Finally, what felt like hours later, the cab stopped under the shadow of a large mansion buried in snow. It wasn’t mine. Alex’s architecture was more tasteful, but it was close to my family’s place.
“Well, it was nice meeting you, whoever you are,” Alex said, handing the driver several hundred-dollar bills—plural—and nodded toward me. “Take the boss home, Rudy. Keep the change. Thanks for getting us here safely.”
Rudy? When did he get the driver’s name?
Without any ceremony about it, he opened the door and vanished into the storm, instantly swallowed up by wind, snow, and the mysterious castle he lived in, and I stared at the space where he’d been.
I felt a strange longing for him to return, or at least to have gotten his number, but the cab rolled forward and I sighed. It was probably better this way. I didn’t even have time for a battery-operated boyfriend these days.
Getting a real one would be an absolute disaster.
CHAPTER 2
ALEX
Ishrugged out of my overcoat and handed it to a member of staff before I made my way to the drawing room of my father’s cavernous mansion. The scent of leather, firewood, and the faint metallic tang of generational expectations wafted through the air of my family home, almost overpowering the memories of the strikingly beautiful woman I’d just met.
It wasn’t often someone really grabbed my attention just because of their appearance, but she really had been something else entirely.
“Shocking,” Nate said when I walked into the drawing room, cutting off my thoughts of her. “You’re early.”
I blinked the world back into focus, seeing Nate already nursing a scotch while Will, one of the twins, was sprawled across a sofa, flipping through something on his phone.
“It was a slow day,” I replied, loosening my tie. “Try not to sound too surprised. It has been known to happen on occasion.”
Fridays were light by design. Technically, it was only a half-day for me, though it was really only a retreat from the office to deal with the endless responsibilities of being human more than actual time off.
Tonight, that meant an impromptu dinner with my brothers and my father, who had been shockingly cool for the last few months. Nate, however, snorted through a laugh and then rose to pour me a drink.
“On occasion? Like what? Give me one example of a time when, in the last year, you were early to anything.”
“Fuck,” I muttered when absolutely nothing came to mind. “You might have me there.”
He smirked. “Exactly.”
As he strode over to the bar in the corner, I dropped down on the couch opposite Will, who looked up and sent me a bored grin. “Any idea if today is the day things go back to normal?”
I laughed. “You mean Dad threatening us or picking a fight? I don’t know, but I kind of wish it would just happen already.”
These last holidays had even come and gone without anyone getting disowned, stabbed, or thrown off the roof. Metaphorically speaking, of course. But the point was that Dad hadn’t once tried to strongarm us into anything by using our inheritances against us.
Theo, our youngest brother, had brought Zach’s secretary—who was also his very obvious crush—to our Christmas Eve dinner just to get under Zach’s skin, but that had been about the worst of it.A real fucking feat, if you know this family.
Even Charlotte and Trent had breezed through before jetting back to Texas, where snow was apparently rare. January, as always, had meant a return to business as usual, and while I’d actually looked forward to it, for the first time in my tenure as CEO, things felt strangely settled. Calm. Too calm.
God help me, but I think I’m actually bored. That always gets me into trouble.
And my father had noticed, but he still hadn’t brought up marriage again despite obviously knowing I finally had a minute for something other than work every now and then. To mymind, that could only mean one of two things—either he’d finally dropped the subject or he was planning something.
If there was anything more dangerous than my father talking about arranged marriages, it was my fathernottalking about arranged marriages. Frankly, I didn’t love the odds.
Zach arrived a few minutes later, his hair mussed from the wind and his coat dusted with snow. He kicked off his boots with all the grace of a toddler and headed straight torward the bar. “Does anyone know if Aunt CC body-snatched Dad with this ‘family dinners on a Friday night’ bullshit?”
“Bad day?” I asked when he blew past me. “It’s not bullshit, per se. It’s just weird.”
“Exactly,” he said flatly. “My day was fine, but my evening is going to involve buying a snowmobile just to get home.”
“That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable idea today,” I said.
