AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Nope,” he answers, not the least bit bothered.
Okay. So he doesn’t seem to know anything about the note.
“Do you think I shouldn’t have showed up?” I ask him straightforwardly.
Now, he reacts. His eyes grow wide, then he rubs his neck.
“I guess I’ve given myself away, huh?”
My eyebrows arch. So he’s not denying it?
Calvin lets out a deep breath. “Please don’t take this personally. You seem like a nice person and I’m sure you don’t mean any harm, but everything was a mess even before you showed up, and now that you have, things are only bound to get worse.”
“Because Samuel wants to include me in his will?” I ask. “This is about the money, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he answers. “Billions and billions of dollars.”
I exhale. “Well, I’m not really after that, Calvin.”
“And you think that makes us feel any better?” Calvin snaps. “It’s even more infuriating, in fact, because you don’t want it but you’re still going to get it while the rest of us, we all want it, every bit of it. We’ve been waiting all our lives to get our hands on it. We all have plans for it.”
So he admits he has plans.
“What are you going to do with billions of dollars?” I ask him.
Calvin shrugs. “Get far away from here. Finally stand up on my own two feet and make a name for myself.”
I give him a puzzled look. That doesn’t sound like a plot to take over the Northup estate. In fact, it sounds just like everyone’s dream.
“My point is that Grandfather’s fortune means a lot to all of us,” Calvin says. “And I know how that looks. I know it makes us seem like vultures circling him, waiting for him to die, waiting to devour him, to get our share. But what you don’t understand is that we’ve been living like vultures, waiting on scraps, having to fight to survive. You have no idea about everything we’ve had to endure just because we were born into this family.”
“No, I have no idea,” I agree with him. “But I’d like to know. I’d like to get to know each of you, to understand what you’re feeling.”
Calvin shakes his head. “You’ll never understand how we feel, how it feels to be a prisoner in your own home, to have to act a certain way all the time, to have people see only dollar signs when they look at you when you don’t actually have a single cent to your name.”
I frown. He really must have had it tough.
“They’ll look at you the same way when they find out you’re a Northup, you know,” Calvin tells me. “They’ll see you as just a bank account that they can withdraw from, though I guess it’s even worse for you because you’ll be both a Northup and a Knight.”
“Not if I make them see me as something else,” I say.
Calvin snorts.
“I’m sorry that you haven’t met any nice people,” I tell him. “But I’m sure there are people out there who can see you as something more than just a source of money.”
He frowns. “I’m past believing that.”
I reach for his hand. “You know what I see when I look at you?”
“Someone you’d rather not have as your cousin?”
“Someone with a lot of heart,” I tell him. “Someone who cares about his family more than he lets on. Someone who’s willing to pour his soul into a song for the person he loves.”
“And what a world of good that has done me,” he mutters.
“You’re not a vulture. You’re a…”
Calvin gives me an expectant look as I pause to think.
“You’re an ostrich,” I say.
For a moment, Calvin just stares at me. Then he laughs. It’s the first time I’ve heard him laugh, and I have to say I love the sound of it, mainly because he seems to pour out his heart into his laughter.
He wipes the tears from the corners of his eyes when he’s done laughing. “Please tell me why I’m an ostrich.”
I shrug. “Because you have long legs and you don’t hesitate to get your claws out to defend yourself and your loved ones.”
He grins. “And I have long eyelashes. At least, that’s what people tell me.”
He flutters them. I chuckle.
“Yeah. I guess you do.”
“So do you.”
He suddenly grasps my chin and brings his face closer to mine. I blush because he’s too close.
“Um, Calvin…”
“But Suzannah’s right.” He lets my chin go. “Your eyebrows are a mess.”
I feel them crease. Excuse me?
“Oh. And maybe you should lose the glasses,” he says. “You’d look prettier without them.”
I push them up the bridge of my nose. “But I need them.”
Calvin shrugs. “Well, I guess they do make you seem a tad smarter. Besides, even with them on, you were able to get yourself someone as hot as Rainier Knight.”
My gaze narrows. Did he just call Rainier hot? Since when do men call other men hot?
