Page 8 of Lucky Boys
I started a video chat, and the top of Diego’s head popped up on my screen. “Ready for me?” he asked without greeting me.
“Yeah. I got Luca, Skye, and Maverick here.”
Diego’s eye twitched before he pulled himself together. D didn’t do strangers very well, even through a video chat. He sort of knew Luca, but he’d always been pretty antisocial, so even when we’d been younger, he’d hidden himself away whenever Mom and Pops had had people over.
“Okay, do they have a monitor clear? It’ll be easier if I can see all of you and you don’t have to hold up your phone.”
“Yeah, hang on,” Skye replied distractedly. He pressed a couple buttons and nodded to me to transfer him to the screen. I did, and Diego’s face was now covering a whole monitor.
I started to zone out as D walked them through the technical process. I just couldn’t follow it no matter how hard I tried. I focused on staring at Maverick’s thick thighs and sexy ass in hisworkout clothes as he bent over the computer, following Diego’s instructions.
Wow, he really could kill a guy with those thighs. What a way to go . . .
I was so lost in my fantasy, I didn’t realize they were in until I heard Luca curse quietly under his breath. I steeled myself for the worst, whatever the fuck that could be, and finally looked at the screens.
At first, I had no idea what I was looking at. There seemed to be a lot of contracts and legal documents, a birth certificate for someone—a lot of boring shit that would not be worth dying over, in my opinion.
But the clicking continued, or soon Diego did as he took over their system, and I realized that it wasn’t all as innocuous as it seemed. First, there were two birth certificates under the same name, a Matthew Covington. One listed Lewis and Michelle Covington as the parents, and the other listed a Leah Covington as the mother and no one as the father.
“Matthew Covington, that sounds familiar,” I shared out loud.
“Yeah, he’s Lewis’s son,” Diego replied distractedly, typing away, “Sixteen and at an all-boys boarding school in Connecticut. He has a fourteen-year-old sister, Lydia, and she’s at the sister school about ten miles away from him.”
“That’s right . . .”
“Then who’s Leah?” Luca asked. “And why would Fieldburg pay Brooks to steal this information?”
“Hold please,” Diego told him. “I’m looking. Apparently, I didn’t dig as far as I should have.”
Diego began mumbling to himself, so I took the time to look at some of the other documents. Luca had a nice setup going on here, with huge touch screen monitors so we could all access information without getting in each other’s way.
“This is an NDA,” Skye interrupted. “Signed nearly seventeen years ago between Fieldburg and Covington.”
“What’s it about?” Luca asked.
No one had a chance to answer before Diego started to curse to himself.
“Fuck, how did I not fucking see this?” More muttering and cursing and general berating himself ensued, causing me to flinch. I hated when Diego got like this.
“Diego.” Maverick’s deep and confident voice broke right through his self-flagellation. I shivered, standing a little straighter. Holy fuck, it wasn’t fair how sexy these men’s voices were. How was anyone supposed to think straight?
Of course, Diego being Diego, he didn’t react the same way I would and snapped at Maverick, “What?”
Maverick clicked his tongue. “What’s going on? And tell us without putting yourself down please.”
I swear to fuck, Diego stuck his tongue out at him. And people called me a brat? I wouldn’t dare, not with the way Mav was staring down the monitor now. At least not to his face.
Finally, Diego gave in. “Matthew Covington is not Lewis’s son. Or Michelle’s either. Also, Lewis does have two kids, but Matthew isn’t one of them. He has a daughter, Leah, from a previous relationship. Nearly seventeen years ago, she was quietly erased from the Covington family history, and no one has heard from her since.”
Luca whistled under his breath. “And she’s Matthew’s biological mother?”
Diego nodded. “Yeah, and get this. Marshall’s son—Bradley Fieldburg of fucking course—is the father.” He scowled in disgust. “He was 32 at the time of conception.”
“Fuck,” I muttered, trying to process all this information. “So that’s the point of the NDA and the faked birth certificate. Theymade some kind of agreement to pretend he was Lewis and Michelle’s kid so there wouldn’t be a scandal?”
Diego wasn’t looking at us anymore, but he still answered. “Yeah. I’m not sure what the arrangement was yet, I’m working on that. It looks like Leah spent a year institutionalized after giving birth and has been living in Germany with some distant relatives ever since she got out.”
My gut churned. That was fucking awful. The girl had been raped, had gotten pregnant as a teenager, and had then been thrown away. Had she even seen her son? It made me remember my birth parents, whom I rarely thought about. I’d always assumed they’d abandoned me, but what if it had been something more sinister? What if they hadn’t had a choice?
