Page 2 of Love by Design (Club Rapture: Risk Aware #1)

MARSHALL

T he only thing worse than having four younger brothers, I imagined, was having four younger half -brothers.

After finishing up the joke of a meeting with Stanley and his son, I was early for my weekly family dinner, which wasn’t so much a whole family, just me and the four younger men I shared fifty percent of my genetic makeup with.

As the oldest of the herd, I clocked in at thirty-nine.

The second oldest brother, Finn, was thirty-five.

Then came Hunter, who was also thirty-five.

Because while all of them were half-brothers to me, they were also half to each other, and our father, Willem Covington, had never met a woman he didn't want to bed.

Which is how we ended up with Smith, the youngest by far at twenty-five.

Same age as Stanley Ayres’ kid, who wasn’t really a kid at all, but an overworked and overlooked shining star of his generation and our field.

It was too bad for him—and the world as a whole—that he was going to burn out before he even had a chance to get going.

Stanley had been pigheaded since I met him at school, and old age clearly hadn’t made him any wiser.

He was going to ruin his business and his only son’s life if he didn’t get his head out of his ass.

My brothers and I had taken bets on more than one occasion about how many other Covington brothers were floating around, but it had been years since any had come out of the woodwork.

My father had gotten rich at the right time, thanks to some well-played stocks back in the eighties, so anyone foolish enough to get pregnant by him never kept it a secret for long.

The women would be paid off accordingly and given the choice to keep the child or… for lack of a better term, sell him.

My father— our father—wasn’t cruel. He was simply pragmatic.

It was crass to explain to people outside of our circle, but all four of our mothers had taken the latter deal, relinquishing parental rights in exchange for a sum of money that none of us would ever know about.

In return, we were raised together for the most part, tutored and trained and boarded, wrapped up with expensive college educations and hand-selected internships, then sent into the world.

Smith was not only the youngest, he was also running headlong toward his teens by the time he’d come around.

I had already graduated from college, and Hunter and Finn were well on their way.

The house we’d all grown up in was practically empty when Smith landed on the doorstep, and the end years of his childhood were far different from ours.

More isolated and more lonely, but for the most part, he’d turned out all right.

The twins, as I called them, even though they weren’t, had tried to be present for Smith, and I even tried to come around more, but our youngest brother hadn’t wanted any of it.

Not until he’d graduated himself, and then it was like meeting a completely different person.

Smith Covington accepted his diploma and tossed his cap into the air like he’d tossed away a death sentence.

It wasn’t until after he had finally settled in his first post-graduate job that I realized how hard he’d been fighting behind the scenes to keep himself together emotionally.

He refused to talk about it, and the three of us gave up trying to press the matter.

As far as we could tell, Smith was as well-adjusted as anyone could be in his situation, but it was shortly after his graduation that we’d started our weekly little get-togethers.

If he saw through our motives and knew it for the check-in we meant it to be, he never said anything, which was for the better.

To be honest, the touchpoints weren’t just for him anymore.

All of us had our struggles. My current one being Stanley Ayres and his attempts to trip me up from securing the Walterson Homes project off Cahuenga.

He’d steal it right out from under me if he stopped talking long enough to listen to his son, Silas, but there wasn’t much Stanley loved more than the sound of his own voice so I didn’t think it was likely.

I’d gone straight to the restaurant after leaving the meeting with Ayres, where I’d tucked into our usual booth and ordered a glass of red wine, which I was halfway through when Finn showed up.

“Are you ever not working?” he asked, collapsing into the seat across from me with a dramatic huff. He stretched his arm across the table, clasping my laptop and turning it to face him.

“I’m just reviewing the numbers on this bid,” I told him, leaning back and rubbing hard at the bridge of my nose. “You know I hate math.”

“And yet it’s your whole job.”

“In the fun way, not the boring way.”

Finn snorted and adjusted the angle of the laptop, setting it down on the white tablecloth so he could get to work. He scratched mindlessly at the side of his nose and scrolled back to the top of the page I’d been stuck on. “Leave this to your capable baby brother. ”

With some complicated math degree from CalTech, Finn was more than capable, but if I told him that, his head might explode. Either way, I was happy to let him triple-check the bid for me and sit back to finish my drink.

Smith was the next to show up, sliding in to flank me with a tired sounding groan when his ass hit the booth. His wavy hair flopped down over his face, and he puffed out his lower lip to try and use his breath to blow it back…to no avail.

“Long day?” I asked.

He flagged down a waitress with a curl of his fingers and ordered a fresh round for the three of us, plus a drink for Hunter, who’d never been on time for anything a day in his life. Not even his birth, Finn liked to remind him, or else he would have been the older one.

“I’m thinking about changing my name,” he announced.

“Coming from you, I’m not surprised. What would you change it to?”

