Page 14 of Love by Design (Club Rapture: Risk Aware #1)

MARSHALL

S ilas spent the night in my arms. He slept like a log, unmoving beyond the swell of his chest on every inhale.

When he woke up the next morning, the sleepy way he smiled at me before dropping a kiss against the center of my chest was enough to ruin me for other men entirely.

As if the night before hadn’t already done the job.

He hadn’t argued when I brought him coffee and a bagel, and then he was gone before ten.

My house sat achingly empty like it had forgotten that until the night before, I’d been more than enough of a presence to fill it.

It was Saturday and was meant to be a slow day for me.

No work at all. I wasn’t even supposed to open my laptop up to check my email.

At least that was what Finn had said when he’d told me to come over in the afternoon to help him paint his office.

My brother could afford to hire it out, but I was relatively certain he was trying to send me to an early grave, and his refusal and subsequent ask for help was just another tool in his plot.

Either way, he was my brother, so after I drank my own coffee and had my own toast, I put on an old pair of basketball shorts and a weathered college t-shirt and drove across town to Finn’s place.

He was in the driveway when I got there, on his hands and knees with his ass sticking out of the open car door.

I parked next to him then came around to the driver’s side of his car and smacked him hard enough across the top of his ass for it to hurt.

He yelped, and fell backward onto the concrete, his cell phone clutched in his hand.

“Is this a new way to cruise that I’m too old to understand?” I asked.

“I dropped my phone between the seat and the console,” he said, dusting off the screen and standing up.

Finn was tall, but still a few inches shy of my six-foot-two frame. We were similar in the way cousins were similar, features that looked reminiscent of each other without being carbon copies. Our father’s DNA was clearly too weak to make a stand across all four of our mothers.

“If you say so.” I gave him a shove toward his front door. “What color are we painting your office, and why aren’t you paying someone to do it?”

“I don’t remember the name, but it’s some pink they use at MoMA,” he said. “Pouting room or something.”

“Do you often have tantrums in your office?”

“It’s supposed to be a calm neutral,” he said, stepping over the threshold and into his house.

It was an old ranch house that he’d done enough work on for the insides to look brand new and the outside to look like it was fresh in the fifties.

I personally hated Finn’s maximalist style, but after he’d closed on the property, he managed to forget I was a designer until it was too late for me to walk back the monstrosity that had already become his living room.

“There’s nothing calm about your house,” I said, ignoring the cacophony of color to my right.

I followed Finn down the hallway to the bedroom he’d converted into an office, finding his massive desk in the middle of the room, covered with a plastic tarp.

He’d taken down all of his ornately gold-framed paintings and stacked them against the front of the desk, each getting their own covering to keep them safe from the catastrophe that was about to be the paint job he’d solicited me for.

“And I’m not hiring it out because you’re free, and I did the analysis on the cost of my time versus my skill set, and?—”

I interrupted him, lifting a hand in surrender, “Alright, Finn. Just say you want some one-on-one time with me next time, though.”

He rolled his eyes at me, and I laughed, dropping into a squat beside him to look down at the already open can of mauve paint.

“Calming, you say?”

“That’s what the article said.”

He handed me a roller brush, and I groaned. “I read the article.”

“Of course you did.”

I killed time by painting my palm and my forearm with the dry roller, waiting for Finn to dump the paint into the tray and tell me where he wanted me to start. When he pulled out an extension rod, I raised a curious brow.

“I want to color wash it,” he said, moving quickly to dip his roller into paint and smear a garish streak across the ceiling before I could protest. We both blinked up at the streak of pink on his ceiling, and I chuckled under my breath.

“This is going to feel like being back inside the womb,” I teased, picking a wall to start. There was no way my arms had the strength to handle the ceiling, not after the spanking I’d given Silas the night before.

Painting turned out to be a welcome distraction because it was mindless and my mind was otherwise occupied with Silas. Finn blathered on about something I wasn’t quite listening to, which explained how he caught me off-guard asking, “So how was your date last night?”

“Good,” I said, before realizing what I’d admitted to .

We both froze, and I turned slowly, finding Finn standing on top of his desk, paint roller raised and a triumphant smile on his face.

“Good?”

“It wasn’t a date,” I corrected.

“What was it?”

There were a dozen answers, and none of them were right. I settled with, “It was a hookup.”

“Did he stay the night?”

“Yes.”

Finn lowered the paint roller. “That’s…”

“Don’t,” I warned.

“You don’t ever let people stay over, Marshall,” he said, like I didn’t know.

“It was an extenuating circumstance,” I said, but my cheeks burned, and they had to be a darker pink than the wall I’d just been painting.

“Fucked him until he forgot how to drive?”

“It wasn’t a date,” was all I could say.

“What’s the not-date’s name?”

“Does it matter?” I re-wet the roller and turned back to the task at hand, which was decidedly not playing the game of conversational chess with my brother.

“Very much.” He started painting again, the wet roller squelching against the ceiling behind me.

“Silas,” I finally said.

