I’m normally a confident guy - some would say “cocky” - but I’m a bundle of nerves waiting for this hearing on our coding ordinance request to start. At least I take some comfort in the fact that we have almost everyone in my corner of the courtroom, and Lance is all by himself, as the lone challenger, over on his side.
As the bailiff calls out, “All rise!” I jolt to standing attention, and so do my brothers and Lucy, by my side.
“The Honorable Judge Brown will now hear the case,” the bailiff says. “You may be seated.”
“All right, I see some familiar faces here,” the judge starts out by saying, as he nods to Delia and her husbands. “I just want to say you guys have been doing a great things with that ranch. I love driving by it and knowing that there are some Irish guys making this small Texas town look good. I’ve heard tell that ya’all plan to make a dude ranch out of it with some of your neighbors, and I think it’s a great idea. Make sure you let me know when I can start helping you out by advertising it to whoever sets foot in their cowboy boots in this here courtroom of mine.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Delia gushes, while her husbands nod and squeeze her shoulders.
I flash Lucy a smile and see that she’s winking her sexy eye back at me.
We’ve got this in the bag.
“And who is this?” Judge Brown asks, glaring in Lance’s directions.
“I’m Lance-”
“I’d like Miss Delia to explain it to me,” the judge answers him. “I know her and I don’t know you.”
“Yes, your Honor,” Delia says, standing up to explain. “Lance is Lucy’s brother. Lucy is the person I’m trying to make the ranch with, along with my husbands here, and some other investors. Lance is here challenging the very thing we’re trying to do- to turn their land, and portions of my own, into a ranch, where people can come from Ireland- or anywhere, really- and appreciate this great Texas land and work on it with their own hands.”
I love the way she described it, and I can tell that Judge Brown did too, which is undoubtedly why she phrased things that way. She was speaking his language, for sure.
“And why in tarnation would you want to challenge that?” Judge Brown asks, addressing Lance again.
“Sir, I-”
“It’s your Honor,” the judge says. “And stand up when you address me.”
“Yes, sir, your Honor,” Lance says, his face reddening as he stands up. “I’m a part owner of the land that Lucy lives on. And it’s not properly zoned for commercial use.”
“Well now, are you wanting to be a partner in this amazing business they’ve concocted, or are you trying to stop it by raising zoning issues?” the judge demands, looking annoyed. “Because I can’t tell what you’re trying to argue.”
“I don’t think it should be turned into a dude ranch,” Lance says, stubbornly. “Or if it is, then I want my fair share.”
He looks a bit confused about what he’s arguing, himself.
“Well, fine,” Judge Brown says. “This whole thing is a matter than can be decided in a matter of minutes then. I was going to give you a chance to work out something with the lovely Miss Lucy here, your own flesh and blood and beloved sister. I’m sure you two could put your heads together for an agreement that’s fair about how to split profit, but it seems she’s been living there and taking care of it for most of her life, and Miss Delia knows how I feel about possession being nine tenths of the law. But there’s no need to even get into all of that, since you told me you’re trying to stop her plans and it’s simply a matter of me changing the zoning ordinance for that location to let her do it.”
“What?” Lance cries out, looking very upset. “This is not how it was supposed to happen. Brogan contacted me and told me that there were rumors of the place being turned into a dude ranch, and that I shouldn’t let it happen, or if it does, I should make sure he and I profit off of it. He told me the ordinance plan would work, and then that he and I could bribe the court of appeals to change the zoning so that he and I could make of the land what we wish.”
Well, fuck. It figures my old man would be behind this.
“Now this makes perfect sense,” Judge Browning says, seeming less shocked than I feel, and Lucy looks, at hearing that all of this was my dad’s idea. “Brogan is a dum-dum and I don’t know why you or anyone else would listen to him. He’s a few yards short of a Texas acre, that man is. So, now that you were dumb enough to reveal all of this to me, I see that you and he are meant for each other, and I won’t have Miss Delia and Miss Lucy’s plans derailed by the likes of you two. Instead, I’m going to decree that the zoning is changed and that the entire property is Miss Lucy’s to do with as she wishes, you hear?”
