately.”
“Anything more exciting than a mystery brother appearing out of the ether?”
“Marshall has a boyfriend,” I said.
“Is that…not normal?” he asked.
“He hasn’t dated anyone since college as far as I know,” I explained. “And his new boyfriend is young.”
“How young?”
“Smith’s age,” I said, realizing Andrew probably hadn’t committed my brothers’ ages and birthdays to memory yet. “He’s twenty-five.”
Andrew let out a low whistle, and I chuckled.
It had been a two weeks since we’d all met Andrew, one week since we’d met Marshall’s boyfriend, Silas, and I prayed we made it through the rest of the month with as little fanfare as possible.
“And Smith was okay with that but not me?”
I laughed. “Smith is…he’ll be fine.”
Whereas it had always been the four of us, it was also always me and Finn, Marshall and Smith. Whatever feelings Smith had about his idol dating someone fourteen years younger than him was between the two of them to work out and explicitly not my problem.
“Do your brothers know you and I have been talking?” he asked just as I flipped the blinker to turn onto Finn’s street.
“They know we talked before you met them. I can’t imagine they’d assume that would stop.”
“So, no,” he said.
“I’m close with my brothers, but I don’t tell them everything.” Andrew didn’t know what to say to that, and I was thankful. “Speaking of, though, I just got to Finn’s house, so I’ve got to go. Do you want to get together soon? If not everyone, maybe the two of us can grab lunch.”
“Yeah. Yes. That would be nice.”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Bye.”
“Bye, Andrew.” I disconnected the call by turning off the car.
Dropping my head against the headrest, I let out a breath.
The adrenaline from my hookup with John still raced through me, and I needed something to take the edge off.
I just needed a minute to get myself together, but bright light washed over the porch and Finn’s tall silhouette filled the open doorway.
He gestured for me to come inside and didn’t wait for me to follow before heading back in himself.
“You got this,” I told myself, grabbing my things and following my brother into his house.
I kicked off my shoes at the door and dropped my phone and keys on the side table. He had an overgrown monstera that made it impossible to leverage any open space on the table, but he had made no moves to trim her back so I didn’t say anything about it.
“Going to piss!” I shouted out to Finn, heading for his guest bathroom before finding wherever he’d gone off to on his own.
The fluorescent was damning, so I turned the light back off and locked the door, undoing my pants and pulling out my still sticky and half-hard cock.
Using warm water from the sink and a washcloth I would make sure to bury at the bottom of his hamper, I cleaned myself up from the earlier rendezvous, then pissed because I wasn’t a liar.
“It’s fine,” I said to my reflection in the mirror. My hair wasn’t even out of place from work. The whole go with John had been so low impact I hadn’t even broken a sweat. “You’re fine.”
“Everything coming out okay?” Finn shouted from somewhere in the house.
Even though he couldn’t see it, I rolled my eyes, then dropped the washcloth on the top of his hamper on my way to find him because fuck him.
I found my brother in his office, which we’d recently painted some odd shade of pink that he assured me was meant to make the place feel calm and cool like a museum.
It reminded me of the nipples of Annaleigh Watson, a girl I’d dated in college for a few months, but I didn’t think Finn would appreciate the comparison.
“Do you really like this color?” I asked.
I couldn’t imagine spending all my work from home time in a room the color of my ex-girlfriend’s areolas.
“It’s classy,” he said.
Ignoring him, I went for the liquor Finn kept on his built-in bookshelves, pouring some bourbon for him and a vodka for myself.
He wasn’t behind his desk, instead on the cushioned window seat that overlooked his back yard.
Finn was still dressed for work in navy slacks and a black button-up.
He’d undone the top buttons and rolled up the sleeves, stretching a slender arm toward me when I got close.
I passed him his drink and climbed onto the seat myself.
With our backs against opposite walls, and knees bent, we didn’t fit as well as we had when we were younger.
The window seat in one of the guest rooms at our father’s house had been our favorite place to escape to as children, then as pre-teens.
At some point, we’d evacuated to the roof, seeking more privacy, but some of our most intense conversations had been with our feet aligned, his, mine, his, mine, and our faces tipped toward the ceiling.
“I never asked you,” I started, raising my glass over our bent knees. He knocked his into mine, brow raised in question. “Did you buy this house just for the window seat?”
Finn snorted, but his cheeks flushed. “That’s absurd.”
“Of course,” I agreed, having my answer.
Finn was an asshole sometimes, like Andrew had said, but it was a defense mechanism. I’d never met anyone who loved as hard and deep as Finn, but he was prickly about it. You had to break past the shell to get the gold, and he’d been locked up tight since his last breakup two years before.
“Tell me something interesting,” he said, taking a swig of bourbon. “I’ve had a long day.”
“Was the math being mean?”
“Don’t make me hold you in contempt,” he shot back.
“Literally not how that works, but good luck.”
“Would you just tell me something?” he asked again, dropping his head against the wall behind him.
“The Psittacosaurus is a dinosaur with quills.”
“The what now?”
“Psittacosaurus,” I repeated.
“Has what?”
“Quills,” I said.
“Like, for writing?”
“Like a porcupine.” I took a drink and watched my brother’s face as he tried to process what I’d just told him.
Eventually, Finn scrunched his nose and made a dismissive noise in the back of his throat. “I meant about you.”
There weren’t many interesting things about me.
My name was Hunter Ethan Covington. I was thirty-five years old, my birthday was one month after Finn’s, same year.
I graduated summa cum laude from USC with my J.D.
, and I’d been working as an attorney ever since.
Contract law was boring, but it was helpful for all of my brothers, and I wasn’t miserable over the whole thing.
Work was work for me, and I’d always managed to have a good work/life balance, even if my life was often the most boring part of my day.
Feeling bold, though, I took another swallow of my drink and gave Finn an answer I knew he wouldn’t believe.
“I came straight over here from a hotel. Met a man named John earlier tonight and came all over his chest for fun.”
That earned me a full body laugh and my brother pouring the rest of his drink down his throat.
He slapped my knee and used my leg as leverage to get up from the window seat, clearly dismissing the truth as a lie, which was perfectly fine with me.
Finn and I were close, the twins Marshall and Silas often called us, but that didn’t mean he knew everything about me.
“That’s a good one, Hunt.” Finn helped me up from the far too small bench seat, and we both made eyes at my right hip when it cracked a little too loudly. “Let’s go get something to eat.”