One Night With The Wrong Brother novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: What He Was Told

In Mitchell's truck the two lies are laid side by side, Lana remembers the night in the dark, and she tells him the baby is his.

"Don't," I said.

"I'm not going to touch you." Mitchell let go of the door. "Lawrence has a car coming around to the front. You have about a minute."

A battered black pickup sat at the curb with its hazards blinking.

I got in.

I told myself it was because of the minute.

He pulled away from the Ashcroft Grand without checking the mirror, and neither of us said anything until we hit the avenue.

"Show me," he said.

I scrolled to the message and held my phone up to the dashboard light.

Suite 5204. Don't turn on the light. I want to be surprised by you.

It was from Lawrence's number. It was timestamped 11:40 p.m.

Mitchell read it twice, and the muscle in his jaw jumped.

"A week before that night he came to the boatyard," he said. "He hadn't been there in seven years. He said you'd been looking at my photograph on his phone."

"I hadn't."

"He said you couldn't face me in daylight. You wanted the dark, and my silence, and his name in your mouth."

His hands tightened on the wheel.

"He said he owed me seven years and this was how he'd pay it."

"And you believed him."

"I believed my brother." He said it flatly. "It's the stupidest thing I've ever done."

I turned to the window and watched the lights run past.

"When I opened the curtain," I said, "you looked at me like I'd shot you."

"You had just hit me."

"Before that."

"Yes," he said. "Before that."

He pulled the truck over beneath a dead streetlamp and cut the engine.

"Tell me what I did," he said. "I need to know. All of it."

I could have said no.

Instead I let myself go back.

The elevator had been mirrored, and I watched my own face the whole way up, so pleased with itself.

I had worn the black dress he'd once told me he liked.

The door of 5204 was already unlatched.

The room was so dark that I walked in with both hands out.

"Lawrence?"

Somebody caught my wrist.

Not roughly. Just certainly.

"Lana," a voice said, low and tired and very close.

It was lower than Lawrence's. I thought the late hour had done that.

"You're late," I whispered, and then a mouth was on mine, and I stopped thinking about anything at all.

He kissed like a man who had been holding his breath for years.

My back hit the wall.

One big hand slid up under my hair and held my head still.

I made a sound I had never made for Lawrence in a year of forehead kisses.

"Wait," the voice said against my jaw. "Say it again."

"Say what?"

"Anything. I want to hear it."

"Please," I said, and felt him shudder.

He found the zip of my dress and pulled it down my spine so slowly that I begged him to hurry.

The dress fell.

His palms spread over my ribs and then my breasts.

When his thumbs dragged across my nipples, I bit his shoulder to keep from screaming.

"Lawrence," I said into his skin.

His hands went still.

It lasted half a breath.

Then he lifted me against the wall and I wrapped my legs around his hips.

He pushed inside me in one long, hard stroke that left me gasping.

"God," I said. "Lawrence, God, you're so..."

He fucked me, deep and unhurried and exact.

One hand was braced beside my head and the other was under my thigh, holding me open for him.

Each time I said the name he gave me more.

I thought that was Lawrence being generous at last.

When I came it ripped through me so hard I cried out, and he turned his face into my neck and said my name like a prayer.

He carried me to the bed and took me again, slower, my wrists pinned in one of his hands above my head.

"Look at me," he said.

"I can't see you."

"I know," he said, and he sounded so strange that I almost laughed.

I came a second time with his cock buried to the hilt in me and my nails raking down his back.

Afterward I slept more deeply than I had in two years.

One heavy arm lay around my waist.

Then the first gray light came through the curtain and I pulled it open to see my fiancé's face.

It wasn't Lawrence's.

The truck was quiet.

Mitchell had both hands on the wheel and his eyes shut.

"You said his name every time," I said.

"I know."

"You heard me."

"I heard you." He opened his eyes. "I should have stopped at the first one."

"Why didn't you?"

"I told myself it was part of what he'd said. That's the worst thing I know about myself."

I didn't answer that.

I wasn't ready to.

"There's something Lawrence didn't tell you," I said instead.

"What?"

I put my hand flat on my stomach, where nothing showed yet.

"It's yours," I said. "It can't be anyone else's."

He didn't move.

He sat in the dark with his hands locked on the wheel.

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