Page 10 of If You Were Mine
Melanie Cage blinked at me and took a step back as if surprised I would dare speak out loud to her in any way. She shouldn’t be too surprised considering this wasn’t the first time I did so. It was just that I was usually the person she listened to.
I had an idea why, hell, anybody who knew the truth knew why she called me her favorite, and why she actually paid attention when I spoke usually, but in this moment, it had nothing to do with that.
She let out a long breath and rolled her shoulders back. “Dorian. Don’t talk to me in that way.”
“In what way? Mother. Seriously, breathe. You’re talking so quickly without inhaling, you’re going to pass out at some point. There’s only so long you can stand there with that stick up your ass and pretend like you care about me in this moment.”
Okay, that was probably a little too on the nose.
Her eyes narrowed, the pink stains on her cheeks darkening.
Thanks to a wonderful surgeon, and Dysport versus Botox, my mother did not look her age. I was all for doing whatever you wanted to your own body. As long as you had the money, and were doing it safely, go for it. Hell, I might even try it one day if I ever ended up with crow’s feet. Why not? It didn’t hurt anyone but myself if I chose to do it. My mother’s attitude on the other hand, that hurt.
But in this moment, she didn’t look like a woman in her fifties, let alone a woman who had birthed seven kids.
She looked like a terror. “Dorian Cage. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I guess answering with the whole ‘Daddy had a secret family and then I almost died in a plane crash’ is a little too on the nose?”
Even as I said the words, I knew I had gone too far. Not with mentioning the plane crash, because I was too numb to even think about that.
No, it was Daddy’s secret family.
A secret family my mother had known about.
Because of course the Cages could never be simple.
My father apparently had quite the stamina. Not only had he decided to have seven children with my mother—he had a whole other family. One that my mother had known about and had colluded with the other woman in order to make the timing work out.
Considering my father had been a CEO of a billion-dollar company, one that not only worked in real estate and property development, but countless other assets that were all tangled up in his will, he had somehow made it so that he could have two sets of families.
The main one, as my mother called it, had lived in decent wealth. I hadn’t quite been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but adjacent. And now the silver spoon was right next to me, and I wasn’t hurting for money anytime soon. Especially with the settlement that was coming out of the plane crash.
No, I didn’t want to think about that. I wouldn’t think about that.
The other woman, my dad’s mistress, was a pretty decent person. Once she had begun to shave off some of the bitterness of her own situation, Constance Cage Dixon was a pretty cool person. She’d been able to come back into her children’s lives and they’d all found a way to make it work.
All five of her children from what I could tell.
Yes, dear old dad had twelve kids. Twelve.
I would wonder how he could do it all. But it wasn’t as if he had ever come to any of our games, or cared about our school beyond making sure that we didn’t disgrace him. He hadn’t been in our lives enough to care. Of course, maybe he had been in Aston’s life a bit more considering Aston was the prodigal eldest. And he had been in and out of the other Cages’ lives enough that they barely knew him.
But the asshole had made it work for him.
Not us. But it wasn’t like we could ever make it work for us.
Not that I was bitter or anything.
Okay that was a lie.
“Why do you have to bring up your father?”
“You’re the one that married him, Mom. And stayed married to him.” I gave her a look that spoke volumes, but she just rolled her eyes. Because we weren’t going to talk about that, or the other thing. Or the other secret thing that we never talked about.
Secrets tended to add up, and my mother was the queen of them.
She was also the Queen Bitch, and I hated even using that word. I didn’t use that word for women. My new sisters and sisters-in-law were the prime examples of what goodness could be. Even if Isabella had a bit of an attitude, I loved her. And I would never call another woman a bitch and degrade women in any way. But my mother personified the word most days.
