AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Not Dani. Not even McMurphy.
My brother. Devon fucking Wilder.
He was wearing jeans, a white t-shirt. He had black scruff on his jaw and his hair was mussed. He looked at me from green eyes beneath his dark slashes of brows, and for a second I couldn’t speak. I just stared at him like I was in a dream.
“Afternoon, brother,” Devon said.
Ten years. I hadn’t seen him in ten years. He didn’t look the same as when he was sixteen—no one did. And even though I’d seen a photo of him, it was different seeing him in person. Watching the contained ripple of emotion behind his green eyes. Seeing the tic in the muscle of his jaw and the faint lines around his eyes. He’d got those lines, maybe, from doing two years in prison. I’d never know.
“How did you find me?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I have a lot of money,” he said. “Money finds people, especially when those people are checking into hotels and getting married under their own names. The car threw me off this morning, though.”
It should have. I’d left my car with Dani, then taken a cab to a garage on the outskirts of town. I’d talked to the owner, who referred me to a guy, who referred me to another guy who had an old Civic to sell. I paid him cash, took over his plates, and drove off in a matter of two hours. I was discovering that, like Devon said, surprising things can get done when you have a lot of money.
“My investigators caught up with you in Vegas,” Devon said, watching me carefully. “You and your new wife. But by the time they got there, she was alone. You were in the wind again.” He narrowed his gaze on me. “You left her?”
He could accuse me of that. Of course he could. I’d left him, too. “I had to,” I said.
My brother seemed skeptical. “That so?”
I scrubbed a hand over my face. Fuck, I was happy and in wretched pain at the same time. I felt like a cloth being wrung hard from both sides. “Devon,” I said, reaching deep to explain, because I owed it to him. “Do you have a woman?”
He didn’t say anything—my brother was a man of few words, like me—but his green gaze went dangerously dark. I could read that look; it meant yes, he did, and she was very fucking important.
“So if her biker ex-boyfriend wanted to kill both of you,” I said, “what would you do?”
Still Devon didn’t speak. But I saw him think about it.
“You’d deal with him one on one,” I said, knowing full well I was right, based only on the look of murder on Devon’s face. “But first, you’d get her out of harm’s way. You’d put her somewhere he couldn’t get to her.”
My brother blinked once, his sign of comprehension. “In a hotel room in Vegas, in Lake of Fire territory, with your name on her legally.”
“Yes,” I said. “And then you’d turn around and go find the fucker and tell him to do whatever the hell he thinks he’s going to do.”
“Maybe,” Devon said, which meant yes.
“You told me how you tracked me to Vegas,” I said. “You didn’t tell me how you tracked me here.”
He shrugged, the motion so familiar I could be looking in the mirror. He was just like me, except my brother was darker, broodier. He was a good-looking motherfucker, too. He’d been good-looking at sixteen, and he was better-looking now. I wondered who his woman was. It would take a hell of a strong woman to handle my brother; we Wilders weren’t easy on people.
>
“My lawyer,” Devon said. “He’s done a lot of work for the Lake of Fire over the years. They were kind of his specialty until I came along. The Lake knows where you are, and Ben told the Lake to give him an update. We got a call this morning, and here we are.”
I looked around. “I don’t see any lawyer,” I said. I pictured a bald, fat guy in an expensive suit, but there was no one like that in the diner.
“He’s outside,” Devon said. “Ben decided to give us a little privacy for this brotherly reunion.”
“Why the hell do you have a lawyer who works for bikers when you’re a billionaire?” Couldn’t he hire some thousand-dollar-an-hour guy? A guy who worked for Goldman Sachs?
Then again, this was my brother. He’d grown up like I had. “I trust Ben,” Devon said. “He was my lawyer when I was driving, barely scraping by. He was my lawyer when I went inside, and he got me the best deal he could. And he’s my lawyer now. The difference is, now I can actually pay him.”
I shook my head. No one in this diner would know Devon was a billionaire; no one would know I was, either. We were two dusty, road-stained guys in jeans and t-shirts, one dark, one lighter. We could be on our way to our factory jobs, or truckers taking a break. Except for the fact that we were obviously brothers.
Jesus, this was my brother. My brother. Sitting right here, across from me, with ten years of wasted time running between us like a muddy stream. Ten years of things I didn’t know.
So I started at the beginning. “Fill me in,” I said. “We had a grandfather?”
