Page 25 of How to Undo the Proud Billionaire

“Stepdad,” Brin corrected him. “He’s sweet but quiet. He’s been in my life since I was a three, but we’ve never really bonded, I guess.”

Brin felt his eyes on her face but didn’t look at him, choosing instead to track a satellite moving across the sky. “Why not?”

“Because my mom fell pregnant with my sister and, from that moment on, it became all about her,” Brin admitted. “I was never in any doubt about who their favorite child was.”

Radd didn’t respond and Brin appreciated his silence, there was nothing worse than trite sympathy. Not that she believed Radd could, or would, be trite but…still.

“If it makes you feel any better, my parents didn’t have favorites. They disliked us all equally.”

Brin rolled onto her side, resting her head in her hand. The amazing sky couldn’t compete with this fascinating man. “Why do you think they had kids if they were so uninterested in being parents?”

A cynical smile touched Radd’s mouth. “That might be because my great-grandfather, my father’s grandfather, set up a trust fund in the fifties, when the Tempest-Vanes were seriously rolling in cash—”

“As opposed to how poor you are now,” Brin interjected, her tongue literally in her cheek.

Radd’s chuckle at her quip warmed her. “Brat. But I’m talking about family money, not what Dig and I made since my parents lost everything.” Radd lifted his wineglass, took a sip and placed it back on the floor. “Anyway, my father was the only T-V descendant—Great-Grandfather’s other son died in his teens and his daughter didn’t marry or have kids—so it was up to my father to restock the family tree. Great-Grandfather told my father that he’d give him two million for every male child they produced.”

Brin wasn’t sure how to respond to that blatant, old-fashioned misogyny and finally settled on: “Nice of you lot to cooperate and be male.”

Radd’s chuckle danced over her skin. “The first and only thing we did right,” he said, and his lack of emotion saddened Brin.

She risked putting her hand on his chest, somewhere in the region of his heart. “Scale of one to ten…how bad was it?”

Radd’s chest lifted and fell in a jerky movement, and then his hand clasped hers, pushing her flat palm against his chest. “Honestly, about a five. I mean, we weren’t beaten or neglected, we had everything we needed. We went to an expensive boarding school and we were happy there. We spent a lot of time here at Kagiso. As long as we were together, we were okay. And Jack was five years older, so he stood between the parents and us.”

Brin shifted down and placed her head against Radd’s shoulder, happy to hold his hand in the moonlight. “And then he died. How?”

“Brain aneurysm,” Radd replied. “It was a shock.”

Now that was the understatement of the year, because Brin could see the devastation in his eyes. “I’m sure it was. And around the same time, you divorced your parents.”

“Divorce… That’s a good way to put it,” Radd mused. His hand tightened and Brin winced, but didn’t pull away. Whatever he was thinking about was painful, and she knew the wound was still raw.

“Did you sell their art and car collections?”

Radd shook his head. “Everything they owned, including their property and cash, and two massive life insurance policies, was put into a trust. Neither of us is a trustee or a beneficiary.”

Brin frowned. “Who is?”

“That’s the question. We don’t know, we can’t find out and frankly, we don’t much care.”

She thought he did, a little. But something in his voice had her cocking her head, questioning. “Why do I think you know more about that than you are saying?”

Brin smiled at his shock. “How the hell do you know that?” he demanded.

She shrugged. “Just a guess. Can you tell me?”

Radd hesitated. “I have no proof, but I suspect the person he wanted us to meet and the beneficiary of that trust is the same person.”

“Could be,” Brin agreed. “But it would be hell to prove.”

“Yep.”

“Look, I know your parents were…unconventional, but can you tell me what caused you to divorce them? Can you trust me with that information or is it too personal?”

“Jesus, Brin, that’s a hell of a question.”

The night wrapped them in its soft embrace and Brin couldn’t help dropping a kiss on his shoulder, hoping, in a small way, to give him an anchor while horrible memories battered him from every side. Because she did not doubt that, whatever it was that caused that final break, it had to be truly horrible.

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