Chapter 4
brAM
Imanage to catch Josie a moment before she hits the ground, scooping my limp babygirl into my arms. “What did you say to her?” I snarl at Gray, who matches my expression with an impressive snarl of her own.
“I didn’t say a goddamn thing. All I did was call her name and then she took one look at me and passed the fuck out. What did you do to her?”
“All I did was wake her up and spank her ass for cussing at me.”
“Jesus Christ, Bram, you couldn’t even give her a few hours to get her bearings?”
Guilt stabs at my chest. “What was I supposed to do, Gray? Let her keep swearing at me with no consequences?”
“Enough, you two.”
At the sound of our eldest brother’s stern tone, we both turn to find him standing at the bottom of the stairs, Lanie perched on his hip. Our Little niece is watching us through wide, round eyes.
Scared eyes.
Fuck.
“Sorry, Ax.” Forcing a smile for Lanie, I juggle my unconscious ex-girlfriend in my arms. “It’s okay, Lanie. Your Auntie Gray and I were just… having a discussion.”
“Is that Josie? What happened to her?”
“She just got a little overwhelmed, sweetheart. She’ll be okay.” At least, I hope she will.
Ford appears seemingly out of nowhere and sighs. “Bring her back to the exam room. I’ll check her over.”
Even though I’m certain she really is just overwhelmed, I’m not willing to take risks with my babygirl, so I follow him back to the room we built just for Ford.
The sterile white walls and stainless-steel cabinets rival any doctor’s office, and despite not having a medical degree, Ford is as skilled as any physician.
There are times I look at him and my chest aches for what he could have been in another lifetime.
But there’s no time for those regrets right now, so I lay Josie out on the table while Ford pulls on a white coat and the stethoscope Gray bought him for his twentieth birthday.
It has his initials engraved on it, and though there are probably better models out these days, we all know he’ll never part with it.
He listens to Josie’s heart and her breathing, checks her blood pressure, all while I watch, feeling helpless and hating myself for not being able to do anything for her. For this woman I’ve loved for half my life.
“Everything looks and sounds good,” Ford says as he straightens. “I think it’s like you said and she was just overwhelmed. This is going to be a lot for her to take in all at once.”
“I know. But she’s stronger than she seems.”
Not looking the least bit convinced, Ford opens a drawer and pulls out a small white bottle. Twisting the top off, he holds it beneath Josie’s nose, and she jerks awake with a violent cough.
“What the fuck—” Stopping short, she gapes up at him, her mouth falling open. “Fallon?”
“Hey, Jo.” A grin splits my baby brother’s face. “It’s Ford now, but yeah. It’s me.”
“This isn’t happening.” Drawing her knees up to her chest, she closes her eyes and rocks back and forth. “I’m having some weird-ass dream and I just need to wake the fuck up.”
Her little meltdown would be adorable if I wasn’t worried she might be on the verge of an actual mental breakdown. “It’s not a dream, bug. We’re really here.”
“But you can’t be. You died. All of you.” When she opens her eyes again, tears shimmer over the pale gold. “I watched them put you in the ground. Every single one of you.”
“I know, baby.” And I grieved the loss of her just as keenly, though I know that’s not what she wants to hear right now. “If you think you can handle it, we’d like to tell you what really happened.”
“I’m not your baby.” Her voice is hollow, as if she’s withdrawn so far into herself even her words are a mere echo. “But fine. Tell me.”
“We will.” Meeting Ford’s gaze over her head, I smile. “But first we need hot chocolate.”
Josie
I’m still not convinced this isn’t all a dream, or maybe a very vivid hallucination that’s going to end up with me in a mental hospital for the rest of my natural life, but somehow I find myself sitting at a table with seven ghosts and a complete stranger.
The stranger—Lanie, as she was introduced to me—is the one sticking point.
I read somewhere that you can’t dream a face you’ve never seen, and I would swear I’ve never seen hers.
Maybe I have, and I just don’t remember, but the more I look at her the more certain I am that she is, indeed, a complete stranger.
If she is, and if what I read is true, then this isn’t a dream or a hallucination.
And I’m not sure if it’s being crazy or sane that terrifies me the most.
Perhaps the most bizarre part of this possible dream-slash-hallucination is the hot chocolate.
Not only is it hands down the most delicious hot chocolate I’ve ever had in my life, there’s something about watching a group of burly men in flannel sipping cups of hot cocoa piled high with marshmallows as if it’s the most natural thing in the world that my brain simply refuses to acknowledge.
“I know this has been a huge shock for you,” Adrian—Axel now—begins, his expression apologetic. “And we’re all so very sorry for the pain we put you through. If we could have done anything differently…”
He trails off and Lanie leans into him, a move so sweetly supportive it brings tears to my eyes. Almost absentmindedly, he turns his head to press a kiss to her hair as Bennett—Bram, god this is confusing as fuck—picks up the thread.
“How much do you know about the night we died?”
