Page 77 of Proof

“Not even your grandmother?”

There was enough light in the room that I could see Cass’s facial expression. It shifted a little, but I couldn’t figure out what emotion he was experiencing. “My grandmother wasn’t the most demonstrative of people. She hugged me a couple times but there was always something off about it. I mean, I didn’t really have anything to compare it to when I was a little kid but when your dad would hug me, it was always like a bear hug, even later in life when his body was frailer. I was taller and heavier than him, yet I still felt safe when he hugged me. Like I didn’t need to think about how long I was allowed to embrace him for or if anyone was watching.”

“Have you seen her since—” I stopped abruptly when I realized what I’d been about to say. Reminding Cass of the hell he’d been through in the past two years wasn’t really first date conversation material.

“Yeah. I went to see her earlier this week.”

Cass fell silent. I could feel the tension in his body. His muscles had stiffened and the fingers he’d been running along my spine came to a stop. “I’m sorry, Cass. We don’t need to talk about any of this.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s okay. Believe me, I’ve been wanting to talk to someone about it. No, notsomeone. You. I wanted to talk toyouabout it.”

I couldn’t help but press a soft kiss against the skin that covered his pounding heart. Cass began running his fingers down my back again. I wasn’t even sure if he knew he was doing it.

“I think she’s sick,” Cass began. “Some kind of dementia or something. She was so different than I remember her,” he added on a soft whisper.

Despite the very different childhood he’d had compared to mine and Sully’s, it was clear Cass loved his grandmother.

“How so?” I gently prodded.

Cass shook his head briefly. I couldn’t see it, but I felt his chin brushing the top of my head. I shifted my body enough to watch his expressions as he spoke.

“Despite her age and standing in the family, Mother Ashby was always put together. Neat, polished, refined, elegant… she represented a kind of class that no one else in my family seemed to have inherited. Even when I was a little kid, she made sure I represented the family in the same way. She’d always say stuff about me being super important one day. That I’d show the world how powerful the Ashbys really were. I never understood what she meant by that. She’d also tell me I’d take over the Ashby empire when I was old enough. She never mentioned my father, even though he would have still been young enough to keep running the company. It seemed like… it seemed like she had somethingmoreplanned for me.”

As Cass fell silent again, I thought back to when I’d met him for the first time. I’d never met Chandler Ashby III before or his mother—Cass’s grandmother—but I’d seen stuff about Cass’s father in the news and there had been one incident when a criminal case Chandler Ashby had been involved in had made it to my desk, but I hadn’t even gotten through the first page of the case report before it had been whisked away by my superior.

If Cass’s father had stepped out of line somehow, especially criminally, the press would have jumped on the story. The Ashbys were always involved in some kind of scandal, but it had all been tabloid fodder more than anything. Not one member of the family had ever been charged with anything despite being arrested for DUIs and possession of drugs. The Ashbys had greased a lot of palms when it came to the cops and the petty crimes various Ashbys were always caught up in.

Until Cass. For some reason, there’d been no palm greasing for him. Granted, the crime he’d been accused of had been impossible for the Ashby patriarch, Cass’s own father, to get him off completely, but why hadn’t they provided him with a top-notch lawyer like Asa Hutch?

“Did she shield you from what your family was really like?” I asked. I immediately wanted to take the words back for fear that they’d make Cass angry, but I held my tongue. If I wanted to be his equal partner in whatever kind of relationship we were trying to forge, I needed to be brave enough to speak my mind.

“For the most part, yes. I was homeschooled until I was a freshman in high school. I knew my grandmother had been trying to protect me, but when I got a taste of that freedom, I couldn’t get enough. All the kids treated me like I was some kind of god. So many guys flocked to me, and I pretty much became the captain of the football and basketball teams without even needing to try. A lot of the girls made it clear that they were available for extracurricular activities.

“It wasn’t until I tried to have sex with my first girlfriend that I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t go through with it. She bought my excuse about having pulled a muscle in my last game. I was terrified that the fact that I hadn’t fucked the girl would get back to the guys I hung out with, and they’d start joking about me being a fag and all that bullshit. But no one ever said a word and thankfully, none of it got back to my grandmother. I was on some weird pedestal, and the kids kept me there for some reason.”

“And then one day you showed up skidding into the parking lot of a tiny, shitty park and met a big, cocky asshole just like yourself and that was it,” I said.

Cass looked at me and smiled. “That was it. That car was one of my dad’s favorites. I’d already gotten my own brand-new Porsche, but I decided it would be more fun to take my dad’s Aston Martin for a joyride, even though I didn’t have a license. Looking back, it wasn’t just a stupid act of teenage rebellion. I wanted something to happen once I was caught. I wanted to get arrested or have my dad tear me a new one… anything that would force Chandler Ashby to acknowledge I was his son. I was gone for hours while I played football with you and Sully, so it was dark by the time I got home. No one said a thing. Not about me stealing the car and not about me being gone the entire day without checking in even once.”

“Did your grandmother or father ever find out about us?” I asked. Cass hadn’t spoken much about his family when he’d been around our small, blue-collar family.

“No. My father was married to wife number three by then, and they spent a lot of time traveling overseas. They’d left behind my half-sister, Allison, when she was around fourteen, I think. Allison was the daughter of my father’s second wife. When they divorced, he ended up gaining full custody of Allison, which made no sense because he didn’t really want her.”

“Did your grandmother raise her too?”

“No,” Cass said with a shake of his head. “I honestly don’t know who took care of her. I just knew it wasn’t her mother because she’d been out of the picture since she’d lost custody. Allison died when she was nineteen… drug overdose. I came back for the funeral but none of the Ashbys attended. Not a single one besides me. My father and his third wife were too busy vacationing in Tahiti or something to be bothered with something like watching his only daughter being laid to rest.”

“So it was just you there?”

Cass shook his head again. “Her mother was there. She’d divorced my father when I was five, so I never really knew her. When I introduced myself, she slapped me and told me that my family had killed her daughter. When I told her that Allison had been my sister, her mother apologized right away and then just fell apart. No one else attended the funeral, not even any friends, so her mother and I listened to the priest and watched her casket being lowered into the ground. After that, we just sat there on a bench near Allison’s grave and watched the workers cover the hole with dirt. The last thing Allison’s mother said to me was that I was lucky I’d made it out and warned me not to go back… to never let them suck me back into their world. Then she was gone, and I never saw her again.”

“She was warning you not to go home,” I said in understanding. “Have you spoken to your dad at all?”

I’d been bracing my head on my bent arm so I could see Cass’s face as he spoke. My heart did a little jump when he turned onto his side so he was facing me. The move allowed me to see him without needing to hold my head up. I lowered it back down to the pillow. As much as I would have liked to scoot closer to him, I knew if I did, it would make it that much harder to control the needs of our bodies.

“Not really. I didn’t even know he was my father until I was four and one of the maids who’d been cleaning me up after I’d snuck into the kitchen to scarf down some chocolate cake pointed him out and told me he was my daddy. Whenever I tried to talk to him, he’d say he had an important phone call to make or that he was late for a meeting.

“My grandmother used to have these monthly family dinners, but they were a sham. My father and grandfather never attended, so Mother Ashby was in charge. No one ever said a word, so I figured that’s what family dinners were. After I met you guys, I knew their silencehadn’tbeen out of respect for my grandmother. They’dfearedher. The little kids would usually be excused right after dessert, so my cousins and I would play games in the house. One of my cousins once told me my grandmother was grounding our parents.”

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