“I can well understand that!” Paul Westin said thoughtfully. “So we have a witness who can swear a statement to the court that there was an inappropriate relationship going on. We have an older half sibling who would have been born at a time in the marriage when Tisha Olivares-King was about to be in violation of the child clause. And we have a prenuptial agreement that would have absolutely stripped your mother of all rights to an inheritance had your father decided to enforce the prenuptial agreement.”
“I know that our mother can seem very frightening when it comes to the social aspect of things,” Orion told the lawyer. “I get that she can make it look like she has everyone in her pocket and that she would be able to make your children walking targets for bullying.”
Devon pursed his lips and looked at the lawyer. “All of that is a lie.”
“What?” Paul Westin finally looked up from the legal pad and frowned at them. “She’s one of those people who are part of the first circles of Dallas society! My wife is terrified of her.”
“That’s like saying she’s the number one clown of Dallas society,” Zane snorted. He shook his head at Westin. “Our mother is a laughingstock in Dallas. You need to understand that. It’s important. She can say a lot of things, but we are in a position to argue with her and we will do so if necessary.”
“Don’t buy into what she tells you,” Orion agreed. He stood up and pointed at Westin. “I want you to go home and have a good holiday with your family. But when the world starts again the day after Christmas it’s time to make the terms of that prenuptial agreement public knowledge. Do you get me? If Gemini King needs to come in here and introduce himself, he will. He hates our mother more than anyone else I can think of. We’re all fed up with her games and her machinations and her attempts to sell King Security Solutions, Incorporated so that she can live forever on the proceeds.”
“There is no way that the judge will just cut her out of things,” Westin advised the brothers. “It’s not going to happen. Like it or not, your mother is your mother and she was the spouse of the deceased.”
“We don’t want to cut her out of it,” Orion explained.
Zane whipped around to stare at Orion. “We don’t?”
“No. It’s not even realistic. It’s like trying to divorce our own mother. We have to provide for her. We just need to put boundaries on it.”
“Ah.” Devon was nodding. “So basically we need to come up with an offer and suggest it to the judge.”
“Exactly!” Orion bobbed his head. He could tell from Westin’s expression that this was the right thing to say. “And we need to be absolutely certain the judge does not believe that we’re trying to suggest that our mother killed our father. We know it’s true. But we can’t go there or that judge is going to think our motives are all wrong.”
Westin chuckled to himself. He was still writing notes on the yellow legal pad. “You should have been a lawyer,” Westin told Orion. “You would have made a good one.”
“Yeah. No thanks.” Orion made a face. “The idea of dealing with scumbags all day long isn’t my idea of fun.”
“That’s why I’m in probate,” Westin confided. “Except this case started to feel like divorce court a long time ago.”
“Go home,” Orion told the attorney. “Have a very merry Christmas with your family. We will be in touch in a few days.”
“Thank you.” Westin pursed his lips and Orion knew that he was saying thank you for far more reasons than just the suggestion of a Merry Christmas. A lot more.
Chapter Twenty
Engagement and marriage was supposed to be a happy time in a young woman’s life. It was the time when you got to be the center of attention. There were parties and gifts and plenty of well-wishing from friends. The bloom of love was fresh and it was supposed to be a magical period of preparing to start a life with someone that you love deeply.
Eleni Ariosa lifted the mug of hot vanilla chai tea to her lips and felt the steam bathe her face in welcome warmth. She wasn’t sure now how long she had been sitting on her sofa with a blanket wrapped around her legs. It was probably forever. That’s what it felt like.
Maybe it felt like forever because it seemed so very long ago that she had woken with Orion’s arms wrapped securely around her body. This morning when the two of them had stirred from sleep she had felt as though the whole world were at her fingertips. There was so much hope. Or there had been. Before. Before she had gone to visit her mother and try to help her with the financial pit of despair that seemed to have swallowed the Ariosa household.
Now Eleni sat on her sofa with a blanket around her and a mug of cooling tea in her hands so that she could stare out the window and remember that only a few hours ago she had thought that she was going to get married and live happily ever after. Not anymore. Not now. Not after her mother’s order to do just that.
It was hard not to think about Embry. Eleni’s sister had been so excited to marry Joseph Orville. She had loved the young man. That had been evident from the beginning. But Embry had also been thrilled by the prospect of leaving Alaina and all of her maneuvering behind. In Embry’s mind, it had been a chance to start over in a family where Alaina did not rule the roost. But that wasn’t really possible. Alaina was determined to run everything, be in charge of everything, and to ruin anyone’s happiness that did not somehow give Alaina something in the process.
“Eleni?”
Orion’s voice wasn’t unwelcome. She did need to talk to him. And yet she wasn’t really sure what to say. He walked into the living room from the direction of the front door with an almost excited expression on his face. He looked fresh from a successful fight or something else of that nature.
Let’s see. Where had he said that he was going? Something about an attorney. That was what she thought anyway. Eleni had never felt quite that positive about a visit with a lawyer. Apparently being a King changed the resulting feelings.
