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“Found the laptop,” Rueben calls out after a few minutes of raking around inside one of the boxes.
I move over to where he is and take the case out of his hands. “Thanks.”
“Where do you want your sweater collection?” he asks.
“Um, the closet, or a drawer. You pick.”
I bring the laptop over to the bed and take it out of the case.
There’s no life in the battery so I pull out the cable and plug it into the socket by the nightstand.
I guess I won’t be calling the resort tonight. It’s already after eight p.m. and I probably don’t want to know what my sister’s up to with her favorite band at this time of night.
Rueben’s putting my rolled-up sweaters in one of the dresser drawers.
Gus is hanging up some of my other clothes, while Bishop and Scout put random bits and pieces on top of the dresser. It’s probably going to take way longer with all of them helping me, but it feels nice to be doing this with all of them.
This is my home now, and these are my mates.
Everything is exactly how it should be.
Chapter ninety
Scout
Helping Sapphire get settled into her new room feels kind of strange. She has a lot less stuff than I would have guessed, and there isn’t much in the boxes to show us who she is. I have to smile at the Crystal Lakes Crocs shirt I come across, which shows she really does support that team, but other than that, and the collection of romantic comedy DVDs, I don’t know much more about her than I already did.
“Was it just you and Scarlett when you were kids?” I ask, as I unpack a photo album with old pictures inside. “Or did you have any brothers or sisters?”
She laughs. “Me and Scarlett were more than enough trouble for our parents. They wanted two kids at most, so they said getting us at the same time was like God answering their prayers.”
“How ‘bout pets?” I ask, as I pass her the album.
“None that I can remember,” she tells me. “How about you? Brothers, sisters, hamsters?”
I laugh. “No hamsters, and no sisters. I have five brothers. I was never close to any of them.”
“All Alphas?” she asks.
“How did you guess?” I ask, giving her a wry smile.
“Oh, I don’t know. The fact that a lot of Alphas seem to butt heads, unless they’re just the right combination of personalities.”
“That’s pretty much spot on,” I admit. “My brothers and I were encouraged to compete in body building tournaments. My eldest brother Jimmy was a bit of a legend in those circles and my parents … I don’t know. They were kind of obsessed, I guess. It’s like they got addicted to seeing him win. None of the rest of us ever measured up. It didn’t matter how well we did. They always insinuated that he could do better, and that he had done better.”
“That’s awful,” Sapphire says. “It must have been hard to grow up like that.”
“It was … different. We all sort of just tolerated each other until everyone started growing up and leaving home. No one ever came back. Apart from Jimmy. To be honest, I think my parents only had enough space in their hearts for one kid. I don’t know why they had the rest of us. They only care about Jimmy. The three of them are the family. The rest of us … We were just around. A nanny took care of us when we were young. My mom was too busy with her own friends. My father was too busy working.”
“You had a nanny?” Rueben asks, sounding shocked.
I nod. “We had an older woman who was criminally underpaid and overworked, so don’t go thinking she was like Mary Poppins. She was more like prison warden. If we didn’t do what we were told, we got to skip a meal or scrub the floor in her place.”
“Geez,” Rueben says. “I didn’t know you had the life of a Dickensian orphan.”
I can’t help but laugh at Rueben’s overly dramatic commentary on my life.
“It wasn’t that bad.”