“But…” Lance starts to sputter, but the judge cuts him off.
“But nothing. This is my court room and I can do with it as I please. Welcome back home.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Lucy tells the judge.
She looks overjoyed, as does everyone else on our side of the courtroom, and I feel the exact same way.
I’m so excited that we are going to be able to proceed as planned. It sucks that my dad would try to scam Lucy out of money, but I know now that that’s just the type of person he is. I’m just focusing on the positive and the future.
I can’t wait to get back and celebrate with Lucy. I want to kiss her, touch her, love her - and watch her be loved and pleasured by my brothers, too.
I hope Lance never tries to mess with Lucy again. I’ll have to slug him if he does - or at least drag him back here to court for another dose of Judge Brown’s Orders. He should know by now not to mess with him, although Brogan didn’t seem to have learned his lesson, so maybe Lance will end up as equally dense.
“You’re welcome. Now, you’re free to work out some deal of your own with your brother if you’re inclined to cut him in. But, from the stunts he’s been pulling, I would advise you not to rush into anything any time soon, okay, darlin’?”
Lance huffs and said, “There’s no need to do that. I’m outta here as quickly as I came, now that I know about this crooked courthouse. Brogan and I will head out of town.”
The judge raises his eyebrows in disbelief. But I hope Lance is telling the truth and that my dad will be gone for good now.
“We’ll just see about that. I know Brogan will be scheming up some silly plan again soon. So, Miss Lucy, I’m just warning you that if your brother ever comes back into the picture, you should just think really long and hard about letting him and that fool Brogan mess up the good thing you’ve got going on over there.”
“I definitely will, Your Honor,” Lucy says.
I smile, thinking if the judge only knew what other good thing Lucy has going on over there, he would mean that in two ways instead of just one.
Chapter Fourteen
Seamus
We spend the evening celebrating at Rowan and Keenan’s place with the Brynes and Gina. The four of them continue to butt heads with her, even though Flynn has told me that he thinks she’s crazy hot. And I’ve caught Conor, who seems to detest her the most, staring at her ass on more than one occasion when her back’s been turned.
At one point when the five of them are embroiled in a heated argument, the origins of which I’m not sure of but that now seems to be about which “Toy Story” movie was the best.
Keenan takes advantage of their distraction to hand something to me, Cillian, and Barry. “So I know this might be a little bittersweet with all the happy stuff going on,” he says quietly, “But Delia found all of this in an old filing cabinet of Molly’s and we thought the three of you needed to see it.”
When we finally head home, the guys and I delve into the tote bag curiously. Lucy had offered us some privacy, since we had no idea what the bag might contain. The first thing I pull out is a manila envelope. The papers inside it are some sort of court papers from Ireland. My eyes flit to the dates across the top and my eyebrows furrow. These are from when I was about six or seven years old.
I pore over them, reading an ocean of legalese that makes my head swim. A lot of it goes over my head, but the crux of it, to my understanding, is that these are all of Molly’s records for a lost custody case, trying to bring my brothers and I to live with her.
My emotions are a whirlwind. My father’s ex-wife, whose house is now Rowan, Keenan, and Delia’s, had basically raised me up from infancy to about age five.
My memories are still blurry of what happened, but from what Barry and Cillian have said and what I’ve pieced together on my own, apparently Molly had finally grown tired of my father’s abuse, and had fled with us to her brother’s house, where we lived for a brief time with Rowan and Keenan. But then our dad had hunted us down, and Molly fled.
We’d only ever heard from her once after that, a phone call that Barry had happened to answer. We’d all huddled around the phone and had only been able to talk to her for about three minutes before our dad had caught us.
