Page 111 of He Loves Me Knot

Isla draped herself on his arm. “Oh stop. I swear, Callum, if I have to spend this entire trip hearing you whine about how terrible Mum is, I’ll shoot you myself.”

Seeing an opportunity to shift the conversation away from Liddy, Callum took it. “Did Mum tell you she’s thinking of sellingLa Hacienda?Sophia said business isn’t going so well.”

Isla’s demeanor changed in an instant. “Wow, she brought you up to speed faster than I thought.” She chewed on her lower lip. “I knew,” she admitted to his hard stare.

“Mum told you she was struggling?”

“She probably would have told you—you just refuse to talk to her. Or to me about her. When was the last time we talked about Mum? You rarely let her name pass my lips.”

That’s true.

Then as he’d expected, Isla said, “I want to buy it. But I don’t have the money. So I was thinking maybe you could lend it to me?—”

“Absolutely not.”

“Callum, this is Mum’s dream. She built this place with the love of her life, and you, what, just want to see it die?”

Callum frowned, her words hitting him hard.

Love of her life?

“What?” He gave Isla a confused look. “What ‘love of her life?’”

“Carmen.” Then Isla scanned his face, horror coming into her expression. “Are you telling me you . . . didn’t know?”

“Didn’t know . . .”

Isla covered her mouth. “How could you not know? Oh my God, big brother, I never imagined you werethisnaive.”

He was quickly putting the pieces together, but less quickly than he should have for something that should have been more obvious. “Mum and Carmen . . . were best friends.” His words sounded empty, even from his own lips.

“They were a couple, Cal. Mum left Dad to be with Carmen.”

“S-she . . . cheated on him . . . with Carmen?”

Isla nodded.

What. The. Fuck.

Unfiltered rage curled through his veins.

All this time, he’d thought Dad was the one who broke up their family.

But Mum?

AndLa Hacienda—and everything they’d built here—had been based on that betrayal.

A sick feeling crested through him.

No wonder Mum hadn’t batted an eyelash at Sophia’s cheating.It takes one to know one.

Although, that wasn’t really all it was either. His mother considered Sophia an actual daughter.Because she’s Carmen’s daughter.She had literally been like a goddamn daughter to Mum for more years than he’d known.

“How can you make me choose?” Mum’s words make far more sense now.

Callum raised a hand to his throbbing temples. “I need to sit.” He stumbled toward the chair at the table and sat, unable to think straight and feeling sick.

How could his mum never have said anything? How could she have been so happy to see her son in a relationship with a girl she viewed as her own daughter? He felt incestuous as fuck. The whole thing was sick.

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