Total pages in book: 143
Estimated words: 132834 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 664(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 443(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132834 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 664(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 443(@300wpm)
I hadn’t seen Ford in ten years. He’d done some pretty shitty things in his day, including orchestrating Griffen’s exile and marrying his fiancée and later, joining our father in trading my life for a business deal. But I still couldn’t believe he’d shot our father. For one thing, if Ford wanted to kill Prentice, he wouldn’t have been caught. He sure as hell wouldn’t have been stupid enough to stash the murder weapon in his own closet. No one believed he did it, but the evidence said otherwise, and he remained in prison.
Ford’s arrest was my first surprise in coming home.
The reading of the will was the second.
I hadn’t expected my father to leave me anything. Once upon a time, he had the option to save my life with a handful of cash. He said I was a bad investment. I was shocked to find out he’d left us all trust funds—with a few stipulations.
To inherit, we each had to live at Heartstone Manor for the next five years, allowed to leave for only two weeks a quarter. And we had to be good little boys and girls for Griffen. My father had exiled Griffen when I was thirteen. They’d never spoken again. To everyone’s surprise, Prentice had left him everything. The company. The house. Control over our trust funds. But no cash.
My father had been wily. My guess? He assumed Griffen would dip into our trusts for ready cash, draining us dry while he ran the company into the ground. Goes to show Prentice didn’t know everything. Griffen hadn’t told us how much was in our trusts—I wasn’t sure he knew himself—but he’d sworn he wouldn’t touch them. Instead, he’d been working his ass off, along with his wife, Hope, and our brother Royal, to grow the company into more of a powerhouse than it already was.
I wasn’t close to my siblings. Until a few months ago, I hadn’t spoken to Griffen since I was thirteen. None of them knew where I’d been for the past decade or what I’d been doing. Not really.
I didn’t know how I would survive living in this house for the next four years and six months, but I thought there was a chance Griffen wasn’t going to steal my inheritance.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t fuck it up on my own. There was that second clause, after all. The one about being a good little boy. Being good has never been my forte. I was a raging asshole through most of my teens and early twenties. In the last few years, I’d gotten my inner asshole under control. Mostly.
I was a decent human being these days. Most of the time. Dropping that sugar cube in the soup had been a dick move. Driving Mrs. Bailey into quitting was not the act of a nice guy.
I’m self-aware enough to know when I’m being an asshole, and while I was mostly good these days, this plan to take over the kitchens was like a trip back to see the old Finn. The Finn who’d set the headmaster’s office on fire to get kicked out of school. I’d had a plan back then too. And it had worked. Just like this one was going to work.
Chapter Two
FINN
I crunched the last bit of salad, biting back a smile as I watched Savannah open the dumbwaiter to reveal the steaming tureen of soup.
I did feel bad about what I was doing to Mrs. Bailey. She wasn’t the worst cook in the world. She just wasn’t the best. Or more than halfway decent. But she was a hard worker and reliable. She’d find another job. Another kitchen. I just needed her out of this one. This kitchen was mine.
Here’s the thing that really makes me the asshole.
I could have told Griffen I wanted to take over the kitchen after the last cook quit. By then I’d already been drawn back, stealing into the kitchens in the dead of night to cook, shuffling in the dark, moving in near silence so I wouldn’t wake Savannah and Nicky. I’d loved those kitchens as a kid. They were the only place I felt like me. The only place in this entire fucking town where I had real roots.
With every night I snuck in, the need grew. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was a man. This wasn’t Chef Guérard’s kitchen anymore. And it sure as hell didn’t belong to Mrs. Bailey. It was mine. It had always been mine. If I had to be in Heartstone Manor, I needed to be in the kitchens. Needed it like I needed food and sleep. Like I needed to cook. It was an itch under my skin, this need. So deep, so true, it was more than a little terrifying.
I could have gone to Griffen and asked to take over the kitchens. I’d thought about it. All I had to do was walk into his office and say I wanted to claim the kitchens. I’d have to cook for the family, sure, but the trade-off was worth it. The kitchens would be mine. My territory. My space. Mine. I hadn’t known how much I needed that until the idea fully formed in my mind. The depth of my want left me unsteady.