Chapter 25
FINN
After the high of a weekend spent with Sophie and Daniel, waking up alone in my own bed on Tuesday morning might have been the worst thing that ever happened to me.
That was a lie. Neil and Annette were the worst thing that ever happened to me.
Though, being abandoned by my mother for a seven-figure payday might have been a close second or third, depending on how I felt about the rest of my life at the time.
Leaning against my kitchen counter, dressed for work, I used a butter knife to slice the corner off a block of parmesan cheese.
It was not a good breakfast by any means, but something about cheese made me feel a little bit better about the situation I’d found myself in.
It certainly didn’t go with coffee, so I allowed myself two more chunks before re-wrapping the block and returning it to the appropriate drawer in my fridge.
I brushed my teeth and switched to coffee, making some rash decisions on my way to the car.
I texted Andrew, asked him to come up and join us for dinner on Friday.
The invitation was a little self-serving, because while I did want Andrew to get to know us, I also wanted the heat off of me and after last week, I didn’t trust Marshall to play it cool with me.
I also read a weekend’s worth of text messages from Hunter and Smith, deciding to ignore them all until later in the day.
There wasn’t anything pressing. It was mostly Hunter guilt tripping me over ignoring him, which had clearly worked out well for him.
Smith mostly rattled on about Riggs, which was fine.
I was glad he was happy, and I liked it better considering how uneasy it made Marshall.
I’d have to invite Riggs to dinner soon too.
No.
I liked Riggs. I didn’t want to do that to him.
When I got to work, I did end up texting Smith, letting him know I’d invited Andrew up for dinner on Friday and seeing if he and Riggs wanted to join us for drinks either before or after.
I probably should have extended the invitation to my other brothers, but Covington men were best handled in moderation.
I’d realized that far too late, myself as the prime example.
Powering up my laptop, memories from the weekend trickled into the front of my brain, reminding me just how horrible I was when it came to moderation.
There hadn’t been a single thing Daniel and Sophie offered me over the weekend that I hadn’t taken greedily and without question.
Something had shifted between the three of us during that Saturday morning shower, Daniel and I on our knees with Sophie’s swollen and dripping cunt above our heads.
There hadn’t been words to explain it, but that whole morning had been an unspoken act of commitment between the three of us, and as much as I wanted it…
Fuck, I wanted it.
I’d put Sophie into a normal pair of panties after the shower. Pale pink cotton that, by the time we made it back to the house after brunch, were so dark between her legs from her arousal I would have repainted my office a third time so I’d never forget how good she looked when she wanted.
My phone chirped with an incoming text message from Smith, startling me back into the present.
Smith
Are you not inviting Hunter and Marshall?
I hadn’t planned on it.
Smith typed something and deleted it, typed something and deleted it. The three dots appeared and disappeared on my screen at least four more times before I sent him another message.
You need to turn off that setting that lets people see you’re typing because what can be so hard to say, Smith?
Hunter asked me about you.
It hadn’t been that long since I’d seen him. I’d gone over to his apartment and pinky promised him I was fine. What more did he want from me?
My desk phone rang, and I stabbed my finger into the speaker phone button.
“This is Finn,” I said automatically.
“Your first meeting is here,” the receptionist told me.
“Send them in.”
I turned my cell phone upside down and slid it toward the edge of my desk. I hadn’t even been at work long enough to review my calendar and see who the obscenely early meeting was, but it wasn’t long before Hunter’s broad shoulders filled my doorway and answered the question for me.
“Don’t you have some documents to file with the court or something?” I asked, rolling my chair back from my desk and gesturing weakly for Hunter to take one of the guest chairs.
My brother was dressed for court, a sharp navy suit and a pale yellow tie.
His hair was styled, thick curls that managed to hold themselves in place on the top of his head.
He’d let it grow out since meeting Lincoln, and I didn’t hate the look on him.
Hunter undid the button on his suit jacket and sat down, leveling a tired look at me from the other side of my desk.
“To what do I owe the pleasure? Is this another Marshall-staged intervention?”
Hunter made a dismissive noise. “Bold of you to assume Marshall is the only one who cares about you.”
“I told you the day I came over I was fine.”
“Forgive me if I didn’t believe you.”
“Are you calling me a liar?” I scrubbed a hand down my face and stared blankly at the fluorescent overhead lights until my eyes hurt.
“Finn.”
Hunter said my name gently and I hated it.
“You know.” I cleared my throat and dropped my head back into place so I could look at him, black spots from the light and all. “Do you ever think about our mothers? About what Willem said to them? Or how that whole decision-making process went?”
Hunter grimaced, shaking his head. “I try to not think about either of my parents any more than I have to.”
“I was thinking about my mom this morning,” I admitted. “How her love for me had a price.”
No wonder I didn’t trust Sophie and Daniel.
Or anyone.
If my own mother could give me away for the right amount of money, why would anyone who wasn’t even related to me want to stay?
I had to give it to Willem; he certainly had a type and seemed to only stick his dick into women who didn’t know better.
Maybe it was the abandonment that made me so needy in my relationships, even though common sense would dictate the less I asked for, the more likely people would be to stay.
It seemed my subconscious need to overcompensate ran counter to my need to be loved unconditionally.
A therapist would have a field day with me, but I hadn’t sat across from a shrink in well over a decade.
“Oh,” Hunter said simply.
“Oh?”
“This girl you’re seeing,” he said. “You really like her.”
There was no way around it.
Marshall had tried to catch me off-guard at lunch. Hunter had showed up at my office knowing I wouldn’t have noticed his name this early on my calendar. Smith wouldn’t be far behind, and Andrew was always waiting in the wings. I had to stop avoiding them. It was time to face judgment.
