“You can’t love that.”
He scoffed. “I really fucking don’t, but someone’s got to do it and if it has to fall on anyone’s shoulders, I’d rather it be mine.”
“Spoken like a true martyr.”
He rolled his eyes at me, silent for a beat before he dipped his head toward his son. “If it wasn’t for him, for all of them, I’d have saidscrew it, let’s not do it, but I can’t. The way we’ve done things for decades has brought us to where we are now. Changing it up is a risk I’m not willing to take, especially not when Cam, Emma, and Little J will have to live with the consequences of my decisions.”
I thought it over for a minute, really actually trying to put myself in his shoes for a change. For well over a century, the Westwood family and the company we’d started had been going from strength to strength. While our relatives overseas couldn’t really say the same thing, we’d remained rock solid for all these years.
The company flourished from generation to generation and so did our personal wealth. All of which, according to our fathers, at least, could be attributed to the fact that we stuck to tradition and focused on protecting what we had before we turned to building on it.
While I hadn’t always agreed with all of it, evenIcouldn’t deny that the recipe had clearly worked so far. We were all extremely fortunate and it was because Alex, and our fathers before him, and theirs before them, had hunkered down and done what they’d had to do.
It couldn’t be an easy burden to carry and honestly, if I was in Alex’s shoes, having to think about my little niece and nephews’ future, I wasn’t sure I’d have had the balls to gamble either.
“Jacque says it’s over between us,” I heard myself say before I’d even really decided to do it. “She thinks we can’t go any further than we already have.”
Alex was quiet for another second before he looked at me again. “What do you think?”
“I think she’s wrong, but she doesn’t see a future with me.” I exhaled a long, slow breath, fighting the wince that wanted to come along with admitting all of this out loud. “She’s not convinced that I won’t get bored with her once I finally realize that she apparently doesn’t have anything to offer the family.”
“Will you? Get bored, I mean.”
I shot him a look. “Really?”
“It’s a fair question.”
“No, it’s a stupid question that you’ve asked me before.”
“If it was so stupid, you’d have answered it by now.”
I grunted, but he wasn’t wrong. “Would I normally come on a walk with you and voluntarily spill my guts?”
“No.” He called Cam back when he started running too far ahead of us, waiting for him to circle back before looking at me again. “What’s your point?”
“That I’m not going to get bored or just move on. I know exactly what she brings to the table and I also know that it’s not Thayer Steelworks or even the Hinds account like Kate, but none of that matters to me.”
“You just want her,” he concluded after studying me for a second. “I get that, but have you told her?”
“Yep. Unfortunately, she doesn’t believe me.”
Cameron suddenly changed direction and took off like a small, chaotic comet across the park. We rushed after him, but when he paused to inspect something in the grass, Alex sat down on a nearby bench and motioned for me to join him.
“What are you going to do about it?” he said after I’d planted my ass on the cold metal beside him. “You do have a plan, right?”
“That’s another reason why I agreed to come here with you today,” I admitted. “With her out of the picture, I know the plan for the Gala has probably changed, so I figured I’d better find out where that leaves us for now.”
“You mean where it leaves Zach?”
I nodded. “As much as I want to go rogue and just go after her, I can’t unless I know he won’t be the one paying the price for it.”
“That’s surprisingly responsible of you.” Alex’s mouth twitched into a sort of smile, sort of grimace. “Whatever you choose to do, it’s on you, Jess.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means that Jane told me to lay off.” He chuckled, his head shaking before he leaned back on the bench and spread his armsout on the backrest like this was his personal kingdom. “Her exact words were to ‘stop interfering and let things happen as they will.’”
My eyebrows shot up. “That must’ve been painful for you to hear.”
