By All Accounts (Club Rapture: Risk Aware #4)

Chapter 1

FINN

My baby brother looked more like Marshall than ever when he reached across the center console of his car to pop the handle and open the passenger door of his car for me…all while being parked alongside the curb in front of the sheriff’s department.

“Finn,” he said.

I slipped into the passenger side of his car, put the seat back, and covered my eyes with my forearm.

“Please don’t,” I begged.

Most of my brothers had seen me in various stages of my life.

Hunter was probably the most familiar with the ins and outs of my personality, my pet peeves, my dreams, with Marshall a close second on account of the way he fathered us all.

But Smith…Smith was the furthest removed from that inescapable kind of knowing that only came from being someone’s brother.

It was mostly because he was nearly ten years younger than me and partly because he’d come into the Covington name later in life than Hunter and I had, later than Marshall.

All that aside, though, there was still some horrible little psychic tie between all of us that I’d never be able to escape no matter how hard I tried.

Not that I really wanted to, at least not most days.

“Are you all right?” Smith asked.

“I’m fine.”

Smith gripped the steering wheel, leather creaking beneath his fingers.

It was Sunday, and I imagined I’d interrupted him from picking a tidy little outfit from his closet to wear to work the next day, ironing his chinos the way Marshall always had.

No, that…that was an unfair assumption. That was what I would have imagined him doing the same time last year, before he met his excessively tattooed and long hair-having boyfriend, Riggs.

I checked my watch and found it just before nine, which meant I’d probably interrupted some sort of deviant sexual behavior that would have had the Marquis de Sade blushing.

“Where do you want me to take you?” he asked, but I could tell by the tight clench of his jaw he had about a hundred things he wanted the answer to more.

I could have asked him to take me to Marshall’s.

Maybe a stern and unsexy tongue lashing from my oldest brother was the right thing in this situation.

I could have also asked him to take me to Hunter’s because, out of the three of them, he was the one most likely to understand my headspace, but he was probably doing more indecent things than I imagined Smith had been, so that felt like an immediate no.

I could ask Smith to take me to his house, but there was also a strong possibility he was staying with Riggs and that wasn’t something I had any intention of interrupting.

Unfortunately, home didn’t feel like a safe option either.

“Are you staying with your boyfriend tonight?”

“That’s where I was when you called.”

“Is that where you’re going back to after you take me wherever I want to go?”

Smith sucked his tongue across the front of his teeth. What a fucking mini-Marshall he’d turned out to be, despite all the effort he’d put into not, the tattoos and the rebellion and whole of it.

“I was planning to spend the night there,” Smith said carefully. “But if you want company—”

“I don’t,” I answered quickly. “If you’re going to his place, would you take me to yours?”

Smith put the car into drive without an answer either way. He waited until he merged onto the freeway to speak, but by then I’d already taken my arm away from my face and started to fidget with a hangnail on my thumb.

“You don’t want to talk?”

“I specifically called you so I wouldn’t have to.”

He cleared his throat and merged into the carpool lane. “But do you need to?”

“If I wanted to be parented, I would have called Marshall,” I said.

“I’m not trying to parent you.” Smith tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, shifting his grip to one hand so he could shove the sleeves of his oversized hoodie up with the other.

The dark lines and shadows of his tattoo came into focus after every light we flew past, quickly disappearing into the darkness as we drove.

“That wasn’t fair of me.”

I meant it as an apology.

Smith didn’t say another word until he pulled up in front of his place in Larchmont. He did put the car in park, though, and swiveled his head to face me. I hoped he enjoyed the view of my side profile because I knew better than to turn and look at him in that moment.

“Do you just want the code to the door?” he asked.

Fuck, I hated Smith sometimes.

“You know I don’t do well with those keypad locks.”

“Do you want me to just come let you in and then go?”

“I want to drink a gallon of water, brush my teeth, and go to bed,” I told him.

Smith swallowed hard and turned off the car, throwing us both into a deafening silence when whatever music he’d had playing in the background cut out completely.

“Do you know where I keep the spare toothbrushes?”

“Is that even a thing people really do?” I shot back.

“I use an electric one,” he admitted. “There’s spare heads under the sink in the primary bathroom. You can just…trade it out if you want.”

I think, in that moment, I loved Smith more than the other two.

“Maybe you can show me,” I muttered under my breath.

The sigh he let out was audible, and I was too tired to stop myself from rolling my eyes at it. I put the seat back upright and shouldered open the door. I stood on the curb and waited for him, trudging across the sidewalk to the front door at his heels.

“The code for the door is nineteen-nineteen,” he told me. “You’re welcome whenever you want to come over.”

“I won’t use it.”

“Just in case.”

Smith keyed in the digits and the door lock disengaged, trilling an annoying little song at us both.

He stepped over the threshold, not bothering to take off his shoes once inside.

I took mine off, though, because his floors were too pretty to scuff.

Smith was like Marshall in most of the best ways, his eye for design detail being one of them.

I wish he’d been the one to come over when I was painting my office.

Maybe he would have had enough sense to talk me out of it.

I made a mental note to call off work the next day and prioritized a trip to the paint store to the top of my to-do list. I’d get rid of that color—and that couple—once and for all.

Fucking Neil and Annette.

Jesus Christ, the two of them had been a horrible idea.

What had I been thinking getting myself involved with a married couple?

The two of them had already been on the brink of divorce—a fact they’d willingly withheld from me through the whole relationship—and bringing a third in as a last-ditch attempt to save something irreparably broken was cruel for all of us.

