Deadline

“Right. Which is why we don’t need to talk about it anymore. The situation won’t improve with discussion. There’s nothing to be worked out. It just is, and it won’t ever change. I was sired by Carl Wingert, criminal of renown. Jeremy, my brother, was your husband.”

“Hunter and Grant are your nephews.”

“Yeah.” Mention of them caused him to smile spontaneously, in spite of himself. “And they’re great. God, there were times when—” Realizing what he was about to say, he broke off.

She tilted her head inquisitively. “When what?”

“Nothing.”

“When what?”

He chewed his bottom lip, but then decided, The hell with it. “When I wanted to hug them and hold on. They were the first blood relatives I’d ever met.”

Her chest rose with a sudden swell of emotion. “You can hug them any time you want.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“Why?”

“Those boys are going to have enough to deal with just living down their heritage. Having me in their lives would only make the issue muddier.”

Besides, he added to himself, he couldn’t be around them without being around Amelia, and he couldn’t be around her without wanting her, and wanting her without having her was already killing him.

“I’m your sister-in-law.”

“I’m fully aware of that,” he said tightly. “I was aware of it when you walked into the courtroom and things went haywire.”

“What things?”

“Things. Everything. I was sitting there wishing for a drink, a pill, cursing Headly for sending me down here, telling myself that I didn’t care about the fate of a brother I’d never known. Wishing my ass was anywhere else except growing numb on that hard bench in the courtroom.

“Then the doors at the back of it were opened, you walked past me, and all of a sudden I’m being sucked in. By you. Jeremy. Lust. Despair.”

“What do you feel toward him now?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I hate him for what he became, what he did, but…” He turned his hands palms up and extended them toward her. “I was holding his head, looking into his eyes when he died, Amelia. My brother. First time I set eyes on him, and he dies.” He gave a bitter laugh over the cruel irony of it.

“Did you tell him?”

He shook his head. “But there was a moment, no an instant, of recognition. Connection. Something. Or maybe I just imagined it because I wanted to see it. Doesn’t matter now, though, does it?”

“Not to Jeremy. I think it matters greatly to you.”

“I was right not to tell him. He was better off not knowing that the stranger moving in on his family was his brother.”

“Dawson,” she said softly, “when you and I met, I hadn’t been Jeremy’s wife for a long time. I’d believed him dead for more than a year. Does it bother you that much to know that he and I…That—”

“That he had you first? Yeah. It bothers me some. But not in the way you’re thinking.”

“What am I thinking?”

“That it’s a sexual competition, that I’m afraid you’re making comparisons. It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s that I wanted you in the first place.”

“When I should have been off-limits.”