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 theeffort 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.