Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Mark
I was pissed. In fact, pissed didn’t even begin to cover it, and if I hadn’t been feeling pain in every single inch of my body, I’d open up the dictionary app with a thesaurus on my phone so I could look up a more appropriate word.
After my last comment to Layla, everyone had started yelling, but then Brett Townsend, the one I was always so sure was the calmest in the family, had lost his mind and swung, hitting me in the stomach and knocking the air out of me. Thankfully Layla had been in the huddle of women watching us by that point, otherwise, I’d have been arrested by my colleagues for either murder or attempted murder for putting her at risk of being hit.
Of course, my brothers had taken it personally and jumped in to push the Townsends away and make some hits of their own while I’d gulped in as much oxygen as possible before I was taken down again. This time, it hadn’t been by one of the adults. No, it’d been the kids, like rabid little heathens, who’d done it. Apparently, insanity was instilled in that family either in utero or in the first years of their lives.
“Honey, let me clean up some of those bites,” Mom said, coming back into the living room where I was lying on the couch with another baggie of ice in her hands. “I can’t believe they broke the skin. What were those kids thinking?”
Glancing at a bite near my elbow, I scowled at the size of it. “That wasn’t from one of the kids. That was from Jack.”
Mom gasped, looking even more horrified. “Her dad bit you? But he’s so nice normally.”
Yeah, but he ‘normally’ hadn’t just discovered that his only daughter had been married for four years after a quickie wedding in Vegas. Oh, and that it was to the guy responsible for her leaving town for that same period of time, meaning the guy in question had hurt her so much that she’d practically run away from her family.
“In his defense, he didn’t want to risk hurting one of the kids, so he went for whatever area he could get to.”
Picking up the First Aid kit that my brother had kindly left next to the couch before he’d gone to the store to get more Neosporin, Mom sat on the coffee table and watched me as she chewed on her lower lip. The guilt that’d been eating away at me for four long years made it feel like I had acid in my throat—although that could still be possible given how hard Brett had hit my stomach—and I had to turn away so I couldn’t see her face.
Finally, she sighed, and I heard the sound of the kit being opened. “I’ve only got the wipes to clean you. If we patch you up now, I’ll take you to the doctor in the morning to see if you need antibiotics and shots.”
“Shots?”
“The doctor’s the best person to tell us if that’s necessary,” she explained quickly. I was cool with tattoos. In fact, I found them quite relaxing, but shots and piercings? After the singular piercing I’d tried to go through with in my ear when I was seventeen, I could raise merry hell, even at twenty-seven, if someone came toward me with a syringe. “Like, what if they have rabies or tetanus? You might even need a distemper vaccination.”
I didn’t have a clue what that even was.
“I doubt I need to be vaccinated, Mom.”
“Well, we’re going to make sure. Now, hold still while I start cleaning out the scratches and bites.”
Staring up at the ceiling and wondering how I’d managed to get scuff marks on it, I did as I was told as she went through wipe after wipe, cleaning out whatever cut, graze, and bite she could find. Once she was done, she stood up, and I glanced out of the corner of my eye as she frowned at my feet. My shoes were off, and I was fairly sure I’d put clean socks on this morning, so I lifted my head to say something just as she yanked up the ankle of my jeans and gasped.
“Who the hell managed to bite you through denim?”
That I couldn’t answer, I hadn’t even felt it, but as I raised my head to see where she was staring, sure as shit, there were red teeth marks that were already bruised.
“Looks like a small jaw,” I mused. “My bets are on one of Cole’s kids.”
Echo and Louis were little savages. I kind of admired that about them, though.
She pursed her lips and jiggled her head. “Probably. No matter how often Ebru tells him to quit putting the mattresses on the stairs for them to toboggan down, he keeps doing it. God only knows what damage has been done to their brain cells with all the hits to the walls.”
“They take after their father,” my brother, Luke, said from where he was coming in through my front door. “After watching Jack in action today, I won’t ever say the true insanity skipped a generation with him from Hurst. Did you know I had to pull him off because he was biting your arm?”