“Eleni, are you all right?”
Orion knelt beside the sofa. He took the cooling mug from her fingers and set it on the end table. Then he carefully began to rub her hands in his. The feel of his fingers stroking her palms and her knuckles was exquisite. She had never been pampered like this before in her life. The guy acted as if she were the only thing in the world that mattered. Had he always been like that?
“How come you’ve always seemed so grouchy?” Eleni whispered. “Everyone talks about Orion King like he’s the troll under the bridge. For the last few months I’ve been so worried about you. You were always scowling and constantly looked like someone pissed in your cornflakes just that morning.”
He laughed. Laughed! It wasn’t really a laughing matter. And yet he was smiling as he turned both of her palms up and placed kisses on each one. “You’re right. I’m grouchy as a troll. I growl and complain and make everyone feel like crap. I think in some ways that it’s been my job as a big brother to treat my younger brothers like babies. I’ll admit that they piss me off sometimes.”
“Embry used to make me mad,” Eleni observed distantly. She thought about her sister’s constant positive outlook and bouncy outgoing vibrancy. “I never understood why she didn’t realize that our mother was a disaster and that the most important thing in life should be making absolutely sure that you could support yourself without the help of a man.” The thought of that twenty-five thousand dollar complaint against Alaina Ariosa by her last boyfriend was a classic example of that sort of thing.
Orion sat down on the floor and leaned against the side of the sofa. He was so big and so broad shouldered that it was almost like he was just sitting beside her. He kept hold of her hands and continued the slow and almost mesmerizing rubbing. “Jason and Zane have always made me mad as hell because they’re absolutely careless with the shifter secret that our family has carried for all these years. Those two will shift and run right through the middle of town. Our half brother, Gemini, is the same way. It’s like they don’t understand how serious it would be for some
one to discover them. If they get caught or photographed or whatever, they all act like it’s no big deal. But it is.”
“Wow.” Eleni chuffed out a huge sigh. “I suppose I had never actually looked at it quite like that. The whole shifter thing is—well, it’s amazing and scary as hell all at the same time.”
“When my father first explained it to me and my body started having signs of the shift, I begged Dad to make it not so.” He looked grim as though it had been a very hard time in his personal history.
“You’ve had a drinking problem for the last few years. The last few months especially.” Eleni murmured the words as her brain spun around and around the admittedly few things that she truly understood about shifters and their physical characteristics. “Is that why you don’t actually have a drinking problem? You made a comment to me before. I didn’t really understand it. But you said something to the effect that you didn’t have a problem. At first I thought it was just one of those classic blow-offs, you know?”
He smiled up at her. His dark eyes were twinkling with something that almost looked like merriness. How could the two of them be so far off the emotional mark with each other? He looked high as a kite and she felt as though the world was about to end.
Then he touched his lips to her fingers. “Shifters aren’t actually prone to drunkenness. It could be true that I have a problem. I suppose I’ve never really looked at it. I was angry at my mother and my brothers and that is why I drank. I wanted to escape. I wanted that to work. It just doesn’t. Not really. I could drink bottles of straight Absinthe and maybe get a few hours of oblivion out of it. But our bodies process too quickly. We are efficient and it takes an awful lot to make one of us really pass out from something like alcohol. So our drinking problems aren’t of the traditional variety.”
“So I suppose it’s just a lot easier to quit then,” Eleni murmured. “It must be nice to have no chance of getting something awful like cancer or some other disease. You don’t suffer from allergies or colds or the flu. You’ve probably never broken a bone. It’s like you’re just physically destined to live a perfect life. So how do you die?”
“Old age.” Orion seemed to sober up and Eleni realized that he was thinking about his father. “You can be physically fit and still fall prey to your wife and your best friend as they decide to murder you because they want all of the wealth that you’ve spent your life working hard to accumulate.”
“I’m sorry, Orion.” She felt bad for bringing that up. Maybe her own bad mood made her secretly determined to ruin everyone else’s day. That did not speak very well of her as a person.
“My grandfather just went to sleep one night in his late nineties and never woke up. That’s traditionally how it happens. One second we’re fine and the next we’re not.”
“That’s sad!” Eleni whispered. “It’s so unfair to think that you guys are always destined to be the ones left behind. That you will always outlive your fully human spouse. Aren’t there other shifters for you to marry so that doesn’t happen?”
“We don’t gather in communities that are large enough to support that. And honestly, female shifters are rare.” He chuckled to himself. “My brothers and I just got done speaking to our probate attorney. He was my father’s estate lawyer. We talked over some finer points of the prenuptial agreement that existed between my parents and I think the poor guy was pretty baffled by some of the stipulations.”
“Really?” In spite of her dark mood, Eleni was curious about that aspect of the King family. There were five boys all one year apart as though at one point Tisha Olivares-King had been cranking them out like a baby factory. “I always wondered how your mother could just pop out five sons in five years like they were loaves of bread she was baking or something.”
