Our Secret (The Benson Brothers Book 1) Read online

  Our Secret

  By

  G.L. Snodgrass

  Copyright 2019 G.L. Snodgrass

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means. This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Other Books by G. L. Snodgrass

  Regency Romance

  The Reluctant Duke (Love’s Pride 1)

  The Viscount's Bride (Love’s Pride 2)

  The Earl's Regret (Love’s Pride 3)

  Marrying the Marquess (Love’s Pride 4)

  Confronting A Rake (A Rake’s Redemption 1)

  Charming A Rake (A Rake’s Redemption 2)

  Catching A Rake (A Rake’s Redemption 3_

  Challenging A Rake (A Rake’s Redemption 4)

  Duke In Disguise (The Stafford Sisters 1)

  The American Duke (The Stafford Sisters 2)

  Young Adult Romance

  Certain Rules

  Unwritten Rules

  Unbreakable Rules

  My Favorite Love (Lakeland Boys 1)

  One Night (Lakeland Boys 2)

  My Brother’s Best Friend (Lakeland Boys 3)

  Worlds Apart (Lakeland Boys 4)

  My Brother's Bodyguard (Hometown Heroes 1)

  My Hidden Hero (Hometown Heroes 2)

  My Best Friend’s Brother (Hometown Heroes 3)

  My Sister’s Best Friend

  Hidden Friends

  Love's Winding Road

  Finding You

  Rescuing a Best Friend

  A New Year's Kiss

  Our Secret

  Chapter One

  Jake

  It was a crappy day going downhill fast. One look at my brothers’ faces and I knew it was going to get worse.

  Turning the bike off, I pulled my helmet, tucked it under my arm, and just stared, waiting for the news.

  Parker, the middle brother looked like someone had stolen one of his favorite textbooks. He slowly shook his head. I swear you would have thought one of us had just received a death sentence.

  My stomach tightened into a knot. If Parker was worried, it must be pretty bad. Although he was just two days short of a year younger than me. Irish twins, Dad used to say. Parker was the calm one of the Benson brothers. At seventeen he was too smart to worry about the small stuff. No, if he was troubled, it must be bad.

  Buck, the littlest brother sat up from pressing one fifty and glared at me as if I’d gotten between him and supper. At fifteen, he had shot up over the summer and was almost as tall as me. He’d gotten Dad’s height and would pass my six-one by Christmas.

  Once he filled out, it was going to be difficult to kick his butt. I’d still do it, but it would be harder than it should have been.

  “What?” I demanded. Their forlorn looks were eating at my guts.

  They both shook their head then glanced to the door leading into the house.

  “Mom wants to talk to you,” Parker said.

  My stomach dropped as I ran a dozen different scenarios. School hadn’t started, so they hadn’t called. I hadn’t had a run-in with the police in two months. So that was out. Maybe an angry father of any of a half-dozen different girls.

  No, that shouldn’t be it. At least I hoped not.

  Both of them looked back at me but neither would say a word. No, the cowards were going to leave it up to Mom.

  “Screw you both,” I said as I stepped off the bike and marched inside. Best to get this over with.

  Mom was in the kitchen washing vegetables for dinner, she saw me come around the corner and her eyes jumped. I put my helmet on the dining table and folded my arms across my chest, ready for bad news. Hey, I had a lot of experience with bad news. I had become an expert over the last few years.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, giving her an opening.

  She sighed heavily, turned the water off, and started drying her hands on a dish towel. I could tell she was nervous. That surprised me, normally when I screwed up, she was mad. An angry mother I could deal with. A nervous mother sent a bolt of fear down my spine.

  “You’re moving into the boys’ room,” she said quickly as if she had to get it out before she changed her mind.

  “What? Why?” I snapped. I was the oldest. I got a room to myself. Those were the rules the world over.

  She sighed again and said, “We have a guest coming to stay with us for the next year.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said before I could stop myself.

  Mom looked back at me as if I was an uncaring idiot. If anyone knew about the unfairness of life it was my mother. A widow, two years earlier at thirty-six. The insurance company had gone bankrupt three weeks before the accident that killed my dad. No parents on either side. She’d been left to scramble all alone with three teenage boys.

  Believe me, Mom knew about unfair.

  I took a quick breath to try and calm down. I knew things were tight. Was she renting out my room?

  “Who, Why? Couldn’t it wait?” I demanded. “I’m out of here in ten months. Heck, if you want, I can take off now.” The anger building inside of me threatened to erupt. How dare she give away my room. I had no idea where I would go or what I would do. But believe me, I was within a hair’s breadth of marching out and never coming back.

  If I had to, I could grab my guitar and set up on a street corner in Seattle.

  Mom had her own anger issues boiling just beneath the surface. Throwing the dish towel onto the counter, she stepped closer and stared up into my eyes.

  “Jacob, Robert, Benson. If you think you are dropping out of high school, you are a bigger idiot than I thought. Your father would haunt me to my grave. I would have to disown you. No son of mine is dropping out. Do you get me?”

