Chapter 9 Cash
CASH
“Remy! You came back!”
She looks … different somehow. Glowing. Even more fucking gorgeous than I remember from the night we spent together in my brother’s guest room.
Her hair is loose over her shoulders, her tank top and jeans cling to her curves, and the blood is pumping around my veins and straight to my throbbing loins.
Which is why it takes me a couple of beats to read the room.
She isn’t smiling. Her mouth opens and shuts like a goldfish, her eyes darting back and forth between me and Bash, her fingers fiddling with the silver pendant around her neck.
Bash is all cold metal and brittle energy. He hasn’t moved since I came in, and I might be biased when it comes to Remy, but I’m getting the distinct impression that he doesn’t want me to interfere.
“What’s going on? What did I miss?”
George Quinn’s smug fucking smile flashes behind my eyes. Surely not. She isn’t mixed up in whatever plans he has for world domination. She can’t be.
“You’re twins.” Her voice barely crosses the room to reach me, and I step forward involuntarily.
Remy steps backwards, the back of her knees colliding with the edge of the sofa. She resembles an animal keeping a predator in sight, no sudden moves, until she’s ready to run for her life.
It dawns on me like a thunderbolt striking me down from above. “I thought you knew.”
She shakes her head. “You never said.” Her eyes are still flitting back and forth between us. “You…” She points to me, her thought process clicking into place behind her eyes. “You said you were stuck here.”
It isn’t what I recall from that night, but I’m not going to deny it. She’s in flight-or-fight mode. One push, and she’ll be falling into a chasm so deep I might never get her back.
“Fran said you were Bash. Bastien. The boss.” She squeezes her eyes closed momentarily.
“Easy mistake to make. Bash was in Ireland on business.”
“So, you’re…?”
“Cassius. Cash for short. Our brothers chose the nicknames when we were kids, and they stuck.”
She shakes her head and then covers her face with both hands.
I glance at my twin brother and I realize that he hasn’t said a word. His lips are pressed together though, fighting to keep the words in, his eyes dark and cold. It’s the calm before the storm. He’s about to blow, and I have no idea why.
Remy lowers her hands. She’s smiling now, but there’s no amusement. “Cash and Bash. Your hair. The scar.” She tilts her head back towards the ceiling and spreads her hands wide. “You even have the same tattoo.”
“How do you know that?”
I’m not normally this dense, but I’ve never met anyone like Remy before. Her presence interferes with normal frequencies, throws everything out of sync, tosses regular thoughts into the air to see where they land.
“Because I met Remy two days later.” Bash’s voice is cold, mechanical. “When she came to my apartment to find a lost pendant.”
“Oh, no, please don’t…” Remy murmurs.
“So, how did she know about the tattoo?” Because I’m still playing catch-up like I just woke from a deep sleep.
“How do you think?” Bash narrows his eyes at me, waiting for the question to land.
Which it does with a gigantic fucking explosion.
“You and Remy?” Bile rises in my throat.
I pace the floor, hands clasped around the back of my neck. No. It didn’t happen. His reaction in the boardroom when Remy’s name was mentioned was off, but I assumed he knew about Remy and me. I never thought…
“No.” I stop pacing and address Remy, not my brother. “I thought…”
Who knows what the fuck I thought. But it certainly didn’t involve my brother sleeping with the woman who crawled under my skin and made herself at home with our first kiss.
“I told you I couldn’t let you walk out of my life.” It sounds lame now, but I meant every goddamned word… and then she slept with my brother.
The ache in my chest is real. Fucking heart-attack real.
“I didn’t know.” Her voice catches on the tears spilling over her bottom lashes. “You’re identical twins.” Remy clutches her stomach as if in pain.
“Everyone knows.”
“Everyone except Remy, apparently,” Bash says.
“Oh no.” Remy shakes her head and her shoulders stiffen. “You’re not putting this all on me.”
“Who else is there?” My brother hasn’t flinched since I barged in on this conversation. He hasn’t moved a muscle. He’s a stone-cold fucking statue, watching her as if she planned the whole scenario.
“Um, you?” Remy blinks the tears back under control. “And him.” She hooks a thumb my way again. “Don’t you communicate by twin telepathy or something? Or did you both have a laugh at my expense?” Her face grows flushed with embarrassment.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I glare at Bash, then turn back to Remy. “It wasn’t like that. I promise you, I haven’t stopped thinking about you since that night in Bash’s apartment. You’re special, Remy. You—”
“Don’t!” she snaps, shutting me down. “You didn’t speak to me again. I thought that you were him. I thought…” She shudders as if it’s too painful to relive. “It doesn’t matter what I thought.”
