Prologue #2
“He laid down the law,” Soren said with a gruff laugh. “Told us we’d been invited to Thanksgiving only to help him decide who would inherit the family business. We’d always assumed it would be divided among the three of us, so you can imagine our surprise when he suddenly changed the game.”
“Not all of us wanted it,” Greyson said, his stare turning pointedly toward his brother.
Soren scoffed. “How can you say that?”
“Because if you wanted it, you’d have it. Hawthorne men get what they want. And they own their mistakes.”
“Fuck off.” Ice rattled in Soren’s glass. “It was never about who wanted it most.”
“Wasn’t it?”
Logan stretched out his legs on the ottoman, mimicking Greyson’s radiated confidence. “As his sons, we all deserved an equal share.”
Soren’s eyes narrowed on his brothers. “But we’re not talking about the company, are we?”
Together, they all turned to her, each wielding that penetrating Hawthorne stare. “Don’t look at me! I had nothing to do with this.”
“Wren,” Soren smiled wickedly, “you had everything to do with it. You were the true prize.”
She rolled her eyes. “No, I wasn’t. It was always about the company. I was just a means to an end.”
Logan laughed, the sound a little lighter now. “Dad wanted one last hurrah—one last chance to pit us against each other—and he got his wish, just not the way he expected.”
“I was never part of Magnus’s plans.”
“But you were always part of ours.”
“Take it easy.” The low warning was enough to defuse any flirtation sizzling in the air.
The room fell silent. Even the crackling fire seemed to quiet as Greyson met his youngest brother’s stare. “You never showed any interest in running the company back then, so stop acting like you did.”
“How the hell would you know what I wanted? All you cared about was keeping to yourself in that secluded cabin of yours, chopping wood at all hours of the day and night.”
“All right, Logan, keep it civil.”
“Grey’s right,” Soren agreed. “You never said anything about wanting it until Dad said you couldn’t have it.
On paper, the fishery might look good, but you never cared about the actual work that went into managing the fleet or making sure the captains had everything they needed to keep the crews safe.
You were too impatient to sit through quality control meetings, discuss logistics for managing the supply chain, or build relationships with our overseas buyers. ”
“Because I was never given the chance.”
“Bullshit.”
“Here we go,” Greyson mumbled, rolling his eyes.
“Boys!” Wren snapped, slapping her hands against the fur blanket covering her lap. The muffled sound didn’t have quite the effect she wanted, but it got their attention. “We were reminiscing, not having an argument. Stay on topic, or I’m going to bed.”
“Maybe we all wanted the prize,” Soren admitted, meeting her stare from the shadows. “At least on some level.”
Greyson and Logan glared at Soren. Wren dropped her gaze to the contents of her mug, afraid to meet any of their stares in that moment.
“Dad did what he did best,” Logan said, disrupting the tension. “He reminded us how much we disappointed him and leveraged his stingy affection to create a competition between us.”
“Not all of us were starved for his affection, Logan.”
“Shut up, Grey. I guess it was just about the money for you then.”
“Watch it.”
Wisely, Logan withdrew his challenging words and continued with the story. “What choice did we have? We either grew up, settled down, and acted like responsible adults, or he was selling off the company and giving the profits to the board and shareholders.”
“He loved being a prick.” Soren sipped his bourbon and stared into the fire.
“Maybe his actions weren’t malicious at all. Maybe this was his way of making sure you boys would be okay in the end.”
“There she goes, romanticizing things again,” Soren grumbled. “Sometimes, people are just shitty, Wren.”
She adjusted her blanket. “Everything in nature has duality, Soren. Even Magnus Hawthorne. If he could feel anger, he could feel peace. And if he was capable of happiness, he also knew sadness. I know for a fact your father loved you.”
“You guys ever see Dad happy?” Soren joked, and his brothers chuckled.
“Couldn’t even tell you what his laugh sounded like.”
“Did Dad even have teeth?”
They all chuckled, but then the mood sobered as they each recalled a personal memory with Magnus that—despite his gruff and direct manner—brought a soft smile to their faces.
“He laid down the law before we’d even digested our Thanksgiving turkey,” Soren recalled, his gaze unfocused as he seemed to relive the whirlwind of the past few months. “The doctors gave him weeks, and he wasted no time meeting with his attorney to permanently change the will.”
“It was a pointless clause,” Logan grumbled. “How did he expect any of us to actually change our lives that much before Christmas? His expectations were always unrealistic.”
A strange mixture of guilt and relief flooded Wren as she kept her gaze down. That holiday clause was where she came in.
Magnus had changed his will just before the holidays to include a section stating that the lion’s Hawthorne Fishery of the family business would be inherited by the son who married first. None of the men had been thinking about marriage until Magnus dropped that bomb.
He’d wanted a reaction, and he’d gotten one.
Hawthorne Fishery wasn’t just some rinky-dink, small-town operation.
It was a billion-dollar, global-scale company with astronomical expenses and hundreds of vessels in each fleet built to travel deep international waters.
There were inland processing plant stations off the coast, and the board wielded government-level influence when it came to ocean-related legislation and the country’s environmental laws.
There was an entire world of capitalism out at sea, and the Hawthornes were one of the oldest family-run fisheries still in existence.
The boys had a right to be disgruntled. It wasn’t just Magnus’s legacy—it was their birthright.
