Shay scratched his head, and his short-cropped blond hair stuck up in messy tufts. He made a face. “To apologize,” he said. “The other night I was out of line. I’m still not happy about it, but what you do—who you do—is your call. I shouldn’t have punched you.”
“Took you a couple of days to work that out?” Boyd asked.
Shay spread his hands in front of him. Both sets of knuckles were scabbed and swollen, and there were blue bruises under the skin.
“Got drunk. Got in a fight….” Shay flexed his fingers and grimaced. “Maybe a couple. Woke up and it was Monday.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t say I was sober Monday,” Shay said. He waved off Boyd’s look of concern as he tucked his roughed-up hands under his thighs. “I don’t have a problem with booze, Boyd. I have problems, and sometimes the booze helps.”
“Tell the courts that if whoever you punch ends up dead or in the hospital,” Boyd said as he grabbed a shirt and pulled it on over his white T-shirt. “I’m sure it’ll make a big difference.”
Shay snorted skeptically. “I’ve never won a fight when I was drunk,” he said. “Hell, for all I remember, I could have laid out a tree. We okay?”
It would probably save Boyd a lot of heartache to say no. Instead he sighed and offered Shay his hand to haul him onto his feet.
“What else we going to be?” he asked with a shrug. “But you knew that. What else, Shay?”
Shay hung on to his hand, fingers rough from years of fights and being stuck in engines. “I need to talk to that guy,” he said. “The one you brought back.”
“Morgan.”
“Not calling himself Sammy?”
“I told you, he says he’s not.”
“And what do you think?”
It was a good question. Boyd wished he had a good answer. Every time he decided one way, his brain threw a “what if” at him to chew over. If it was Sammy? Jesus, Boyd didn’t even know how’d they would all cope with that—what it wouldmean. And if he wasn’t? In that case Boyd had put his apartment up as the bond for a stranger on the basis of pretty eyes… and the rest.
That would be a wholethingto deal with.
“That he didn’t ask for any of this,” Boyd said as he pulled his hand free to finish his buttons. “Besides, I don’t have to make that call. Once the DNA results come back from being retested, it’ll turn out to be a mistake.”
Shay cleared his throat as he stuck his hands in his pockets. His shoulders hunched up toward his ears, and he was as lanky and gangly as the teen he’d been when all this started.
“Yeah, well, that’s the thing,” Shay said. “They did.”
The air in the locker room was suddenly too thick to inhale. What was already in his lungs felt too dense to force back out. He fumbled the buttons on his shirt with numb fingers and gave up. It felt like a nightmare, that unsteady moment when you realized it was a bad dream and anything really awful could happen.
“And?” Boyd asked. His voice cracked on the word, and he had to bite his tongue as the sudden reversal of “I changed my mind. I don’t want to know” tried to escape him. He closed his eyes and managed to exhale.
Con artist or kidnapped child?
Everything would change, or nothing would. Maybe. The thought of Morgan, the uncomfortable blend of cocky asshole and awkward tenderness, flickered through Boyd’s mind, and he felt an unexpected pang of possessiveness. Whoever Morgan was that night—the kiss, the taste of Morgan on his tongue, the ache of hunger between them—had been Boyd’s.
Nothing elsewouldbe after this, but he could hang on to that.
“Inconclusive,” Shay said.
Boyd had already taken a deep breath, ready to react. It caught in his throat as he stumbled over what to say.
“Huh?” was what he managed to get out.
Shay dragged his hand down his face. “Sammy and me had different dads, remember. Half-brothers. So all the DNA can tell is whether we have some blood relation or not.”
“No blood relation sounds like it would be conclusive,” Boyd said.
