Page 151 of My Dark Prince
I was going to kill Ollie. He wanted a reaction out of me, and he would get it.
“Briar Rose, you are being incredibly cruel to your mother,” Jason barked in the background. Guess I was on speaker, too. “We are your family, for better or worse, and we would like to take part in this wedding.”
Ah, now I got it. They wanted to worm their way back into high society. For the past two decades, Jason had found himself in the courtroom, thanks to his crimes of embezzlement and theft.
By the time they disowned me, I knew their debts had mounted higher than they could possibly pay off within ten lifetimes.
My guess – they were flat-out broke now.
It wouldn’t surprise me.
This call was just another money-grabbing scheme for them. It just so happened thatIneeded to execute it. It shouldn’t have made me feel shitty after all this time, but it did. It also made me very wary of Oliver’s intentions. Perhaps they weren’t as pure as he would like me to think.
“Hello, Jason.” I cleared my throat, forcing myself to stay calm. “Long time no seethe.”
“Oh, get off it.” His chuckles wouldn’t convince a saint. “I wasn’t that bad.”
“You were, actually. You called methegirl.”
“How else was I supposed to call you? The headphone?” He tried to laugh again, but it died in his throat.
I couldn’t believe Oliver’s trolling had gotten me here. This was unhinged.
“Goodbye, Jason. Goodbye, Philomena.”
“Wait.” My mother rushed to the speaker. “What about the invita—”
I hung up before she could complete the sentence.
That would give her a taste of her own medicine.
“At least we have cake.” Seb hopped to his feet and rolled the box over to us. The one I’d managed to get from a canceled bachelor party. “When one marriage ends, another one begins?”
“Too soon.” I groaned but tugged the bow off the box anyway and watched as the walls fell to unveil the cake.
Our jaws dropped.
Seb raised his brows, turning to me. “I thought you said this was a four-tier cake.”
“That’s what they told me.”
Nope. It wasn’t a four-tier cake, but itwasadick-shaped cake. With cute, cursive letters written on the peach frosting in black icing.
To have and to hold.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Briar Rose
Age eighteen.
The first thing I lost was my Harvard acceptance.
“We cannot afford it,” my mother announced one evening, not bothering to glance up from the Caprese salad she was making. “It’s simply impossible.”
It would be just my luck that my parents had finally managed to make it to Lake Geneva, only to crush my hopes and dreams.
She stacked basil leaves over tomatoes and fresh slices of mozzarella.
