Page 14 of Bound To Be Mine

I opened my office door and froze. I’d like to think I was still drunk and hallucinating, but my headache was a stark reminder of how sober I was.

All three of my brothers were sitting in my office.

Adrian was in the chair across from my desk. Sebastian was on the small sofa along the wall, forearms on his knees. Dash was in my desk chair spinning it slowly back and forth like a bored child.

“Get out of my chair,” I said.

Dash stood up, but slowly, as if it was his choice. I sat down. The leather was familiar. Lucky for him, he didn’t fuck with my lumbar position or height. I hated when people fucked with my chair.

I opened my desk drawer, found the bottle of aspirin I kept there, and took two without water.

“You look fresh as a daisy,” Sebastian said with a smile.

“Thank you,” I growled.

Jasmine appeared, took one look at me and grimaced. “Coffee?”

“Yes. And water. And orange juice.”

“For you guys?” she asked my brothers.

They all declined. She rushed away, leaving me with my brothers’ scrutiny.

“Say whatever you’re here to say,” I said.

“Cleo and Callum came to see the baby this morning,” Adrian said.

“I assumed.”

“They told me what happened,” he said.

“I assumed that too.”

Kudos to my cousins for getting up at the crack of dawn to tattle on me.

Adrian went quiet. Sebastian and Dash were smart enough to keep their mouths shut. It was always like this between us. Adrian and I were the serious ones. We handled the boring business stuff. Dash and Sebastian were the playboys who took nothing serious.

But apparently they were serious now. That was not a good sign.

“You lost Mandy Carter,” Adrian said.

“I asked her a question.”

“You lost Mandy Carter.” He said it again with the patience of someone who wanted to make sure the full weight of each word landed right where it was supposed to—square on my shoulders. “Do you have any idea how long it took me to convince her to come to the table?”

I did not, in fact, have any idea. That was the crux of the problem and we all knew it. There was nothing in the paperwork that made her out to be the Goddess of Weddings. Goddess, sure, but I didn’t see what they saw.

“She has her own business,” Adrian continued. “It’s thriving. She doesn’t need us. She was doing fine before we started talking to her and the cousins. And she’ll do fine after. She was hesitant about the Blackwell side of things from the beginning. She knows Cleo, she trusts Cleo, but taking on a corporate partner was a different conversation entirely. It took months of back and forth before she agreed to come in.” He paused. “She took time out of a schedule that is, apparently, booked further in advance than most people plan their lives. She flew across the country even though she is supposed to be on a job. Mandy walked into that conference room in good faith. And you made her explain herself before she’d had a sip of coffee.”

Sebastian winced sympathetically, which I didn’t need.

“I expect that kind of thing from those two,” Adrian said, with a brief gesture toward Sebastian and Dash.

“Excuse me?” Sebastian sat up straighter.

Dash just nodded. “Fair.”

“But not from you, Briggs. You’re the one who prepares. You’re the one who knows the room before he walks into it. That’s not a small thing—it’s most of why you’re good at what you do. So what happened?”