I squeezed my eyes shut so I didn’t cry. “It feels strange to know that account is real and I can touch it now.”
In fact, I didn’t want to touch it. I wanted to slide the card back to him and run away, because although, technically speaking, I’d always had the money, there was something to be said for knowing I could walk up to an ATM and withdraw it.
“And, without Dad having control—and I know you just had an interview, but hear me out—there’s a position for you in the company. When you turn thirty, we’ll both be equal owners. Mom thought everything through.”
“I think I’m going to throw up.”
“It’s a lot to throw at you. I’m sorry.” Worry creased his forehead. “But I wanted you to have all your options available to you.”
I blinked a few times. “I have a question.”
“Yes?”
“Does this mean I have my brother back?”
A smile spread slowly across his face. “You never really lost me, Perrie. I was always here.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Perrie
“Okay, so, she has no idea I was meeting with you,” I tell Damien when he joins me at my front door.
If I thought Adrian’s unmarked cop car looked out of place in my neighborhood, I was not prepared for the sight of Damien’s perfectly-valeted, super-expensive BMW parked behind my car.
Talk about a diamond in the rough.
“I can’t believe this is where you’ve been living.” He followed me inside the house. “This is…”
“A million miles away from the life we grew up in? Yeah. That’s exactly what Benedict wanted. This wasn’t where I chose to live.” I dropped my purse at the bottom of the stairs. “I’m gonna change. Feel free to go sit down.”
I darted up the stairs—as quick as you can dart in heels—and disappeared out of his view before he could mention anything about my house.
Anything else, that was.
I was almost ashamed he was here. That my brother, who had never known anything but wild wealth, was standing in my run-down neighborhood. He was a fish out of water. Hell—he was a shark in the middle of the continental United States.
I sighed and pulled a pair of jeans out of my drawers, plus a slogan tank that proclaimed I would “run for wine.” White Converse completed that outfit, and once I was changed, I pulled my hair into a loose twist on top of my head, the hairband snapping against my fingers as I twisted it.
A glance in the mirror told me I needed to touch up my make-up, no doubt thanks to my crying session earlier.
How could I not cry?
Sometimes that was the best way to say hello. At least…that was the story I planned to stick with.
I ran back downstairs and almost ran into the back of Damien. “Whoa, sorry. Are you being nosy?”
He turned with a grin. “That obvious?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Shit. You look just like Mom when you do that.”
I frowned. “I do?”
“Yeah. You know when we’d do something that annoyed Dad, or when we lied that it definitely wasn’t us who almost burned down the kitchen making Pop Tarts? The look she gave us then.”
I flashed back to the last time he mentioned. Neither of us had been particularly adept in the kitchen as kids, so when we were home alone and needed to eat, Pop Tarts were all we decided we could cook.
Well… Let’s just say that my genius brother had no idea that the numbers on the toaster correlated to the minutes the Tart would be cooking, and it wasn’t exactly pretty.
There was an explosion.
Benedict was furious, but Mom was amused. Hence the eyebrow.
I snorted at the realization he was right. God, it’d been so long, but I could still remember the way she pushed past a raging Benedict, stepped in front of him, surveyed the mess of the kitchen with her dark eyes, and raised one perfectly-shaped eyebrow at the pair of us.
“I’ll remember that piece of information,” I said, picking my purse back up. “You ready to go?”
“Sure.” He motioned for me to lead him out.
I did so, locking the door behind him. I unlocked my car, but he placed his hand on my arm.
“Let’s take mine. I’ll bring you home when we’re done.”
“I need Lola’s seat.” I pulled the seat out and Damien opened the back door of his BMW for me to fit it. Minutes later, we were pulling out of the drive and I was giving him Adrian’s address.
“So, Adrian Potter. He arrested you?”
I side-eyed him. “Really? We’re going there already?”
Damien shrugged a careless shoulder. “I’m only asking. Despite your previous insistence that I don’t.”
Goddamn it. I wasn’t going to get out of this.
“It’s complicated,” I started. “I mean, the first time we met, he arrested it. It’s not exactly Romeo and Juliet, is it?”
“A tragedy as opposed to a romance, but continue.”