She steps around the couch and glances at the elevator.
Neither of us tries to stop her. Because while she’s trying to process the discovery that she had sex with us both, I’m still trying to wrap my head around my twin fucking the only woman who has ever stolen my dreams and replaced them with a fantasy that I’ll never grow tired of.
“I had stuff going on.” It sounds like a copout even to me, and I know it’s the truth.
“Don’t even bother.” Remy’s eyes touch mine briefly, and my heart melts.
I cross the room and try to hold her hand, but she backs away from me, keeping her distance. “I wanted to see you, Remy. I thought you felt the same way.”
“I…” She shakes her head again and shrugs. “It’s too late now. Whatever game this is that you’re both playing, I want no part of it.”
“It isn’t a game. You’ve got this all wrong. I didn’t know about Bash, and I sure as fuck wouldn’t share you with him.” The image leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that I’ll never be able to erase.
She looks to Bash for confirmation. He remains silent.
I can’t even begin to imagine how she feels, thinking that we used her, that because we’re twins, we share everything, including our women. I want to scrub this conversation from her mind and start over, and my brother is still standing there, untouched by the whole scenario.
“Tell her, Bash.”
He hesitates like this is something he has to think about. Then, “We’re not the ones playing a game.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Remy beats me to it.
I know exactly what it means, and for the first time, I’m not going to take my brother’s side on this one. “Drop it, Bash.”
Remy’s gaze darts between us again. “No, don’t drop it, Bash.” She’s firm. “I can’t wait to hear what game you think I’m playing.”
“He doesn’t think you’re playing a game.” If I don’t intervene, he’s going to push her away, and I don’t want to hold this against him for the rest of my life. “This isn’t about you, Remy. This is about George Quinn.”
“George?” Frown lines appear between her eyebrows. “What has he got to do with anything?”
“He and his fiancée want a slice of the Murray pie in New York.”
I fill in the blanks on Bash’s behalf. His silence is unnerving me; when it finally morphs into action, it isn’t going to be pretty, and I’m fucked if I’ll stand here and let Remy experience the full force of it.
It’ll only cement the notion in her head that we’re twins with psychopathic tendencies, and we’ll never see her again.
That isn’t what I want. I don’t care what she thinks of me right now; I know that I have unfinished business with Remy Jones.
“But, of course, you already know this,” Bash says coldly.
“With the timing,” I quickly add, “we had to consider the possibility that he was using you to get to us.”
“Using me?” The incredulity in her voice is unmistakable. “I haven’t seen him in eighteen months.”
“Don’t lie to us, Remy.” My brother rubs his jawline, and I pray to God that he’s finding this awkward. I need some proof that he isn’t the hard bastard he’s currently portraying. “You were seen with him before you arrived here this morning.”
Her eyes widen; her mouth forms a round ‘O’. “Have you been following me?”
“Not me personally.” Bash shrugs. “But you must see how it looks.”
“Not really.” Remy is no longer looking at me. This is between her and Bash. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”
“You walk into our lives at the same time as your ex threatens our empire. You introduce yourself to my twin first, and then me, making sure that neither of us knows about the other. And George Quinn has been spotted outside your residence halls and the café where you work. Do you deny it?”
Remy releases a short, sharp bark of breath. “Would it make any difference if I did?” When Bash doesn’t answer, she adds, “That’s what I thought.”
She walks to the elevator, presses the button, and the door glides open. Turning around to face us, she no longer resembles the hunted. Something has shifted with Bash’s accusation.
“Thank you for opening my eyes, Bash, if that’s which twin you are.
For your information, I wouldn’t help George Quinn if he promised me the Rinse on a gold plate.
Or the Titan. Or any other business that your family owns.
You haven’t asked because you’re clearly not interested, but I’ll tell you anyway.
I came here today to tell you that I’m pregnant. With twins. And the babies are yours.”
It’s unclear which one of us she was speaking to, but she steps into the elevator and presses the button to close the doors behind her.
Neither of us moves.
Part of me is proud of her for having the last word. The rest of me is numb, unable to process the bombshell she just dropped on top of our heads.
Remy Jones is pregnant.
Remy Jones is pregnant with twins.
Remy Jones is pregnant with twins, and one of us is the father.