Page 7 of Overnight Inheritance

She glanced at the hedge. “Went next door to talk to our neighbor.”

“Newport?” Heath was suddenly alert.

Given that she and her brother jointly owned the share in Bellavista Holdings, she should have checked with him first. But facing Sebastian was something she’d had to do alone. “We sort of met last night and I needed to ask him something.”

“Get any answers?”

“Not really.” She dug her hands in her pockets. “Did you know he has a baby?”

He screwed up his face in thought. “Don’t think I did.” He surveyed her face and frowned. “Don’t you go softening toward him just because he has a kid. It doesn’t take morals to procreate—just look at our own father. It means nothing.”

Mae nodded. He was right, but... There was something about the way that Sebastian had smiled at Alfie and cared for him that had raised questions in her mind. Their father might have produced children, but from all accounts, he hadn’t been caring to them.

She rolled her shoulders, searching for perspective. “What do you know about Sebastian?”

“Not a lot, personally.” He shrugged. “I only met him a couple of times, and the best thing I can say about him is that he’s better than his father.”

And they both knew that counted for nothing. “Ethical? Transparent?”

“Well, I trust him about as far as I can throw him, and he’s a fairly big man.”

She snorted. “So no trust at all. But how many people have we trusted in our lives anyway? Adding Sarah and Freya into our circle of trust in the same year must be a record for us.”

He winced and then shoved his fingers through his dark blond hair. “Freya says that I’m hypervigilant, because of our upbringing. She says it’s a trauma response.”

That made a lot of sense. Some of her earliest memories were about realizing that her responses to things were different than those of other kids. “It kept us safe, though.”

“That’s exactly what I said to her.” He grinned.

The lack of trust was usually something they reserved for other people, but when Heath had found out about their inheritance, and about their father’s identity, he’d kept it a secret from her. Mae understood his need to investigate before exposing her to risk, but it still stung. She’d let it go at some point, but she wasn’t ready to do that yet.

“So,” she said, digging her hands into her pockets, “using your power of hypervigilance, tell me more about your impressions of Sebastian Newport.”

“When I went into the office to look around, he tried a pretty basic divide-and-conquer move—tried to get me away from Sarah and Freya to talk alone. I didn’t fall for it.”

She shifted her weight to the other foot. “Did you find out what he wanted to say to you alone?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, nodding. “To talk me into selling my half of the company to him.”

Mae sucked in her bottom lip. It was the same thing he’d asked her. “Were you tempted?”

“To be honest, selling would be the easy option.”

“But...?”

“At the time, you didn’t know about the inheritance and it wasn’t my decision alone, not to mention, it wasn’t then—and still isn’t—in our names. Besides—” he crossed his arms, seeming less certain now “—it seemed like it was something we should think about.”

Mae waited a beat. She knew her brother, and there was something else, something deeper, here. “Think about what? As Sebastian says, we don’t know anything about property development.”

“It was something our grandfather built. His life’s work.”

She rocked back on her heels. That was not the answer she’d been expecting. “We can’t keep a huge company out of nostalgia, Heath.”

“I get that. But we owe it to ourselves, and everyone whose livelihood depends on the company, to at least think it through first. I realized during my visit to the office that walking in and upending things without a thought to the people it employs, is something our father would have done.”

A cold shiver raced across her skin. That one line affected her more than anything else he could have said. “Do you have a plan?”

“It’s on my list of things to do,” he admitted. “I’m still getting my head around the investments and the whole portfolio.”

---