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Unfortunately, I heard male voices, plural, out that way.
Fuck.
Just get it over with. Go say your hellos.
He won’t even be here.
According to my cousins, Jacob’s reprobate son rarely showed his face at family functions anyway.
I stepped into the glass walled sunroom overlooking the backyard to find that brunch was laid out, buffet style, on long banquet tables against the inner wall. And right in front of me, the all-male Ellis family was sprawled on the sumptuous furniture like kings.
They all looked at me as I walked in.
They were sitting beneath a big banner draped across the windows that saidWelcome Home, Jolie.
Holy God.
“Mom.” I stopped short and my mom, who was following me and chattering away with Aunt Marie, almost stepped on me. “What’s with the banner?”
“Well, you can’t just come home after three long years without a proper welcome party,” Mom said.
“Welcome party?” I blinked in shock at my family, who’d piled up behind her as I stalled in the doorway. “I thought we were just having brunch.”
“We are. In my daughter’s honor, of course. We’ve all missed you so much.”
Right. My family was all staring at me. And surely they had missed me.
But did they have to make such a big deal about it in front of the guys?
Dani smirked at me.
I turned back to face Jacob and three of his sons. They were all here.
All except Shane, of course.
I was simultaneously relieved and fucking annoyed. Was he still causing friction for Jacob and Mom? About the wedding?
Weren’t we all past that by now?
Or at least pretending to be, for our parents’ sakes?
I slid my aviators over my eyes. Becauseouch. There were way too many windows in this room and the daylight was blazing and everyone’s attention converging on me made me feel like an insect roasting under a magnifying glass.
“Morning, sunshine,” Joss said jovially, and I groaned.
Darcy laughed.
I must’ve been wearing my hangover like a bad dress.
“Welcome home,” Brandon said, looking me over with amusement.
I mumbled aThank youand took a few steps into the room, wondering if I could get away with literally not talking to a single one of them.
It wasn’t that I disliked Jacob’s sons, exactly. Jacob’s oldest son, Joss, was a horse breeder, lived on a veritable ranch right in the city and kind of looked like a thirty-something Matthew McConaughey. He seemed to be the nicest of them. The next one was Brandon, Jacob’s business partner, some kind of tech investor/genius and all around hottie-in-a-suit. The girls had gossiped to me that he was stinking rich, like richer than Jacob. The youngest, Darcy, was a hockey player, a rich-boy jock who was barely out of high school.
The level of success, sophistication and hotness exuded by guys like these was sort of my kryptonite. But much, much worse than that was the unanswered, unwelcome question that had taken up rent in my mind for the last four years:Did Shane tell any of them about me?
I’d only met Joss, Brandon and Darcy a few times in that first year of Mom’s engagement, before I moved down to California. But we weren’t total strangers. I was pretty sure Mom blabbed about me to them all the time, as much as she blabbed about them to me. I was her only child, after all. That’s why they all showed up to this little welcome home brunch she’d put together, like dutiful future stepsons, and got up to give me a polite hug.
