Page 23 of Fireworks & Forehead Kisses

We never talked about my mother’s cancer diagnosis or her dying from complications of pneumonia when I was six. We never talked about my father leaving his children at home to care for her while he spent weekends with his mistresses. Or the fact that my father, their son, died at age twenty-eight when he hit a tree going ninety miles an hour—he was three times over the legal limit.

“How is Serena?” my grandmother asked.

“Fine.”

“You two excited about the wedding?”

Gran had always had a sixth sense with people. She knew if something was bothering someone or if they were hidingsomething. Everyone else in my life said that I was hard to read, impossible even. Not Gran. She somehow saw right through me.

“We’ve been busy. I’ve had a lot on my plate. I haven’t really thought about it.”

And honestly, the only reason I was getting married was because it was expected of me. My grandfather had always drilled it into both my brother and me that it was our duty, as if we were royalty or something. We were the heirs to the Wolfe throne. Family and legacy had always been the most important things to him. He’d been the one who had pushed for me to settle down. He’d introduced me to Serena. She was the daughter of a man he knew nearly his entire life. She was smart and beautiful; she came from money, so I knew she wasn’t using me for that. She had her own career. She had an education. She was entirely appropriate for a spouse.

For someone who had dedicated sixty-plus hours per week every week of his life to building the Wolfe empire, his true love, his true passion, hiswhywas his familyname. Not the people in his family. The name. His legacy. That was the only reason he did what he did. He built this dynasty to pass on for generations.

All my life, I knew what was expected of me. I would work for the family business, get married, and have children, and they would also work for the family business. The blueprint was in my DNA.

“Declan, dear, what do you love about Serena?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a simple question. What do you love about your fiancée?”

“Where is this coming from?”

Besides the fact that Wolfe’s did not talk about things, Gran did not have patience or interest for small talk. She once told me that she’d rather get her eyeballs tattooed than be subjected to tedious, idle chit-chat. It was in reference to her being asked toserve on the PTA at the boarding school I attended when I was twelve.

“I was going through some papers in your grandfather’s desk, and I found this.” She reached into her Hermès Birkin handbag and pulled out a piece of paper that was folded in half. She leaned forward and slid it across the desk to me.

When I unfolded it, I saw that it had a child’s handwriting on it. My name was in the top right corner and there was a tree that had writing on it.

“What’s this?” I began to read it and saw that it was some kind of questionnaire.

“It was an assignment your class did in first grade after you did family trees. You had to make a future tree, and on the branches, you had to describe your future spouse.”

Ah, I saw where this was going.

“I was six.” I folded the page back up and slid it back to her.

“Did you read it?” She lifted her left brow.

“Why would I read it?”

She picked the paper up and unfolded it.

“When asked what you wanted your wife to look like, you said you wanted her to have hair like the sun and eyes like the ocean.”

Even as a kid, I’d always been a sucker for red hair and blue eyes. Later, I came to learn that it was a very rare combo. The rarest combination in the world, actually. I blamed it on my first crush being Ariel fromThe Little Mermaid. My mom loved Disney movies and would always put them on when she was sick in bed, which sadly was most of my childhood. I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie, per se, but I was infatuated by her. Mesmerized. Captivated. Completely twitterpated, not to mix film references.

“I was clearly into nature,” I stated dismissively.

She glanced back down at the sheet of paper. “When asked what qualities you wanted her to have, you said that you wanted her to talk to animals like Dr. Dolittle.”

“Clearly an achievable goal.”

The truth was, as a kid, I loved animals and wanted to be with someone who shared my love of them. My mom was a huge animal lover, but since her health was so poor, we couldn’t have any. She was unable to take care of them, and my father was never around. Once she died, my brother and I lived with our grandparents or were in boarding school, so we never had any pets.

As an adult, I’d always been so busy with school and then work I never thought it was fair to have an animal who depended on me.

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