Page 108 of The Scandal You Started
“I would like to hear them from you.”
“Well, like they said, I was a bit bossy. Not in a mean way, but I liked being the leader.” Dominic’s grin spread from ear to ear as she waved a hand around. “I mean, Benedict cried all the time anyway, and George was happy to follow along, so it’s not as if I forced them to let me decide everything. They were fine with it, even though now they pretend like I bullied them and got them into trouble all the time. They always pointed the blame on me anyway.”
“And did you take the blame?”
“No,” she said impishly, and he laughed. “I mean, yeah, when it was my fault, I owned up to it. But when it was their fault, I used to yell at them for lying. That’s how a lot of our fights normally started. But we never stayed angry at each other for more than a few minutes.
“We never fought at school, though. Everyone knew how Benedict was a cry-baby, but his older brother and sister were already in secondary school, so George and I basically made it our mission to protect him.” She puffed out a humorous sound. “At one point, I was known in primary school as the girl who punched a year-six boy for bullying Benedict. I think I was in year four, so I would’ve been what? Eight or nine.”
“Bloody woods.” Dominic gaped in disbelief. “I do not think I have ever heard of a little girl punching a boy before, and that of one older than her too. What if he had hit you back?”
“Then I would’ve hit him again.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“I got suspended from school for three days. But I remember Uncle Declan picked us up that day, and he took the three of us for ice cream and told me I did a good job for standing up for my family.”
He shook his head slowly. “So your thuggery was rewarded?”
“Yup. Basically,” she said. “It wasn’t the same in secondary school, though. They went to an all-boys school, and I ended up going to the all-girls equivalent a year later where I became friends with Kelly. By that point, the Griffins had already moved to the farmhouse, so we mainly spent holidays together, but we had a lot of fun in that house. With Kelly too.”
“I imagine so.”
In the silence that followed, old shouts and laughter played as a blurred reel through the back of her mind, and an unfocused glaze slipped over Dominic’s gooey stare.
“May I ask you something?” he said, his arms wrapping around her in a loose hug.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Mr Griffin mentioned something in passing a few days back that I cannot stop thinking about.” He paused, his throat bobbing slowly. “Something about your parents.”
All the contentment oozing from Rayna’s muscles evaporated. Gone. All of it. Just like that.
No wave of emotion replaced that happiness. No coldness, or shock, or discomfort. Just a still tightness.
“He seemed to suggest you had lived with them once,” he added, so obviously trying to approach the subject with care. “You never mentioned them, so I had assumed you did not know them. But did you?”
It wasn’t as if she’d expected it to be kept a secret from Dominic—it inevitably came up in conversation eventually. Neither had she expected him to never question her parentage.
But knowing the topic would come up didn’t make it any easier to actually speak of it. It wasn’t exactly an easy subject to talk about to begin with.
Now that he’d broached it, though, she wouldn’t avoid it. She’d tell him the truth.
She nodded. “Yeah. I did know them.Do, actually.”
His lips pinched in confusion, but he waited patiently for her to continue.
“My mum passed away when I was twelve. But my dad’s still alive. He lives in Jahandar with his wife and my half-brothers, Sameer and Timothy. I spoke to them the other day, actually, when you were having a lesson with River and I popped out to the shop.”
It took Dominic a few seconds to piece together her explanation, at which point heavy puzzlement weighed on his features. “I do not understand,” he said. “If you have a relationship with your father and his family, why did Victor adopt you?”
She opened her mouth. And clapped it shut. Then exhaled as she smiled.
It wasn’t a happy smile per se. But it helped ease her own discomfort.
“So, uh…” she started. “My parents were married once upon a time. But when I was five, they ended up getting divorced.
“To put it simply, my mum worked as a research scientist at the POTeM lab, and my dad was—is still, actually—a dentist. She wanted to focus on her career, but he wanted to slow down and have more children. It led to a lot of arguments, and eventually, they decided they loved each other but wanted different things in life, so it was better to get divorced.”
