“I’m not your baby.” Her voice is hollow, as if she’s withdrawn so far into herself even her words are a mere echo. “But fine. Tell me.”
“We will.” Meeting Ford’s gaze over her head, I smile. “But first we need hot chocolate.”
Josie
I’m still not convinced this isn’t all a dream, or maybe a very vivid hallucination that’s going to end up with me in a mentalhospital for the rest of my natural life, but somehow I find myself sitting at a table with seven ghosts and a complete stranger.
The stranger—Lanie, as she was introduced to me—is the one sticking point. I read somewhere that you can’t dream a face you’ve never seen, and I would swear I’ve never seen hers. Maybe I have, and I just don’t remember, but the more I look at her the more certain I am that she is, indeed, a complete stranger.
If she is, and if what I read is true, then this isn’t a dream or a hallucination.
And I’m not sure if it’s being crazy or sane that terrifies me the most.
Perhaps the most bizarre part of this possible dream-slash-hallucination is the hot chocolate. Not only is it hands down the most delicious hot chocolate I’ve ever had in my life, there’s something about watching a group of burly men in flannel sipping cups of hot cocoa piled high with marshmallows as if it’s the most natural thing in the world that my brain simply refuses to acknowledge.
“I know this has been a huge shock for you,” Adrian—Axel now—begins, his expression apologetic. “And we’re all so very sorry for the pain we put you through. If we could have done anything differently…”
He trails off and Lanie leans into him, a move so sweetly supportive it brings tears to my eyes. Almost absentmindedly, he turns his head to press a kiss to her hair as Bennett—Bram, god this is confusing as fuck—picks up the thread.
“How much do you know about the night we died?”
I have to swallow hard three times before the words come. “Not much. A rival family attacked your home, killed you all. Your uncle vowed revenge, but I don’t know if he ever got it. He wouldn’t talk to me or my parents about your family, no matterhow hard we tried. And after the house sold, we never saw him again.”
“That lying bastard.” Venom drips from Gray’s voice. At least her new name is easy to remember, as it’s relatively close to her old name. “It wasn’t a rival family. It was him.”
Shock robs me of the ability to speak, to breathe. “What? No.No. He loved you. He was devastated when you died.”
“No, Jo. He was just a really good fucking actor.” Across the table, the man I once knew as Everett Kincaid, the boy who always had a smile for everyone he met, glowers at me. He’s Elias now, and every trace of the boy I knew has been stripped away, leaving nothing but a bitter, prickly shell behind.
“He came for us in the middle of the night.” Seemingly recovered, Axel continues the story. “The gunfire woke us up. I’ll spare you the gorier details, but Gray found our parents first. I had to drag her away from their bodies. Somehow, we managed to escape without any of us being seen or getting shot. Our parents kept enough money in their safe to keep us going for a few months, so that’s what we did. We crisscrossed our way across the country, picking up little odd jobs here and there to refill the coffers. Eventually we landed here and we built a life for ourselves. Built an empire of wood, though that’s mostly thanks to Gray. She was determined we wouldn’t just survive but thrive, and we have, because of her.”
“Because of us,” Gray says, her voice firm if hoarse. “What we have isn’t because of just one of us. We all played a part in it. Though if we’re being honest we wouldn’t have half of what we do if it weren’t for Maxwell Stone.”
The name rings a bell somewhere in the back of my mind. “Wait. Like, the world’s most eligible billionaire, Maxwell Stone? What does he have to do with any of this?”
Surprisingly, a ghost of a smile stretches Gray’s lips. “He found us. Not because he was looking for the Kincaids, butbecause he was looking for people with very… specific interests. He’d apparently run into Colt?—”
“Stop. Who’s Colt?”
To our right, the man I knew as Callum waves. His hair is cut slightly differently from his twin’s, but for the most part they are still nearly identical, down to the tattoo on their right arms. “That would be me. We kept it alphabetical to simplify things and to honor our mom.”
Grief slams into my chest. “I see.” I want to tell them how sorry I am, how much I miss their mom every fucking day, but the words stick in my throat.
After a brief silence, Gray clears her throat and continues. “As I was saying, Colt and Maxwell met at some conference in Vegas and they hit it off, had a few drinks, and Colt confessed that he was a Daddy looking for a Little girl, but he couldn’t imagine bringing one into our world. And, well, Maxwell took it from there. Invested in our business, paid us a ridiculous amount of money to provide the lumber for the community he was building on a small island in the Atlantic. Once we confided in him who we really were, he vowed to keep us and our identities safe. Which he has, without fail. We owe him our lives.”
My head is spinning, and I’m desperate for some tiny bit of normalcy to cling to, so I sip my hot chocolate again, letting the sweet liquid soothe my nerves as much as possible. “You all understand how absolutely insane this all sounds, right?”
“We do,” Bram assures me, his expression somber. “And we understand it’s going to take some getting used to. Not just us being alive, but our… lifestyle, as it were.”
“What about your lifestyle?”
He shares a look with his siblings, who all nod in turn as if giving their blessing for him to continue and a chill creeps up my spine. “Colt isn’t the only Daddy of the group. We’veall been looking for Little girls of our own, even Gray, and we agreed long ago that after…” He swallows hard and blinks, giving me the impression he’s fighting back tears I can’t see. “After what happened to our parents, we decided we didn’t want to be separated. That we would live together, protecting each other, supporting each other in every possible way. So, for instance, while Lanie is Axel’s Little girl, we all act as her aunt and uncles, taking care of her, disciplining her when necessary.”
In light of finding them all alive and well after twenty years of believing they were dead, this should be the least shocking revelation of all. And yet I can only stare, dumbfounded, as my brain tries to come to grips with what he’s telling me. “When you saydiscipline, do you mean…”
“Yes, baby. When Lanie is naughty, she gets spanked on her bare bottom just like you used to.”
Jealousy curdles in my gut. Which is absolutely ridiculous because I haven’t had a claim on the man beside me in twenty years. And yet, there it is, churning and gnawing at me as I imagine another woman over his knee while he spanks her bare ass and tells her what a naughty girl she’s been.
