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"That's good, Reese. Make sure you have a great time while you’re there, okay?"
She deserved it. She'd gone through a rough time, and fortunately that was all behind her now. The guy she was supposed to marry cheated on her with her best friend and then continued to be a nuisance to the whole family. His latest thing was that he threatened Reese with telling the entire breakup story to the press. The whole family shunned the press, so she'd done something I never thought she would do: she'd talked to the media herself. Now they were hounding us even more than before. You couldn't win with these people.
It was one of the reasons why I liked to stay out of it as much as possible. Honestly, we all did. The headlines about the Maxwell heirs stopped years ago after it became obvious that we were all just continuing on our own paths and weren't giving them anything to write about.
But Reese did a spread inVogueof her wedding dress, and that called the press's attention to us all over again. So, naturally, after the wedding was canceled, they hounded her. I hoped being in London would give her a break from everything.
"By the way, I hear there's been a lot of excitement since Gran and I left," Reese said.
"I can't believe you already know. You just got off the plane." I laughed and sat down on the couch.
"No, Ijustgot to the hotel. Travis called while we were waiting in customs at Heathrow and spilled the beans."
"Of course he did," I said. "So, are you going to warn me off, like Declan?"
"Oh, hell no. You do you, like always, even if it gets you in trouble."
“True.”
“You know, I never thought all my cousins would shed their bachelorhood so fast.”
“Not this cousin.” It had been years since I’d had a serious relationship, and that one hadn’t ended well. I wasn’t going to follow in my brothers’ footsteps anytime soon. "Back to you,” I continued. “What are your plans? Besides meeting your dad. Are you going to catch up with our cousins?"
Part of Mom’s family lived in England. Technically, Reese wasn’t related to them, but she still considered them family.
“Of course. I’ll also use this time to figure out what I’m going to do once I’m back.”
I frowned. “You’re already managing The Happy Place.”
After selling the bookstore chain, Gran kept the first store she and our grandfather ever opened and went there several times a week.
“Yes, but that’s not exactly a full-time job. I’ve been floundering for too long.”
“Reese!”
“Oh no, you’ve got yourDeclanvoice on. You’re about to scold me.”
I cleared my throat. “You’ve had an amazing career in finance, and then you prepped to go into business with Malcolm and the Halsey Group. Then everything exploded in your face. You deserve time to relax and think things through.”
Reese was too hard on herself. She’d been in pieces after canceling the wedding. I couldn’t believe she’d almost tied the knot with that moron.
Privately, I thought she was lucky she’d discovered what scum Malcolm was before signing any papers. I wasn’t a cynic when it came to marriage the way Declan had been before meeting his fiancée. As a divorce lawyer, he’d claimed that far too many marriages ended up in divorce for him to even entertain the idea of it. His theory was that marriage wrecked relationships. I disagreed. I simply believed relationships weren’t meant to be a long-term thing. I’d tried once, and it didn’t end well. In all things in life, I had a rule: don’t make the same mistake twice. Learn your lesson the first time. I didn’t need to repeat the experience to draw conclusions.
“I know, but I’ve got too much free time, you know? I want to go back to finance. The hours are long, it’s true, but it keeps my brain busy.”
“You know what you need best.”
I’d always been overprotective of my cousins, and I was trying to keep myself in check. They were strong women who were more than capable of taking care of themselves. Out of all my brothers, I was the closest to them. It had been like that ever since that fateful summer when we were kids. Reese and Kimberly were staying with us, and they went to explore the area around the house. A couple hours later, they still weren’t back, so I went to find them. They’d fallen into a ditch by the vineyard on our property. While trying to pull them out, I got stuck too. The police found us hours later, in the dark. We’d been inseparable that summer. My overprotective instincts had been working overtime since, but I was determined to tone them down.
"Okay, I've got to go now because Gran and I want to go out and explore a bit before it gets dark."
"How did Gran like the flight?" I asked.
"She says she's fine, and I believe her. Don't worry so much about her."
"She's eighty-two," I said, emphasizing the numbers.
She snorted. "Really? I had no idea. She's fit, so please don't worry about her. You know she doesn't like it."