“Her name is Sophie,” I muttered, and there was no possible way I could have missed Hunter’s proud smile.
“That’s a pretty name.”
“It is. She is pretty.” I worried my tongue across my lower lip, suddenly very worried about what my brother would think when I told him the truth.
It was a weird life, growing up the way we had.
Our common circumstance had maybe bonded us more than our shared blood, and my brothers were proof that not every relationship was fleeting or transactional.
My mother might have abandoned me, but I knew my half-brothers never would.
I was the one who’d been running from them, desperately chasing… something.
“I sense a but.”
“I hate how well you know me.” The corner of my mouth quirked up, and Hunter gave me a sad smile.
“No, you don’t.”
“No,” I agreed softly. “I don’t.”
“So what’s the but?”
“I think we’ve all been too hard on Marshall,” I blurted, the sentence surprising Hunter as much as it did me. It wasn’t what I’d intended to say, and it absolutely wasn’t an answer to his question, but it was the first thing that came to mind.
Was this what love did? Made a person annoyingly introspective about all their other relationships? Not that I was comparing Sophie and Daniel to my brothers or my parents, but I certainly compared my parents to each other and my parents to them.
“That’s not where I thought this was going.”
“Off topic, I know.” I walked myself and my chair closer to my desk, propping my elbows on the edge and resting my chin in my hands. “He was the oldest, though. The first. Can you imagine what it was like to come into that huge house and to be so alone?”
Something flashed across Hunter’s face that looked a lot like regret. I knew it because I felt it myself.
“And then we showed up, and he’s always been so Marshall, you know?”
“I know.”
“I just realized maybe he’s always been trying to soften life for us which, objectively, not his job, but—”
“The thought is there,” Hunter finished before I could.
“I think you and I had it easiest because we were so close in age, so much alike. He had to have seen the three of us already out of the house by the time Smith showed up. I wonder maybe if Smith is so much like Marshall because of that, but Marshall tried to—”
“Soften it,” Hunter finished for me again, this time with a grimace. “This can’t be why you’ve been so distant, Finn. Is this what you’ve been thinking about?”
“Literally just thinking about it since you sat down.”
Hunter laughed at me under his breath and scratched an itch behind his ear. I didn’t know how much time my brother had before he needed to go back to work, but it certainly wasn’t enough time to have the conversation the four of us had been avoiding for our entire lives.
“We can table this for Friday. I’m sorry.”
Hunter shook himself out of whatever haze my thoughts had put him into, then he narrowed his eyes on me again. “Was this a way to avoid talking about Sophie?”
I scoffed. “No, this was a way to avoid talking about Daniel.”
My brother’s eyes went comically wide, and I had no choice but to laugh at him.
“Who is Daniel?” he asked.
“Sophie’s fiancé.”
“Fiancé?!”
“Are you okay, Hunt? Do you need to get your hearing checked?”
“You cannot drop that bomb on me when you know I have to leave and go to court,” he protested, already standing and buttoning his suit.
“I’m not the one who scheduled this meeting so early,” I shot back.
Hunter walked around to the other side of my desk, and I stood to meet him at the corner of it.
I was still taller than him, slimmer, but since he’d started to date Lincoln, my brother’s confidence had exponentially grown.
It was honestly a little bit annoying, watching all of us grow up into Marshall’s footprint whether we liked it or not.
I raised my hand between us, pinky out, and Hunter hooked his around mine with an unimpressed look.
“I promise you I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m not sure I believe you.”
“They know what they’re doing,” I tried. “Does that help?”
“Marginally,” he muttered.
“Would it help to meet them?” I asked.
Hunter breathed deep, exhaling into the small space left between our bodies. “Is it already that serious?”
I thought about Sophie’s smooth legs stretched out across my lap, her head nestled on Daniel’s stomach, her hands holding a plate of nachos for him and me to pick from while Daniel tried to find something mindless for us to watch.
He’d picked some horrible CGI shark movie and Sophie’s disgusted laugh had sounded like church bells to me.
“Yeah. Yes,” I told him.
“They’re getting married.”
“Yes.”
“To each other.”
I swallowed hard, the reality still much sharper than I wanted it to be. “Yes.”
“And you’re okay with that?” he pressed.
If I wanted to be with them, I had to be okay with it.
There was no other way around it and there was also no way I’d ever even suggest or hint that they shouldn’t get married.
If that was something they came to on their own, that was another story entirely, but they had so much history and so much love, I knew that wasn’t a possibility.
“They are worth it,” I answered, which was as much of an answer as I could give him in the middle of my office with a workday pressing down at my back. It was true, but the truth sometimes hurt. The problem of course, it hurt less when I was with them, but I couldn’t always be with them.
“Then yes, I want to meet them.”
“I’ll make it happen. And you’ll see it’s a good thing.”
“No more self-destructive decision-making please,” Hunter grumbled, and I turned out my thumb to seal my answer with a kiss.
“I’m mostly back on track. I swear.”
Hunter looked at me like he didn’t believe me, but he kissed his thumb and then let our hands untangle themselves.
“You’ll be good?” he asked, heading for the door.
I nodded before I spoke, the truth of it settling in my bones before the words left my mouth. “Of course I’ll be okay. I am, after all, Marshall’s son.”
Hunter huffed out a laugh, clearing his throat before knocking his knuckles against the door frame in agreement. We were all the product of our upbringings, of our environment, and we owed Marshall more than we’d ever be able to repay him.