Chapter 12 A Matty/Jordan Refresher
Matthew—Matty to his friends—stretched his arms overhead until his joints popped.
He glanced over at the shop counter where there was a full display of fresh baked goods and another ice coffee if he just had the energy to get up and walk over there.
He’d been waiting for his friend, Jordan, to arrive.
But, as usual, he was late. Jordan called it being on ‘Hispanic’ time. Matty had learned to work around it.
He put his elbows on the table and dug the heels of his palms into his eyes until sparks danced, hissing at the faint pain of his almost healed black eye. He really needed caffeine and sugar. Now.
“Matthew Kendrick?”
Matty’s head snapped up, not expecting to be government named at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. He frowned as he eyed the tall, broad man looming over him with trepidation. Was he about to be hate-crimed in the middle of a coffee shop called Bean Me Up? That would be humiliating.
He did his best to look bored. “Who’s asking?”
The man seemed surprised that Matty didn’t recognize him. There was no way the guy was a professor or something. He looked like a Tik-Tok lumberjack and dressed like one too. “My name is Aiden Mulvaney.”
The name sounded vaguely familiar, but Matty couldn’t put his finger on just why. “And…” he prompted, preemptively annoyed at being interrupted mid-caffeine cycle.
The man took a deep breath, looking back at someone over his shoulder. When he looked back, he said, “And I’m your brother.”
Matty couldn’t stop the bark of laughter that escaped. “My brother? He’s dead. Died before I was born. So unless you’re a ghost or a vampire, that’s not actually possible.”
The other man’s eyes went wide, seeming faintly amused. “Is that what he told people? That I was dead?”
Matty’s pulse jackrabbited. If the guy was a scammer, he seemed genuinely surprised to hear that his brother was dead. Weird. “Who are you really?”
The man sighed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
“I’m exactly who I say I am. My name is Aiden Mulvaney, I’m your brother.
He turned and pointed to a hot old man with silver hair and ice blue eyes, holding an adorable Gerber ad of a baby.
“And that’s my husband. We wanted to meet you. ”
Matty returned his attention to the man still hovering above him menacingly. “Who’s the kid?”
His lips quirked up at the mention of the baby. “My son, Theo. You’re an uncle.”
Matty shook his head. “Look, man. I don’t know what scam you’re running but my dad’s dead and my mom is rapidly running through her inheritance getting hammered at the country club and banging her tennis instructor like the world’s biggest walking cliche.
I’m on scholarship and I get an allowance that pays just enough for me to eat.
And not well. If you think you can get money out of me, there isn’t any.
If you want to try and seduce my mom, I can shoot you her address, but she’s usually swimming at the bottom of a gin bottle by ten am, so. ..”
The lumberjack snorted out a laugh, then pulled his phone from his pocket.
Matty’s pulse thudded hard in his neck, weirdly afraid his mother was going to show up out of nowhere and slap him for telling all their family secrets.
Instead, he hit a few buttons, then slid the phone to Matty.
It was an article from some trashy tabloid.
There was a picture of the man in front of him and the man he claimed was his husband, standing in tuxedos.
The headline read: From Ward to Wedding: Billionaire Thomas Mulvaney Marries Former Adopted Son.
Several things stood out to Matty in that moment.
Billionaire. Married. Adopted Son. His heavy heartbeat shot to the moon as he realized where he’d heard the Mulvaney name before.
His father’s files. The Watch. Project Watchtower, to be exact.
Had Aiden been working with their dad the whole time?
The thought was a bucket of ice water on his preconceived notions.
Matty had never seen Aiden’s name in the files, but he hadn’t exactly had time to peruse them before they’d come to collect the things from his home office.
Still, he couldn’t let on that he knew anything about that.
It was a top secret project. The kind that gets people killed for knowing too much.
Once more, he shrugged. “All this proves is you can use photoshop. So can I. Give me five minutes and I’ll have you standing next to Bigfoot in that tux. Bonus points for the effort though.”
The man—Aiden—rolled his eyes. “Kid, just Google Thomas and Aiden Mulvaney. You’ll see us everywhere.”
Of course, he would. Thomas Mulvaney was the Thomas Mulvaney.
Billionaire-philanthropist Thomas Mulvaney.
Adopted-seven-kids Thomas Mulvaney. Married-one-of-those-kids Thomas Mulvaney.
Had his father pawned his brother off on Thomas then told the world he died?
