Love Me Again - Aiden Bates Page 0,67

waited for us to remove our shoes—like her well-behaved boys always had—and catch up to her before leading us to a location we could have found ourselves. Controlling old shrew.

Mom opened one of the double doors to the master suite and ushered us in to where Dad was sitting up in bed, looking as healthy as any of the rest of us. A tray sat beside him with the remains of what he’d had for breakfast, and work papers were scattered at his other side, with the newspaper open on his lap.

“Okay.” I glared at my mother.

She shrugged. “I know what you’re thinking, but your father’s sick, and I didn’t lie. He was diagnosed with cancer but has just finished his course of chemotherapy and doctors have said he can expect a full recovery. He’s going to be fine,” she finished with a smile that I couldn’t read.

It was partway between a manipulative twitch of her lips and something deeper, something that said gotcha like she’d always known she could move Kane and me to do her bidding if she offered the right incentive.

Kane closed his eyes, like he was simply tired of them and their games, as he breathed out a long exhale through his mouth, but anger burned along each of my nerves.

“What a manipulative asshole thing to do,” I ground out. “You know that’s not the way you made it sound.”

Dad shrugged. “We also know you wouldn’t have come over here any other way. It was the only thing we could think of to get the two of you home.”

I scoffed. Some home. “This house hasn’t been my home in a very long time.”

I’d barely even had a home before now because I never stayed still long enough, and it was Leo who really made the house I’d rented into a home because he allowed me to fill it with love. Nothing like this old mausoleum of a house.

Dad behaved as if I hadn’t even spoken, although that was nothing new. He shuffled some of the papers at his side and held up a buff-colored folder.

“My cancer diagnosis has made me start rethinking a few things, specifically with respect to my will, which you know will contain a substantial sum of money and a portfolio of stocks and property.”

I didn’t bother to acknowledge him. He wasn’t really talking to us as much as at us. Dad liked nothing better than an audience—willing or not, it seemed.

“Currently,” he continued, his eyes laser-focused on me.

Perhaps he’d identified me as the weak link as usual. No matter how bored I tried to look by their antics, my parents must have smelled desperation for their approval radiating from me in waves. No more, though. I wouldn’t march to their tune anymore.

“Yes, currently, your mother stands to inherit the bulk of my assets with the remainder being split between the two of you, my sons, although any hope I had that either of you might continue the Abbott bloodline has long since died. However, I’m no longer sure either of you deserve to inherit anything. It’s a question that has been weighing heavily on my mind of late.”

I tensed my jaw until it ached and pushed my clenched fists into my pocket where no one else would see how my parents affected me. This was their typical MO, holding money over our heads to force us into doing whatever it was they wanted.

But they’d lost their leverage. Maybe they hadn’t realized, but neither Kane nor I was exactly hard-up for cash ourselves, and we could easily live a life out from under our parents’ mega-wealth, not to mention the influence they tried to exert.

Dad narrowed his eyes as he looked at me, and I could almost see the newest scheme forming in his mind. Maybe this hadn’t been totally about money after all, and he had another way to get us to behave as he wanted.

“One of the assets in my will is a collection of photograph albums.” He waved his hand dismissively, although his calculating gaze remained on me. “You probably won’t even remember them, but your Grandfather used to take photographs and filled album after album. There are a few others, too. Look like a rank amateur put them together on an off-day.”

Fury washed through me, and the feeling drained from my face, the numbness spreading throughout my body. I could barely stand to look at my father, the old bastard. Of course I remembered the albums, and Dad knew