  I’d pushed a button I realized but no way was I backing down. This was my room we were talking about. The one place on this planet that was almost bearable.

  “No,” Mom continued as she poked me in the chest. “You will move into your brothers’ room. The pieces for the bunk beds are in the garage. You can have the regular…”

  “Three boys, one room,” I said, interrupting her before she could finish.

  A big mistake. Mom hated being interrupted. Especially when she was on a rant. But instead of slapping me in the shoulder like she normally did, she stepped back and stared at me with those eyes that made a guy feel guilty without even knowing why.

  “Please Jake,” she said. “Do this for me.”

  I stared at her for a long moment then sighed. This was my mother. The woman who had sacrificed everything for us boys. But that didn’t mean I had to enjoy it.

  “Who are you giving my room to?” I asked with a bit of a snarl. It had better be a darn good reason.

  Mom hesitated, then said, “Karla Forest,” as if I was supposed to know who that was.

  “Huh?”

  She frowned back at me. “You met her. My friend Jeanie’s daughter.”

  I scrambled to pull up an ancient memory, small, quiet girl with pigtails and too many freckles.

>   “Mom, I was five years old. This is that lady you visit every summer. When Dad would take us camping. Your college roommate?”

  Mom nodded.

  “Why is her daughter staying here?”

  “Because her mother has been selected to be an Ambassador. She’s worked for twenty years in the State Department. She and Karla have been stationed all over the world. And they finally selected her to be an Ambassador. How cool is that?”

  Her eyes lit up with the idea of her friend being an Ambassador.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “But what does that have to do with me losing my room? Why doesn’t her daughter go with her?”

  My mom took a deep breath as if she was fighting to maintain control. She hated it when I pushed back. Life would be so much easier if I just did what she said. Of course, that hardly ever happened.

  “Because she’s been posted to Mali,” Mom said as if that meant anything to me. She saw my confusion and rolled her eyes. “Parker would know,” she added.

  “Parker knows everything,” I said with an exasperated sigh. “Just tell me.”

  “It is too dangerous, the diplomats can’t take their families,” she said as if everyone in the country knew that.

  “But why here? Why us?” I asked as I fought to understand. This was my room we were talking about. “I thought diplomats sent their kids to fancy swiss boarding schools or something.”

  She sighed heavily. One of those sighs that said she was disappointed in me. “Because I owe Jeanie. More than you will ever know.”

  Shaking my head I silently demanded more.

  “For one,” Mom continued in that frustrated voice of hers, “she introduced me to your father. If it wasn’t for her, you wouldn’t even be here.”

  Now it was my turn to sigh. “That’s great. But I don’t know if that means I have to sacrifice my room. It seems pretty steep to me.”

  Mom paused for a second as she looked up into my eyes. Holding me with that mother stare of hers. “We are doing this because Jeanie and Karla are the closest things to family I have besides you boys. I owe her so much. When your father died. It was Jeanie that kept me from going off the deep end.”

  My stomach turned over with guilt. When Dad died. I’d sort of become a jerk and made Mom’s life pretty miserable. It sounded like this friend of hers had been there for her when I wasn’t.

  I swallowed hard. Some fights you can’t win. All I could do was give her my best glare then march to my room and slam the door.

  Hey, it wasn’t going to be my room anymore so why should I care if I tore the door of the hinges?

  Chapter Two

  Karla

  My stomach turned over as the plane banked on its approach to SEA-TAC. For the thousandth time, I second-guessed my agreement to this plan. There had been options. I could have stayed with my Dad on his sailboat. But he and Susan had a new baby and space was obviously an issue. I knew Dad wanted to sail off to Tahiti or someplace. But, they’d be locked to the beach for my senior year.

  So that was out.

  Sighing to myself I pushed away the deep regret on that front. No. It wouldn’t have worked.

  Of course, there was the school in Switzerland. But, I’d been shifted from Embassy schools to boarding schools over and over. And I’d just spent the last three years in an all-girls private school in D.C. while Mom worked at the State Department headquarters.

  Have you ever gone to an all-girls school? Let us just say that it can be rather intense. Jealous girls who didn’t care who they had to climb over to get to the top. All of them with too much time on their hands. Deep down I knew I needed something more. Something real.

  And then, of course, there was Aunt Kim. My mom’s best friend. When she had offered, I just knew that it was the right move.

  A normal school. In a normal part of America. I would get a taste of reality.

  Just another adventure, I reminded myself. Mom and I had been stationed all over the world. From Cairo to the Ukraine. I was pretty sure I could handle a small town in the Pacific Northwest. What Aunt Kim didn’t know was that over the years I had always been jealous of her family. Every year when she visited I would hang on her every word.

  Her life seemed so perfect. Two loving parents, siblings. None of this only child stuff. They lived in the same house, year after year. Putting down roots.

