“What about me?” I cried. “I’m your family. Isn’t what I want important?”
His palm cracked across my cheek, sending my head rocking. I fell back on the bed and lay there gasping, my face flaming red from both being struck and the shame and embarrassment of my father feeling the need to hit me.
“I’m sorry you made me do that, Hallie.” He got to his feet, towering over me. “But you won’t let me down on this. If Tam Cornell sends you home, the whole deal is over. Do you understand that? At some point, the Gilligans will become stronger than us, and will edge into our territory and take over. We’ll be left with nothing, lucky to come out of it with our lives.”
Tears brimmed in my eyes. I didn’t have any choice in this, did I?
“When do I go?”
“Tomorrow. Pack up your things, and I’ll drive you there tomorrow when I’ve finished work. You need to be strong now. Family is everything, and you’re doing this for your family.”
I nodded, my lips pressed tightly together so I didn’t give him another reason to hit me.
I waited until he’d left the room and then snatched up my phone and called Layla.
“Oh my God,” I said before she’d even had the chance to say hello. “You won’t believe what just happened.”
“Hallie, are you okay?”
“No, I’m not. My dad’s just come into my room and told me I’m going to be marrying Tam Cornell now.”
“What? Isn’t he like, thirty-five, or something?”
I sniffed. “Thirty-four.”
“Bloody hell. He’s practically middle-aged.”
“He wants me to go and live with him for a month before we get married, and if I tell him I don’t want to do this at any point, then he’ll call the whole thing off.”
“Good,” she declared. “So, tell him no right away. Tell him you don’t want to marry him either, though frankly I think he’s lucky to have you.”
I sniffed, appreciating her compliment. “I can’t. If I tell him no, this whole deal will fall apart. The future of my family depends on it.”
“Your father’s future, you mean?”
“It’s mine, too, Lay, and Jayden’s. We’ll both inherit everything once he’s gone.”
Marlon Wynter was only fifty. He had plenty of years in him yet.
Layla’s tone grew serious. “Hallie, Tam Cornell is a nutcase. Everyone knows it. He’s part of the reason the Cornells have been so successful—everyone is shit scared of Tam. I heard he once bit a man’s nose off in a bar because he’d nudged his elbow and spilt literally a splash of his drink.”
I shuddered. I was used to violence, but I didn’t want to marry it.
I lowered my head into the hand that wasn’t holding the phone. “What the hell am I going to do?”
“Do whatever it takes to piss Tam Cornell off and get him to send you straight back home again.”
“And then what? We lose all possibility of a union between our two families, we go back to fighting between us, the Gilligans take advantage of the distraction, and wipe us both out.”
She paused on the other end. “Hmm. Now you put it like that...”
“And do you really think it’s a good idea to piss off someone like Tam?”
“Another good point.”
I let out a groan. “I have to just go through with this, don’t I? I’m going to have to marry him.”
“At least there’s no possibility of him having a micro dick,” she said cautiously.