been working still, not in her condition. The petite brunette was very pregnant, her belly protruding through the sides of the white lab coat.
What had Caroline looked like when she was pregnant? She was taller than Rachel with more generous curves. Had she hidden her pregnancy for a while? Being a single mom might have caused her problems at the elementary school where she worked.
He hadn’t asked about that. He’d been too stunned and angry to do more than yell at her. And he hadn’t talked to his son at all. Knowing how close he’d been to losing his temper, he had let her call her friend to pick up the boy. Instead of talking to him while they waited, Thad had just stared at the kid and had probably scared him.
Had he scared Caroline, too? After he’d demanded a relationship with his son, she had asked him to leave, saying that she needed time to think. That had been a couple of days ago.
All he’d been doing was thinking.
“Hey, little bro!” Devin snapped his fingers in Thad’s face. “You called this meeting. Down here.” The CEO of Kendall Communications glanced around the sterile lab and shuddered. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t care,” Ash murmured as he pressed a kiss against the nape of Rachel’s neck, which her high ponytail left exposed. “He gave me an excuse to see my gorgeous wife.”
“Get a room,” Thad grumbled.
“You’re just jealous,” Ash teased. But he was also right.
Thad was jealous that he’d missed out on seeing Caroline like Rachel was now, glowing and beautiful in her pregnancy … with his son.
The door to the lab opened again. “I’m here,” a deep voice murmured as former navy SEAL Grayson Scott joined them. “And if my fiancée asks, I was out bonding with my brothers-in-law-to-be.”
“How are we bonding?” Devin asked with a grin. His eyes gleamed with curiosity and mischief. “Drinking? Working out?”
Color flushed Gray’s face, and he grumbled his reply. “We’re Christmas shopping.”
Rachel laughed. “Now you’re going to have to actually go shopping, so that you weren’t really lying to Natalie.”
The thought of Christmas shopping, of the music and the crowds and all the goddamn cheer, had Thad’s stomach churning.
“It’s better that she doesn’t know why we’re all together,” Thad pointed out. “There is no point in upsetting Natalie until we know the truth.”
Rachel nodded and was suddenly all business. “The FBI lab results came back.” She stared at Thad, her hazel eyes narrowed with suspicion. “I don’t know how you got the results rushed, but the DNA report is back already. It confirms my findings.”
Thad hadn’t needed a DNA test to prove that he was Mark’s father. The little boy was him twenty-eight years ago.
“So was I right?”
Rachel studied him again. “I don’t know how you knew.…”
He shrugged. “I didn’t know for sure. But the eyes …” He shuddered even now, thinking of how looking into the dead man’s eyes had been like looking into his sister’s. Only the color had been different. “So Natalie is only our half sister?”
“According to the DNA tests you all took in comparison to Natalie’s samples that you had taken while she was in the hospital, and the dead man’s samples I took from the morgue—” Rachel’s ponytail bobbed as she nodded “—her stalker was her half brother.”
“So she had a different father from all of you?” Gray asked, looking somewhat ill.
“That’s the most likely scenario,” Devin said with a weary sigh of resignation, as if this was merely confirmation of something he had already suspected.
He’d been older than the rest of them, sixteen, when their parents had been murdered. He remembered them best. Or perhaps, worst.
“We need to tell her,” Gray said. After dragging in a deep breath, he added, “I need to tell her.”
“No,” Thad said with a head shake that only intensified the throbbing pain. “I’ll tell her.”
Gray’s jaw clenched. “Any particular reason you want to be the one to tell her?”
Over the years, Thad, Devin and Ash had given Natalie’s boyfriends a tough time because none of them had ever been good enough for her. Until now. Grayson Scott was a good man, but that hadn’t stopped them all from being a little rough on him in the beginning. He’d had to prove to them, as well as Natalie, how much he loved her. Taking a bullet to save her life had pretty much sealed the deal for all of them.
“I’m the one who killed him,” Thad offered in explanation. “I’m the reason she’ll never get to know this guy.”
“He didn’t want to get to know her,” Gray reminded him. “He wanted to kill her.”
“Why?” Devin asked. “Knowing now that they’re related, it makes even less sense that he was stalking her.”
“Did you find out anything else from his DNA?” Ash asked his wife. “Like who the hell he is?”
She shook her head. “We already ran his prints. While they matched the ones from the break-in at my apartment, he wasn’t in the system.”
“So he is the guy who tried to get the DNA results from our parents’ crime scene?” Devin asked. “He’s the one who tried to destroy the evidence that cleared Rick Campbell?”
The petty thief had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had done twenty years’ time for someone else’s crime. He never got the chance to enjoy freedom again. He’d been killed to cover up the corruption that had rushed his conviction in order to clear a high-profile case and advance a career.
Ash gave a grim nod in response to his older brother’s question. Rachel had been hurt during the break-in; it was how he had learned she was pregnant since they’d broken up months earlier.
“We need to find out this guy’s identity,” Gray said. “I’m not even sure Wade is his real first name. It’s just what he told the girl at the coffee shop Natalie goes to.”
“Did you get any leads from the photograph that was released to the media?” Devin asked Ash.
Ash shook his head. “The new chief wouldn’t let us release the morgue photo, and that surveillance photo from the ATM camera outside the coffee shop is too grainy for anyone to make a positive identification.”
Devin turned to Thad. “Why don’t you leak a better photo?”
“The chief will know where the photo came from,” Rachel warned them.
“We don’t need to know who this guy was,” Thad said, which elicited gasps from his family.
Gray’s neck snapped back in indignation. “What the hell—he tried to kill Natalie—”
“He’s