He had screamed and raged at her on the phone and we had scattered like rabbits, hiding in our rooms from his fury. Barry pulls two journals out of the tote bag. They’re tied together with a ribbon, and the front is marked with a Post-It note scribbled on in Delia’s handwriting, saying “Start with the blue journal. You can read the brown one after, but I think you need to see the blue one first.”
We open the blue journal, as requested, and start to read. We quickly figure out that this was a diary belonging to Molly, and the dates marked at the top are a little before the dates on the legal paperwork.
The entries start out hopeful and excited, with Molly raving about how happy she is with her new husbands-”Husbands?” Cillian asks aloud.
Barry peeks into the brown journal, looking at the top for a date. “This one came first,” he says, sounding puzzled, “I wonder why Delia wanted us to start with the other one.”
“There must be a reason,” I say with a shrug, “We’ll figure it out.”
The hopeful entries talk about us, too. Molly had talked to a lawyer and apparently they thought she had a good chance at gaining custody of the three of us. But as the entries continue, they grow less and less hopeful, with Molly reporting that the case was not going well and that she was terrified to lose us.
She wrote about how much she missed us, saying that no matter what, we were her boys, and she loved us.And finally, we reach the entry that explains why we never heard from her again. It’s crinkled and blurred, like it was water-stained, and as I read the contents, I realize that it was stained with tears.
We had to drop the case today. And Brogan can now keep me from seeing or talking to my boys ever again. Apparently, he told his lawyer and his lawyer told ours that we were in an illegal relationship and therefore unfit to raise the boys.
I guess he told his lawyer we were polygamous so he could use it against us, and even tried to imply that there was an incestuous relationship between James and Chris, which makes me so angry I just-
There is a large paragraph of text scribbled out after that, but it continues down the page.
So our lawyer, who was admittedly pretty nice about it all, told us that it was either drop the case, or risk scrutiny and possibly even end up in jail if Brogan has his way.
We’ve been mulling this over for almost a week, and James and Chris have been so sweet, promising to support me no matter what I decide to do. And it was pretty clear that there was no way I could possibly win this case, and continuing to pursue it risked so much. So I had no choice but to let go. I’m crushed in a way I can’t even describe.
Dropping it like this, I can still try and write, and call, but just like now, Brogan will continue to block every call and return every letter. I feel so helpless.
I wish there was some way I could tell those boys that I love them like my own. I wish I could tell them that I hate this, that I can’t be with them, watching them grow up, but I just don’t know what more to do. I won’t give up on them, even if it means I wait until they’re adults and out from under Brogan’s umbrella and hunt them down in person.
But for now, for the sake of my husbands who love me and support me, I will step back until we can come up with another way to get my boys back.
Barry and Cillian both scan my face. They’d loved Molly, of course, but I had always been the closest to her, and I had always been sad and angry and wondered what had happened. All I knew was that she had disappeared and my dad had fed me more and more bullshit about how we’d been abandoned by her and what a monster she was.
For a long time, I’d let him poison my mind about Molly. I’d held that anger in and hadn’t let it go until shortly after Molly’s death. Her death had made me ask my brothers questions, and I’d learned about our father’s abuse and Molly’s attempt to escape with us.
And now, to learn how hard she’d fought and see how much she cared about us, any last tendril of that rage evaporated. I was sad, of course, wishing things had been different and I’d gotten to have her around growing up, but at the same time, this new information was a balm on those old wounds.
And digging deeper into the tote, we find several bundles of envelopes, banded together with rubber bands.There are multiple bundles of letters addressed to each of us, all at our old address living with Dad, all of them from Molly. They seem to start out as Molly Donoghue, and later the return address always reads Molly Matthews.
They’re postmarked as far back as the month after she’d left, and they extend all the way up to about two weeks before her death. But because the three of us had still been living with Dad and he always seemed to manage to be home to intercept the mail, we’d never seen a single one.
“Well,” I say finally, “Looks like we’ve got a lot of reading to do,” I hold up one of the bundles addressed to me.
