Page 18 of Three Corporate Kings and a Hands-Off Bride

As for forgetting everything? The only thing she’d manifested was a lifetime of misery. How could she go back to being herself when she knew what it was like to be touched by them? Held. Taken. Owned.

Well, it had all been a lie. For them anyway. Not for her.

Chapter Fourteen

Alicia fidgeted in the silence that followed after her unappetizing meltdown. They still blocked the door, which meant she was trapped in there with them, cooking in her humiliation.

“What’s happening with law school, Alicia?” Eli asked.

Alicia whipped up her gaze at Eli. She wasn’t ready for the abrupt change in conversation. She expected them to tell her, Yes, she was a mess, and yes, she needed to get herself straightened out. She hadn’t expected them to get to the root of her problem in one go without her breathing one single word about it. She had no idea they knew anything that was going on in her life.

“Umm… It’s there. I think I got accepted. I think it’s time I start looking at what my life will be going forward as a lawyer. I think it’s time I grow up.”

Nothing could compare to the sinking heaviness in her heart at not being their wife or them touching her, but the whole law school was a far second.

“Hey,” Cade said softly. “You don’t have to be a lawyer if you don’t want to, Alicia,” Cade added, surprising her with his observation.

“But I have to be a lawyer,” she said, her shoulders sagging. Why was this so hard for her?

“Alicia, if you think your dad wanted you to become a lawyer because he was one, then you got it wrong. You got him wrong,” Baxter said with unusual seriousness.

“But how will I be close to him if I’m not following in his footsteps?”

“Do you want to be a lawyer?” Eli asked gently.

Her eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head from side to side. She couldn’t even bring herself to say the words—no, she didn’t want to be a lawyer.

“I didn’t get a chance to tell him I changed my mind. I think that’s the reason why he died before I could tell him I was dropping out. So he didn’t have to suffer from the heartache of my decision.”

She would never have said that out loud to anyone else. Not even Holly. But here everything just poured out of her.

“And you think your dad is going to be happy knowing you’re following in his footsteps just to make him happy? Let the man rest in peace, Alicia; he doesn’t need your unhappiness at doing a job you feel obligated to do, following him around.”

She thought about Eli’s words.

Oh god. They were right. She knew this, deep down obviously, but maybe she needed to hear this from them. Her father wantedher to be happy. And the only way to make him happy was if she was happy.

“I don’t want to go to Harvard. I don’t want to study law. I don’t want to be a lawyer." She exhaled noisily.

Again saying it out loud lifted a boulder off her chest. Because this was also how she was finally saying goodbye to her dad. She’d been holding onto him for dear life. It had been her unhappiness that made it impossible for her to say goodbye to him. Was it this easy? She just said she didn’t want to be a lawyer, and now she believed her father would rather her be happy over anything else. Why had she waited so long to do this?

“Thank you,” she whispered. At once she felt centered, a tiny glimmer of her old self returning, but now with a broken heart in tow.

Her breakthrough still didn’t take away the fresh heartache that now settled in her chest. Would she have to move out, despite her father’s wishes they look after her until she turned twenty-two?

It would probably be awkward for them to have her around and know what the inside of her body felt like around their cocks. For her, she realized it would be devastating. The worst kind of pain ever.

“Should I move out?. After everything….”

“When you moved in here, six months ago, we got really drunk that one night, and you know what we called you?”

“Brat?”

“That too. But we called you our 'hands-off bride. You were ours in every sense of the word. Our bride. No other man was going to touch you. But then, neither were we.”

“We planned to keep you here forever, Alicia, whatever it took, as long as we were still respecting your father and the trust he put into us to look after you. But nowhere did he say we could take you and make you ours.”

“So, no. You’re not moving out. And you’re certainly not going to be ourhands-off brideanymore. Because we tried everything to keep our hands off her. You drove us fucking insane prancing around here with that sweet body. Your eyes. Your smile. Your laughter. You killed us, night after night.”

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