Page 30 of Claimed By My Ex’s Brother

He’s not flattering me. He’s reading off a list of facts, the way you might read the time off a clock.

“How old are you?” I ask. “Do they go after you often?”

“I’m eight.” He shrugs a bony shoulder. “And those idiots are wasting their time. They will get bored of it eventually.”

“You almost drowned just now.”

“Yeah, but I learned something.” He wipes his nose. “Next time I stay away from the water first, then argue.”

“Why not simply argue at all?”

He wrinkles his nose as though I have said something foolish. “That’s not realistic.”

I look at this soaked, skinny, stubborn little creature, and I feel the corner of something shift in me. He’s the first eight-year-old I’ve ever met that I don’t half want to throw back into the river myself.

“Eat more,” I tell him. “Grow big and strong, like me.”

He bats my hand away from his head and smooths his wet hair back down with enormous dignity. “I’ll cooperate, as long as the cook is not trying to poison me.”

He grins, and for half a second something in the shape of his face snags on a memory I cannot quite place. Then a figure comes running across the grass, and my whole chest reorganizes itself, because it’s Delaney.

What’s she doing all the way out here?

She drops to her knees in front of the boy, breathless, hands flying over him. “Milo, are you hurt? Are you okay? Let me look at you.”

“I’m fine, I promise, a man pulled me right out.” He submits to the inspection with a long-suffering sigh.

She sags with relief once she’s sure he’s whole. Then the director, passing again, thanks Mr. Volkov for his quick action, and Delaney goes very still. She lifts her head slowly, and her eyes find mine and go wide.

My wet shirt is plastered to my chest, and her gaze catches there and lingers. My body remembers her fingers and her mouth spread over exactly that spot.

Fuck, I curse the way my cock stirs the instant it starts.

“What are you doing here?” she manages, aiming for calm and missing it entirely. “You actually saved that boy back there.”

“What is he to you?” The question leaves me faster than I mean to let it. Some strange, jealous pressure has clamped around my ribs, bracing for an answer I have not named.

“She’s my mom,” Milo says, matter of fact, before she can speak. My ears ring at the word. Then he adds, unprompted, “I saw a guy with your exact face on our couch for five months. And I didn’t like him.”

The arithmetic assembles itself against my will. Twenty-three and eight. She is twenty-three. He is eight. A cold, black, murderous rage rises in me on her behalf, for whatever bastard put a child in the arms of a fifteen-year-old girl.

Delaney shoots Milo a look that could strip paint, but she doesn’t correct him. “He saved my son,” she says instead. “Thank you.”

The confirmation lands somewhere low under my sternum and twists.

I will find whatever bastard did this to her. I will learn his name and his address, and I’ll take my time about it. The thought arrives fully formed, and I don’t question it for a second.

“I did what the situation required,” I say, and bury every bit of it behind a flat voice.

“You are soaked through,” Delaney says, and I watch her decide something. “We live ten minutes from here. Come and change before you catch a chill. It’s the least I can do.”

I had planned to leave the second my driver came around. I change the plan on the spot. “All right, lead the way.”

Their apartment’s old and cramped, the furniture worn soft at every edge. One armrest has been carefully restitched by hand. A table leg stands level on a folded wedge of cardboard. A jar of cut flowers sits in the middle of all of it. Everything in this room says that someone with almost nothing loves this life and tends it anyway.

Delaney hands out towels, apologizing for how thin they are. Milo gets the gray one. I get the white.

The towel smells of her, of lemon soap and something warm and filthy underneath it, and I breathe it in slower than I should and think a few things about her that have no business crossing my mind in a room with a child in it.