Destroyed Destiny (Crowne Point 4)

“Every time you eat a sucker, any time you watch me eat one, know I’m thinking of fucking you.” He cupped me and I swallowed air. “Of eating your cunt.” He slid one finger inside me, and out too quickly. “But I won’t.”

Forty-One

GRAY

The months passed by sluggish. February into March, and March into May. Every day it seemed like my mother and Lynette came up with a new fucking way to celebrate Lottie’s pregnancy. Today

it was the ephemeral cherry blossoms in her garden—and us, our budding newborn.

Snitch was eight and a half months pregnant, and just as fucking stubborn. She was determined for us to have a happily ever—but at what fucking cost?

Something came in the mail for her this morning, something I’d barely intercepted before it got to my mother. I had no fucking idea how to get it to her, or how to help her.

Helpless.

Again.

I was getting real fucking tired of being helpless.

In a few weeks, she would give birth. Story could only wear flowing dresses because she’d grown so big. Every fucking day it was a lesson in self-control not to pull her against my chest, to hug and kiss her. Like today, as she stood beneath the silky petals, all I wanted to do was sit her down and rub her swollen ankles.

Instead, I stood next to my mother.

“Why are they back?” My mother exclaimed, pulling my attention from Story. She pressed a hand to her chest, staring at Charles, Keller, and Jo on spring break and standing beneath a cherry tree, as though they were locusts descending on her crops. “Their mother is dead. What reason do they have to be here?”

“Maybe they want to know why their mother is dead.”

That their mother was murdered. By my grandfather, maybe because she was about to tell me something important.

“What are you implying, Grayson?”

“Nothing, of course. I’m sure they only wanted to attend the shower.”

She made a sound in her throat. “Them and everyone else in the world.” She lifted her chin, trying to get a better look at them.

“You could always go and ask them,” I said.

“Why don’t you go ask them?” she countered.

For the same fucking reason you won’t.

My grandfather was in Switzerland, as far as I knew, and everything was back to normal. Except, Josephine was still in the fucking ground, those three kids’ presence a jarring reminder that everything was not normal.

My mother made a noise in her throat, turning away from them as if mortally disgraced. “Your wife is alone.”

Lottie was supposed to be sat on a silky, turquoise chaise beneath a cherry blossom tree, but she was standing—fawned over by socialites and reporters.

“And?”

My gaze shifted back to Story. She watched me with wide, walnut eyes from beneath pale pink cherry blossoms. Her eyes landed on the sucker stem in my lips, and she shifted, swallowing.

I grinned.

My mother patted me on the shoulder. “You know you really are becoming a lot like your father.”

I paused. There it was, the manipulation I knew so well. I was starting to think my mother had hit her head or something.

“Around the eyes, of course. You’ve always had your father’s eyes.”