Page 18 of The Last Goodbye

“Of course you can’t see it, because you’ve never been in my position.” He was standing now, hovering over me like a big brute.

His words stung. How the hell did he know I’d never been in his position?

“You don’t know anything about me, and you sure as hell have not made any effort to allow me to tell you what options I can offer you.”

“Do you think I didn’t notice that your photo is on the website? The big caption stating that it’s a family business with photos of you and your brother? Did you think that just because you had a different last name, I wouldn’t figure it out? That I’m not smart enough to know that you can use your married name and still be a Winchester? You own the damn company, Briar. You’ve probably never worked a day in your life outside of the family business. One that makes your family hundreds of millions of dollars a year, if the internet is even remotely accurate. So don’t come to me with this bullshit about knowing what’s best for me. You don’t have a fucking clue.”

How fucking dare he say I’ve never worked a day in my life? He doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.

He didn’t know how hard I’d worked. How much I’d struggled.

I wanted to tell him how wrong he was.

I wanted to shout it at the top of my lungs.

He’d hit a nerve in a way I couldn’t explain.

But I forced myself to swallow it all down.

I stood up and stepped forward, tipping my chin up and glaring at him. “I’m not married, you stubborn ass. You don’t know a goddamn thing about me.”

“So you aren’t a Winchester? William Winchester is not your father?” He crossed his arms over his annoyingly hard chest.

“It’s complicated,” I said, my voice just barely a whisper. The lump in my throat was too thick to talk.

The tears threatened to fall as I blinked rapidly, trying hard not to lose it in front of this man.

So, I turned on my heels and got the hell out of there without saying another word.

Because even though I’d been fighting my entire life to prove who I was, in this moment, I just didn’t have any fight in me.

Maybe Bass Bennett had broken me.

five

​. . .​

Bass

“We’ve got a full house out there,” Sally said. She’d been a server here for the last year, and she was damn good at her job.

“Good to hear.” I plated two steaks and handed them to her. The sound of pans hitting steel filled the space around me as my team moved like a fine-tuned machine.

Knives clanking against wooden cutting boards, and orders being called out as food hit the heat with a hiss, played like a musical chorus in the background.

I fucking loved being in the kitchen.

The smell of seared meat mixed with garlic and herbs filled my senses.

“The special is quite the hit.” Winona stepped into the kitchen to speak to me. “Everyone is raving about the short ribs.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking about adding them permanently to the menu.” I reached for the Himalayan sea salt and added a dash to the simmering potatoes on the stove.

Every time the door swung open to the dining room, we’d get a brief moment of the cool jazz playing in the candlelit space, and I was grateful for what I’d built here.

“So I noticed that Briar Sinclair, the woman who was in here every day last week to speak to you, suddenly stopped coming by this week. I guess she got the message, huh?”

“I guess so,” I told her.