Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 126850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
I would never like the woman, but it made her a little bit tolerable.
The problem came after university. I didn’t want to return to Loxford House, and I was pretty sure Carmen didn’t want me there either, so we compromised.
Dad would gift me the money to buy a house up to a certain value in cash. Carmen wasn’t happy that he was more than willing to buy me an admittedly very nice house, completely missing the point that her son would hopefully never have to buy one and that I would get only slightly over absolutely nothing of cash value from my father’s estate on his death.
It was probably the only time my father ever told her to shut up.
In return, I would show up once a month for dinner and make a concerted effort to tell my grandmother not to bitch out Carmen on a regular basis.
Somehow, we’d carved out a relationship that was kind of… functional.
Not really.
Still, I continued to show up for our monthly dinner date, and I made a half-hearted attempt on occasion to remind my grandmother not to be a bitch to her whenever they saw one another.
Not that Olive Brown cared a damn about the opinions of two people who ripped her daughter and granddaughter’s lives in two, even if it was almost twenty years ago. The woman could hold a grudge like nobody else I’d ever met.
Granny didn’t much care for my father and would have nothing to do with him at all if not for me, and she went out of her way to deliberately piss Carmen off whenever she could. I’d tried reminding her that I was an adult now and there was no need to have any kind of relationship with my father, but she saw it as her duty to ensure I did in fact receive my part of my inheritance.
She and Carmen had been arguing for a decade over how much that should be. As far as my stepmother was concerned, my house was the entirety of my estate, but Granny thought very differently.
I did wonder if Carmen had even seen my father’s will.
I knew what my inheritance was.
If he died first, she was going to be absolutely fuming. I was pretty sure that was his plan—it would be just like him to die and leave me to deal with it all.
Although, as my father had once said, “Vincent has no use for a diamond necklace, does he?”
The argument, of course, was that his future wife and possibly daughter would. That was probably why the family heirlooms he intended to end up in my hands were in a safety deposit box somewhere, ready to be gifted to me within the next few years in the hopes of avoiding the same inheritance tax that had decimated so many aristocratic families over the years.
I wasn’t even sure Carmen knew those exact items existed.
I did question their marriage sometimes.
Quietly.
To my grandmother.
After my monthly dinners where I had fresh material to complain about Carmen.
I wasn’t a total bitch, honestly, just a little bit of one, and only when she couldn’t hear me. Not that it made it any better, but at least I wasn’t lying about it.
Besides, I wasn’t saying anything that I wouldn’t say to her face. Granny would probably beat me to it, though.
“Ah, Granny,” Amber said with a happy sigh. “Is she coming over again soon? I miss her roast beef.”
I laughed, putting my mug down. “I’m sure if I ask her nicely after I have dinner with my dad, she’d be happy to come for a roast beef bitchfest.”
“A roast beef bitchfest sounds like heaven, to be honest.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“When are you having dinner with your dad and the demons again?”
I fought back a laugh. “Vincent isn’t that bad, aside from being a teenage boy.”
“And Carmen?”
“Oh, you mean Beelzebub’s niece?”
Amber buried her face in her hands, and her shoulders shook as her amusement became too much. “I don’t know how you keep a straight face at those dinners.”
“Easy. When I get tempted to make a bitchy comment, I think about the family heirlooms in the bank vault and what the look on her face will be when she realises they belong to me.”
Slowly, my best friend nodded. “That will do it.”
“Mm. Anyway, dinner is this Friday, and I suspect it’ll be to talk about Vincent’s birthday.”
“So they don’t know about the colossal piss-up he’s organising in London, then?”
“Not a damn clue,” I replied, reaching for the biscuit packet. “He’s going to tell them then that he doesn’t want whatever they’re trying to plan.”
Amber narrowed her eyes. “Is he using you as his emotional support animal again?”
“Yeah, but he’s like my emotional entertainment animal because I know it’s going to piss Carmen off, so I’m all right with it.”
“Your family is extremely fucked up; do you know that?”