Breaking The Bro Code (Hawthorne Brothers 3)

“Shouldn’t you be in your office?” I ask him as I tap my fingers on my desk.

He looks at me with narrowed eyes. “Were you watching porn?”

“No.”

Of course that’s the first thing he thought of when he saw me closing my laptop.

“Why would I have to do that?”

“I see.” Asher grins. “So things are going that well with Claire?”

I shake my head. “I’m not giving you any details.”

He frowns. “Even though I helped you get back together with her?”

I guess that’s partly true. Even so…

“No.”

He sighs as he sits in front of my desk. I give him a questioning look.

“Did you come here just to ask me about Claire?”

“I came here to check on my little brother,” he answers.

“I’m fine.”

“How was the wedding shower?” he asks.

“Good. Everything went well.”

“And the bachelor party? Any strippers?”

I knew he was going to ask that.

“No. And you should stop thinking about other women. Violet will kill you.”

“No, she won’t. She can’t live without me. Besides, she knows she’s all I think about.”

I know it, too. Asher may still act like a playboy sometimes, but I know he’ll never cheat on Violet. He’s in love with her.

“I was just curious if you had fun last Friday night,” he says.

“It was fun,” I tell him. “We drank. We threw darts and played pool.”

“Oh. Like when you were in college?”

“And then we hit an arcade that I paid to stay open late just for us so we could play video games for old times’ sake.”

“Kids,” Asher mutters.

“It was fun,” I tell him again. That’s what matters, and even more so because I beat Joel at one of his favorite games—a fact he refuses to acknowledge until now.

“Good,” Asher says.

He falls silent for a moment as if waiting for me to say something. I don’t, so he speaks again.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I spent last Friday night?”

I put my hands up. “I’m happy for you, Asher, but if you’re going to start telling me about how you and Violet—”

“I spent two hours listening to Ethan whine.”

I look at him with furrowed eyebrows. Oh, right. He was drinking with Ethan. I was supposed to be with them, too, but I had Joel’s wedding shower and the bachelor party.

“Ethan? Whine?” I shake my head in disbelief. “Since when does Ethan whine?”

“Since Stella got very pregnant and very emotional,” Asher answers. “Apparently she’s past the stage where she wants to have sex all the time. Now she just cries all the time because she misses her parents. And if Ethan tries to comfort her, she picks a fight with him and throws stuff at him.”

“Poor Ethan.”

“So yeah, Ethan is pretty lost. And pissed.”

Which means he’s probably going to lock himself up in his office and bury himself in work again, which in turn means I won’t be able to talk to him and present my plans for the Hawthorne Foundation. Even if I go to his office, he won’t be in the mood to listen. And I need him to be in the mood to listen.

Damn.

“And you owe me one.” Asher points a finger at me. “Because you weren’t there, I had to listen to all his crap alone.”

“You could have just told him to shut up.”

“No one tells Ethan to shut up. Except Stella, maybe.”

“Then talk to Stella. You’re friends, right?”

Asher shakes his head. “I would, but I don’t want her throwing stuff at me.” He touches his chin. “Maybe I’ll ask Violet to do it. But you still owe me one. You better be there on Friday.”

“I will be,” I promise him.

I’d rather spend the night with Claire, but I’m not going to let my brothers down.

“Okay.” Asher stands up. “Now, do you have that report I asked for last week?”

Is that the real reason he’s here?

“You could have asked Dylan to come get it.”

“Like I said, I wanted to check on my little brother. So do you have it?”

I pull the folder out from under the pile of papers on my desk. As I do, a sheet of paper falls to the floor. An alarm sounds in my head as I realize it’s the document outlining the philanthropic efforts of another company, the one I researched for the Foundation.

Asher picks it up and looks puzzled.

“Are we trying to acquire this company?” he asks. “I thought it was one of our major competitors.”

I grab the sheet of paper from him and hand him my report. “It is. I was just doing some research.”

Still, Asher gives me a puzzled look.

“About the companies they’ve acquired,” I add to convince him.

That seems to do it.

“I see.” He taps his fingers on the folder I’ve given him. “So you’re not leaving the company?”

“What?”

Did he somehow find out about my plans?

“Because I heard they want to be more aggressive about their expansion into the Asian market and they’re looking for someone to spearhead that.”