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“Hello?” Her voice sounded husky with tears and sleep, putting me on red alert.
“What’s wrong, Kitten?” I asked softly, when I wanted to demand answers. Who upset her and made my sweet little Nevaeh cry?
“Brax,” she whispered and sniffled. “Sorry, I guess I must have fallen asleep.”
“Why are you crying?” I clenched my hand around my phone, but I quickly relaxed it a little when I heard something begin to crack.
“I got the worst news tonight.” Her voice broke, and then I heard her sucking in a shuddery breath. That sound made it impossible for me to breathe until she spoke again. “Oh God, Braxton. I…I really wish you were here right now.”
“Baby.”
There was a knock on the door. “Brax, man. Your parents are about to make an announcement.”
I pulled the phone away from my mouth. “Fuck them,” I called through the door. “This is more important.”
“Shit,” Nevaeh muttered. “I’m interrupting your thing with your parents. You should go. Can you call me back later?”
“No. I don’t care about them and their big announcement.” Nothing they had to say mattered more than finding out what was wrong with my girl. “Talk to me, Nev. What news did you get?”
“It’s my dad,” she said, and a sob escaped her. I listened as she told me how sick her dad was and that he needed a new liver. I could hear the fear and heartbreak in her voice, and I felt like I was suffocating because there was nothing I could do to take her pain away.
There was another knock on the door I was leaning against. “Dude, you seriously need to get out here and stop this before your parents fuck up your life.”
“Y-you should go,” Nevaeh said, having heard my cousin. “I need to go talk to my brother and sisters anyway.”
“I wish there was something I could do, Kitten.”
“Just hearing your voice was enough,” she whispered. “Now, get back to your party. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Baby—”
“Go,” she commanded softly.
“Brax!” Barrick growled from the other side of the door. “Seriously. Get out here now.”
Muttering a curse, I told Nevaeh I’d talk to her tomorrow and jerked the door open. Barrick’s jaw was set, and he grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me out of the library. After he turned me to face the stairs, it took me a second to understand what I was looking at.
My mother, clad in a dress that probably cost the equivalent of a compact car, dripping in diamonds, and with her hair and makeup her idea of perfection, stood beside my father with a glass of champagne in hand. His tux was tailored to his lanky frame, his wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose as he lifted his own glass of expensive French champagne toward the woman standing to his left.
I narrowed my eyes on the woman. Dressed in a simple floor-length black dress, she had her blond hair pulled into a delicate twist at the right side of her head. It took me a second to realize who she was because I hadn’t seen her in… Fuck, I couldn’t even remember how long it had been.
“Is that—?”
“Yup,” Barrick growled.
“What the hell is she doing here?” I bit out.
“Officially announcing your engagement.”
“Fuck.”
“There he is,” my father said with a chuckle, his eyes falling on me. He waved me forward, as if he expected me to fall in line with their newest scheme to try to run my life.
My eyes landed back on Darcy Hamilton, and I cursed my own past idiocies. Darcy was my high school girlfriend. And like most guys that age, I’d thought more with my dick than my brain. I thought because the sex was good and she pretended to love me, we would be together forever. I proposed on her eighteenth birthday, and even though we were young, both her parents and mine had actually endorsed our marriage.
Then I’d enlisted in the Marines. Darcy changed, and I realized she was trying to manipulate me just as much as my parents were. But it wasn’t until I lost my leg that I saw how shallow she really was. She dumped me, saying she wasn’t the type of woman who could spend her life caring for an invalid husband because she didn’t think I would walk again.
To be honest, she hadn’t broken my heart when she gave me back the ring. If anything, I’d been relieved I was able to get rid of her so easily. I’d spent the months of my deployment trying to figure out how to break off our engagement without stirring up more shit with my parents.
