Free Just Surrender... by Kathleen O'Reilly Page A

Tyler hadn’t figured it out earlier.
    “That’s why you want to fly up here,” Tyler persisted, keeping on the offensive because Austen would stay silent for only so long. Brooke had called Tyler as well, but he didn’t tell Austen these things because it was easier to pretend that Brooke didn’t exist.
    “I don’t want to fly up there,” Austen argued.
    “You just said you did.”
    “I lied.”
    “So stay home,” Tyler suggested.
    “Tricky, very tricky. Trying to corner me into admitting the truth.”
    “You couldn’t admit the truth if seventy cheerleaders attacked you in Jell-O.”
    “Tyler! Listen to you. Making the sex jokes as if they don’t make you twitchy and uncomfortable. It’s the hotel, isn’t it? I should come see it. Check it out for myself.”
    Tyler wasn’t fooled. There were very few things that Austen dodged. Truth, lasting commitment and the harsh reality of their mother. Tyler, being a rational medical professional, had long understood that their mother had a reason for walking out the door. She had a reason for abandoning them to the paternal pile of bitterness that was their father.
    Only eight-year-old Tyler had been there to see her leave. Only eight-year-old Tyler had been there to cry and plead and try to change her mind.
    In the end, he hadn’t been persuasive enough, caring enough, or cute enough, and life went on. That was water under the bridge and their mother wasn’t worth the time, thought, or pain.
    “Why don’t you just admit your weakness? You want to see her.” Tyler said the words easily, because he didn’t care about his sister. She was a stranger and wouldn’t be a part of their lives because the Hart family had only two members; Tyler and Austen. “You want to see her because you want to know what she’s like, or if it’s all a big con.”
    Austen blew a raspberry into the phone. “Sure it’s a con. Dad would have said if Sheila was pregnant when she left us. He would have called her a no-account whore, and then bitterly explained how if she’d been pregnant, the little brat wasn’t his.”
    “Maybe he didn’t know,” Tyler suggested, as if the thought had only just occurred to him.
    “Nah. Frank knew every bad thing about her. He was very talented that way, almost eerily so. No way that he could have kept it secret. It’s a con meant to separate me from my millions.”
    “You don’t have millions,” Tyler reminded him, merely to get his brother back on Planet Earth.
    “I don’t have millions yet, but my future income potential is limitless. After I convince the East Texas legislators that drilling for natural gas in somewhat porous shale is not only financially viable, but a boon to the state economy, then, as God is my witness, the red Ferrari will be mine.”
    Tyler leaned back against the leopard-striped pillows, making himself comfortable now that he was once again firmly in control of his life. Which was exactly where he needed to be.
    “Stay home. We’re not going.”
    “You’re dying to go, aren’t you?” Austen shot back, the irrepressible irreverence clear in his voice. “I think you’re missing the opportunity of a lifetime here, Tyler. She’s there. You’re there. It’d be easy for me to hop on a plane and join you, we’ll take a car to Cold Springs. It’s perfect.”
    “No. Forget it. I need to get to the hospital,” Tyler stated firmly, because there were things that were best left unknown.
    Austen argued for a little bit longer, but eventually gave up, and after Tyler put down his phone, he noted the tranquility of the hotel room. The palatial bed complete with Arabian knights canopy, the glass stripper pole, the supersize hot tub, and in the midst of such blatant, cheap sexuality, he felt a sense of foreboding because Tyler was already aching to see Edie Higgins again. Feel her legs locked around him, feel her tongue in his mouth, around his cock.
    Quickly, he showered and dressed in a neatly pressed suit,