Ten Years Ago
Nate
Nick was getting married and I didn’t give a fuck. Our app was topping the charts and I was only getting started. He, on the other hand, wanted to shut down operations for a week to get married to his university sweetheart in the South Island.
“It’s one weekend,” he said, his voice going whiny like when we were kids, “and you can fly right back up here. Two hours on a plane, two days to celebrate, then you’re back. Come on, Nate. You don’t have to be tied to that desk. How about we enjoy some of that money we’re making?”
I let a sneer curl my lip. “Being tied to this desk is why we’re making enough money to obliterate your student loans.”
That slowed him down for a second. “Wait, you paid off my loans?”
“No,” I snorted, leaning back in my office chair. “I made an investment that’ll make more than enough to pay the loans off within the year—starting today. Happy future divorce, brother.”
“You fuckhead.”
He grabbed me up in a hug. I sighed, returned his embrace, then I resumed my seat in front of the three monitors, checking I hadn’t missed anything.
“You’ve got to meet her, Nate. You’ll love her.”
“You love her,” I said, my eyes on the aggregator. “I don’t need to.”
“Everyone needs someone.”
He nudged my shoulder, trying to get me to look up.
I could already hear the sweetness replacing the whininess, and I didn’t want to see it.
To see it would be to succumb to the power Nick still had to bend me to his will with that smile.
Besides, I had a decent situation: Jessica, a smoking hot divorcée with legs for days and a penchant for dominant men outside of the kink scene.
She’d been breaking me in for the last six months, and I didn’t want or need anyone else.
At least, that was true until I heard what Nick said next.
“And Grace is my someone. You’ve got to meet her. Please, man. I’m begging now.”
Grace.
My fingers paused on the keyboard, my eyes flicking up. Nick’s smile hit hard, but it was the name that had me.
“Her name is Grace?”
“We usually call her Graciously, but I’ve been trying to switch to Grace because she prefers it.”
A frisson raced down my back. “Who is ‘we’?”
“Me and her mum. She’s a great lady, so caring and big-hearted. You’ll love her, too.”
I fucking doubt that.
An image filled my mind as I watched the screens, hardly seeing the finance matrix.
Instead, I saw a girl dressed in lace, brown eyes striated with amber, and a mother who showed up before I could steal her.
Nick had talked about someone I variously thought was named Gracie-Lee or else Gracelyn for months now, his eyes going calf-like while I ignored everything he said.
I hadn’t put together the name with the girl in the lace—with Grace.
But suddenly I knew who she was. The mysterious illness he’d mentioned.
The overbearing mother. Even the fact that they met during his time at uni down in the South Island.
I knew precisely who she was, and I knew there was no way I would miss this wedding.
***
The wedding would be a tiny affair. In fact, I was the only family member from our side, and Grace’s mum was the only one from hers.
Our father was too busy fucking his latest wife on a cruise around Samoa to bother coming home, and Nick emphasised that he and Grace would have a proper celebration once she was feeling better. This ceremony was for legal purposes.
“Exactly which legal purposes are you fulfilling by marrying her now?” I asked Nick as our plane prepared for landing.
He turned his attention from the rolling Dunedin hills to focus on me. “There’s an opportunity to get into the townhouse adjacent to her mother’s. The landlady is interested in doing a special rent-to-buy deal for us, and I don’t want to miss out.”
My suspicions went from deep to fathomless. “What does a townhouse have to do with it?”
“We can’t get the deal if we’re not married,” he said, staring out the window, “which makes perfect sense if you think about it.”
“Explain this perfect sense, Nick.”
He turned his eyes to me. “No one in their right mind would do a deal like this for a couple of unmarried twenty-two-year olds, one who dropped out of university late last year, the other who’s in a risky app startup with his uneducated brother.” He sent me a quick grin. “No offence, by the way.”
I didn’t grin back. “So you’re going to marry this girl who’s too sick to finish her degree, whose mother has organised this arrangement, and who’ll keep you down here in the middle of nowhere while I continue growing our business in the North Island on my own?”
Nick gave what he probably thought was a reasonable shrug.
“We both know I can do my bit from anywhere, so yeah—I’ll be staying with Graciously in the South Island.
Consider it a secondary investment of sorts.
I get the ball moving for us on real estate, while you keep things going on the business end. ”
And he gets Grace…
I didn’t say anything else, though I was marshalling myself to approach Grace once we landed. The wedding was scheduled for that afternoon, so I would only have a matter of minutes to get her alone. I wanted to remind her of my promise all those years ago, on that playground—
Or I could just steal her, and finish what I started a decade ago.
The thought was insane and I knew it, but not a day went by that I didn’t think about the girl in the white lace dress.
I’d had girlfriends throughout the years, but I failed to stay interested for longer than a few weeks.
Jessica came along with a glint in her eye and knowledge to pass on, but we weren’t emotionally involved.
I was one on a roster of guys she liked to ‘play’ with, and I had no delusions of anything more in that quarter.
I’d never considered my romantic future seriously—until now.
Now that Nick was closing on the only girl I’d ever felt something for, I realised what I’d suppressed for years: I could only be with Grace.
And my own damn brother was about to marry her.
I considered everything Nick had told me about his fiancée, all the hints that her mother was over-involved, that Grace herself wasn’t taken seriously by the medical system, that she’d been ill on and off for years without any kind of diagnosis or medication beyond psychosomatic syndrome and painkillers.
I realised now, years later, that the relationship with her mother went beyond neglect or misunderstanding—the woman wanted her daughter sick.
If Grace married Nick and lived in a townhouse next to her mother, all of it would continue.
I loved my twin, but I knew him; he would never stand up to someone like Grace’s mother.
Instead, he would keep her in that damn house, with that damn woman.
If Grace were in my care, on the other hand—
I stopped my thinking there.
We left the airport, and I tried not to notice the odd looks Nick kept sending my way.
“What?” I finally demanded.
“You’re really quiet,” he said as we got in his car, ready for the twenty-minute drive into town. “Are you putting together a best man speech?”
“As if a sudden civil union deserves a speech,” I muttered.
He gave a mild chuckle and we headed off. Dread filled me despite my plans. Something told me I was about to lose Grace a second time.