Long hoursand high stress are basically my life as the marketing VP for Aurora Gardens, and I generally thrive in it.
I’m built for it.
I’ve spent much of the past four years questioning everything about the belief system my parents raised me with and whether they would still treat me the same if I were more like Daphne.
What if I hadn’t wanted to go into the family business? What if I’d pushed more boundaries? What if I’d forged a separate life for myself beyond being a Merriweather-Brown working at Aurora Gardens?
And I always circle back to the same answer, that I know to the depths of my soul that I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t have a job that pushed me hard to excel at the highest levels.
That partisme.
But since Daphne was disinherited, I’ve realized that there’s another part of me that’s been starving.
And that’s the part of me that wants to be loved unconditionally, when I fuck up and when I’m having a bad day, when I’m underperforming expectations and when I just feeloff.
The part of me that knows that I need to learn togivethat kind of love if I want toreceiveit too.
I’ve nearly told Lucky who I really am half a dozen times this weekend as he’s been showing me all around Snaggletooth Creek and the surrounding area, telling me stories about his friends and brothers and parents while Decker’s retreated to work on a book that’s on deadline and Jack’s apparently off camping.
I want Lucky to like me for me, not for the persona I’m playing.
But I can’t tell him. Not yet.
Not when Decker still doesn’t trust me—yes, I see the irony—and when I haven’t even met Jack yet.
And all of it has me exhausted by Sunday night.
On top of my fake identity, I generally prefer to live alone with security nearby, not on top of me, so having a cabinmate, even a cabinmate who’s supposedly safe and would be helpful in the event of a situation arising, is complicating the situation, regardless of how he feels about me.
Especially with the living room being his bedroom, and neither of us broaching the subject of one of us moving out iftemporaryisn’t as short-term as I hope it is for Rhys.
I can’t go stay somewhere else without making Lucky and his brothers wonder where I got the money for a hotel or other rental house—my broke-as-hell housekeeper story really sold him to the point that I couldn’t turn down his offer to stay in the cabin and take a job out here, especially when Lucky insisted on paying for my gas money too.
Clearly, I’ll pay them back and then some, whether or not they ultimately agree to go to the Aurora Gardens board of directors with me to prove once and for all that my father and hischeating are a liability for the company and that the board needs to boot him.
And then I’ll amply pay my half brothers back for every bit of their trouble.
But, on the other side of the spectrum, if I decide I can’t trust them, or if there’s some other reason I can’t tell them, I’ll disappear and send cash anonymously.
Either way though, right now I can’t tell the triplets I don’t want to share their cabin with one of their friends.
So I’m being agreeable Sunday night when I leave my room after sneaking a few hours of answering emails from my executive assistant and find Rhys in the kitchen, stirring something that smells so good I almost drool.
The dye streaks are still on his face, even if they’ve faded to the kind of lavender-blue that makes it look like he has thin skin showing off odd veins.
While he hasn’t said a word about his stomach, I’ve seen him wince a few times, like when he got off the barstool at the coffee shop yesterday, so I think I probably left a mark there too.
“Looked at your van,” he says. “Drive belt’s shot. Jack’s on his way with a new one and the tools to replace it.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
He grunts.
I open my mouth, then close it.
Margot Merriweather-Brown would just buy a new car. Or tell my staff to do it, except my staff is so good that I never know when there are car troubles.
Or possibly even when I get a new car. They’re functional tools to me, not hobbies, so my staff handles making sure there’s one available wherever I am, with a driver in the city or a full tank of gas when I arrive at one of my vacation homes—if it’s a home in a location where I want to drive myself around.