I have to swallow hard three times before the words come.
“Not much. A rival family attacked your home, killed you all. Your uncle vowed revenge, but I don’t know if he ever got it.
He wouldn’t talk to me or my parents about your family, no matter how hard we tried.
And after the house sold, we never saw him again. ”
“That lying bastard.” Venom drips from Gray’s voice. At least her new name is easy to remember, as it’s relatively close to her old name. “It wasn’t a rival family. It was him.”
Shock robs me of the ability to speak, to breathe. “What? No. No. He loved you. He was devastated when you died.”
“No, Jo. He was just a really good fucking actor.” Across the table, the man I once knew as Everett Kincaid, the boy who always had a smile for everyone he met, glowers at me.
He’s Elias now, and every trace of the boy I knew has been stripped away, leaving nothing but a bitter, prickly shell behind.
“He came for us in the middle of the night.” Seemingly recovered, Axel continues the story.
“The gunfire woke us up. I’ll spare you the gorier details, but Gray found our parents first. I had to drag her away from their bodies.
Somehow, we managed to escape without any of us being seen or getting shot.
Our parents kept enough money in their safe to keep us going for a few months, so that’s what we did.
We crisscrossed our way across the country, picking up little odd jobs here and there to refill the coffers.
Eventually we landed here and we built a life for ourselves.
Built an empire of wood, though that’s mostly thanks to Gray.
She was determined we wouldn’t just survive but thrive, and we have, because of her. ”
“Because of us,” Gray says, her voice firm if hoarse. “What we have isn’t because of just one of us. We all played a part in it. Though if we’re being honest we wouldn’t have half of what we do if it weren’t for Maxwell Stone.”
The name rings a bell somewhere in the back of my mind. “Wait. Like, the world’s most eligible billionaire, Maxwell Stone? What does he have to do with any of this?”
Surprisingly, a ghost of a smile stretches Gray’s lips. “He found us. Not because he was looking for the Kincaids, but because he was looking for people with very… specific interests. He’d apparently run into Colt—”
“Stop. Who’s Colt?”
To our right, the man I knew as Callum waves. His hair is cut slightly differently from his twin’s, but for the most part they are still nearly identical, down to the tattoo on their right arms. “That would be me. We kept it alphabetical to simplify things and to honor our mom.”
Grief slams into my chest. “I see.” I want to tell them how sorry I am, how much I miss their mom every fucking day, but the words stick in my throat.
After a brief silence, Gray clears her throat and continues.
“As I was saying, Colt and Maxwell met at some conference in Vegas and they hit it off, had a few drinks, and Colt confessed that he was a Daddy looking for a Little girl, but he couldn’t imagine bringing one into our world.
And, well, Maxwell took it from there. Invested in our business, paid us a ridiculous amount of money to provide the lumber for the community he was building on a small island in the Atlantic.
Once we confided in him who we really were, he vowed to keep us and our identities safe.
Which he has, without fail. We owe him our lives. ”
My head is spinning, and I’m desperate for some tiny bit of normalcy to cling to, so I sip my hot chocolate again, letting the sweet liquid soothe my nerves as much as possible. “You all understand how absolutely insane this all sounds, right?”
“We do,” Bram assures me, his expression somber. “And we understand it’s going to take some getting used to. Not just us being alive, but our… lifestyle, as it were.”
“What about your lifestyle?”
He shares a look with his siblings, who all nod in turn as if giving their blessing for him to continue and a chill creeps up my spine.
“Colt isn’t the only Daddy of the group.
We’ve all been looking for Little girls of our own, even Gray, and we agreed long ago that after…
” He swallows hard and blinks, giving me the impression he’s fighting back tears I can’t see.
“After what happened to our parents, we decided we didn’t want to be separated.
That we would live together, protecting each other, supporting each other in every possible way.
So, for instance, while Lanie is Axel’s Little girl, we all act as her aunt and uncles, taking care of her, disciplining her when necessary. ”
In light of finding them all alive and well after twenty years of believing they were dead, this should be the least shocking revelation of all. And yet I can only stare, dumbfounded, as my brain tries to come to grips with what he’s telling me. “When you say discipline, do you mean…”
“Yes, baby. When Lanie is naughty, she gets spanked on her bare bottom just like you used to.”
Jealousy curdles in my gut. Which is absolutely ridiculous because I haven’t had a claim on the man beside me in twenty years. And yet, there it is, churning and gnawing at me as I imagine another woman over his knee while he spanks her bare ass and tells her what a naughty girl she’s been.
Doing my best to ignore the uncalled-for jealousy, I shrug as if I don’t care the least little bit what he does with other women. “That’s great, I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing. But I fail to see what that has to do with me.”
Bram shares another look with his family before laying a hand on my arm, his voice calm and patient when he speaks again.
“It has everything to do with you, Josie, because we can’t let you leave. So from now on, you’ll be living here, with us. As my Little girl.”