“The ride’s here.”
She grabs my hand and we’re already walking the other way when I realize Arkane isn’t with us. I know I shouldn’t look, I can’t, I totally mustn’t...
But yeah, I still end up looking over my shoulder, and that’s when I see Arkane walking the opposite direction, and as he comes close to a silver, fancy-looking sportscar, it automatically opens, he slides inside, and seriously?
Not once does he look back.
Not. Even. Once.
Chapter Five
THE YOUNGS, THE LIMS, and me, the restless.
If my life were a daytime soap, that would have been the title of tonight’s episode, with how I suddenly find myself dining with Icelle’s family, which turns out to be one of San Antonio’s wealthiest families.
I’m seated between Joy and Icelle, with an empty chair to my right, and when I glance at it, Icelle only says, “Ark’s,” without further explanation, and that’s when I realize: the empty chair is Arkane’s. He’s not here, because he’s still on thebusiness thinghe warned me about at the airport, and I’m absolutely not thinking about the empty chair beside me.
Nope.
Not once.
The dining room around us is bigger than the entire first floor of any place my mom and I have ever lived. Walnut table the length of a bowling lane. A chandelier that looks like it weighs more than me. A painting on the far wall that I’m pretty sure is an actual, you know,painting.
Aldrich sits at the head of the table, and Lucius, Benedict, Marius, and Raiden are all across from me. Four brothers. Four ridiculously good-looking men, and I already know the first thing I’m supposed to be doing tonight is studying them for clues, because Icelle told me she’s in love with one of her stepbrothers and refused to say which one.
Detective mode: engaged.
Lucius, the eldest, is dark-haired and harsh-featured in the way Roman generals used to be carved into stone. He’s eating with the kind of precision that suggests his cutlery knows him personally. Good-looking in a way that makes you want to stand up straight.
Across from him, Benedict is blond, blue-eyed, and so beautiful it’s giving me pause, because he looks like a painting of an angel someone decided to give a jawline.
Beside Benedict is Marius, who’s got copper eyes and the easy charm of someone who’s never had to work for a laugh in his life. He’s the one everyone at the table keeps turning toward for punchlines, and whatever he’s saying is already making Icelle’s RBF soften at the edges, which for my friend is basically a standing ovation.
And then there’s Raiden, twenty-one and Icelle’s biological half-brother, so that’s obviously a no-go. Their family may be complicated, butnotthat kind of complicated.
Anyway, that leaves Lucius, Benedict, or Marius, and...