Yeah, that sounded like something he’d do.
Matty had to admit he was curious. “Fine, so you don’t want money. That doesn’t make you my long, lost dead brother.”
Aiden huffed out a frustrated breath. “A DNA test can prove we’re related easily enough, but I think you’re just being stubborn now.”
“We look nothing alike,” Matthew said with a sniff, just being stubborn.
It was true. The man standing beside his table—his brother, Aiden Mulvaney—was over six-feet-tall with longish brown hair that dusted his shoulders, blue eyes that were almost navy and scruff on his cheeks and chin that Matty couldn’t grow in ten lifetimes.
Matty, on the other hand, was barely five-six, with chestnut hair, blue-green eyes and a complexion and bone structure that Jordan had once likened to ‘a Victorian child with cholera.’
They couldn’t have been more different if they tried.
But still, if Matty squinted, he could sort of see it.
They both had the same mouth, the same flat stare, the look of someone whose father was a total douchebag.
Not that daddy issues were rare. Shitty dads were at an all-time high.
“Say I believed you,” he heard himself say. “What do you want with me?”
Aiden flushed beneath his golden tan, gaze floating away from him like he was embarrassed. Clearly, feelings weren’t his strong suit. “I want you to know that you have family. A real family. One that won’t lie to you.”
What a weird way to phrase that. Lie to him about what?
Project Watchtower? Were they going to invite him into the fold and then reveal whatever weird project the Mulvaneys had going on with his father?
Somehow Matty doubted that. Why would anyone be that honest with a stranger?
It didn’t make sense. Besides, they might want that honesty to be reciprocal and Matty wasn’t in a position to reveal certain things about himself.
“Lie to me? You mean like my dad? Our dad? Did you go snooping and find all his deep, dark secrets, too?” he asked, arching a brow at him.
“Too?” Aiden asked, looking surprised. “What is it you found out?”
Oh, he definitely knew about Project Watchtower. Aiden was trying to see if he knew. What was happening? Were they trying to play him? Bribe him into silence? If he was gonna talk, he would have done it before now.
He shrugged. “I know my dad wasn’t some paper-pushing bureaucrat. I know that he killed people. For a while, I suspected he killed you, based on what he said about you to my mother.”
“What did he say?”
“It’s not what he said but how he said it.
He talked about you like you were a ghost still haunting him.
” Matty blew a breath out through his nose.
“Could you at least sit down? I’m getting a kink in my neck looking up at you.
” Aiden threw a glance at his husband and baby.
“They can come, too, if you don’t mind them hearing you airing out our family’s dirty laundry. ”
Aiden waved over the older man, then slid into the booth across from Matty. When the man sat down beside his brother, Aiden scooped up the baby, who was delighted by this, not because he seemed happy to see his father but because it put him closer to all the things on the table.
“Tommy, this is my brother, Matthew. Matthew, this is my husband, Tommy and our baby, Theo,” Aiden said, pulling Matty’s laptop cord from chubby baby hands with an apologetic look.
“Matty,” he said. “I hate Matthew.”
Thomas nodded. “Nice to meet you, Matty.”
“Yeah, same,” Matty mumbled, closing his laptop. It was clear his study session was over. “So, what do you want?”
Thomas Mulvaney snickered. “Yeah, he’s definitely your brother. The likeness is uncanny.”
Matty gave him a weird look. “We don’t look anything alike.”
Thomas smiled. “Its the attitude, not the looks, though I can see a resemblance there, too. Same nose, same mouth, same stubborn set to your chin,” the older man said fondly looking at his brother with goopy heart eyes.
Ew. Good for them or whatever, but he just didn’t see the appeal of falling in love. People sucked. People disappointed. People were all just inherently…bad. Even him.
“Well, what is it?” Matty asked. “Not to be a douche, but it’s finals week.”
The two exchanged a long glance before Aiden said, “That’s why we wanted to talk to you.”
“You wanted to talk to me about finals week?” Matty asked, bewildered.
Thomas shook his head. “No, I wanted to ask if you really loved this school?”
Matty glanced out the window with a frown, looking at the campus across the street, then shrugging. “I mean, it’s fine. Why? You look a little old to be starting college. No offense.”
Aiden huffed out a laugh of exasperation. “You get that you’re in an ivy league school that most people would have killed to attend. And it’s just fine?”
Matty shrugged. “I was accepted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell and Dartmouth. I could have gone anywhere.”