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“Yeah, ‘get some rest’, ‘go to bed’, ‘eat all your lunch’, ‘stop watching true crime docs and getting anxious.’ What kind of messages were those? Did you have a live feed of my hospital room?” I joked and then nearly died as he nodded.

“Of course I did. All the rooms in the private suites are fitted with CCTV. Though, rest assured, I was the only one watching. I’d never allow anyone else to.”

“You were watching me?” I repeated, my face hot and scratchy. Some of the choicer things I’d said about Brody and his father in the last few days replayed in my head. Hmm, maybe he’d brought me here to kill me and get rid of the body in the backyard…

“I’m always watching you, heathen. I can’t look away,” he murmured, tucking my hair back behind my ear.

I shook my head. “I don’t understand you. You’re always watching, but you go and get my mom in trouble, and you care about me, but you don’t care if my sister is kicked out of her special school?—”

“Who said I didn’t care? Of course I care. If you care about it, I care about it,” Brody said simply.

I let out a long, incredulous breath. The panic and disappointment in my chest were gradually morphing into relief and hope.

“I won’t lie about wanting our parents to get divorced. I wish it had happened fucking yesterday. That marriage never should have happened in the first place, though I’ll always be grateful for it, as it brought you to me.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “And you do know that I’m not going to continue our… situationship or whatever you’re calling it, while my mother is destitute on the street and Cici loses her place at school?”

“First of all, call our relationship some ambiguous bullshit term again and I’ll put you across my fucking knee and spank some sense into you. You’ve been warned. I won’t tolerate it. Second of all, your mother and sister won’t be destitute. Of course I’ll take care of them. They’re your family. I’ll always take care of them.”

“I don’t understand.” I gave up on trying to figure this mercurial man out.

He sighed. “I went to New York to speak to my father. That was part of taking care of your family. He needed to understandsomething, and now he does.” He gazed down at me. “Come on, we have to sit, because I can’t stand watching you in pain.”

“Yet you watched me for days stressing about our… relationship.” I rolled my eyes at his ridiculous threat of spanking me if I called it a situationship again, but also not trusting that he wouldn’t do it.

We sat in the sitting room. The doors were open to the pool, the weather warm, sun filling the space. The scent of lavender from the pots lining the walkway drifted to me.

“I had a PI follow your mother initially because, yes, I didn’t want any of you in my family. I’ll admit that. It was, however, before I knew you. Once I did, once I… realized what we were, I didn’t call the PI off because I needed to not be legally bound to you.”

I blinked at him. “Why?”

He shrugged. “Call me old-fashioned, but I believe it’s still frowned upon to marry your sister, step or not.”

“Marry,” I repeated, numb.

He nodded. “So, you see, I had to find a way to drive your mother and my father apart. I figured that as soon as they were divorced, you’d rejoin the family in a different capacity. Wife.”

I could only stare at him.

“I was going to put it to my father, make sure your mother was well provided for— though that wouldn’t matter once we were married—and explain to him how I’d provide for her and your sister, but it wasn’t going to be some big dramatic thing. Then thanks to a mix-up, my father got the photos of your mother andher boyfriend prematurely. I apologize for that, though you’ll come to see, it wasn’t solely my fault.”

He paused.

“Well? Go on, don’t leave me hanging,” I protested. I was still reeling from the shock of Brody talking so casually about marriage. I needed time to recover.

“So, I had an attorney look into the prenup. Airtight, of course, including that damn morality clause, which your mother broke. But then my PI came through with something else. Something he’d discovered while watching your mother.”

“What?”

Brody smirked at me. It was that good old arrogant smirk that had always driven me crazy. The smirk of a guy who planned to win at everything he did.

“My father broke it first.”

Shock hit me, followed swiftly by fury. “Your father was cheating on my mom already?”

Brody nodded.

“Who with?”