Me especially.

But Annette had smiled at me so sweetly that first night, perched on her husband’s lap, his hands curled around her thighs to hold her open for my enjoyment.

I hadn’t stood a chance against the two of them.

Even though it was only supposed to be sex, even though it was never meant to be a forever thing, I knew from the first taste I was a goner.

So, it was my own fault really. I should have walked out of their house and never looked back.

Instead I’d done more than look back.

I’d circled back, I’d driven back, I’d crawled back.

And even as their four year-long marriage disintegrated in real time, I held on for all of our lives.

In the end, it hadn’t been enough. Neil and Annette split, which was jarring for me.

I nursed my wounds over a bottle of scotch and tried to remind myself it was good while it lasted.

But then Neil had called me, wanted to get together one on one, and he sounded so sad I knew I couldn’t tell him no.

Three days later, Annette called.

She wanted the same thing, and I was as gone for her as I’d been for her husband, so I gave her the same answer I gave him.

Being with them separately was like having my heart torn in two directions, and it wasn’t that long ago I asked her if she felt the same.

Her hair was fanned out across my stomach, her breath ghosting over the sticky and limp remnants of my erection, and she gave me a truth I wasn’t expecting.

She didn’t feel pulled in any direction because she and Neil had reconciled. Decided to fix things and try again.

Just the two of them.

I swallowed all of my pride and pretended it was okay. I watched her get dressed afterward and go home to him, my cum still inside of her. The thought of her taking that part of me back to him…

Where it had once thrilled me, now it made me sick.

Two weeks after that, another phone call, another separation, though the messaging was much harsher than before. It was my fault, she told me.

I caused it, Neil said to me six hours later when it was his turn to pick up the phone.

I didn’t know what to say to either of them, so I did the only thing that made sense.

I took the blame for it all. I let them put their jealousy and their wrongs and their misgivings onto my shoulders, and I hoped in the end both of them felt lighter for it.

Hunter knew I’d been involved with a married couple, but Smith was the only one who knew how things had ended.

Hunter, my usual confessor, had been so freshly involved with Lincoln I didn’t want to distract him from that happiness with my own misery, and Smith had needed someone to talk to, so the whole thing had worked out.

In the end, I found my youngest brother to be much more level-headed than I’d always assumed, a quiet kind of middle ground between the rest of us.

I was looking forward to seeing him come into his own more, safely extracted from the gentle press of Marshall’s thumb.

Smith again adjusted the sleeves of his too-large hoodie—the same one he’d been wearing the night he showed up at family dinner with a fresh tattoo he’d kept hidden from us—on his way up the stairs to his second floor.

He kept looking back over his shoulder to make sure I was behind him, like there was anywhere for me to go besides wherever he led me.

I absolutely was not going back to my house, not with that color Annette had hand-picked for me smeared across the walls of the only room in my house I truly liked.

Paint store, first thing tomorrow.

Maybe I’d take the room back to white.

No, that was horrible.

“Toothbrush stuff is under the sink,” he said, pointing casually into the dark expanse of the primary bedroom as we passed it.

Smith walked me to the end of the hall, even though I did already know my way, flipping on the lights as we went before doing the same to the guest room.

It was annoyingly bright, white walls and that same gorgeous floor, and there was no way I was going to paint my office that color. I’d have to find something else.

Smith leaned against the far wall and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

“Are you hungry? How long were you in there for?”

“Somehow long enough and not nearly at the same time,” I answered, unclipping my watch and depositing it on the nightstand. “A few hours on the low end. I honestly don’t know when I got picked up.”

“And you don’t want to talk about what happened?”

“Neil and Annette happened,” I said.

Smith clenched his jaw, understanding that was all he would get from me, and also that it was enough of an answer by itself.

“Okay.” He pushed away from the wall and changed places with me, stopping in the doorway. “There’s food in the fridge; you can have whatever you want. Do you need a phone charger?”

I hadn’t even thought about my phone.

I reached into my pocket and pulled it out, finding it dead.

“No,” I said, setting it down next to my watch. “I don’t.”

“Please eat, Finn.”

“Okay, Marshall,” I countered.

Smith rolled his eyes at me, and I gave him a conciliatory smile instead of an apology or correction. If I was being honest, I’d have to admit I appreciated the concern, but the liquor had left me raw in all the wrong places and I wasn’t sure I could say that to him just yet.

“Is there anything you need?” he asked me next.

A lobotomy.

“Do you work tomorrow?”

He shook his head, mouth twitching into a small frown. “Riggs and I just got back from a trip. I was planning on taking the day off since the shop is closed Mondays. Why?”

“Nothing.” I sat on the edge of the bed and patted the mattress, testing the firmness. “Don’t worry.”

“Why?”

“I was going to see if you would come help me paint my office,” I blurted, inhaling deeply and shaking my head in annoyance at my own lack of self-control.

“Oh, you’ve run through your other brothers and now you finally come asking me for a hand?” he teased. “Of course, I’ll come help you paint your office. I can bring Riggs if you like. More hands make less work or something.”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted Riggs there. I hadn’t been in the best of moods the first time I’d met him, and I wasn’t happy with the impression I'd made. I was also certain I’d be nursing the worst hangover of my life in a few hours, which meant I would be far from fun to be around.

But I didn’t think Smith would partner himself up with a man who would judge me for any of that.

Riggs had nice enough eyes, and if Smith liked him…

“You know what, nev—”

“Yes,” I interrupted my brother before he could walk back the invitation. “I would love the help, Smith. Thank you.”