Page 93 of Daddies' Little Troublemaker

He actually wrote back, surprising me. I’m at the Charles de Gaulle airport. I’ll be home late tonight. Come over tomorrow.

Well. It’s tomorrow now. I park in front of his house and stare at the building. It’s got solid structure. Sort of like Mark. He’s normally such a solid, strong presence in my life. Losing Evelyn has been the absolute worst, but losing Mark is almost as bad.

Taking a deep breath, I get out of my car and march to the front door. Mark opens it before I can knock. He stands in front of me, his blue eyes hard, his face a mask of nothing. No feeling. No anger, no sadness, no irritation.

“Hey,” I say. I feel like I’m five years old again, wishing my new big brother would like me.

“Hey.” He folds his arms over his chest, then drops them and sighs. “Come in. Get some coffee.”

I follow him inside, immediately looking around to see if Evie is nearby.

“She’s still in Paris,” he says.

“Oh.” Disappointment washes through me. “Is she…is she coming home soon?”

“Next week. For her sister’s wedding.” He faces away from me and pours out two cups of coffee.

This isn’t how I expected the conversation to start. I expected him to yell at me, maybe throw a punch, maybe hand me a shovel and march me to the woods to dig my own grave. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this calm, resigned version of my brother.

I take the cup he holds out and lean back against the counter, affecting a casual attitude I sure as fuck don’t feel. “Mark, I know you don’t want to hear this from me, but my feelings for her are serious and real.”

After a long moment of quiet, where he stares into his mug, he says, “Shit. That’s what I was afraid of.”

He’s just standing there in the middle of the kitchen, coffee in his hand, looking completely unmoored.

“You’re afraid of it?” I ask.

“If it was temporary, I could be mad at you and ignore that any of this ever happened.”

“Hey,” I say. When he looks up, I stare directly at him so he can see how dead serious I am. “I don’t want it to be temporary. I want forever. And I want to be telling her these things right now instead of you.”

“And…Caleb?”

“Feels the same as I do. He’s been harassing me to make you talk to me.”

Mark snorts. “You were really going to fly to France?”

“I fucking was. Japan, after that. I’d search the whole world for her.”

“This is really hard to believe.” He takes a sip of coffee and sighs. “You’re way too old for her.”

“I tried to tell her that.”

“The kind of things you like to do with women…fuck, man. I don’t want to think about it.”

“Then think about how much Caleb and I care about her, instead. How solid we are. Secure. We have good jobs?—”

“You travel all the time.”

“We don’t have to.”

“You’re my brother, Link. Her uncle.”

Nodding, I say, “I’ve always felt like your brother, all the way, like you’re more family than anyone related to me by blood. But we don’t share blood, and Evelyn never grew up with me as an uncle figure. When we first met, it wasn’t here—it was at a dance club.”

“That’s what she told me,” he says. “I’m just having a hard fucking time wrapping my head around it.”

“I had a hard time with it, too, to be honest.”

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