Cillian claps me on the shoulder, that small gesture of brotherly comfort speaking volumes, and Barry flashes me a smile that speaks similarly.
The three of us put everything carefully back into the back. We’ve taken in a lot of information, and the idea of reading what are sure to be emotional letters just seems like too much right now. We’re still dealing with the buzz of winning out case in court, and now that’s been topped with the bittersweet knowledge that Molly had never stopped caring about us.
Overall, it makes for a heady cocktail of emotions. So we put the tote in a drawer to look over later, before we all head upstairs in search of Lucy.
She’s square in the center of our bed, her clothes in a careful pile on the floor, and her bare body is stretched out before us on the bedspread invitingly.
“I figured if it was happy news, we could celebrate, and if not, maybe I can offer some consolation,” she says with a smile.
“It was kind of bittersweet news, so maybe a little of both?” Cillian offers jokingly.
“My wish is your command,” she says with a sultry smile.
My clothes are off in a flash and I kneel between Lucy’s parted thighs, bending down and kissing her, hard.
She meets my kiss with equal fervor, nipping lightly at my lower lip with her teeth. I can feel the heat radiating from between her thighs, and when I tease her soaked folds with the head of my cock, she whimpers with need.
“Hang on,” Barry murmurs, and gestures for me to get off of her.
He repositions Lucy with her straddling me, with room in front of her for Cillian while Barry kneels behind her and starts lubing up her ass.
She enthusiastically takes Cillian’s cock into her mouth while she rolls her hips, riding Barry’s fingers as he works them in and out of her asshole. Her dripping slit slides along the length of my shaft and I realize I have to be inside her, right fucking now.
I grip her hips hard, stilling her motion, before using one hand and positioning the head of my cock at her tight entrance. As desperate to take my cock as I am to give it to her, she fights the grip of my other hand and rocks her hips, driving my cock deep inside her, her cries muffled by Cillian’s dick.
Barr
y continues to finger-fuck her asshole while I bury my cock in her pussy, and she rides us both enthusiastically, all the while bobbing her head along Cillian’s shaft, taking him deep into her throat.
She feels so fucking good, hot and slick with arousal, the tight grip of her walls clamping around my cock as if she’s milking every last drop of plasure out of me. Her tits bounce against my face and I cup one of them eagerly and wrap my lips around her rock-hard nipple. Barry slathers lube along his dick and replaces his fingers in her ass with it.
This coaxes a fresh wave of muffled moans from our girl, and I can feel the trembling of a pending orgasm rippling through her. In answer, I buck my hips up, pounding into her harder as Barry slams into her ass, and those muffled moans turn to muffled screams as her climax rips through her. Her pussy grips me like a vice and I grit my teeth, fighting to maintain control and draw out this pleasure.
But Lucy makes it a fucking challenge. She’s so hot, and her skill in the bedroom is un-fucking-real. We’ve taken her from a sweet virgin to a sensual goddess, giving her the opportunity to delve into the truth of herself and embrace the wild woman within.
So I all want to do is ram my cock into her and pump her full of my seed, but I’m dragging out the pleasure. Although, apparently, Cillian either can’t do the same or doesn’t want to. I hear his grunt of release, and a glance up shows me that Lucy is gulping down his load with ease and pleasure before releasing him with an audible pop.
And Barry’s pace is stuttering and ragged as he nears his own climax, challenging me just that much harder to hold out longer. When he shoots his load into her ass, I feel a surge of pride at being the “last man standing.”
When Barry pulls out and I have Lucy to myself, I flip her over onto her back and pin her down, slamming my hips against hers and driving my cock deep inside her. She throws her head back, her back arching and pressing her body against mine, and she coils her legs around my waist. “Yes, yes, yes,” she breathes, her voice shaky and needy, “Don’t stop, fuck, right there!”
All Our Luck: Complete Irish Reverse Harem Series Page 17