  Of course, that happy life had been shattered when Aunt Kim’s husband died two years ago. But it had been those roots that helped get them through it, I was positive.

  Anyway, it was only for a year. I’d handle it. Mom deserved this chance. She’d worked her entire life to get there. Of course, it would have been nice if they offered her an Ambassadorship to some place like Tokyo, or Paris. But no, it had to be Mali, one of the most dangerous places on earth.

  As the plane touched down I noticed a chip in my nail polish and grumbled under my breath. It probably happened when I wrestled my carry on bag up into the overhead. Great, now I was going to have to spend my first evening there stripping and redoing them all.

  Taking a deep breath, I tried to calm down. Careful Karla, I told myself. It was just a chipped nail. Not the end of the world.

  Aunt Kim was waiting for me at the luggage carrousel as we had agreed. Her huge smile and welcoming hug went a long way to easing my concerns. She wanted me there. I could tell.

  “Here, let me help you,” she said as I tried to pull the first of my bags off before it could whiz by.

  “Jesus,” she added as she pulled at the huge bag. “I knew I should have brought one of the boys.”

  I laughed. It had taken two weeks to pare everything down to just two bags plus my carry on. If the airlines would have allowed it I could have packed another two bags just for shoes.

  Between the two of us, we got my bags to her car and we were off.

  As she merged into traffic, she let out a long breath and smiled over at me.

  “I can’t believe you are really here. You need to call your mom and let her know you arrived safely. She’s probably pacing by the phone waiting.”

  I laughed. “I called her from the plane after we landed. She sends her love.”

  Aunt Kim smiled as a comfortable silence fell between us. That was the thing about the two of us. Neither felt the need to keep the other entertained. She had always been the one person I could talk to if I needed to. But also the person I didn’t have to talk to if I didn’t want to. We were comfortable that way.

  The one person besides my mom who had known me my whole life. That put Aunt Kim in a special category, as far as I was concerned.

  As we drove to her home, I studied my surroundings as we circled around Seattle and into the hills and forests on the outskirts. Everything was greener than I was used to. And the air had a crispness to it that surprised me. A pine smell with a hint of woodsmoke.

  Everything was very pretty I thought, then gasped as we took a bend to find Mount Rainier directly before us.

  “It is beautiful.”

  Aunt Kim smiled. “We have a habit of taking it for granted.”

  My heart filled for just a moment. Seeing the snow-capped mountain laid out before us like that almost made the entire trip worth it.

  We drove in silence for almost an hour and a half until we pulled off the highway into a small town.

  “Welcome to Everton Washington,” Aunt Kim said.

  I couldn’t help but smile. Typical small-town America. The main street lined with small shops and wide sidewalks. Modern enough to have a mall, but quaint enough to have its own flair.

  “Here we are,” Aunt Kim said as she pulled into a driveway to a small ranch style house located on a cul-de-sac. The house was smaller than I had anticipated. Nestled in with a dozen other houses.

  “Let’s leave the bags. I’ll send the boys to get them. Come on. I want you to meet them.”

  My stomach turned over. This had been the one thing I had worried about. I was invading their space. No way they could be happy about i
t.

  The inside of the house was cute with comfortable looking furniture. A livingroom on the right. A dining room that connected to a kitchen. A picture of a very handsome man hung above the fireplace. Her deceased husband, I realized.

  “There they are,” Aunt Kim said, pointing through the sliding glass door to three guys throwing a football around in the back yard. Suddenly, one of them threw his shoulder into the middle of another and both of them tumbled to the ground in a tangle of feet and hands.

  I held my breath until they both bounced up smiling and laughing. The third took that opportunity to grab the ball and sprint across the yard. Both of the others immediately jumped after him and once again they all tumbled into a pile fighting for the ball.

  As they wrestled one of them threw a punch to the other’s stomach and I swear I saw one of them try to knee his brother between the legs.

  The violence was shocking.

  Aunt Kim saw my obvious concern and smiled. “It was even worse when they were younger. I swear, we had a running account at the emergency room.”

  I gawked, unable to believe that this was normal.

  “Boys,” their mother yelled out the kitchen window.

  The three ruffians froze for a moment then started fighting again.

  “NOW,” she yelled again.

  This time they forced themselves to stop from killing each other and slowly got up.

  “That’s Buck,” Aunt Kim said as she pointed to the youngest of the three. “And then, Parker, the middle one.”

  Both boys looked like handsome versions of the picture of their dad.

  “And that’s Jake, my oldest.”

  The boy in question spit a glob of blood and wiped his bloody lip with the back of his hand as he stared at me with an intense glare that made my insides quiver.

  My heart skipped a beat. Boys shouldn’t look that dangerous. Black hair in need of a cut. Piercing blue eyes, and a rough, rugged face. Wide shoulders and an air of dominance. This was a person who did not back down.

  I swallowed hard but refused to look away. The two of us held each other’s stare for a long moment. I didn’t know why it was important, I just knew that it was.