Sinful Longing

Which meant…

“My father is Luke Carlton,” Marcus supplied, and Colin blew out a long stream of air. His mother had not only cheated on his dad, she’d gotten pregnant from the affair. Course, that was the least of her crimes.

“So she was pregnant when she went to prison?” he asked, the words tasting like chalk.

“I guess she had to have been,” Marcus said from his post on the sidewalk. The three of them stood in their places like actors on their marks.

“Pregnant? She was fucking pregnant?” he asked again, as if repeating the facts would assemble them into a neat, orderly package.

But before Marcus could respond, Colin turned to his other brother. Ryan’s jaw was open. He hadn’t moved. He didn’t blink. “Can you believe this?” he said to Ryan, holding his hands out wide. He’d barely batted an eye when the detective had told him last week that Dora had been dealing drugs.

But this—this was something else entirely. This was the true bombshell.

He had another brother. One who was fourteen years younger. One he’d never known existed.

This was a meteor crashing into his backyard, slamming a crater in the earth. This was him standing over it, trying to figure out what to do with that gaping maw in the ground.

“No. This is insane, even for her,” Ryan said, the look in his eyes mirroring Colin’s.

He snapped his gaze back to Marcus, who rubbed a hand over his chin, a gesture that Colin did often, too. He flinched at that one small, shared trait. “I can’t believe she was pregnant that whole time, as all the shit went down. And she hid the pregnancy through all of that?”

“My dad told me she didn’t want anyone to know. She was scared of it getting out,” Marcus said. His early nerves seemed to have evaporated, replaced by something that sounded like relief. He straightened his spine, standing taller. He still wasn’t as tall as Colin or Ryan, though. Perhaps, the height genes among the Sloan men had come from their father. Somehow, this small detail mattered to Colin—mattered because he’d loved his dad. Because he missed his dad.

“When did Luke tell you that?” Colin asked, using Marcus’s dad’s first name.

“When I was older. I think ten or eleven.”

“When were you born?”

Marcus gave them his birthday. Three months after their mom went to prison. Which meant she would have been six months pregnant when she was locked up. Colin tried to remember how she’d looked then, during the trial and her arrest. She wore baggy clothes, if his memory served. A seamstress, she’d have known how to make the right outfits to hide a growing belly. The thought of her planning a whole deception hit him like a sledgehammer.

“Holy shit.”

There were no other words for this situation. Just none. He backed up, reaching for a railing, a tree, something to hold on to.

Nothing was behind him—only sidewalk, yard, and the utter surprise of the foursome becoming a fivesome. He grabbed Ryan’s shoulder, and his older brother steadied him, as the news started to register as real.

His own mother had methodically hid her fifth child, keeping him secret as the tsunami rocked their family.

Five.

He was one of five, not one of four.

And none of them had a clue.

He started traveling back in time, trying to add up the facts and make some sense of this latest machination of their mother’s. “So she was pregnant when she was arrested,” he said, thinking out loud, taking a minute to process the absolute fucking weirdness of that detail. “And she was clearly pregnant when she was sentenced and went to prison.” His brain kicked back into gear and started reconnecting the parts to the whole. And as he lined up the pieces, his jaw nearly dropped with one cold, stark realization. He brought his hand to his mouth, started to speak, but his voice was vacant. Then he found words again, managing a bare whisper as he turned to Ryan.

“She was pregnant when Stefano pulled the trigger.” And the corollary to that hit him like a harsh smack in the back of the head. Motivation. “Was that why she did it? Was that her motive?” He shifted his gaze to Marcus. “Did it have something to do with you?”

Marcus held up both hands as if he were surrendering. “I have no idea. I wasn’t even born.”

He didn’t mean to imply that Marcus was the motivation for the murder, but even so, it had to have played a role in their mother’s thinking. She probably wanted the life insurance money so she could run away with her lover and her unborn child.

Colin spun to face Ryan, who looked like a mad man still—like this new wrinkle was rattling him to the core.

“Do you think this had anything to do with it?”