Close Range Christmas by Nicole Helm (ebook reader for laptop TXT) 📗

And it would change everything.

“There’s something I’ve never told you. Any of you.” Dev heard nothing but a buzzing in his own ears. He didn’t want to say the words. Didn’t want to do any of this, but that AW was impossible to ignore.

And his brothers’ lives were at stake...their families’ lives. “Ace had another son. His name is Anth Wyatt. AW.”

Chapter Two

Dev waited. For the questions, the demands, the accusations. He should have known better. All of those things he expected he could have met with cool detachment.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Jamison asked, his voice rough and...wrecked. Dev had never heard that tone from his brother no matter what had happened in their lives. And boy, had they survived some wreckage.

Dev swallowed down the emotion coating his throat. He fell back into the black void of detachment that had gotten him through those first months after he’d come out of the coma his father had beaten him into. “Anth is the only reason Ace didn’t kill me back then,” he managed to say, sounding flat and unaffected even though he was anything but. “In return, I made a promise. Which I’m now breaking by telling you he exists.”

“You think it’s him?” Cody asked. He’d recovered his voice more than Jamison.

“I don’t know why, after all this time. But AW isn’t some coincidence. You don’t sign a note to us with AW and not expect it to be Ace or someone connected to him.” Ace was dead. They’d made sure of that.

But the effects of Ace would live on. Why had he been stupid enough to think they wouldn’t?

Silence swallowed the kitchen whole. Dev wasn’t sure he’d ever heard such a silence in this kitchen. There had been months of danger and fears last year, but someone had always had something to say.

Dev couldn’t help but glance at Sarah. She sat at the table, eyes wide, mouth open, still holding onto a forkful of food that had never made it up to her mouth. Her belly was big and round and all he could think about was his hand on her belly—feeling the outline of that foot inside of her.

A foot they’d made together during a night that played over and over again in his mind when he didn’t want it to.

Especially now.

He’d failed her. He’d believed it was over and let himself be stupid enough to think he could give someone something.

“I guess you should tell us everything you know about this Anth Wyatt,” Cody said, finally breaking the heavy, choking silence. “Starting with...” Cody trailed off. That stoic demeanor he’d been trying to hold on to slipped, and he raked his hands through his hair. “I don’t understand, Dev.”

His brothers looked at him like he’d killed something in front of them. And he supposed he had. Their trust. So, what was there to understand? He was no upstanding Wyatt. He wouldn’t say he was like his father—he wasn’t an evil madman. He was like their mother—weak-willed enough to care more about self-preservation than any of his loved ones. The ones he should have protected.

Sarah got up from her seat and came to stand between him and his brothers. She laid her hand on his arm—gently like she had at Brady’s wedding. Like Sarah had some well of gentleness she’d always hidden.

“I’m sure if we all sit down, Dev can tell us the whole story,” Sarah said authoritatively, reminding him of Grandma Pauline. Until she tried to force a smile at him. “There’s an explanation, of course.”

“Not the one you’re hoping for,” he replied bleakly.

She swallowed at that, but she didn’t drop her hand or flinch. She pointed him to the table, and Dev didn’t know what else to do but sit.

His brothers did too, on the opposite side of the table from him and Sarah. Grandma Pauline piled plates with food and set them in front of each of her grandsons. She still hadn’t said anything.

When had Grandma Pauline ever not said anything?

Dev could only stare at his plate, words tumbling around in his brain, but none of them making it to his mouth.

Sarah reached beneath the table and took his hand. He didn’t know what to do with her faith in him, because God knew he was about to destroy it. But wasn’t that what he needed to do? Just blow it all up, lay it all out there.

Because someone thought it wasn’t over, and he knew who.

“It goes back to when Dad and I had our little standoff,” Dev managed to say. He didn’t sound so devoid of emotion now. The emotions all but strangled the words and they sounded like just that.

He wasn’t sure he could do this with Sarah holding his hand. He wasn’t sure he could do it without.

“You’ve never told us much about that,” Cody said, with enough detachment Dev could only be jealous.

“What was there to tell? I thought I had him. I thought in a one-on-one fight I could take him down and arrest him. I didn’t. He beat me within an inch of my life and then let me go.” Dev tried to tug his hand away from Sarah’s, but she held firm under the table. It was a curse and a relief. “The only part I left out was that someone else was there.”

“This...other son?” Jamison supplied.

“I didn’t know that at first, though he looked like Ace. More like Ace than we do, except he had blue eyes.” Dev could remember all too well. He’d been cocky and stupid and had tried to take down his father on his own.

Then there’d been another Ace. Same face. Same build. Same sneer, but blue eyes instead of hazel.

“He stopped Ace. I was in and out. I don’t remember much.” He didn’t tell his brothers the pain had been so bad he’d half wished to die. At least then it would be over. He’d been twenty-two and stupid. So damn stupid.