Total pages in book: 66
Estimated words: 63469 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 317(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63469 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 317(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
“Hey, Bella,” I greeted, rubbing under her chin and scratching behind her ears. “Where are all your people?”
“Glenn? Is that you?”
Thankfully, it wasn’t Rand calling out to me, but his partner, Stefan. And he was late determining whether there was a stranger in his home, but because he’d heard no screaming, which meant his dog was not tearing me limb from limb in the living room, he had to be confident it was either me or my uncle Tyler. No one else walked into the huge Folk Victorian home without permission. As much of a family as everyone was on the Red Diamond, this was still the boss man’s house, and since the baby was born, since Wyatt James Holloway arrived two years ago, no one walked in unannounced. No one.
“It’s me,” I called back to Stef as he came out of the kitchen, dish towel over his shoulder, carrying a platter of cooked bacon.
“Hey, take this out to the table, will you?”
I moved fast to do as he asked and grab the dish, closing the distance from the living room to him, marveling as I always did at the man Rand loved. Before I met Stef, I had no idea men could be that pretty. I never dreamed I’d meet a man with such beautiful, delicate, angelic features, golden skin, and thick blond hair that fell to his shoulders. It had been, it turned out, the final brick in the wall. Me seeing Stef, noticing everything about him, his face, his skin, the way he moved and the sound of his voice, all of it, even my now long-dead desire for him, had finally made something crystal clear in my head. I was tired of wrestling with the whole question of whether I was gay. Meeting Stefan Joss, the partner of the man I’d thought was my cousin, sealed the deal.
Again, Rand was a sore point with me, beyond his having the ranch and the monogamous partner and basically everything I’d thought I wanted. Two years ago I found out my father, Rayland Holloway, sired not only my brother, Zach, and me, but also Rand Holloway, the eldest child of my uncle James and his wife, May. It was bullshit someone should have told the whole family years ago. It took Stef looking at Rayland and looking at Rand to figure it out, which was just ten kinds of stupid because who looked at someone and thought, Hey, those eyes of yours ain’t right. It had mostly been Stef thinking he knew something and his assumption being correct. Which pissed me off no end. Like he was frickin’ Sherlock Holmes or some shit. It was really giving him way too much credit, the whole uncovering of the big hush-hush family secret. But without him talking to May and Rand, neither would have ever come clean, and the rest of the family would have remained in the dark. So while I appreciated what Stef had made everyone admit to, I was still really annoyed that Rand and I now shared a closer biological bond—and that my bond with Zach was no longer unique. It was like I got Rand, whom I’d never taken a shine to, and lost my one claim to Zach, who I’d always thought was my sole blood brother. But now I had two siblings, neither liked me, and both got on together just fine, leaving me firmly out in the cold.
Worst of all, my father was trying so hard to mend fences with Rand that he’d forgotten I was alive, and Zach was now working on Rand’s ranch.
It had hurt me in more ways than one. My father, who’d promised to help me with a down payment for my restaurant, had backed out to expand the family ranch, the White Ash. He was exploring the land for mineral reserves and oil, and that took cash. It was, he said, an opportunity he couldn’t pass up, and the money he promised me was quickly committed elsewhere. Zach, at least, had an excuse I understood. He couldn’t help me because he was working for Rand, and the Red took up all his time. In the end I sold everything I owned but my horse—I could not be parted from her—and had just enough to get the restaurant off the ground.
So my life basically boiled down to coming out, telling my father I wanted to open a restaurant instead of working on the White Ash, and my family—such as it was—abandoning me. I always missed my mother, there was a hole in my heart where she had been, but I had not felt her loss as sharply as I had when I was first trying to get my dream to take shape and she wasn’t there to stand beside me. My father and Zach abandoning me would not have been so crushing if she’d been alive to take their place. As it was, I grieved all over again and felt the pain of her passing like it was brand new.