Page 4 of Baby for my Best Friend's Brother

She raised an eyebrow, too used to being stared at to be bothered by my fixed gaze. Slowly, she raised one hand and mimicked snapping a picture. Then she made a box with the Ls of her thumb and forefinger and framed me in it.

“What are you doing back here, Quinn?” I asked, shading my eyes against the glare of the sun that was beginning to sink behind her.

For a minute, her face went rigid. Her eyes flickered. Then she dropped her imaginary photo and sighed bitterly. “Climbing a tree, Callum. What else?”

CHAPTER 3

QUINN

Callum Evans hadn’t changed a bit. A strong, lean torso with muscular arms. A jaw as firm and solid as an oak. His eyes were the celery green of new sprouting leaves, and his voice came from deep in the barrel of his chest, a rich, vibrating baritone that made me want to close my eyes and listen to whatever he had to say.

Until the things that he said made me want to shove in my earplugs–the really expensive kind I’d bought so that I didn’t lose my hearing on stage when Joanna was walloping away on her kit.

I didn’t understand how someone could be related to wild child Renee and be soconventional.When we were teenagers, everything that came out of his mouth sounded like he was quoting his dad. Now, ten years later, he had become the dad he always sounded like. Obnoxious and overbearing. But I couldn’t help but notice that for all his boring, straightlaced qualities, Callum Evans was even more devastatingly good looking than I remembered.

He was broader across the chest, and his hair had grown out from the military-style buzz cut he’d sported in his twenties. He was wearing a pale gray suit with a crisp white shirt underneath, and, naturally, he hadn’t loosened his navy blue tie a bit.

I sighed over the shame it was that all that masculine beauty was paired to an infuriatingly conscientious stick in the mud like Callum. He hadn’t looked twice at me when I was a teenager and he was in his twenties, butnowhe might be a nice distraction.

And I needed nice distractions.

The tension was back in my neck now. Belmont Springs had provided only temporary relief. A cortisone shot to an inflamed joint–just enough to get me through the next show, the next few hours. Taut with stress, I climbed down the ladder to where Callum was still waiting. When I reached the bottom, I was surprised to see that he’d stepped forward, his arms outstretched the way they’d been to catch Noah if necessary. He backed up instantly when I turned around, his arms dropping to his sides.

“I’m a little heavier than a six-year-old,” I said drolly to cover how discomfited I was by his unexpected closeness. It wasn’t that I was uncomfortable. Callum was as different from Jason as the sun from the moon. It was more that it had been a long time since a man got close to me without any agenda. Who stepped up just to be there if I needed help.

“Not enough heavier.” His celery green eyes took my measure in one quick glance. “You need a good meal, Quinn.”

I jerked my shoulders, irritated that he’d noticed, but not surprised. The stress of the last few months–the last few years,really–had smacked down my appetite. “Good thing I’m about to crush a cheeseburger and fries.”

His lip curled down at the corner. “McDonalds isn’t dinner.”

The one tour thatThe Belleshad gone on in the summer between junior and senior year begged to differ. The dollar menu at McDonalds and sleeping two to a shitty motel bed had been the only way we broke even instead of losing money to the scummy clubs we played. We’d still had the time of our lives. We’d thought it was a means to an end, the beginning of something, and we’d been right.

The beginning of Jason Cain.

The end ofThe Belles.

“Yeah, well. It tastes like dinner to me,” I said finally.

When we walked inside, Noah was eating his nuggets and drinking his glass of milk at the table. He had been smiling at something Renee was saying, but his little face tightened right up when he saw his dad.

“Hey buddy,” Callum said, clearly trying to make nice. “How are the nuggets?”

“Good,” Noah said, not so subtly curving his arm around his plate like he thought his dad might whip it away and replace it with a bowl of broccoli.

“And white meat,” Renee added. “So they’re healthy.”

Callum looked like he wanted to argue the point, but he didn’t. Instead, he snagged a fry from my place setting–Renee had laid our meals out on real plates to make it look better to Callum–and sat down next to his son.

“So what’s going on?” he asked expectantly when we were all seated around the table.

I peeled the top bun off my burger and tried to sound casual. “What makes you think something is going on?”

“You show up out of nowhere, for one thing.” Callum flipped one palm up, like he was introducing a piece of evidence. “And for another, I think hell froze over when Renee told me that she needed a favor.”

I’d been carefully picking off the tiny diced onions from my cheeseburger, but now my head shot up. I’d thought Callum was just here to pick up Noah.

Renee glared at her brother. “That phone call was attorney-client privilege.”

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