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“Yeah, what the hell?” Seven snaps. “You guys are the only family I have. You just fudging try and take that away from me.”
“Families don’t always live together,” Gabe points out. “It doesn’t make them less of a family.”
Goddammit, there goes my eyes again.
“How did you guys find me?”
Gabe shrugs. “Well, you’re no tacos, but we’ve been training for this for a while.” He spares a glance at Émile. “And turns out your boyfriend knows you pretty fucking well.”
“I …” I turn to Émile, surprised to find true worry looking back at me. “We’re not boyfriends though, right?”
“What do you want us to be?”
Bitterness burns in my gut. “It doesn’t matter what I want. I can’t have it.”
“Of course you can. You just need to work out how.”
I drag my teeth over my bottom lip. “What doyouwant?”
He doesn’t even need to think about it. “I want to get married and to keep falling for you, and I know it normally happens the other way around, and if you want to do things the traditional way, we can. But the traditional way isn’t exactly our thing, and Ilikethat. I like that we’re chaotic and messy and don’t always know our next move. I like that we’re making things up as we go along, and that I might have fallen for you by accident, but now I want the chance to keep falling for you on purpose. And I know that I don’t want my family to win. Not with the will. Not with this.”
“If we do that, you’ll never see the money. They said there’s this clause where your gran has to approve whoever you get hitched to.”
“They lied.”
“What?”
“There’s no clause. I’ve had a lawyer go over it twice. Pa knew what he was doing.”
“And yet, he still wanted you to get married for it.”
Émile’s smile starts out slow. “It’s almost like he knew.”
“So, is it still happening?” Xander asks. “Because we wanna be groomsmen.”
“I …” I look back at Émile. “I can’t risk the show. How do we fix this?”
I’m sure he’ll have an answer. It’s his thing. He fixes my screwups, and I’m sure this is going to be like every other time before. His answer is the last thing I expect.
“I don’t know.”
Chapter 31
Émile
Every day away from him is exquisite torture. All I want to do is to tell my family to shove their threats up their asses, but I bite my tongue. He’s right. Until we know how to play this, we can’t risk his show.
Christian finishes up the weekend performances, and I secretly go to the final show and have flowers waiting for him when he’s done. Watching him proves to me he belongs out there. Performing. Heshines,and I know that he won’t be in the background forever. Someone with that much talent deserves to be showcased, which makes what my parents and gran planned to do that much worse.
I comfort myself over the distance, knowing he’s working hard with Reece to get Rosswell House officially signed on. It won’t completely help things if Gran is planning to blacklist the show from national media, but we can only deal with one step at a time. And once Carlisle has signed and invested, it’ll be in his best interest to make sure things go smoothly.
Still, it doesn’t help my side of things. Every time we talk, IknowChristian is looking to me to find answers, but …what? I’m clueless and it’s not a feeling I’m well acquainted with. I can talk out of my arse with the best of them, but apparently solving a relationship-ending debacle is beyond me.
Every time I look it over, they have us kneecapped.
We could get married, I’d get the money, and then pay for the show myself. But that doesn’t solve the problem of it being trashed in reviews thanks to my family’s influence. Not only that, Christian would never let me. No matter how passionate he is about this, he’d never sacrifice my plans for that money for his own happiness.
I haven’t given up hope that there’ssomethingwe can do, I’m just struggling to work out what exactly it is.