The thought that the company could have been divided into shares and sold to the highest bidder or passed down to the board was simply unthinkable.
Hawthorne Fishery needed to stay in the Hawthorne family.
“As always, Dad got his way.”
Like a magnet, she felt Logan’s dark stare pulling at her senses.
Wren lifted her eyes and met cold obsidian.
The year had changed him in ways she was still trying to figure out.
Gone was the sweet companion she’d grown up alongside, and in his place sat a cold-hearted man desperate to hide all the gentle qualities he now believed made him weak.
He held her stare. “Didn’t he, Wren?”
Logan had a gift for unnerving others with that penetrating glare, but she’d learned how to deflect it long ago. Despite the way her breath grew shallow, she held her body perfectly still. “I suppose he did. In a way.”
Logan’s cold stare slowly warmed when he smiled at her. With a past as long as theirs, every glance carried language outsiders couldn’t decipher. Her tangled history with the Hawthornes harbored more secrets than anyone would guess, and their silence spoke volumes.
When the four of them were together, it was impossible not to feel the pull of nostalgia. Their shared past could be as overwhelming as their masculine intensity.
“Don’t give me that look.” She turned back to Soren. “Finish the story.”
Soren sighed and sipped his bourbon, shifting to get more comfortable in his seat. “So he dropped the bomb on us, and we all knew he meant business. None of us woke up that morning with a single thought about marriage, but that all changed when we understood what was at stake.”
“It’s a big company,” she agreed, and they all chuckled.
“Yeah, that’s what this was about.”
Her cheeks flushed. She couldn’t fathom a reality where she wielded that much influence over men as unapproachable as the Hawthorne brothers. They might not intimidate her as much as they did outsiders, but that came with a lifetime of knowing each other.
Despite playing together in diapers when they were young, she still recognized the potent breed they were. She preferred to believe their actions were motivated by money, but when she found herself at the center of their family feud, she learned there was more to the story. Much more.
Logan chuckled. “There was no way you were beating me to her.”
“I guess not when you stole my fucking keys.”
“I didn’t steal them. I relocated them into a snowbank.”
“Prick.” Soren reclined in the wooden rocker and stretched out his legs. “We all had the same thought. If we had to pick a wife in a pinch, there was only one choice.”
All eyes again turned on her, and her cheeks burned. “Okay, take it down a notch.” The testosterone radiating from the three of them was thinning the air and making it hard to breathe.
They smirked with Neanderthal-like male satisfaction.
“So Logan steals my keys, leaving me with whatever was left in Dad’s garage. I grabbed the first set I could find—“
“To the snowmobile.”
“Correct. Next thing you know, I’m blasting through the woods—without proper gear—in my socks—getting blinded by the snow.” He shot his brother a pointed look. “I could have died.”
“Don’t be such a drama queen.” Logan rolled his eyes. “The whole time I was driving, he wouldn’t shut up on the two-way radio. It couldn’t have been that treacherous if you had the ability to use the radio.”
“Talking shit was my only defense! You were in a truck!”
Logan snickered. “And I got to her first.”
“Which brings us back to where I left off.” Wren set her mug aside and sat up. “I was carrying in my groceries—swarmed by cats—when you two maniacs barreled in like a landslide and almost killed me.”
“Now who’s being dramatic?”
“My whole life flashed before my eyes!”
“And like I said, that’s not where the story starts.”
She frowned at Logan. “If not there, then when?”
“You have to go back. Way back, to when we were kids.”
“He’s right,” Greyson agreed, watching her with that quiet attention that missed nothing.
Wren frowned, oddly feeling as if they harbored secrets that—for once—didn’t include her. “How far back?”
Soren shrugged. “Probably to the Christmas after Mom died.”
The room grew silent as it usually did at the mention of Sable Hawthorne. As always, any reference to their mother reminded Wren of her own.
Haven Wilde and Sable Hawthorne had been lifelong best friends.
Losing them at the same time was a sort of poetic tragedy that further sealed the bond she shared with Greyson, Soren, and Logan.
Their mothers’ connection had been stronger than marriage.
The expectation that the four of them remain friends had been instilled from birth.
Therefore, Wren’s life had always been entangled with the untouchable Hawthorne brothers—even when she’d tried her best to detach herself.
As she stared at the lapping flames in the hearth, she tried to recall the fading memory of her mother’s hair.
It had been blonde, like hers, but with fiery copper undertones.
The crackling wood put her in a trance as she fixated on the flames, searching for the exact shade of red she sometimes glimpsed in her mother’s highlights when she stood in the sunshine.
A gentle hand closed around her shoulder, startling her. She closed her eyes, able to recognize and differentiate each brother’s touch. The grief in her chest instantly eased as she pressed her cheek to his familiar fingers and sighed.
Their silence spoke volumes. After their mothers passed away, birthdays, holidays, and ordinary Mondays were never the same. Nothing was. They’d somehow managed to stick together.
The Christmas Magnus died was, by far, one of the most challenging, but, as always, the challenges they faced together only made them closer in the end. And, what was one of their hardest holidays, somehow also ended up being one of the most memorable and cherished.
“Fine,” she eventually conceded. “If that’s not where the story starts, then you tell it from the beginning.”
The men shared a knowing grin. “For that, we’re going to need a refill and another log on the fire.”