Page 28 of If You Were Mine
“So…” Isabella drawled. “What was that?”
Sadly my two best friends didn’t speak up for me, so I just cleared my throat.
“It’s not like that. He’s just trying to fill my brother’s place. You know, in that overprotective stance. Seriously. Not like that.”
Except the more I tried to deny it, the more I knew they didn’t believe me.
Oh, how I wanted to believe them.
But Dorian was not for me. He never had been, and frankly, he never would be.
Chapter Six
DORIAN
“It could be worse. We could be having this at your ghost house.”
I glared over at Hudson as we scrambled up the stone pathway to Aston’s home on the edge of the lake.
Each of my siblings—at least the ones I had grown up with—had a place on the lake. I wasn’t using mine currently, and Hudson’s was farther back into the forest, but we each had a place that we used when we visited. For some it was an oasis. Some an escape. For me, it would be my reward if I ever actually finished this particular project.
Currently we were walking up to Aston’s place since he and Blakely were in town for the lovely family dinner we were required to have every month.
Because when our dear old dad had died, he hadn’t just decided to throw a few skeletons out of his closet directly into our faces. No, he had decided to make it complicated for us.
While most people may have realized that their parents had secrets, I felt like ours were a little special.
Some cheating fathers had a single kid out there with a woman who had been forced into silence.
Not us.
We had an entire family out there who had thought their dad took far more work trips than was reasonable.
Then again, we had thought the same. Well, knowing what I knew at the time, it was more that my parents had probably hated each other in some way, so being apart would be easier than having to deal with one another face-to-face. But for some reason, both of the moms had been in on it. I didn’t know their motivations; money, a twisted form of love, or exhaustion, but here we were. Dealing with the consequences.
Because if our family did not have dinner once a month, we would lose everything.
I wasn’t sure exactly which crackpot lawyers had allowed this to happen, but because it was so tangled in red tape, we were leaning into it.
At least five of my Cage siblings had to be in residence for a dinner once a month. We had an actual spreadsheet and calendar to ensure this happened. Because it couldn’t just be five from one side of the family and not any from the other. There had to be at least three from one side at a time. Usually that meant the siblings I grew up with because we were seven. And the ones who had grown up farther south, and in a different tax bracket thanks to Dad’s cruelty, were only five.
The fact that I had eleven siblings truly made my stomach hurt.
Then again, for all I knew there were more siblings out there. I swallowed hard. Countless other siblings that we would never know about until a new skeleton popped up out of nowhere.
Hell, maybe one of Dad’s special letters would show up and at the end of this torment and betrayal, we’d have a whole new surprise.
I shuddered to think there was a third family out there. Because no, there couldn’t be. If there had been, Dad would’ve mentioned it at some point in the will.
It was how he fucked with us.
It wasn’t that we would just lose everything. It would break the shaky foundation that Cage Enterprises and Cage Lake sat upon.
Cage Enterprises was a billion-dollar company that fed into real estate, development, environmental concerns, research and development, and countless other departments. My family that worked with the main part of Cage Enterprises were brilliant at what they did and wanted it to succeed. Thousands of jobs would be lost if the company was dissolved. Not only that, but real people would be hurt without some of our research.
Aston, Flynn, and James worked on Cage Enterprises, and they split it into three main sections. Blakely and Isabella now worked with them. Our family was a tangled mess, but it made sense.
With so many siblings there were bound to be knots and tangles.
