Release!: A Walker Brothers Novel (The Walker Brothers Book 1) Read online

  I took a deep breath. “I told you that I’m an ex-con. You were disgusted that you’d slept with me. Admit it.” I didn’t want to hear him say the words, but I needed to hear them. My moments of pleasure were over and it was time to face reality.

  “I wasn’t disgusted with you. I was mad at myself, Eva. I should have known, should have recognized that you were inexperienced. I didn’t. I wanted you, and I couldn’t think past that. Yes, you surprised me. I was angry, but not at you.” He paused for a minute before continuing, “Who set you up? It was your mother, wasn’t it?”

  I gaped at him. “You think I was innocent?”

  He lifted an arrogant brow. “Weren’t you?”

  “Yes.” My chest ached as I realized that he assumed I wasn’t guilty of committing the crime that had put me away for most of my adult life.

  He shrugged. “I believe you.”

  Just like that? That easily? He believed I was innocent? “Why?”

  He slowly released his grip on my wrists, as though he was reassured I wasn’t going anywhere. “Because you’ve given me no reason to doubt it. You’ve worked most of your life, and you came to me begging for a job so you could make a living. You were honest when you didn’t have to be. I don’t think you’re capable of whatever crime you supposedly committed.”

  He helped me sit up, but he kept a supporting hand behind my back.

  “You barely know me,” I argued, stunned that he didn’t appear to have any doubts.

  No one had ever believed me, not even a jury of my peers.

  “What happened?”

  Tears sprang to my eyes again, and I clasped my hands together because I was trembling. Trace was the first person to doubt my guilt, and his exoneration touched my soul. “I don’t understand why you believe me.”

  “Believe it. You don’t have to understand why. Just tell me what happened, Eva.”

  His voice was low and soothing now, and I felt my body finally relax.

  One of his large hands reached out and covered my conjoined fingers. “Stop fidgeting. If you did nothing wrong, you have no reason to feel guilty.”

  It wasn’t all guilt that was making me nervous. It was him. Trace made me uneasy, but not in a frightening kind of way. “Nobody has ever believed me. And I don’t like to talk about it.”

  I hated remembering how terrified I was, how I’d been duped by a mother who hadn’t given a shit about me. She had known what had happened to me. I’d called her, and she had denied that she’d had anything to do with the crime, but I could tell she’d deliberately left me to take the blame if the theft had been discovered.

  “Tell me,” Trace said insistently.

  I swallowed hard, knowing I owed him an explanation. “My mother didn’t work much, but she got a temporary position with a Mrs. Mitchell as an assistant and companion right before she met your father. In fact, she met your dad because she worked for the Mitchell family. They were rich. Probably not as rich as your family, but well-to-do.” What I really meant was that the Mitchell family probably had only millions instead of billions, but they were still incredibly rich. “Mrs. Mitchell introduced your father to my mother during a party.”

  I turned my head and saw him nod, but he was silent, waiting for me to go on.

  “My mother stole some very pricey jewelry from her employer right before her temporary job ended, during an event Mrs. Mitchell was having to celebrate her son’s birthday. I came to the festivities to work with my mother - Mrs. Mitchell offered me decent money to come work that night as hired help. I was serving food, and on the cleanup crew. I couldn’t turn down the extra income for one night’s work. It was a decision I eventually regretted.”

  “How did you get blamed?” Trace asked curiously.

  I shrugged. “My mother left the jewelry in our apartment when she realized your father was going to get serious very quickly. She wasn’t going to risk being caught with the goods, so she left them when she went to Texas to be with your father. By the time Mrs. Mitchell raised the alarm and the theft was being investigated, my mother was gone. They found the items in our apartment and I was the only one living there.”

  “That isn’t enough—”

  I interrupted before he could say anything more. “Mrs. Mitchell swore my mother would never steal from her. It didn’t hurt that your father had already proposed to my mother, and she’d left to live her happily ever after in Texas.” I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. “I don’t think Mrs. Mitchell wanted to believe that she’d set your dad up with a thief, and she didn’t want something like that to go public. There was also video evidence.”

  “You were caught on video?”

  I shook my head. “Not me. It had to be my mother. We both started out wearing the same uniform that afternoon, but she changed shortly after arriving at the mansion because your father was attending the party. She didn’t want to be seen as one of the workers. I don’t think the Mitchell family ever saw her in the uniform. They weren’t around while we were setting up.”

  “Did she do it on purpose?” Trace’s voice was getting irritated.

  “Probably.”

  “So she planned to pin it on you?”

  “I really don’t think she planned on getting caught. She didn’t try to sell the items right away. They were hidden in her room at the apartment. She’d stolen before, and had never gotten caught. Little stuff. Shoplifting and petty theft. She went big this time, but I think she was too afraid to take the jewelry with her when she went to Texas to be with your dad.”

  “How in the hell did they mistake her for you in the video?”

  “No one remembered seeing her in uniform, and the quality of the video was bad. They could only tell the approximate weight, height and hair color of the person taking the jewelry. That description fit…me. It also fit my mother. Which one do you think they suspected when I had the goods and my estranged mother was marrying a very rich man?”

