An Inconvenient Affair (The Alpha Brotherhood #1)(26)
Author: Catherine Mann

“Lucky for me or I’d have been in prison.” He stuffed his hands in his suit pockets. “Hell, if I’d done the same thing today, even as a teen, I wouldn’t have gotten off so easy.”

“So the brotherhood, the guys like you at the military high school, they were really more of the family you never had.”

Defensiveness eased from his shoulders. “They were.”

“The casino owner? He’s a brother?”

“What do you think?”

Her mind skipped to the obvious question. “What did he do?”

He hesitated for an instant before shrugging those broad shoulders that endlessly drew her eyes. “It’s public knowledge anyway. Remember the big fluctuation in the stock market a little over seventeen years ago?”

“No kidding?” She gasped. She’d only been about ten at the time, but her teachers had used it in a lesson plan on government and economics. Newscasters and economists still referred to it on occasion. “That was him?”

She sank down on a park bench as other tourists milled past.

“He accessed his father’s account, invested money, made a crapton. So his dad let him keep right on investing.” He sat beside her, his warm thigh pressing against hers. “But when he caught a couple of his dad’s friends assaulting his sister…”

“He crashed the friend’s business?”

Troy stretched his arm along the bench, touching her, taking part in more universal dating rituals. “He did. And once he was in the system, he uncovered a cesspool of companies using child laborers overseas. The press lauded him as a hero, but he never considered himself one since his initial intent was revenge.”

“So even though what he did was wrong, he had an emotionally intense reason for it, as did you.”

“Don’t try to glorify what we did. Any of us. We all broke the law. We were all criminals heading down a dark path that would have only gotten darker if we hadn’t gotten caught.” He tugged a lock of her hair, bringing it close to his face and inhaling. “There was this one guy—a musical prodigy—whose parents sent him to reform school instead of to drug rehab.”

She turned on the bench, sliding her hand under his suit jacket to press against his heart. “That had to be painful for you to see, because of your brother.”

He didn’t answer, just stared back at her with those jewel-tone green eyes, and she wondered if he would kiss her just to end the conversation. She wouldn’t stop him.

Then something niggled in the back of her brain. “I think what you did had something to do with your brother.”

He looked down and away.

“Troy?” She cupped his face and urged him to look at her again. “Troy?”

“My brother failed out of college, enlisted in the army, then got busted and sent to jail.” He held up a hand. “I’m not defending Devon. What he did was wrong. But there were others in his unit dealing, and two of them got off because their dads were generals.”

Her heart broke over the image of a younger brother dispensing justice for his older brother.

“Once I got into the system, I stumbled on other…problems…and I decided I might as well do a thorough job while I was in there.”

“Wow…” She sagged back. “You sure set the world on its ear.”

“The irony of it all? My dad used his influence to keep me from serving time.” He bolted to his feet. “Time’s up. We need to head back to the airport.”

He didn’t take her hand this time. Just clasped her elbow and guided her back out of the gardens. His expression said it all.

Date over. There would be no kiss at the door. And honestly, as vulnerable as she felt right now, she could use a little emotional distance herself.

* * *

On a plane leaving Lyon, France, Troy knew he should be pleased with how his meeting had gone today with Salvatore at Interpol Headquarters. His plans were falling into place. Hillary was safe. The world believed they were sharing a romantic week in Monte Carlo. No one except the colonel and Conrad knew about their true destination as they flew through the night sky.

Costa Rica.

They would be there by sunrise. He should be pleased, but still he felt restless. Unsettled.

Hillary was snoozing in the sleeping compartment. The transferable pod made his location less traceable as he came and left in different crafts, while still having all of his personal comforts available.

He preferred his life simple, although he couldn’t miss the excitement in Hillary’s eyes over dining in France. She’d told him from the start that she’d chosen her job to get away from her rural roots, that she was looking for glamour and big-city excitement. He could give her that, and he wanted to. Although he could do without more soul-searching, like what they’d done in the gardens. But he also wondered how she would feel about his more scaled back lifestyle in Costa Rica. He knew his life was not what anyone would call simple, but amidst the travel and business, he preferred things to be…less pretentious, less complicated.

Maybe those days in the military school had left an imprint on him in ways he hadn’t thought about before. At the academy, all he’d had was a bunk, a locker trunk and his friends. He’d lived that way even after leaving school and growing his hair again, even with clothes as far from a military school uniform as he could make them. He’d kept his world Spartan, when it came to letting new people into his life. Until now.

Right now, he felt like that fifteen-year-old kid whose life had been turned upside down, leaving him on shaky ground as he figured out who to trust.

* * *

Troy tossed his uniform hat on the bottom bunk along with his day planner, pissed off, as usual, and he was only six months into his sentence. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked Conrad, who was pretending to be asleep.

Conrad called from the top bed. “You’re blowing my cover.”

“What cover?”

“That I missed formation because I fell asleep,” he said, his voice echoing in the barracks, which were empty other than one other guy who actually was snoozing. “What’s your excuse for blowing off a mandatory formation?”

“I got my ass handed to me in trig class today. Just didn’t have the stomach to get ripped again by Salvatore because of imaginary spots on my brass buckle.”

Conrad extended an arm with his spiral notebook, marked Trigonometry. “Be my guest. Can’t help you with the buckle, though.”