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Chapter 1
Ezekiel
If it wasn’t for the snow on the ground, the twinkle of tinsel and the gut churning reek of egg-nog on everyone’s breath, I’d be checking the calendar.
Nope, not April fool’s. Christmas.
Christmas Eve to be exact.
My father’s ‘announcement’ that he was to remarry was a shock to say the least.
But a man gets lonely. Misses his wife once she’s gone. So I’m told.
And at his age I assumed it would be to one of his well to do, country club types.
Some lonely widower herself.
Just a couple of old folks with way too much time on their hands and way too much money to have anything left to enjoy except a little company.
Maybe some bridge at the club and someone to hold hands with as they reminisce about the good old days.
Figured it was just talk.
Something to keep the rest of the family on their toes. The rest of the family being me, his only son and the other Ellis shareholder in our family business.
A firm reminder that he’s not only still got lead in his pencil, but he’s still the equal shareholder and chief designer at Ellis.
The brand that Europe shunned but everyone who’s anyone owns at least one item of. If we had competition, I bought it up years ago. Re branded it into Ellis.
Anyone who has twenty grand lying around to spend on a briefcase or something shiny to dangle off their botoxed, peel it back ‘til I look twenty again skin. Well. There’s a whole world of quality Ellis items for them to choose from.
What I didn’t expect was the old man to be serious.
Eloping with someone twenty years his junior who has three kids of her own.
Worse than that, she’s poor.
Him getting hitched, wanting to ride the lightning, make a woman squeal a few more times before he bites the big one? I get it. He never could keep it in his pants.
But marriage? Legally binding, contesting the estate when he’s gone marriage?
No fucking way.
His new wife, my new step mom, ‘Trinity’ claims to have known nothing about the family fortune. But I doubt that.
Dad’s such a braggart, but only because he’s so proud of what he made. What we’ve both made Ellis into. And anyone with eyes and ears, even if they don't have the wallet to afford it has heard of Ellis.
She’d know. They all would.
Even my new step brothers and sister.
Ugh.
More lawsuits. I can just feel it in my bones. I had my people do a little ‘research’ on the new step in-laws. They’re just regular ‘folk’, I think was the word I raised a brow at when I read the reports. People who live in the twenty first Century and use cutlery, chew with their mouths closed and don’t name their first born ‘Cletis’. They generally don’t refer to one another as ‘folk’ now, do they?
The whole thing smacks of yee-haw gold diggers, who’s sense of smell is only strong enough for money after inhaling their own moonshine-laden sweat for years on end.
The kind who don’t even have any capital to hedge and most times look and smell like they just crawled out of one.
