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As the mom rings the bell, a new face walks into the room—another giant of a woman as tall as Sandra. She’s in her mid-twenties with thick and long hair bearing pronounced blond highlights and wearing a low-cut royal blue top tucked into a short white skirt.
Her eyes widen as she scans the room, settling on my face as a man walks in behind him, looking kind of like Grey but with darker eyes and hair slightly less thick than Grey’s.
I know instantly that they’re his brother and sister just by their large stature and the similarity in features.
As a third woman walks into the room, Grey’s whole body turns rigid. From the side, I see his eyes flit between the woman and his father.
The woman is breathtakingly beautiful, even taller than the blonde despite her bare feet. In fact, this one must be scraping six feet. If the entire room stands up in one go, I’m going to feel like their freaking garden gnome.
The woman now watching me has luminous green eyes and the kind of face that you see on the cover of magazines. Her black hair is straight but the ends are curled into perfect loose spirals, the kind that me, with my incompetence with hair styling products, has never been able to master. Her body is wrapped in a tight burgundy dress with sleeves that reach her elbows above bracelets and rings of gold.
“So, this must be Indigo,” sings the first blonde and relief flutters through my system at the sight of someone who actually seems excited to see me here. “I’m Elise. Grey’s sister.” She comes to sit at the end of the table to my right, a huge grin spreading across her pretty face. “Nice to meet you.”
“Same here,” I reply but as I do so, I spot her aim a narrow-eyed glance at the brunette, her smile suddenly less than tepid.
I can’t help but flinch as the chair to my right is pulled out and the man sits down next to me.
“Tyrion,” he says, eyes flaring as they lock onto mine. “Grey’s brother. Nice to meet you.”
“Indigo.”
He holds out a hand which I take, swallowing as he grips it almost as tightly as Grey did that first day I walked into his office.
“And this is Gabriella,” says Grey’s mom as the brunette takes a seat next to Landon, diagonally opposite me. “A very close friend of the family’s… and of Greyson’s.”
“I think we’ll be leaving,” Grey announces, his jaw tight, anger clearly weaved into the words he’s attempting to speak with composure.
“No, you’ll be staying for dessert,” bites hell-mom. “I oversaw its preparation myself.”
At that moment, the waiter walks in carrying a large silver tray which he sets onto a side table nearby. He removes our plates and then places a dessert in front of each person, even supplying one to the three newcomers.
I want to rave about how delicious they look—delicate French patisseries with layers of pink mousse, vanilla sponge and a magenta jelly on top, cut into elegant rectangles and decorated with white chocolate curls—but the tension has stripped me of my voice, making my body seize up the way it used to do when I was a child, undoing my ability to be spontaneous.
It doesn’t help that I now seem to have two people glaring at me—Grey’s father opposite and the woman now sitting next to him, Gabriella. I’ve never heard Grey mention her before.
I try to smile at her but her lips don’t move in response and the way her inky eyes refuse to leave my face allows the murk of malaise to ooze into me.
Jesus, these people really take eye contact to new heights.
“Wow, this looks delicious,” I manage as we begin to eat. I would compliment the mom at this point, but I know from the previous discussion that they hired a caterer to do the cooking.
“Have you enjoyed dinner, Indigo?” asks Tyrion next to me, a smirk scribbled into his handsome face. I glance down at his fingers to see a single silver ring, one which looks remarkably similar to the one his father is wearing.
“It’s Indie,” I reply gently. “And yeah, the food’s been… delicious.”
“So, how did you and Greyson meet?” I ask Gabriella, as she slides her silver spoon through the pink layers, bringing it to her bright-red lips and sucking the cake from the spoon as she watches me.
I may be a bitch, but anyone would think she was filming the opening scene of a porn movie with that mouth action.
“We’re childhood friends,” she replies, glistening eyes sliding to the man I came with, “aren’t we, Grey? Our families are very close.”
“Oh, that’s awesome,” I reply, aware of energy now so bleak that no amount of raspberry mousse cake will be able to lighten the ambiance. “What was he like as a boy?”
But before Gabriella can answer, Tyrion sniggers a response in a way which I’m guessing is supposed be a joke, but which chills my blood anyway. “Traumatized.”
The dark smirk in Tyrion’s voice has Grey placing his spoon down onto his plate. His body language, head bowed, eyes staring down at his plate, coupled with that single word, has my stomach sinking to the floor and any dregs of appetite I had left seeping into the hell half these people crawled out of.
“Thank you for dinner,” says Grey. “We’ll be leaving now.”