  “Did you confront your mother?”

  I nodded. “Only on the phone. She swore she knew nothing about it, and she told me that I needed to pay for my crimes right before she told me that she never wanted to talk to me again and hung up.”

  My supposed crimes weren’t stealing jewelry; I was guilty of just one crime: being born.

  “Bitch!” Trace exploded.

  I couldn’t argue with him. My mother was pure evil. It wasn’t something I didn’t already know. “The jury unanimously convicted me. I was caught with the goods, I was poor, I was there and wearing the uniform, and I fit the video description of the perp. I was sentenced to four years. I was out in three for good behavior, but I spent time on parole.”

  “Jesus, Eva. How the hell does a mistake like that happen?” His voice was perplexed, but mostly he sounded angry.

  “I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.” I’d pretty much come to grips with what had happened in the past. I couldn’t change my past or my fate. I could only hope I had a future.

  “How did you survive?”

  I knew what he meant. He wanted to know how I’d endured being in prison. “It was difficult at first. But I started working in the kitchen at the facility. I kept quiet and stayed out of trouble. I didn’t really talk to anyone. I read a lot whenever I could get my hands on books. Time passed.” I didn’t want to admit that every moment I was in prison seemed like forever, and that staying to myself caused tension with the other women. When I finally left incarceration, I swore I’d never go back. I’d die first.

  “And when you got out?” he prompted.

  “I got any job I could find. I lied on my job applications, or I stretched the truth. I lost plenty of positions because they found out I was a felon one way or another. When I could, I worked under the table. I did whatever I could to survive.”

  He gripped my shoulders and turned me toward him. “Why didn’t you contact us, Eva? Christ! We would have helped you.”

  I met his eyes and asked bluntly, “Would you? Would you real
ly? You didn’t even know you had a stepsister, and the last thing that would have occurred to me is that you’d actually believe me. Nobody else ever has. My mother and your father were dead by the time my trial started. Why would you want to help me? I’m nobody to any of you, and you were dealing with grief and losing your dad. Do you know how hard it was just to get into your office, just to have the chance to talk to you? If you hadn’t mistaken me for someone else, I wouldn’t have been able to get a conversation with you at all.”

  He stood and shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “There had to be a way to take care of this, keep you out of prison for a crime you didn’t commit.”

  I smiled as I saw his frustration, his concern over the fact that justice hadn’t been done in my case. “You want to think the justice system is infallible. I wanted to think that, too.” Unfortunately, I’d learned just how unpredictable it could really be. “My illusions were shattered the minute the verdict was read.”

  “You were only seventeen, right?”

  “I was when the jewelry was stolen, but they found the stolen items in the apartment on the day after my eighteenth birthday. My mother died with your father not long after I was arrested, so I was on my own. I was tried as an adult.”

  “Fuck!” Trace ran a frustrated hand through his hair, making him look even more gorgeous in a mussed up kind of way. I knew he was trying to make sense out of a situation that was completely unfair.

  I knew that look, but he couldn’t change what had happened, even if he was a Walker.

  “It’s Thanksgiving. Let me get dressed and I’ll cook us an incredible meal. We can forget about what happened for a little while,” I suggested, standing up to go take a shower.

  Although I was touched that Trace had faith in me, I still didn’t have any faith in myself. I didn’t want to talk about my past.

  Trace grabbed my upper arm as I past and swung me around. “I’ll never forget, Eva. I swear I’ll make this right.”

  Looking at his enraged expression, I almost believed him. But after so many years and so many failures, I knew I couldn’t outrun my past. “It doesn’t matter.”

  He let go of my arm reluctantly. “The hell it doesn’t,” he grumbled.

  I smiled at him as I shrugged out of his grasp. He couldn’t change my past, but I wish I could make him understand how much his belief that I was innocent really meant. Since it was impossible to explain, I simply kept smiling at him weakly and headed for the shower.

  Chapter Eight

  Eva

  “That was incredible, Eva. It’s the best meal I’ve ever eaten,” Trace said earnestly as he sipped a cup of cappuccino in the living room.

  I rubbed my belly, wishing I could have eaten more. The Thanksgiving feast had turned out well, and it was the best meal I’d ever eaten. I didn’t think it was so much my cooking skills, but Trace’s fabulous kitchen. It had every convenience and the fanciest equipment I’d ever used. I was guessing it would be hard to screw up a meal in his kitchen.

  “Thanks for letting me cook. Your kitchen is amazing.”

  He raised a brow as he lifted his mug to his mouth. “You say that like I was doing you a favor instead of vice-versa.”

  He actually had done me a favor. I loved to cook, and his facilities were a cook’s dream. “I liked doing it.”

  I’d been more than a little surprised when he’d pitched in with the cleanup and cleared the table while I loaded the dishwasher. The task had seemed way too domestic for him, but it made me like him even more because he didn’t seem to mind helping out, even if it was a job that he usually didn’t do.

  “I think you should scrap the job at one of the resorts and go to culinary school. It’s obviously your passion. You should pursue it as a career,” Trace mused, his expression watchful.

  “I can’t. I need this job, Trace.” Cooking was my passion, but I was a realist. I needed to work to survive.

