Page 64 of The Forever Rule

Her eyes widened. “So maybe that’s not pressure.”

I leaned down and brushed my lips against hers, needing her taste, needing to breathe. This wasn’t our first kiss, but it felt like a first.

Because even in the short time that had passed between when this had occurred the first time and now, we were completely different people. An eon had passed in a moment of time, and it was all I could do not to need her.

I pulled away, and she smiled up at me, her pupils wide.

“Oh.”

“Oh.”

“So just a walk.”

“Just a walk. And maybe one time I can take you out for dinner, and not just coffee.”

“I do like coffee.”

And so, knowing that this was far too complicated, and against the rules, I slid my hand over hers, and we continued our walk. And I did the one thing that I never did.

I just lived in the moment.

After our walk,I didn’t have time to dwell on if and when I would see Blakely again outside of work.

No, because tonight was the Cage family dinner. And not the one interested in the will, but one for an equally obsessive and emotionally manipulating reason.

Thankfully it wasn’t at my house tonight, but rather my mother’s.

As I walked up the path, my steps faltered.Mother’s. Not mother and father’s. Not my dad’s at all. Because he wasn’t there anymore.

Had I really given myself time to grieve? No, the answer would always be no. But who was there left to grieve? The man that I had put on a precipice, even though sometimes I hated him, hadn’t been that man at all. He had been a liar, a cheat, a manipulator.

No wonder he had been in and out of our lives for so long. Not because he was hardworking or wanted to spend more time in Cage Lake than not. It wasn’t that hewas doing overseas trips—trips that hadn’t happened at all.

It was because he was living a second life, one under the radar that none of us knew about.

And I didn’t know the man who had raised me or had claimed to raise me at all.

I had watched them lower his casket in the earth, and I hadn’t felt a damn thing. Ice over flesh, and nothing but determination to fix his wrongs.

But how was one supposed to fix the wrongs he was unaware of?

And how was one to fix the wrongs that they made in his stead?

“Is there a reason you’re standing out here and looking broody?” Dorian asked as he threw his arm around my shoulder and pulled me in for a hug.

Dorian was slightly taller than me, and wider. Mostly muscle, and all bruteness. Of course, he used that in his business to win over the high-class clientele at his bar.

He owned The Gilded Cage, because of course our family needed to put our name in everything, every fucking thing around us.

“Just thinking about how Mom lives here all alone now, and probably will never visit Cage Lake.”

Dorian snorted. “Of course she won’t. She is not about that small town life. Dad only ever played at it because Grandpa liked it.”

I nodded, wondering if Dorian felt the same about me.

“Is it weird that we spent summers away in the mountains, and living a completely different life?”

“I wouldn’t necessarily call it completely different. It was just our life.”

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