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“No one. But we do know someone in Rocheport, and if Daniel couldn’t get a direct flight into Missouri at that time of night, flying into Eppley Airfield would’ve been the next best option. It’s a five-hour drive to Rocheport from there. Less if the roads are clear.” The car rental and hotel receipts were self-explanatory at that point, so Jasper worked on putting a face and name to our connection in Rocheport. “It has to be,” I said, when he shot his head toward me, eyes enlarged with disbelief.
“Maggie?”he breathed. “Mom’s friend?”
Maggie stayed in the pool house whenever she visited, and she was in town helping with Selene that week. “Think about it. She had to have heard the sirens when the ambulance pulled onto the estate. She must have rushed over,” I explained. Jasper and I had been too consumed with grief to concern ourselves with prying eyes. Our relationship would’ve been evident, not to mention the state of my bedroom when the paramedics arrived, and how little clothes we’d managed to put on. It wasn’t until they’d transported Selene’s body into the back of the ambulance, and my father’s headlights came into view down the drive, that we remembered we were supposed to be brothers, not lovers.
“And by the time my father jumped out of his car and ran over, Maggie was there. But maybe she’d been there all along.” And she’d left after the funeral without ever saying a word about what she knew.
Jasper picked up the wire transfer confirmation next, homing in on the date.
“Less than twenty-four hours after he left Nebraska, the funds were wired,” I explained.
“Almost two months to the day I was assigned ashisintern,” Jasper hissed red-faced, the sheet of paper disappearing into his fist. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when I got here?”
“I thought you were Daniel. I had left a message for him to come here once his flight landed, then I called down and informed the concierge to send him right up. All that was forgotten when you arrived. I was lost in you, in us, in our mother.Nothingelse mattered.”
“Why?” he asked, perching on the edge of the pedestal table. “It doesn’t make sense. Why go through all this trouble?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “To get to my father. Me. Daniel is nothing if not ambitious.”
“It’s beenyearssince I met him, Cole.”
“Yeah, but you weren’t together for all of it.”
“Shit,” he said, as if having just thought of something else. “He’d asked me out once while I’d been an intern. I told him I wouldn’t date someone I worked for.”
“He must have been biding his time, then. Waiting for your internship to end while trying to work his way up on his own—or likely toying with someone else’s life.”
“Still, if it was all a ploy to use me, to get in with Nexcom, if he didn’t really love me, how has he faked it all this time?” He averted his gaze as soon as the question landed, because pretending for years had been precisely what Jasper had done.
“It’s not the same,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” he huffed.
“Only someone fucking diabolical could be capable of this magnitude of deceit.”
His shoulders sagged. “Cole—”
“I don’t care about his shitty childhood or his rich kid expectations, Jasper. We all have a choice between good and evil, right or wrong.”
“And which choice did we make in all this, Cole?” he asked, taking in the cum and clothing painting the floor.
“Don’t feel sorry for him, Jasper,” I begged, knowing he’d likely do the opposite. I hated that he wanted to understand Daniel’s motives more than he wanted to hate him for them. I hated that he saw even an ounce of himself in his husband’s actions. I hated his aptitude for compassion, when all I wanted was revenge. And yet I loved him for it all.
A prickle of fear latched on to my heart. Would I lose him again? Was Jasper slipping through my hands? My breathing quickened as I drew so close to him, as I took hold of his hair, as a need to make this permanent, or to remind myself we were already permanent crashed into me.
“Cole,” Jasper said, guiding a staying hand to my chest. “I’m yours, Cole. Nothing can make me go back on that. Nothing ever again,” he amended.
“Prove it,” I snarled, before assailing him with a frenzied kiss. I slammed him to his back, catching his wrists and locking them down on the table at either side of his head until he yielded. Once I was sure he’d no longer fight me, I lifted his legs, sending them around me.
“Cole, wait,” he protested, trying to back off the crown of my cock now seeking shelter inside him, his hole still wet and slack enough to take me again.
“I can’t.” I pleaded for understanding, dragging him to me by his waist until his ass hung off the table and his hands shot out to grip the sides. Until I’d fully impaled him, buried balls deep and lunging rabidly in and out of his center, until he gave up and gave in, until my teeth were clamped viciously at his throat.
Sating my insecurities came first, getting answers from Daniel would need to wait.
Jasper piled his clothes in his arms, irritated with my caveman behavior, but I didn’t regret a thing. “I need to get cleaned up,” he said, and I stopped him with a hand to his bicep as he passed me for the bathroom.
“No. You go with my scent on you,” I said, immovable, reaching down to catch what leaked from him, and slipping a drenched finger past his lips as his nostrils flared in renewed irritation toward me this time. “Swallow.” I removed my clean digit from the suction of his mouth in increments. “It’s the least of what he deserves.” Reminding him I wasn’t the enemy went a long way, and he begrudgingly dropped his clothing to the ground before getting into them one by one. “I’ll get dressed, too.”