“Having a shifter’s baby isn’t nearly as taxing as having a regular full human kid.” Orion made a face and laughed a little bit at himself. “Although, I have to admit there that I don’t really know that beyond listening to my father and grandfather talk about the subject. To hear my mother tell it, having us boys ruined her body, her life, her prospects, and pretty much everything else.”
“I don’t buy that for a second,” Eleni snorted. The fact that there was a prenuptial agreement suggested otherwise. “I bet she had to provide the kids to keep herself in the will.”
“Exactly. And I think that was something the attorney was a bit confused about. As in, how could my father expect any woman to pop out at least five kids before the marriage was ten years old?”
“I would guess it has something to do with shifter virility.” Eleni contemplated this and was suddenly apprehensive. “Are you guys like super duper fertile or something? Magic sperm? Supernatural swimmers? That sort of thing?”
Orion’s big dark eyes crinkled at the corners as he laughed as though she had just made the most hilarious comment ever. “Something like that maybe. I don’t know. Perhaps one day I’ll have a kid or one of my brothers will have one that can go into some kind of science field and do studies on the virility statistics of shifters.”
“Kids.” Eleni pursed her lips. “Do you want kids? I don’t know anymore. I used to want them. Then I was adamantly opposed. It’s kind of hard to imagine what life would be like with children when I’m struggling so much to try and make my mother be an independent woman.” Eleni quickly outlined some of what had happened earlier that day for Orion. She deliberately left out the part about being ordered to marry him.
“Sweetheart, I’m sorry.” He took her hands in his and lifted them to his lips. “That’s awful. What a burden!”
“I think I keep trying to help her. You know?” Eleni felt the hot splash of tears down her cheeks and wished that she could stop feeling so absolutely confused about what her responsibilities toward her mother actually were. “She doesn’t want my help.”
“She wants you to take care of her completely.” Orion gazed up at her for a long moment. “It’s Christmas Eve. I want you to come to my family’s Christmas party tomorrow. Please? It would mean a lot to me if you would do that.”
“What about your mother?”
“I have no idea if she’s planning to attend or not and I honestly don’t care.” Orion gave a shake of his head. “Tisha Olivares-King is about the least loving and caring mother that I can think of. And the only reason that I don’t consider her the worst mother on the planet is because she still seems to be competing with your mother for that title.”
“They always did compete,” Eleni reminded him. “It’s sick though. Right? Even now when they hate each other they’re basically competing for worst parent of the year award.”
“There’s something else,” Orion said quietly. He stared up at her until Eleni felt the most awful urge to squirm. “What else? Tell me. Please? What else did your mother say to ruin your day. You look as though someone told you that your life is over.”
Funny, but it did feel that way. Eleni did not want to tell him. She did not want to make this all about her and her problems and her mother and the fact that her family was even more screwed up than his was. At least his family had some weird supernatural angle going on. The Ariosas were just selfish people with shitty money management strategies.
“Can I guess?”
Orion got to his knees and then scooted up onto the couch beside her. He wrapped both arms around Eleni’s body and pulled her into his embrace. She wanted to resist. Maybe deep down she felt as though she should resist. Like she didn’t have the right to huddle there in his arms while her mother was secretly planning to mooch off of him for the rest of her natural life.
Eleni sucked in a shaky, ragged breath. “I can’t stop you from guessing.”
“All right then.” He pressed his lips lovingly to the side of her head and then rested his chin atop her hair. “Then I’m going to guess that your mother has suddenly decided that I’m the perfect marriage target.”
“Warmer.”
“Hopefully this does not involve a plan for her to
seduce and marry me because that would be truly terrifying.” The humor in his tone seemed so incredibly incongruent with what was happening. How could he be so flippant about this? “That would mean your mother has decided that the perfect way to supplement her income is to take advantage of how available I’ve been to you and to her lately. So she probably what? Ordered you to secure a proposal?”
“It sounds mercenary!” Eleni felt such distaste for the whole thing. “You should be running for the hills, Orion! You should want to get as far away from me as possible. You don’t want that on your plate! Look what my mother managed to do to the Orville family. I can’t bear the thought of her sinking her claws into you like that too.”
“You know,” Orion drawled. “When Edward first told us—meaning my brothers—about the Orvilles and their issue with your mother, our response was pretty flippant. We all suggested that it was time for people to start setting boundaries with your mother.”
“It’s not easy to do,” Eleni whispered. “Sh-she’s—she’s just demanding!”
“Yes, but I’m not the Orvilles and I’m not you.” There was steel in his voice. And for the first time Eleni had the thought that there might be hope after all. “She can try to bully me all she wants. She’s going to find out that the big bad wolf would rather eat the grandmother than listen to her whine.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Christmas Day. The strangest one that Orion could ever remember actually. As he pulled into the driveway in front of the King family home in University Park, Orion was almost certain that he had never before had such a strange Christmas morning before in his life.
“Are you ready?” Orion turned to look at Eleni in the passenger seat of his truck.
Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5 Page 110