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Her arms tighten around my shoulders and then her mouth is on mine, her lips swallowing my own cries as she takes everything I have, everything I am, deep inside of herself.
—
Half an hour later, I leave Chloe at the elevator bank with a kiss as she heads toward the Atlantis’s designer boutiques and I head up to Sebastian’s office. It turns out that, despite my rather lengthy delay, my timing is just about perfect as I make it to his office only a few seconds after he does.
“Come on in,” he calls, heading to the bar in the corner of his office. “Beer?” he asks, holding up a bottle of Corona. “Or scotch?”
“Scotch, I think.” I pick it partly because I know he’s just dying to rib me about my “pussy surfer beer” and partly because the conversation I’m about to start calls for it. Besides, he never has any limes, and pussy surfer beer or not, Coronas need lime.
He raises a brow but doesn’t say anything else as he pours me two fingers, neat, of Lagavulin before grabbing a Guinness for himself.
I think about giving him a hard time about his beer choice—it’s a time-honored tradition, after all—but it turns out, I just don’t have the heart for it. Not with everything I’ve got to tell him.
I start toward his desk and the chairs sitting in front of it, but he stops me with a hand on my shoulder.
“Let’s check out the view,” he says, steering me over to the small seating area in front of the picture window. I couldn’t care less about the view, and I think he knows it. But he’s got some kind of issue with his desk chairs, and I don’t give a shit where we sit, so I go where he directs me.
Besides Chloe, he’s pretty much the only person on earth I trust without question. But as we sit down—me facing the window, him facing away from it—I’m still a little antsy. Because it isn’t just my shit I’m trusting him with now. It’s Chloe’s as well, and that isn’t quite so easy. Not when it’s my job to protect her.
Buying myself a little time before cutting to the chase, I take a long sip of my drink and then ask, “So, what are you doing here?”
“Funny. I was about to ask you the same thing,” he answers with a smirk.
“I told you, I’m celebrating my engagement to a fabulous woman.”
“While I agree that getting a woman like Chloe to marry you definitely deserves a celebration, we’ve been friends a long time, Eth.” He narrows his eyes at me. “Something else is going on, too.”
So, no small talk, then. Not a surprise considering neither one of us is particularly fond of inanities. “You could say that.”
“I am saying that. So spill, man. What’s up?”
I shake my head, try to figure out what I want to say and how I want to say it. But in the end, all that comes out is, “Brandon.” But because Sebastian knows me, and knows my brother, it’s enough.
“Ahh.” He takes a sip of his beer and though he tries really hard to disguise it, the look on his face says he’s anything but surprised. “Of course. What’s he done now?”
Yeah, he knows Brandon. Maybe better than I did up until a few weeks ago. “This doesn’t go any further.” Yeah, this is Sebastian, and I know it’s not necessary, but I don’t take chances with Chloe. Not with something like this.
“So it’s bad, then.” It’s no more a question than my statement was. “Tell me.”
It takes a minute for me
to get the words out. “He raped Chloe.”
The words hang there between us for long seconds as Sebastian tries to assimilate them and I try to deal with the fresh wave of fury that swamps me. My baby brother, the rapist. My baby brother, the soon-to-be-congressman. My stomach churns even as rage scrapes against my skin from the inside.
“What the fuck, Ethan?” Sebastian’s voice cracks with anger and shock, but not disbelief. No, a quick look at his face tells me it’s no stretch for him to believe Brandon is capable of that.
“It was a long time ago,” I tell him. “When they were in school together. He was a senior, she was a freshman.”
The bastard. The unbelievable, entitled little bastard.
Sebastian drains his beer. “She didn’t report it.”
“She did.” I’m clenching my jaw so tightly that it aches, but there’s nothing to do about it. Not if I’m going to have any kind of reasonable conversation here. “My parents bought her family off, made her drop the charges. She recanted her statement, signed a nondisclosure agreement.”
“What the fuck?” Sebastian says again, shaking his head like he’s trying to clear it.
He gets up, this time, though, and takes my glass before walking back over to the bar to refill it. He pours three fingers into my glass, then grabs another glass and does the same to his own. When he hands it back, I take it and slam the thing down in a couple of long gulps. Maybe not the wisest move, but I’m dying here. I need something to keep me steady if I’m going to get through the next hour.
