“Did you two get along back then? You and Ford?” Alice asked, sipping delicately at her whiskey.
“Back then we did, yeah. Or I thought we did.” Bitterness crept in, leaving a sour taste in my mouth. I took another slug of whiskey to wash it away. It was a lifetime ago, I reminded myself.
“What did Hope have to do with anything?” Evers asked. “Was she an ex? Wasn’t she a little young for you?”
“Not an ex,” I corrected, remembering Hope back then. Gangly and coltish, she’d grown into her adult height but the rest of her hadn’t yet caught up. “She was sixteen. Just a kid.”
“That’s my point.” Evers’ eyebrow raised. “She was sixteen. You were twenty-two. Little young for you.”
“It wasn’t like that. She was always around because of her uncle Edgar, Prentice’s business partner. We grew up together. She was a kid, but she was smart as hell and funny. She was kind. Hope had a way of seeing through the bullshit. She was… I don’t know, it sounds weird, but she was wise.” I shrugged a shoulder. “I liked talking to her.”
“It didn’t hurt that she had a crush on you,” Alice pointed out, reading between the lines.
“It wasn’t like that,” I protested. It hadn’t been. At least not for me. I knew she had a crush on me, and I was careful not to encourage it. I knew she felt like she was all grown up, but in my eyes, she was still very much a kid. “I never touched her. I swear. We were friends. She was the only one I told about the elopement, and she told her uncle, who told my father.”
“That’s it?” Alice asked. “She was a teenager who told a secret?”
I couldn’t keep the bitterness under wraps. It hadn’t been that simple. “Hope knew exactly what would happen. She was young, but she was smart. She knew my father almost as well as she knew her uncle. She knew he’d stop us.”
“Jealous,” Alice murmured to herself.
I raised my glass in a salute. “Exactly. One minute I think I’m getting married, and the next my father’s kicking me out—of the house, of the company—Vanessa is married to Ford, and I’ve got nothing but the clothes on my back. The whole fucking family just stood there. Ford played it off like I’d been trying to undermine that business deal on my own. He handed my father what he needed to force the owner to sell, making me look like I’d betrayed our father and Ford was the savior. Prentice bought it.”
“And no one said a thing?” Alice pressed. “They just let him throw you out?”
“No one,” I confirmed. Whiskey and memories clouded my mind, the truth slowly rising to the surface. “Except for Hope. Prentice made it into a production, introducing Ford and his bride to the family at the same time as he disinherited me. Fuckers didn’t even look guilty. Ford just kept smiling. But Hope started yelling at Prentice. I can’t remember what she said. He had her removed from the room, didn’t want her spoiling his big scene.”
There wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to erase the memory of my father and Ford’s twin smiles. Smug. Triumphant.
“Your father was a royal asshole,” Knox commented. Understated, as usual. I gave another bitter laugh.
“Yeah, and then some.”
“Sounds like Hope did you a favor,” he said.
I went still inside, instinctively recoiling at the idea any favors had been done in that clusterfuck. My entire life had been stolen from me. My future. My legacy.
“Kind of, yeah,” Alice agreed. “She got rid of the fiancée—because why would you want to marry a woman who ditched you for your brother? And Hope got you free of your father. Do you really wish you’d spent the last decade-and-a-half like that? With a woman who—let’s face it—didn’t love you. A brother who stabbed you in the back. A father who tossed you out just because he didn’t get his way. You were better off in the army and then here with us.”
“Alice has a point,” Cooper said. “You’re one of the best men I know, and you wouldn’t be that man if you’d stayed there. Would you?”
The change in perspective was bending my brain so far I thought it would break. I’d spent so long seeing myself as the victim, all this time focused on what they’d stolen from me. What Hope had stolen when she’d shared my secret.
Sure, I hated the rest of them, too. I was all about equal opportunity hate when it came to my family.
Hope was the only one who’d protested. She started it when she told my secret, but she’d tried to stop it. She’d stood up for me.
Had she stolen my future, or had she set me free?
What if I had married Vanessa? I tossed back the rest of my whiskey. That didn’t bear thinking about. I’d been a smart kid when it came to business, not so clever about women.