Breaking the Habit - The Devereaux Case Files, Book 7

Chapter 2

It was an even longer day for Reed than he had expected. The little sniveling shit of a junior manager, Wayland, had gone running to tell on him to Carter the minute he heard that Reed was going around the museum fixing his mistakes. The pair had a screaming row while Wayland stood quietly, with that smile of victory on his face that Reed was dying to smack off. But he didn't dare tell Ayah about it. She hated her father for a lot of things, most of all for being a hypocrite where her safety was concerned, and all the stupid things he had done over the years. If he told her that he was interfering in the running of his museum, owned and run by Reed and Reyes equally, she would blow a gasket. He had worked his butt off his whole life to be able to have his own museum, and Ayah had wanted it too, so he wasn't going to let Carter mess it up.

Ayah refused to even allow him back into the building of Carter's old museum to collect his belongings. She hadn't taken long to get the whole story of what Kelly had done to him, and to Reyes, out of them both. After that, she forbade him from going anywhere near the building where it had all taken place. She had actually convinced him that he needed to contact some old agency friends who owed him a favor, to have some intense security measures built into the museum. He now had facial recognition software connected to all security cameras, that sent an alert to his mobile if Kelly stepped one foot into view of any of the cameras.

He had also, without telling Faith, rigged it to alert him to Reggie's presence too, just in case he came snooping around his kids again. So to avoid an argument and because he knew he wasn't in the best of moods, he disappeared upstairs to change and overheard the twins arguing with each other. "But I don't even like her. She's a girl!" Caleb shrieked in disgust as if that should settle the matter. Reed didn't need to be an ex secret agent to realize that they were discussing his concern from just that morning over Caleb's flirting with Evaine. He actually wanted to step forward and warn Caleb that one day he would like a girl and it would probably be just because she was a girl. But he didn't dare.

"Of course she's a girl, silly. That doesn't mean you can't like her." Mason laughed at his twin from across the room. Reed risked glancing through the open door and wasn't surprised to see that Mason was sitting at his foldaway table, doing his homework, while Caleb sat back against the wall, shuffling a pack of cards. For twins they couldn't be more different. Yet they barely had any resemblance to each other at all, at least not the way most people expected them to.

Where Mason was tall for his age and skinny, Caleb was average height and of stocky build. He looked like the fighter he was, while Mason looked like the bookworm he was. Yet they were each deceptive in their own way. Caleb felt emotions more strongly than Mason did; they seemed so natural and obvious to him that Mason didn't fuss over them at all. Whereas whatever Caleb felt hit him like a tonne of bricks falling from the sky. He was always taken by surprise. Reed wondered how two people, so different and yet so alike, could be the best of friends the way Caleb and Mason were. His own experience of sibling relationships hadn't been good and then he had seen the mess Ayah's family were in. How did their kids miss that chaos?

"But she's...she's...Evaine." Caleb stammered, continuing in his quest for Mason to understand that he didn't even like Evaine as a girl, never mind to flirt with. He barely knew what flirting was. Mason just continued to be of no help whatsoever.

"I know who she is." He laughed. But somehow, to him, that didn't seem to change anything, so he gritted his teeth together and reminded Mason of the most important fact that he seemed to be missing.

"She's practically related to us."

"Well, no...actually she's not." Mason corrected his brother, who just frowned at him and went back to shuffling his cards

"Maybe not by blood, but she's practically our cousin. She's....like Clare and Elyse to me. Why would I fancy her?" He grumbled, trying to find the right way to explain how uninterested in her he was. That at least, Mason could understand.