  “I can help you get what you should have had, Eva. I want to.”

  I shook my head. “No. You’ve helped me enough.”

  “Nothing I do will ever be enough to undo the past.”

  “It’s not your responsibility to try to make it better,” I told him calmly.

  “I’m your stepbrother,” he argued.

  A chuckle escaped my lips. If he was playing the “you’re my family” card, I knew he was desperate. He usually chose not to acknowledge that he was related to me by marriage.

  Probably because he’d just screwed me the night before.

  “What? I am your family,” he said stubbornly.

  “We have no connection, Trace, and you know it. You don’t owe me anything, and even if you did, you’ve done me a huge favor by giving me work.”

  The fact that my mother married his father meant absolutely nothing. He hadn’t even known my mother, so it wasn’t like he could claim a connection through her.

  “I’m not offering because of our connection. I want to do it because you have a real talent, Eva. You should be able to do what you want to do.”

  “Did you?” I asked hesitantly. Trace had been young when his father had died, way too young to take on the responsibilities of the world the way he did now.

  He shrugged. “Mostly. I always knew I’d take Dad’s place someday. Sebastian wasn’t interested in business, and Dane’s an amazing artist. I don’t think either one of them had any desire to be Dad’s successor.”

  “You never wanted something different?”

  “I wanted things to work out differently. I wanted Dad with me a hell of a lot longer than he stayed alive. And I wanted Dane to never have experienced the pain he did. I wanted some time to get my MBA and work a little more on perfecting my mixed martial arts skills. I competed in college a little, but I wanted…more.”

  “You do MMA?” Okay, I was surprised, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. The guy moved lightning fast, and it was evident that he worked out.

  “Only as a hobby.”

  “Did you finish your master’s degree?”

  “Of course. It took me a while because I was filling Dad’s role in the company, but I finished.”

  Of course you did!

  Was there anything Trace Walker couldn’t do?

  Obviously, the one thing he couldn’t accomplish was managing his brothers’ lives.

  “So your brothers aren’t part of the company now?” I was curious.

  “No. It’s just me. I bought them out because they didn’t want the same things. Both of them are incredibly wealthy men, but they aren’t in the Walker conglomerate anymore. It’s not what they wanted.”

  “What do they want?” What do you want?

  “I think they’re pretty much doing what they want,” Trace said sarcastically. “Sebastian does as little as possible when it involves work, and Dane lives outside of society on a private island. His work is in demand, but he doesn’t make personal appearances.”

  “Are his injuries that bad?” I wondered what had made Dane separate himself completely.

  “I don’t know. He’s my brother. I’ve never looked at him as anything except my family. I guess I don’t notice any of his scars anymore.”

  “You’re worried,” I observed.

  “Yes.” Trace sounded reluctant to admit his concern.

  “You’re not responsible for their current situations, any more than you’re guilty of the plane crashing.” Trace was shouldering the burden of his siblings’ wellbeing, and he needed to let go. His brothers were adults, and needed to find their own ways.

  “I’m their older brother,” he argued gruffly.

  “Exactly. You’re not their father.” He needed to understand that even though he had taken on his father’s role in the company, his brothers were never going to see him as anything other than their oldest sibling. In fact, they might end up resenting him for trying to fix them.

  I could easily see all of these issues because I was an outsider. I know that, for Trace, letting go was a struggle. He t
ried to act like he didn’t care, but he cared very much. Maybe too much. Easy for me to say, I guess, considering I had nobody. But my heart ached for the suffering this family had been through. And judging by what little Trace had shared, the family was still broken.

  We were silent for a few minutes, Trace looking like he was lost in thought. I finished my coffee and sat the mug carefully on the end table next to my chair. He finished his moments later, and placed his used cup on the coffee table in front of him.

  “Britney is definitely my fault,” he confessed with a stoic expression. “She went after Dane specifically because I dumped her.”

  “She’s a poisonous snake,” I grumbled. “And it’s not your fault she sought Dane out. That’s all on her.”

  It made my stomach roll to think that a woman could prey on a man who was as vulnerable as Dane.

  “You make it sound like nothing is my fault.” There was humor in Trace’s voice.

  “I’m sure you’re guilty of many things, but not your brothers’ problems. Both of them are wealthy, grown men who can choose what they want to do.”

  “What am I guilty of then?” His tone was teasing.

  You’re guilty of breaking my heart over a family that I’ve never even met. You’re guilty of making me care whether you’re all put together again, even though I’ve always hated the Walker name in the past. You’re guilty of doing things to me, making me feel emotions I’ve never had before. And it’s starting to mess with my head.

  I took a deep breath. “I think you’re incredibly bossy, and you hate it when things don’t go exactly the way you want. I think your control is so important to you because if you ever lost it, it would make you less like your father. In your eyes, that would be almost unforgivable. I think you care about your brothers’ wellbeing more than you want to admit. And I think you’re a wonderfully generous man, but that’s a side of you that you don’t let anyone see.”

  “I think you’re crazy.” Trace was frowning now.

  I raised a brow, mimicking his expression when he was annoyed. “You think so?”