“Miller, did you not tell her?” Vaughn asked sternly.
“May have slipped my mind.”
“How have you not told her?” Grayson asked.
“We agreed you’d tell her when she turned twenty-one,” Vaughn added.
“And I guess I forgot,” Miller responded.
“Tell me what?” Drea asked, confused, looking between each uncle for some kind of answer.
“So all this time she’s been working for me on the boats, she’s had no idea?” Grayson clarified.
“Forgot? That’s not something you just forget,” Vaughn ground out. “Five years, man. It’s been five years. You mean to tell me it hasn’t come up once?”
“Miller, you promised!” Simone interjected. “Right after we fixed up the cottage for her. That was part of the point of giving her the cottage!”
“Tell me what?!” Drea asked again.
Her question was met with more silence and uncomfortable glances between her uncles.
“Tell her,” Simone said through gritted teeth. “Or I will. And it needs to come from you three.”
“We’re all equal partners in this resort,” Vaughn said.
“Right, the three of you,” Drea said.
“No, kiddo, the ownership of the Indigo Royal Resort is in four parts,” Grayson added. There was silence for a moment, all of them letting
the weight of those words sink in.
Miller finally broke the silence. “You’re the fourth owner, baby girl.”
Drea’s head was spinning. No, maybe that was the room. Either way, she suddenly felt dizzy and like everything around her was chaos. She couldn’t have heard him correctly. The Indigo Royal was divided into fourths? She was the fourth partner? The only way that could have been was if she’d inherited it when her parents passed, but they didn’t have a financial interest in the resort. She knew the story of the resort; her uncles bought it from a friend of their grandfather after their father passed away from cancer, using the money they had inherited from his estate. Her dad was just along for the ride as Miller’s best friend, helping them with the restoration.
“What? I’m what?” she sputtered out.
“You’re the fourth partner in the Indigo Royal Resort,” Vaughn said calmly.
“How? I don’t understand. It’s a Quinlan Family Resort. I’m not a Quinlan, I’m a Miller.”
“You’ll actually find that all the legal paperwork says Quinlan-Miller Investments, LLC, dba Quinlan-Miller Family Properties. But we left that off the marketing material since you were underage and we were trying to protect your interests.”
“What? How?” she sputtered again. She felt like a broken record, just repeating the same words over and over, but every one of their answers only confused her more. She reached under the table and grabbed Kyle’s hand. “You three bought the resort with your inheritance, didn’t you?”
“But how do you think we could afford to renovate it?” Grayson asked.
Drea just looked back and forth between them all. She still didn’t understand, but didn’t want to ask the same two one-word questions again. Nothing was making sense.
“Drea, look at me, baby girl,” Miller said, his voice cracking a bit. “I should have done this a long, long time ago. But I guess that I had a hard time accepting you were all grown up, and this was my way of keeping you little. Because if you didn’t know the full story, you weren’t fully grown.”
He took a long, deep breath and sighed before taking a big gulp from his coffee mug. She could tell whatever he was about to say was hard for him, but she was dying to know the truth. She squeezed Kyle’s hand underneath the table. Her heart was racing, but the little squeeze he gave her in return was a big comfort.
“Yes, the story we’ve told you since you were little is true. We used to vacation here, or well, the former version of here, when we were kids. The property had belonged to a friend of our grandfather’s. It’d been in his family for years, originally starting as a family retreat and then someone decided to turn it into a hotel-type thing. It wasn’t really successful for them as a hotel, so they shut it down and were looking to off-load it. When we were kids, we’d loved it down here and often tossed around the idea of someday running our own hotel.” He paused to take another drink of his coffee.
“So, when our dad passed, we approached Mr. Redford and he sold it to us. However, our inheritance really only covered the cost of purchasing the property. In comes your dad, who had his own family money from the life insurance payouts from his parents’ deaths, and he offered to invest in the renovations if we split the ownership four ways and went into business together. We all agreed, and the Indigo Royal was born.”
“Wow,” Drea muttered. It was all she could manage to get out. Blinking rapidly, she tried to clear her head and wrap her mind around all he was telling her. It was just so much to take in at once. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