Raising it so he could see the newly cleaned out cuts, I hummed. “Yup, I found that one almost at the beginning.”
“Damn,” Luke whistled, just as our other brother, Adam, opened the door and slammed it behind him once he was inside.
“I’d get to the doctor to see about vaccinations,” Adam growled as he stomped over next to Mom. “Most likely rabies.”
“I suggested distemper, too,” Mom added as she dabbed at my ankle before lifting the other leg of my pants to check it.
Adam looked at my arm thoughtfully. “Were you wormed recently?”
“He doesn’t need a doctor, he needs a veterinarian,” Luke muttered, sitting on the coffee table.
Finally finished with one job, Mom put the used wipe on top of the small mountain of the things next to him.
“Okay, time for the Neosporin.” She held her hand out to him and waited for Luke to pass it. Instead, he picked up a bag that was almost full to the brim and passed it over.
“I asked the chick behind the counter about disinfecting bites, and she told me to use this stuff before the Neosporin. She also said to go to the doctor first thing or to the ER to get them all checked over.” His eyes slid to the side. “Then again, she thought it was a dog that’d done it, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to correct her.”
He had a point, but then again, I doubted if anyone would be surprised if he’d told them it’d been Townsends who were responsible.
Not that I didn’t deserve the hurt they’d put on me today, though. I deserved way more than I’d gotten.
Adam snorted. “I’ve changed my mind about Colette and Maya. I thought they were the mild mannered ones, the ladies who were the sweetest of the sweet until I saw them in action this afternoon.”
Luke’s head snapped up from his contemplation of the worst bite on my arm. “Did you see her grab Jack and Tom by the hair and pull them off him?”
That’d been Colette.
“Yup, and Maya grabbed Ren and Cole the same way and was shaking hair out of her hand when we were getting in the car,” Adam added, shaking his head. “I saw Ebru and Sabine carrying kids and blocking them from chasing after us, too, and then Layla and Ariana got involved and yelled at the Townsend cousins.”
“Look,” Mom said quietly as she used whatever the hell Luke had gotten from the store—my guess was acid—on my cuts, “I don’t condone whatever y’all did four years ago, but once they calm down, we need to sit down and discuss it. Like adults,” she added firmly.
Eyeing me, Luke asked, “Wanna fill us in on the details before then so we know what we’re going to be dealing with, Mark?”
Did I? Not particularly, but they had a right to know.
“Remember when I went to Vegas twice in one month four years ago? I said the first time was a weekend away, and the second was the bachelor party for Rocko?” My brothers looked blankly back at me, but Mom nodded her head. “Okay, so it was a badly kept secret, but Layla and I had been seeing each other for a long time by that point—”
Adam snorted with disbelief. “Man, y’all have been together since she graduated high school. Don’t talk shit.”
“Language,” Mom snapped at him, then glared at me. “He’s right, though.”
No, it’d been slightly before then, but I didn’t bother to correct them.
Blowing out a breath, I nodded. “You’re right, but she didn’t want to let her family know because they have a tendency to…get dramatic.” That was putting it diplomatically. “Once she hit twenty-one, though, Layla said screw it and stopped making it all so cloak and dagger.”
“Is that why you quit college?” Luke asked, passing Mom a tube of Neosporin and putting another one next to him on the table.
“No, I did that because I didn’t want to be an architect and join the family business. I thought I did, but once I got there and was studying it every day, plucking my pubes out hair by hair would’ve been more interesting, and I realized I’d made a mistake. I had another eighteen months to go, but I quit and started working with you and Dad at the firm to make sure it wasn’t what I wanted.”
I’d done it all ass-backward, every last bit of it.
Adam had an impassive look on his face, but Luke was watching me with his eyebrow raised.
“Really? You wasted almost three years of time and money to decide you hated it. That sounded like a great idea.”
Given what I was about to tell him, I didn’t appreciate his sarcasm one bit, which I let him know with a glare.
“Anyway, we continued sneaking around, even when she went away to college the first time, until Layla’s twenty-first birthday, except none of her family noticed when we made it more obvious. Because of that, she was more nervous about just coming out and saying it, so we decided to wait until they did.”
