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Devlin scratched his beard, as he seemed to be sizing her up as well. If the guy wasn’t related, his hard look would’ve made her run for the hills.
His eyes were cold yet smoldering. His whole persona told her that he lived in a vastly different world. He wore a biker-style outfit with his leather boots, leather pants and black T-shirt. Not to mention his jacket with all kinds of emblems on his back and front made him stuck out from the rest of his family.
Maybe not so much from Catriona, since she had this whole biker look going on too, although much more chic. She wore the same boots as Gwenn, but without all the tears and scruffs. Her face was a spitting image of Bree. Although Catriona had a hard edge in her forthcoming, like she had been through a lot and wouldn’t take any shit from anyone.
“How are you doin’?” Devlin asked her.
“Heard your man’s stoppin’ fightin’,” he added.
Oh. She had forgotten he knew Ronan for a moment. This was good. Ronan was a safe topic.
“Yeah. After he got stabbed, he’d quit. And you? Are you still fighting?”
A strange look passed between her sister Gwenn and Devlin. She got the distinct feeling that if she wasn’t sitting at their table, that they would discuss entirely different topics.
Fianna's brain went into overdrive trying to decipher the unspoken words passing between the two.
“Have you guys met before?”
Their eyes communicated again when their gazes met over the picnic table. Gwenn cocked her head and said, “Did you want to answer that… brother?”
Catriona gasped. “No! Don’t tell me you two slept together without knowing you were related!”
Conversations stopped at the other two picnic tables. And if Fianna wasn’t mistaken, a blush crept over Devlin’s cheeks, popping up from under his beard.
“Fuck. No. Everybody can chill. Gwenn and I just met yesterday. And only in passing. So you can all relax. You can resume your talk about our nut job father who’s responsible for both of our fucked-up families.”
Gwenn was the first who busted out laughing, and soon the rest of them laughed like they were relieved that finally someone had called a spade a spade.
It was indeed too absurd that Rob Walker had fathered all ten of them. He was the reason they sat here. The father who’d left her family for what felt like ages ago.
“How is he, anyway?” Fianna asked Devlin now that every table started their own conversations again.
“You’re asking the wrong siblings, sis.”
She softly smiled at his term of endearment. They may not share a brother-sister-bond, but she also didn’t feel the need to correct him.
She kept surprising herself this morning. If Devlin had come up to her last month calling her sis, she would have thrown a fit and cussed his ears off.
“Why?” Fianna asked.
Catriona brought a hand through her long, black hair that had a pink hue on the undersides. She righted her shoulders and said, “Because, sis…”
Fianna didn’t miss Catriona’s jab at her brother for calling Fianna—a practical outsider, his sister.
“We aren’t on speaking terms with the bastard. My twin Nora and our brother Finn still live with our mom and Rob. But except for them, we all have minimum contact with him,” Catriona said.
“Why are they still living at home?” Gwenn asked.
Catriona shrugged. “Fin is a mommy’s boy. He likes to get pampered.”
Devlin stuck up for his youngest brother. “He’s still young. He’s seventeen.”
Fianna waited for an explanation about Nora not moving out with Catriona, but it never came.
The fact that her half-siblings weren’t close with their dad came as a surprise to her. In her mind, her father had chosen some cheesy sitcom family over hers. She didn’t know what she did expect, really. Rob Walker obviously didn’t have it easy at home, with a part of his offspring willingly turning their backs on him. It made her proud of her half-siblings.
It served the weasel right to get a taste of his own medicine. The man had turned his back on Fianna and her four sisters the moment he heard that his wife Brenda was carrying the twins Catriona and Nora.