The roller stopped, and I knew he’d put two and two together. On account of his job, my brother was extremely detail-oriented. And on top of that, he was a brilliant listener, even when you thought he wasn’t.

“Ayres,” he said.

“Yes.”

Finn let out a low whistle, and I dropped the roller into the paint tray, deciding it was time for a break. Finn repeated the motions, collapsing onto the floor beside me with his legs crossed and his fingers drumming steadily against the tops of his knees.

“The son.”

“Yes,” I said again.

“Smith’s age?”

I sighed and nodded.

“You never struck me as the type to like them young,” he said. It was almost a tease, but the truth in it was too sharp for either of us to pretend.

“He’s not young . He’s just younger than me.”

“Smith is young.”

“He was young when he came to us,” I corrected. “He’s his own man now, and you know it. Just because you still see him as a baby?—”

“Don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” I said, shrugging helplessly. “But Smith and Silas are not the same person.”

“No, I imagine they’re not.” Finn tipped his head to the side, puckering his lips in thought. “Do you want to tell me how you ended up on a not-date with the son of your biggest business rival?”

“I’d hardly call Stanley a rival. He’s not competition for me.”

Finn chortled. “He’s giving you a run for it with the Cahuenga Pass project.”

“That’s only because Silas is getting bits and pieces of his own ideas into the design,” I said. “Stanley on his own is as dated as your house.”

“I should be offended, but I know you don’t mean it.”

“Don’t I?”

My brother laughed at me, then pushed to his feet, surveying the painting we’d gotten done already. “Let’s take a break. Have a drink and we’ll get through the rest after. ”

“This is going to need two coats.”

“Hunter is on deck tomorrow, don’t worry.

” Finn held out his hand to help me up, and I took it.

He was surprisingly strong, hauling me to my feet with ease and giving me a quick slap on the back for good measure.

We went into the kitchen where he pulled two beers out of the fridge, cracking them both open and pushing one across the counter toward my waiting hand.

“Now that we’re free of the fumes, you can tell me how you ended up in bed with this Silas kid.”

“He’s not a kid.”

“You know what I mean,” Finn volleyed.

“You know what I mean.”

He let out a very tired-sounding breath. “How did you end up in bed with this Silas man ?”

I wanted to tell him it was an accident, but that would have been a gross misstatement.

Everything with Silas had been well thought out and calculated, down to the way I fucked him and for how long.

I’d orchestrated this, and there was no way around it.

The problem was my brother and I talked about a lot of things, and I was sure he had his suspicions about me—and I about him—but we’d managed to never actually discuss our preferences in the bedroom.

“I met him at a bar,” I said. “He was about to get taken advantage of, and I stepped in.”

“What a hero.”

I glared at Finn and took a swig of my beer.

“I called him the next day to make sure he was okay, and we sort of hit it off and made plans.”

“Plans for your not-date.” Finn was so fucking amused at the conversation, leaning against his fridge with his head bouncing around like a bobblehead.

“Exactly,” I said.

“And he spent the night. ”

“Yes.”

“This is a dumb question, but are you going to do it again?” Finn scratched the side of his mouth. “I can’t imagine it’s advisable.”

“It’s probably not the best idea, but…” I trailed off because we both knew if I let him spend the night, that there was definitely going to be a repeat.

Finn let me stew in that for a bit, and we both drank the rest of our beers in mostly silence. He polished off the last swallow, smacked his lips, and said, “Remind me of the issues with the ki—with Silas’s dad? Why does Stanley have it out for you?”

Scrubbing a hand down my face, I frowned at the memories from college.

Stanley Ayres was older than me, but not by much.

I’d had him as an adjunct professor for one of my first-year design classes, and he had all of the bitterness required for the role.

Even back then, his design talents were stilted and stifled, and I hadn’t been scared to tell him as much.

I’d pushed back against the syllabus from the start, which had rubbed Stanley wrong through both semesters of course work, and I made sure to let the administration know about it.

It was the only class I’d ever gotten less than an A in.

“We’ve never seen eye to eye on a single thing,” I said. “And he gave me a C once.”

Finn snorted and I finished off my beer, tossing both of our empty bottles into the recycle bin.

“Let’s finish this first coat.” I took one step back toward the hallway, and Finn reached out, grabbing my arm to draw me back toward him.

I looked at my brother, studied the way he studied me. Maybe we were more similar than I’d thought because it was easy to see my own expressions in the tight knit of his brow and the worry in the dark shadows of his eyes .

“Just tell me you’re not doing this to get back at an old man over a twenty-year grudge.”

“Whenever I’m with Silas, his father is the last thing on my mind.”

“Tell me this isn’t a midlife crisis.”

I shook my arm out of his grasp. “I’m not even forty yet.”

“So close,” he murmured, the tension relaxing out of his mouth.

“This isn’t anything like that,” I promised my brother, taking another step back toward his office so I could finish painting it crybaby pink. Then I admitted the truth of the whole thing to him, “Finn, I’m sincerely interested in Silas.”

“Oh,” he said, giving me an apologetic look. “Well…shit.”