“What changed things, honey?” Mom asked, smearing some of the crap on a particularly painful cut.
“She missed her period and took a pregnancy test.” All three members of my family sucked in a breath. “I decided we’d go to Vegas and get married before we told them.”
“Wait, you got married because she was pregnant?” Luke asked, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees.
“Where’s the baby?” Mom said quietly, looking pale.
“I’m getting to that,” I assured her, then looked at my brother. “No, I married Layla because I’ve been in love with her for as long as I can remember. If I had my choice, I’d have married her years before that, and it’d have been a huge wedding with everything she’d ever dreamed of.”
She couldn’t help it, Mom’s face softened, and she cooed, “Aww!”
Holding his hand up to stop her from seeing, Luke mouthed, “ Pussy .”
He was one to talk. He followed Isla all the way to Singapore and then took her to an island in Indonesia to keep her safe. Then again, his actions were one of the reasons she’d left to begin with.
“At least I didn’t go to functions and pretend to date another woman while I was with the one I actually loved.”
It was a low blow, but I’d had more shit than I could deal with today. I wasn’t talking about the shit that’d been kicked out of me, I was more focused on the fact that Layla might divorce me. I’d been on edge, dreading each knock on the door in case the papers were finally coming, and now that her family knew, they could persuade her to do it.
Before he could snap back, Mom smacked her hand down on his thigh, giving him the ‘five star’ we’d all enjoyed giving each other growing up.
“Damn,” Adam snickered. “Was it the full five?”
A five star was when you slapped your hand down on someone else, leaving a red handprint on them that included all five fingers and the palm. It was painful if you received it, but it was immensely satisfying if you were the one doing it.
Rubbing the area, Luke shot her a glare. “No, palm and three fingers.”
That’s how often we’d done it to each other—even without looking at the area we could count the fingers.
“I know what you were doing, that’s why you got the slap,” Mom snapped. “Now, let your brother finish.”
“Anyway, I’d been feeling guilty about Layla only having a Vegas wedding and her dad not walking her down the aisle, so I looked at how to get her the big shebang without her family finding out about us already being married. I was going to tell her about it the weekend after Rocko’s bachelor party, but as I was leaving for Vegas, she found out she wasn’t actually pregnant.”
I rubbed my chest, feeling the pain that fact still caused me.
“I was so excited about the baby when she’d first found out, I replied ‘damn’ or something dumb like that because it’s all I could get out. Then, when she said it was a false alarm, I lost my phone at the airport, and all she got was a text saying ‘oh’—”
“Oh, I remember that.” Mom clicked her fingers. “I thought you’d been kidnapped or were in a coma somewhere. When you got back, I didn’t know whether to throttle you or hug you.”
“At least you didn’t disappear on me,” I said softly, the acidic feeling in my throat feeling worse.
“You had to know where Layla went,” Adam muttered, looking at me like I was stupid. “We all knew where she was.”
“Yeah, but after I tried talking to her a few times and she told me to fuck off, I figured I’d give her time to get over the heartache of not being pregnant and wait for her to come back. I didn’t know where her head was at and assumed she was blaming me for the pregnancy and didn’t know how to handle it.”
“For four years?” he asked incredulously.
Hoping she’d understand, I looked at Mom, who was watching me with tears trailing slowly down her face. “I didn’t know what to do to make it better, but if her being somewhere else and finishing college did that, I didn’t want to take it away from her. I’d have waited until I was ninety if it meant her being happy.”
Her lower lip started trembling, and the tears fell faster.
“There was also no way Layla ever would have stayed away forever. Her family’s here, and she loves them,” Luke pointed out, something that I’d told myself every day she’d been away.
This time when Adam spoke, his voice was quiet and weighted with what sounded like pity. “What if she’d divorced you?”
“I worried about that every minute of every day,” I admitted. “Now that fear’s even worse.”
Mom nodded slowly. “I can understand that, but I think you’re in a better position to fight for her now.”
