Page 7 of It's Never Not Been You

“I lied,” he admitted. “And I will always lie to get away from you while you’re on your period.”

We all started laughing at his honesty, and while most women would feel insulted as hell, a man’s honesty was refreshing in a world full of liars. Now, that wasn’t to say that all men were liars, but not all men were completely honest, either. As for me, I had to learn the hard way just how much honesty mattered to me.

“See?” River said after she stopped laughing. “He needs friends.”

“I mean, you did drag me from the only home that I’d ever known just to follow you here,” he lied, batting his eyelashes like an idiot.

I looked at River and Eris. “You guys are a bad influence on him.”

Eris shot me a look. “We can go down memory lane if you want to start talking about bad influences,” she threatened, making River hoot at that.

“Ooohhh, do tell,” Pierce said in his best old biddy voice.

“Your food is getting cold,” I chided. “Eat.”

Eris grinned. “It’s a salad, Mad.”

“Well, you don’t want it to spoil,” I grumbled.

“Oh, we’re definitely having a party now,” Pierce insisted. “Not only do I need to make friends, but I want to hear all the stories.”

I shook my head, though there was a huge grin on my face. As I glanced around the table, I honestly had no idea how I had managed this past year without my sister and best friend. Yeah, we had talked often, but talking on the phone couldn’t compare with this. Even though it’d been my choice to leave, I still couldn’t help but feel bitter about it. While I had expected life to go on, I hadn’t expected to miss so much, and I hated how I was playing catch up.

We spent the rest of lunch planning the party, and though River kept swearing that it was going to be a small affair, the amount of liquor that she planned on having on-hand suggested otherwise. Granted, there’d be six of us, but not everyone was a liquor partier. In fact, I was pretty sure that all those liquor bottles were going to be for River.

Once Pierce and I got back to the office, he went his way as I went mine. I was a little worried about him becoming restless later on because he wasn’t used to office work, but we could always go camping or hiking on the weekends if he needed some outdoorsiness. Plus, I knew that he planned on visiting Coralship regularly, so there was that.

When I finally got behind my desk again, I did it feeling better about returning home. With a grin still on my face, it really did feel good to be back.

Chapter 5

Raddix~

Two times hadn’t been enough. Even though Caspian and Troy were obviously annoyed with impatience, I didn’t care. I flipped through the folder for a third time, making sure that I wasn’t missing anything important. If you charged into war unprepared, then you deserved to lose.

“The words aren’t going to change, no matter how many times you read them, Rad,” Troy drawled out. “There’s no dark magic at play here.”

I shot him a look. “You can shut the fuck up now.”

The jackass just grinned.

Unlike me and Caspian, Troy had dark blonde hair, blue eyes, kept in shape, and didn’t have a serious bone in his body when he was outside the courtroom. The only things that we had in common were our ages and our heights; we were both thirty-one and six-foot-two. Other than that, Troy Bentley was my exact opposite, and I still had no idea how we’d become best friends.

As for Caspian, we looked exactly the same with our brown hair, blue eyes, and muscular physique that you could see in our father. Despite Caspian being one inch shorter than me and that thing with my left eye, there was no mistaking that we were brothers, often mistaken for twins because we were only a year apart. Caspian had also been the partier out of us, always living life to the fullest. On my brother’s last day on this earth, he was going to have no regrets in life.

All in all, we worked well together, despite our different personalities. Granted, I’d been a completely different person a year ago, but still. During business meetings when all three of us needed to be present, we functioned like a well-oiled machine, ready to destroy any obstacles in front of us. McKay Engineering would not be what it was today if not for the way that we all worked well together. Yeah, Caspian and Troy didn’t work the kind of hours that I did, but I didn’t expect them to. I kept a pace to keep myself sane, they worked like normal people.

“I don’t understand,” Caspian remarked, looking over at me from one of the seats in front of my desk. “It’s good news, right?”

“You’re out of scotch,” Troy announced.

“That’s because you keep drinking it all,” I pointed out.

“I lead a stressful life,” he replied cheekily, still grinning.

“Then drink something else,” I told him, the fucker lying through his teeth. Yeah, his job was an important one, but he was hardly stressed out. He’d have to take life seriously to be stressed out.

“I’m still failing to see what the problem is,” Caspian said, eyeing me.

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