Page 137 of Shattered Silence Duet

“You can’t bargain away something weallneed to tell her for time with her,” I say with a shake of my head.

Dom leans forward, his voice steady as he speaks. “We’ll tell you now. Like you said, we weren’t exactly hiding it, but we neededyou to recover first. Some of it involves you, and I needed to know you were in a good state of mind before we brought it up.”

She nods, encouraging him to go on.

“The seven of us run a private investigating business,” he says, revealing one of our biggest secrets to her as we all watch closely for her reaction. Her eyebrows shoot up in surprise. She clearly didn’t expect that.

“The twins are actually twenty-two. They’re undercover. Gideon and Tucker are undercover too; those aren’t their real jobs.”

Somehow, her eyes grow even wider. I place my hand over hers and give it a reassuring squeeze. She turns her palm to hold mine, and I slide our joined hands onto my thigh under the table, silently showing her my support.

“Twenty-two?” she looks between the twins with a shocked expression.

“Upset you aren’t robbing the cradle anymore?” Max asks, and Jasper whacks him on the shoulder with a scowl.

“Uhh… no.” She lets out a small laugh. “So you thought I was seventeen while I thought you were eighteen?”

“Yep.”

“Well, I guess the truth works out better for us anyway,” she says with a shrug, making the twins smile.

Dom picks up where he left off. “I come from a family of cops, so it was expected I would take the same route. But when I was in training, I quickly learned that being an officer came with too many rules and regulations, and I like to have control of my life. So a PI seemed like the best choice. There was a team hiring, and I joined them. But I messed up my first case, focusing my attention in the wrong direction.” He pauses to take a sip of his coffee.

“That team didn’t want to work with me after that, so I decided to go at it on my own. I did that, a bit unsuccessfully, for a couple years until I was twenty-three. That’s when I met Atlas in a bar one night, and somehow we started talking.”

Atlas continues the story next. “I was a bit lost at the time,having just left the army, and was looking for a new path. So when Dom told me he was a PI and asked if I’d be interested in joining him, I thought it was something I could help with. I had plenty of useful skills from my military years, and it seemed like it would be nice to be in control for once. We could decide what cases to take and what hours to work.”

“Since we got along so well, and money was tight, we decided to live together. Although it was really just moving from one short-term rental to another,” Dom tells her.

“Or hotel rooms, in some cases,” Atlas adds.

“We met Tucker about six months later when we were on assignment. He was working for another PI who was trying to steal the case from us. When we realized Tuck hated his boss, we poached him.”

“Best decision I ever made!” I say with a smile, remembering the exact day they’re talking about.

“It was probably another four months after that when we realized we were in desperate need of a tech specialist,” Dom tells her.

“Ben?” Mina asks, looking at him.

“Yep. They posted online, saying they needed someone for their team, so I applied. One day later, we met, and they offered me the job on the spot,” Ben says with a smile.

“And two months later we met Gideon.” Mina’s gaze turns to him, clearly eager to hear how he joined our rag-tag group.

“Yes, well… I moved here from England in my early twenties. I… needed to get away from my parents. They weren’t bad people, but they are typical British parents, keeping their emotions close to the chest all the time, expecting me to do the same. Not allowing me to step out of line or do anything that wasn’t in their plan for me. I couldn’t handle the restraints anymore, so, one day, I packed up and left.

“I had a bit of money that I’d saved away, so I was able to rent a room for a few months while I tried to figure out what to do. One of my roommates was obsessed with this Sherlock Holmes television show. After a few weeks of watching it with him every night, Igrew intrigued by the idea of problem solving crimes. As Dom said, not like a police detective. I wanted to be able to choose what cases I worked on. I also had no interest in making the arrests, I just want to solve the puzzle.

“I decided to do a little job hunting for private investigators, even knowing I had no experience. Unfortunately, there was nothing available. One afternoon, I was going to the grocery store, and I saw these guys,” Gideon says, motioning to the four of us. “They were talking to a crying woman in the parking lot. They were acting like cops, but they didn’t fit the look. I decided to ask what was going on, as there were lots of people standing around watching them.”

“I told him that we were there looking for the crying woman’s daughter,” I explain. “She was nineteen, and not considered a minor, but she’d waited in the car while her mom went grocery shopping, and wasn’t there when she came out. The police won’t do anything if it’s under twenty-four hours, so she called us.”

“I noticed a couple girls around the missing daughters’ age, standing beside a parked car, trying not to laugh. So I told Tucker,” Gideon adds.

“It turned out it was just some stupid joke the daughter was playing, trying to get her mother’s attention. But it was because of Gideon’s ability to read those girls that helped us figure it out so quickly,” I tell her. “So we asked him to join us.”

Dom continues. “The five of us meshed really well together, we lived together and eventually started taking cases all around the country. While we moved around, each of us tried dating, but it never worked out for numerous reasons. It was Tucker who convinced us that we needed one woman to share. With our jobs being dangerous and constantly moving, we couldn’t drag a group of girlfriends around with us.”

I jump in next. “And we’re a family. If we started dating and eventually got married, we’d have to settle down and end up separated from each other. But none of us wanted that. We’re brothers for life and want to stay together.”