Chapter 5
COLIN
Jane had told me we were getting lunch, but instead, she’d lured me to Ashanti’s mother’s house. I’d been trapped with Gabrielle for the better part of an hour while Jane and Ashanti talked shop, which in their case encompassed everything from actual business, to children, to travel.
I wasn’t entirely sure how they moved between topics so effortlessly, but while they conducted the world’s most efficient catch-up session, I was being interrogated by Gabrielle.
She’d extracted more personal information from me in sixty minutes than most people managed in a year, so much so that I was starting to consider asking about her per-hour therapist fee.
“Do you cook?” she asked after we’d covered my childhood, my dad’s trial, and the amount of hours I spent at the office every week.
I looked up from my tea and nodded. “I do. I’m actually reasonably good at it.”
“And that’s because you had to help your sister take care of your younger brothers after your father got shipped off to jail?”
I blinked hard. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“I remember your mother,” she said thoughtfully. “She used to be such a force on the fundraising scene. A social butterfly, really. I heard she didn’t take the arrest well.”
It wasn’t a question, but I responded anyway, the urge to defend my family imprinted on my DNA and rising fast in the face of this topic of conversation.
“It came as a huge shock to her. She lost her husband, her social standing, and just about everything she owned all in one fell swoop. Anyone would’ve needed some time and space to process something like that. ”
“Yes.” Gabrielle wrapped her fingers around her tea cup and nodded like she agreed with my summary of events. “I can’t imagine being in her shoes. It was quite the scandal. I’m not sure I ever would’ve recovered.”
Honestly, I wasn’t sure my mother had recovered either. There was a reason Jane and I had stuck around our family home for the sake of our younger brothers until after she’d married Alex. For the longest time, neither of us had even thought of leaving.
Jane had finally moved in with Alex a couple months after their nuptials, but Wyatt, our youngest brother, had already been in his senior year by then, the others all already off to college.
I’d stayed at home until Wyatt had graduated and only after moving him into the dorms had I found a place of my own.
All of us still checked in on Mom regularly, though.
We made sure she had food and that she ate it.
We bought her groceries and made sure she got out of the house every once in a while.
She’d been doing much better since Jane had taken over Thayer Steelworks from our uncle, but we still kept a close eye on her.
Gabrielle took a sip of her tea, but before she could ask whatever personal question would’ve been coming next, the front door opened and Khaled appeared, carrying what looked like half the botanical inventory of the Midwest.
Flowers of different colors, shapes, and sizes spilled from his arms, not any sort of bouquet I’d ever seen before. It appeared haphazard and mismatched, but it was beautiful precisely for that reason.
Gabrielle smiled when he walked toward her. “You’re home. Did you have a successful morning?”
“We did.” He crossed the room and handed her the enormous arrangement with obvious affection on his features. “For you.”
She brought her hand to her chest, her face breaking into a wide grin as she accepted it. “You’re letting me have your research? Bless you. I love it. It smells gorgeous.”
Standing up, presumably to go find a vase, she smiled at someone behind me and lifted the arrangement slightly. “Thanks for these, darling. Trust you to find the very best items on offer.”
I spun on my stool to see Deja in the foyer. She must’ve come back with her brother and she walked toward us now, juggling a briefcase, her phone, and several loose slips of paper. After smiling and nodding at Gabrielle, her eyes slid to me and the world seemed to tilt on its axis.
It was absurd, but there was something about her that amazed me almost as much as it terrified me.
Deja Saad, to me, had that same mythical, magical kind of presence as I imagined a Disney princess would in real life, her thick black hair pulled into a simple but sleek ponytail and those golden brown eyes practically glowing.
Her skin was a lighter gold than her eyes, and her cheekbones were high and regal. Even while wearing jeans and a fluffy pink cardigan, she looked like she’d stepped straight out a fairy tale.
And I’m staring again. Wonderful. Smooth, Colin. Real fucking smooth.
Her gaze lingered on mine until I became acutely aware of my own breathing. Then her mouth curved into a soft smirk. Yep. This girl definitely knows what she does to me.
When my sister pushed back her chair, Deja finally shifted her attention to Jane and Ashanti and I snapped out of the trance she’d catapulted me into.
I picked up my tea so I wouldn’t look like a complete idiot, but even sipping casually while the conversation continued around me was a surprisingly difficult task.
“Alex would like to have everyone on the yacht for dinner before Khaled leaves tomorrow,” Jane was saying when I finally managed to tune back in. “Are you free this evening?”
Khaled arched an eyebrow at her. “I thought he said something about his yacht being in the Mediterranean? We talked about potentially meeting up with you on our coastline sometime next year.”
My sister gave him a sheepish smile. “Yeah, but he has one locally too. Come on. What do you say? It’ll be a sunset cruise with dinner and the views of the city are spectacular from the water. You have to come.”
“We’d love to,” Ashanti said after exchanging a look with Khaled. “Just let us know what time we have to be where, and we’ll meet you there.”
“Perfect.” Jane smiled and glanced down at her watch, then sighed and shot her friend an apologetic grimace. “Colin and I should get going back to the office, but it was great to see you. We’ll talk more tonight.”