“My mom’s name is Hartford,” he said.

Finn glanced up from my laptop, one brow raised. “Smith Hartford? That sounds like a brand of breakfast sausage.”

Smith gave him the finger, and Finn returned his attention to my bid.

“That full of disdain?” I asked.

He frowned and shrugged. “I don’t feel ownership of it the way the three of you do?”

“What do we own?” Hunter asked, breathless and late. He dropped his brown leather messenger bag against the side of the booth before sliding in and obnoxiously knocking into Finn’s shoulder.

“The Covington name,” Finn said, not looking up but still reminding us of how unfairly well his brain worked.

“I was thinking of changing my name,” Smith muttered. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You don’t even eat sausage,” Finn said, snapping my laptop closed and looking up at me.

“You had some errors with some of the line items, but I cross-referenced them with the source files in your project folder, and you have better margins now. So that’s a win.

I also programmed it to extract the data automatically, so if you drop a new quote in, it’ll populate. ”

“How did you do that?” I asked, taking my computer back from him and setting it in a slim laptop case between me and Smith.

“It would take me longer to explain to you than it took me to do. Just trust that it’s done, and it’s done properly.”

“I do,” I assured him.

The waitress returned with all of our drinks—fresh wine for me, a matching glass for Smith, a Manhattan for Finn, and a vodka soda for Hunter.

We cheers-ed, clinking our glasses together before lapsing into our normal kind of Friday night conversation.

I told my brothers about the project I’d been working on for months and the disastrous meeting with Stanley and Silas.

Finn talked about the internal debate he’d been having with himself about pursuing grad school or not.

Hunter complained about a recent case filing, and Smith just gestured in the air and took another drink of his wine.

“Who did you say you met with earlier?” he asked me instead of talking more about himself.

“Stanley Ayres and his son.”

“Silas?” Smith asked, scrunching his nose.

“Silas,” I confirmed. “Do you know him?”

Smith and Silas were the same age, but I knew from Silas’s biography in the article I’d read that he and Smith hadn’t gone to the same college, and I knew for sure they’d not attended the same high school.

“Friend of a friend,” he muttered, cheeks flushing.

“Indeed,” Finn said, huffing out a laugh.

I studied my younger brother for a tell, but he kept his eyes trained on his lap until the color in his face returned to normal, only looking up again after he’d taken a substantial swallow of his wine.

“Silas has the potential to be a brilliant architect,” I said. “If only his father would stop suffocating him.”

“The opposite of our father then?” Smith countered.

“You’ll appreciate it when you’re older,” Hunter promised, and I knew he understood our father in the same way I did.

He was far from the best, but he was the best we had.

It was his name and his money that had given all of us our lives, and he’d asked for nothing in return.

It seemed he prided himself on knowing the name would carry on after him and that it would carry on well.

Maybe that would happen in spite of him, but I’d long ago made peace with the kind of man my father was compared to the kind of men who fathered my friends.

I was nowhere near as practical as him. Finn had once gotten drunk and suggested Willem Covington was a sociopath, but I had always found him to be a product of his own environment.

Hunter and I didn’t hold his detached parenting style against him anymore, at least not in the way Smith seemed to.

My whole life, Dad had his girlfriends and he had his hookups, and before my brothers had joined the family, I’d idolized that way of life.

I thought my father was the pinnacle of all things, and when I eventually learned otherwise, it was too late.

Reaching up, I subconsciously tucked my hair behind my ears.

Not that it was long enough for that, but it was going gray, and I was the oldest of all my brothers.

While I held no ill will against my father, I didn’t want to be like him anymore.

I’d modeled myself after him because I had no other role models to look up to, and by the time I’d reached Hunter’s and Finn’s age, there were dozens of notches on my bedpost and not a single serious relationship under my belt.

I rubbed my fingers and thumb around the stem of my wine glass, glancing across the table to see the twins deep in conversation about something that would only ever involve them, so I angled my head toward Smith.

“You don’t have to change your name to not be like him,” I said softly enough for him to hear, but not the other two.

“I don’t want to be like him.”

“You’re not.”

Smith reached for his wine, sliding his thumb and fingers around the stem the same way I’d done, then he lifted it to his mouth and took a drink. “You don’t want to be like him either, do you?”

“It’s not a goal I’m actively pursuing, Smith.”

He rubbed his lips together, and it was so easy to see him as the angry, abandoned ten-year-old he’d been when I met him for the first time. Sometimes I wished I could have done better by him, but I was fresh out of college, fighting so hard to make the Covington name my own.

“You’re not like him,” he said to me, like the question had only meant to confirm his suspicions that Dad and I weren’t the same man.

“I know,” I said, doing my best to commit the observation from Smith to my memory for later in case I forgot it.

Which I sometimes did.