Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35154 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 176(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 117(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35154 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 176(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 117(@300wpm)
…Vlad knew a couple of guys who made sure of it.
So, the good guys won, and the bad guys lost hard. And the heroes — if you can call us heroes — got the girl.
And that’s just the beginning…
Dallas:
We got our company back too, of course. But the thing is, something changed with us when we were up on Blackthorn all those years. We became different men than the ones who’d grown up with the wealth and privilege — more self-reliant, free of the shackles of society and social media and all that shit. And honestly, the prospect of going back to it seemed, well, unappealing.
So we didn’t.
We stayed in charge, in the sense that it was still our company. But neither Dallas nor I were cut out for boardroom meetings or merger deals. Honestly, we were probably a little too rough around the edges for it after living on Blackthorn. Instead, after we’d swept the board clean of all the riffraff who’d coddled up to our uncle, we made our father’s most trusted advisor — Alan, the man who’d warned us those years before about what our uncle was doing — the acting CEO of the company. Hell, he was going to do a much better job at it than we were anyways.
The case was a game-changer for Stella too. I mean, the media circus around the two of us “coming back from the wilderness” and facing charges was huge. And her winning it? Yeah, that basically made her a media darling, and it took all of seconds before every law firm in the country was calling her to throw job offers at her feet.
She’s loyal though, our Stella. Some might say to a fault, but not us. I see it as one of the things I find so amazing about her. She ended up staying with her firm, Bloomington and Stein. Or, I should say Bloomington, Stein, and Bourdain.
Yeah you better believe she made full partner after our case.
They also granted her a satellite office after she pitched them the idea of opening up another office further out of the city to concentrate on environmental corporate law. She started small, but it wasn’t long before the new environmental branch of Bloomington, Stein, and Bourdain was the law group to see for fortune 500 companies who wanted to make sure they were keeping things green. It meant she got to work closer to Blackthorn — an hour drive instead of a few hours back to the city — and it also meant she could work from home a lot of the time.
Yeah, I’d say that’s a sweet fucking deal.
So in the end, in case it wasn’t obvious, we stayed on Blackthorn. After all, after so many years, that’s where home was. Now, not being on the run from the law did bring a couple changes, of course. We took a page from Braun and Katrina’s book and started adding on to our ranger tower house. I mean, we kept the tower, but we started construction on a larger house at the base of it.
A house with more space.
…More bedrooms.
Now, I’d never been a betting man, and I was hardly an expert on fertility calendars and cycles and all that stuff. But just the same, knowing Stella’s backstory, it’s not like I’d have put the odds very high of anything.
…But that didn’t seem to hold us back one bit.
Yeah, Stella got pregnant. Big time.
Actually, by the calendar, it probably happened during those first few days of meeting her. I mean, we certainly gave ourselves enough chances after the wedding too — we basically spent the next two weeks after Braun and Katrina got hitched up in our ranger station making Stella come as much as humanly possible between us. But really, it could have happened that first time out by the lake.
I kind of hope it did.
We’re not taking a paternity test either. I mean, what would be the point? For one, yes, the “father” in the biological sense is either me or Austin, but it honestly doesn’t matter to either of us who’d actually show up on a test. But then, you know, science - we’re identical twins, which means a test wouldn’t be able to tell anyways, which suits us just fine. And in any case, those kids are going to have two dads, period.
Oh, right, yeah, kids. As in, multiple kids. As in, Stella’s having twins.
…How’s that for irony?