“Thanks for popping in,” Ashanti said, walking us out after we’d said our goodbyes.
Naturally, it took another ten minutes of chatting before Jane finally turned over her engine, but the moment we were on our way, I found myself struggling not to keep thinking about those golden brown eyes and what they did to me.
Eventually, I turned to my sister, knowing from my experience after the dinner party that I’d keep obsessing over my reaction to Deja if I didn’t distract myself. “Have you heard back from the lawyers about the return of our trust funds yet?”
One of the fun consequences of our father being arrested and jailed for fraud was having all his assets seized—our trust funds along with the rest of it.
As the only one of us who’d already been old enough to have hers transferred into her name by the time it’d happened, Jane had kept us afloat for years with her own money.
The lawyers had been working on having the rest of our trust funds released to us since we were all now old enough to have been entitled to them, but it was slow going. Jane’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, her expression instantly shifting into a mask of annoyance.
“There’s nothing new yet,” she said, sighing as she shook her head. “At this point, I think we need to accept that money is gone. I doubt we’re ever going to see a dime of it.”
“Unless the proceedings against Mallory Foundry are successful,” I said, even though I didn’t know how true that was anymore. “If Dad is let off the hook, they’ve got to return everything they seized.”
“Again, if it’s still there,” Jane said quietly. “It’s been years, Colin. I’m not hopeful.”
I slumped back in my seat, hating to hear any of this said out loud. Even if I knew she was right.
Our trust funds as well as Mom and Dad’s other assets had been tied up for years now, frozen and endlessly examined by investigators, cops, and anyone else with a professional interest in the case.
Every few months, there was an update, but it never amounted to anything. Especially since Mallory had gotten off scot-free at first.
Even after all these years, that name still had the power to fuck up my day. If it hadn’t been for that woman, our father never would’ve gotten caught up in any of the stuff he’d been accused of.
As far as Jane and I were concerned, he’d been jailed for being an idiot who’d let his pretty, young mistress ruin his life and his finances. The official story was that he’d committed fraud and a whole host of other white-collar offenses, but the truth was considerably messier.
I wasn’t so na?ve as to believe that the man had been perfect.
He was far from it, in fact. He’d detonated his marriage, publicly embarrassed his family, and made a series of spectacularly stupid decisions that still affected all of us even now, so many years later, but I doubted he’d committed criminal fraud on the scale he’d been accused of.
For all his many faults, he’d always been a sharp, careful businessman. Skirting taxes and entering into shady business deals wasn’t his character, but Mallory? She’d left the States immediately, and I truly believed she’d done it for a reason.
As his assistant, she’d had access to his devices and he’d trusted her enough to fuck her. Repeatedly. I had no doubt he’d shared more than just bodily fluids with the woman who’d wrecked our family.
“Her trial is coming up,” Jane said after a few minutes of both of us being lost in thought. “I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t have any idea how far this will go either.”
“Neither do I.”
Over the years, the uncertainty had become its own burden.
We’d been left waiting for a definitive conclusion or some kind of explanation as to how she’d done it or whether we’d been walking around with false hope for so long.
Our entire family was stuck in limbo, but at least she’d been arrested and there was an actual trial date now.
It had taken us five years after Dad’s incarceration to even get the wheels of justice turning on that front. Eventually, it’d only been after she’d come back to the States and confronted Alex that anyone had even taken our suspicions seriously.
I let out a slow, long breath and reached over to squeeze Jane’s arm. “We’re still in a much better place than we were five years ago. Even if we lose the trusts, we’ll be okay.”
Jane’s expression tightened. “You’re okay, but our brothers might not be. Isaac and Ryan are drowning in student loans. We might’ve been able to secure money for Holden and Wyatt, but they were still supposed to be protected by those funds. Now, they’re on their own and so are you.”
“Yeah.”
There wasn’t much else I could say. Holden and Wyatt, being younger, had been somewhat protected from the fallout.
By the time Wyatt had to go off to college, Alex had already entered our lives and he’d insisted on taking some of the financial burden off Jane’s shoulders—as much as she would allow him to, anyway.
Scholarships, Alex, and the fact that Isaac and Ryan had been further along in their studies had saved our asses with Holden, but even though the other two had since graduated and were working for Thayer Steelworks now, they refused to let us pay off their loans.
Eventually, I sighed and turned back to the window. “We’ll figure it out.”
Jane hummed, but I wasn’t sure if she believed me. I wasn’t sure I believed myself either. For most of my adult life, this situation had followed me like a gray cloud I couldn’t outrun, every success overshadowed by the scandal.
There was constant effort involved to convince people that the Thayer name meant something more than the worst thing our father had ever done. We’d clawed our way back from the brink, but there were some people in some circles that still didn’t trust us.
Our association with the Westwoods had helped, but the scars remained. If I was being completely honest with myself, that was one of the biggest reasons I still wasn’t married yet.
Somewhere deep down inside, it just felt like I needed to clean up the past before I could build a future.
I would never admit that out loud, though.
Because even if I met someone and even if I loved her, especially if I loved her, I would never be able to bring her into a family still being chased by the demons that refused to be buried in the past.