I blinked, wondering how the hell that could be true.
Unable to figure it out and hoping she could give me some female insight, I asked, “How’s that possibly true? If anything, she has her family behind her now to help her fight for the divorce.”
Picking up some bandages and balancing them on Luke’s knee, Mom leaned in and said seriously, “Because we’re not the only ones who know y’all have been in love since you were kids. Her Mom and Linda saw it a mile away and mentioned it, then her brother’s wives picked up on it, too. Even her aunts and cousins said something about it. I also happen to know that Colette and Linda were happy about it.”
Picking up a Band-Aid and ripping the paper to open it, she smiled smugly. “Oh, and I got a text from both women saying how happy they were about the news.”
We all stayed quiet as we digested that information until Adam asked, “Are you serious?”
Mom nodded as she stuck the first bandage down. “Yup.”
“Today?” Luke double checked, asking what I’d been about to.
“Yup.”
Not letting up the questions, which was just as well because I’d apparently become temporarily mute, Adam pressed, “And they were talking about him and Layla?”
“Yeeup.”
“Well, fuck me,” he murmured under his breath.
Before Mom could reach across and give him a five star in the same place she’d tried to give my other brother one, Luke slapped his hand on the back of Adam’s thigh, nodding when she thanked him as she applied the next bandage.
“What the fuck was that for?” Adam hissed, rubbing his thigh. “Jes—”
Luke pulled his hand back and swung before Adam could move, hitting him just under the first one.
“No, I’m not getting a daisy,” Adam yelled, jumping away from him.
Ah, I’d forgotten about the daisy. That was when you continued to slap the same area, moving your hand at different angles with each hit and left what resembled a red daisy on the recipient. Good times… so long as I wasn’t on the receiving end of it.
“Stop swearing, and I’ll stop hitting.” Luke shrugged and leaned back on his hands. “It’s either that or you get a slap from Mom, who’s wearing rings.”
“And I’m not against twisting your grandma’s ring so the stone gets you when I do it.”
We all looked at the ring she’d been given by our grandmother last year before she’d died. It was pretty, but the sapphire in it was large and stuck out, meaning it would hurt like a bitch if she did it.
“I’m just saying, it’s a surprise they feel that way, okay?” Adam hissed, crossing his arms over his chest. “Seriously, like he said, Layla didn’t get a big wedding, and her family wasn’t there. As her only daughter, you’d have thought Colette would be pissed about it. As one of only two granddaughters, again, I’d have thought Linda would be flipping her lid.”
“I’m not saying they’re not. But at the same time, I’ll bet they want her with someone who’s going to love Layla, worship the ground she walks on, treat her like a princess, and love her until their dying breath.” Mom nodded at me. “All of which your brother would and will do.”
I was hung on the word ‘will.’ It gave me hope that I still had a chance to do all of those things.
“How’s he meant to get her to give him the time of day?” Adam asked this time. “I don’t know if you noticed, but she didn’t seem overly happy about the marriage today. The male members of her family—of which there are a metric measurement of a fuck ton—also don’t look like they’ll be encouraging the continuation of it.”
I stared at Mom, hoping she had the answer to it, but it was Luke who smiled evilly.
“Like they’ve never fucked up.” Oh, they had, and they’d done it big time. “I think Colette and Linda will be reminding them of that fact as we speak. If the wives are behind them—which I’m sure they will be—the men won’t be able to do or say jack shit about it. That means, Mark, you only have to work on winning Layla around, and I think I know how you can do it.”
The plan he laid out was basic, but the nodding and excitement that came from my mom as he did it convinced me to go along with it.
Step 1: Prove to Layla that I can make her happy.
Step 2: Make her fall back in love with me—which hurt because I hated even the possibility of her not still loving me.
Step 3: Approach the marriage the right way this time and get approval from her dad and Hurst.
Step 4: Plan the perfect wedding for Layla Elizabeth Montgomery—there was no way I was referring to her as Townsend, regardless of our relationship currently.
Step 5: Continue making her happy for the rest of our lives.
How hard could it be?