Page 23 of Love You Truly

“No, I mean, she was. She has an ex-husband.” It’s then I realize the barista has been waiting for me to pick out a pastry while I’ve been standing here gabbing about nothing. “Sorry, I’ll have a chocolate croissant.”

“And an almond one for me,” Jax pipes in, lowering his voice again when he tells me, “I didn’t know that. Was it a recent thing?”

“Not sure. I just know she has an ex. Met him, actually. Guy’s a super douche.” As the words leave my mouth, I realize there will be questions I’m not sure I’m prepared to answer.

“Yeah, that figures. She’s a lot to put up with.”

A defensive surge moves through my chest, and I find myself wanting to tell him he’s wrong about Mallory, even though I don’t know her well enough to say for sure.

“When did you meet him?” Jax asks. The blue of his eyes matches my own, but somehow, I doubt mine leave the piercing impression his do. I heard a woman once describe me as having bedroom eyes, whatever that means. If anything, I doubt she meant they had the discerning focus of the blue staring me down now.

“He was at the Dark Horse earlier this week. So was she. Seemed like there’s some bad blood there, made me curious whether you knew anything about him.”

“Nah, she never mentioned an ex. Not that we spent a whole lot of time talking the one drunken night we were together.”

“How can you hate her as much as you do based on that? I wouldn’t even think you’d remember a drunken night all those years ago.”

He rubs his hand over his face, and I wait for him to tell me to stay the hell out of his business, but he blinks a couple times blankly as if thinking back through time. I make a mental note to buy Ruby a gift because she’s toned my grouchy brother way down, and I like this guy more than the old version.

“It wasn’t the night we were together—not even sure I remember so much about that, if I’m being honest…” He blinks hard and the corner of his mouth hints at a smile. “It was what came afterward. She wanted it to mean something, and I just wasn’t in the headspace for that.”

“Seriously? That’s why you’ve badmouthed her all these years? Because you weren’t in the “headspace” to date her after your hookup, and she had the gall to suggest it?” It can’t be the whole story. Jax is a grump, but he’s not that much of an asshole.

The barista hands us matching white plates with our pastries, and we take them to the table where the rest of our siblings are already sitting. “Look, I don’t know what to say. I wasn’t in a good place after Annabelle left, and Mallory wants what she wants.”

“Which is what?” If there’s something to all the rumors I’ve heard about her latching onto any man she sees because she wants a husband, I need to know.

“It’s all about business with her. It may seem like she’s there for a good time, but there’s always something else at play. Whether it has something to do with Autumn Lake or her parents’ money or something else, she’s working an angle.”

Picking up my chocolate croissant, I let the buttery scent wash over me before taking a bite. “That’s what you thought she was doing after your one-night thing? Working you for something?”

He demolishes half his almond pastry in one bite and talks through the crumbs, shrugging. “I did at the time. Who knows? Maybe it just seemed that way because she kept on hinting to anyone who’d listen that she had some kind of claim on me.” He wipes the crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand and takes a seat next to PJ, who has all but demolished her breakfast. All that remains on her plate are pale flakes of croissant and a dab of ketchup.

“Could it be that your general foul mood until you met Ruby gave you a skewed perspective?” I’m needling him, but I also want to see if he’ll revise his prior take on Mallory. Again, I check myself when I realize that I care about what he thinks of her more than I should.

Jax picks up a white ceramic coffee cup and fills it from an urn on the table. “Yeah, I’d allow that. She did come with me to an event a while back and it was sort of okay. Maybe she’s not so terrible. Why the sudden interest?” He raises an eyebrow.

“No reason. Like I said, I ran into her, so it got me wondering.”

He locks eyes on me, assessing. My brother may be irritable, but he’s not dumb. I just hope my game face is good enough to persuade him there’s nothing there.

I’m saved from further questioning when Archer passes out stapled copies of financial reports, accompanied by a map of our property and the surrounding land.

“Why the map?” Beatrix asks, pushing her long, dark hair off her shoulders. It’s one of the few times she doesn’t have her hair in a clip or a bun or whatever, and she can’t stop fidgeting with it. After re-tucking the loose strands behind her ear, she gives in and twists it into a knot and points accusingly at the page we all have in our hands.

“Look at it and you’ll see,” Arch says calmly like a school teacher who’s willing to wait for us to get the point of his lesson.

We each study the map in front of us. PJ doodles on hers, connecting the squares that denote different types of grapes we grow and drawing circles around some areas that Archer has marked outside of our property.

Beatrix and Jax study the map silently, but I notice Jax’s knee bouncing next to me. He hates it when Archer tries to make him guess what he’s getting at because he hates being wrong.

“I see our property and a bunch of squares of stuff we don’t own,” I contribute, ready for one of my older siblings to jump down my throat and tell me I should stick to human resources issues. But we’re all in the family business together, and it’s as much my future as it is theirs. If Archer’s asking what we see, I’m going to tell him.

It surprises me when he nods. “Exactly. If we want to grow the business, we need to buy land to grow more grapes or buy them from growers in the same appellation. That means taking on new debt when we’re running on a shoestring until the new crops start producing. And now that Dad’s seen fit to buy our half brother a vineyard down the road, our options just became much more limited.”

“Why? We have funds, now that Colin invested in Buttercup Hill.” PJ looks sheepish as soon as she says it. She’s still not used to the fact that her fiancé, an astrophysicist tech billionaire from Silicon Valley, is now a large shareholder in our business. But the truth is he rescued us after our dad took half a billion dollars out of our winery and gave it to the half sibling we never knew about. Without Colin, we’d be up a creek and in debt.

As it is, none of us is certain how to handle the new family member who may have designs on the very same grapes and land we do.

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