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ChapterTwo
LUNA
One year later
“I need to get married? Are you fucking with me?”
The lawyer coughs as if my profanity chokes him. “No. You do not need to.”
“But that’s what you just said.”
“Not exactly.” He traces his finger over the legal documents in front of him. “No one can force you to get married just by writing it in their will. What your grandmother has done is set aside an inheritance for you that you can only claim if you are married by the age of thirty. There are other stipulations, but that is the main one. If you do not meet it, you simply do not get the money.”
Dash snorts in his seat next to me, and I fight the urge to glare at him.
“Whatever. I’m not hard up for cash.” Sure, the three hundred thousand the man just quoted me would be amazing to have stowed away in my savings. Get a nice interest rate, and no need to worry about my retirement. But I have a steady stream of well-paying clients providing me a comfortable life in Nashville. I don’t need the money. Not enough to marry someone in the next five months before my thirtieth birthday. “We can skip the stipulations and move on to the next section.”
“Well. There is one more thing Tsai Shu-fen has made it mandatory I inform you of before reading anything else.”
Gritting back a sigh of impatience, I still can’t keep the bite from my voice. “Just read it already.”
The lawyer frowns, then continues. “If the benefactor, Luna Lamont, does not fulfill the requirements set forth to gain her inheritance, the money will pass on to Bill Lamont.”
Blood fueled by denial roars through my ears.
“What?” Dash asks the single word screaming in my mind.
The man with his slicked back hair and perfectly tailored suit rereads the section slowly, but I heard him the first time.
“That’s a mistake. Our grandmother hated our dad! She thought the man was a demon who stole his daughter away.”
Which he sort of was.
“I’m merely conveying the contents of the will. There’s no further explanation. I can, however, inform you I acted as witness when Tsai Shu-fen last updated this document, and she was of sound mind and body.”
Not fucking sound enough if she decided to hand over six figures to my bastard of a father. And certainly not of sound body, seeing as how she passed away four months after signing this document.
Dash smirks at me. I don’t understand how he can find any of this funny. He had the same messed-up childhood I did.
“What?” I snap.
“She hates him just as much as you do.”
I wonder if the lawyer will kick us out if I kidney punch my brother. “Exactly. Why would she leave him any money?”
“To back you into a corner. Wai Po’s tricky.” Dash uses the title our grandmother insisted we call her. The word for grandmother in her native tongue. A gift she gave us once she started to trust us. “She’s tricky like you.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” The light bulb flicks on in my head. Just took me a moment longer than Dash.
This is how badly Wai Po wanted to see me married. She probably knew my first reaction to the money would be that I didn’t care about it. We talked about my job and my paycheck. By our second visit, she began pestering me about how my line of work could crap out at any time. How I’d be safer in a relationship. A marriage.
I waved her off back then.
But now there’s this money. I know this cash isn’t a bribe to get me to do what she wants.
It’s a threat.
If I don’t find a spouse, then I’m handing the man I hate a fortune. My grandmother’s money.
