Page 71 of Miss Humbug
I shot a glance to Marlowe. I couldn’t read her. She appeared confused, which made sense. A little hopeful, a dash something else.
I wasn’t trying to hide anything. Might as well come out with it. “There’s no contract. Dad said as much. It sounds like it was more of a neighborly agreement.”
Riley looked between us. “Wait, so this is a different land deal than what you wanted Marlowe to give you?”
She’d asked them about giving me land? I scratched the back of my neck. “Yeah. That was a…different conversation.” It was hard to know what to say with so many questioning eyes boring into my flesh.
“More land than what you already have on Holly property?” Rafe clarified.
Marlowe stepped away from the desk, seeming to retract into herself. “You knew? About this?” She pointed to the map.
This looked bad. Really bad. “Only recently. Very recently. It’s…complicated.”
“This is exactly why I said no land to boyfriends,” Rafe muttered. “Look—his family already has several acres and they want more. For free.”
“I never said free—” But my words were cut off by escalating voices.
All but Marlowe, who stood silent.
“Now we know why this scrub was hanging around so much.” Shawn approached, sizing me up as if we hadn’t known each other for two decades. “Mooching off my baby sister to take our land.”
The way he growled you’d think the guy was starring in a Western flick. “That’s not true. It was never about that.”
Itbeing us, and the care and love I’d had for Marlowe practically my whole life, andthatbeing the land deal. Which had been part of our partnership, but obviously not the only reason I’d been spending time with her.
“Do you even care about Marlowe?” Brianne threw up her hands. “Is the small-town B&B romance a total farce?”
Cara whistled sharply for our attention. “Okay, folks. We’re not devolving into chaos for the umpteenth time. Ethan? Here’s the deal. We’ve decided a few things about the house. No one person will inherit. We’re proceeding with a family trust and looking into a few charity options. To come to this decision, we all agreed any discussion of selling land is off the table until we can determine the details of the trust.”
I looked at Marlowe. She’d agreed not to discuss selling the land? Just like that, in a meeting I hadn’t been invited to?
Right, because I wasn’t a Holly. A fact I’d lost sight of the past few weeks. Of course I didn’t get a vote. Wasn’t this exactly what my brother warned me about? Trusting Marlowe to come through on the deal was a risk. In this case, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to fulfill her end, but she didn’t have the power.
She’d been overruled. I should have known it would come to this. The Hollys did what they wanted, all the time, by their own rules. I might have been an honorary Holly accepted at Thanksgiving dinner, but when it came to property rights, I had no say.
I loved this family like my own, but this wasn’t debatable. Unless you were a Holly, and then every aspect was up for debate.
What else could I do but agree? They’d already decided what was what. “Marlowe, I’m sorry about this extra land thing complicating our deal—”
“There’s no deal,” Shawn seethed. “Because none of that land isyours.”
Ashe shouldered in front of Shawn and nudged him aside. “Alright, cool off. I doubt the Sawyers conspired against us. Let’s talk this through.”
Marlowe skirted the edges of the room until she reached the door. She opened the second of the French doors to move past me. “You said you weren’t holding anything back,” she stated in a low voice meant for me only. “I believed you.”
“I never meant to lie. Telling you would have complicated this more than it needed.”
She left the room but glanced behind her as she headed down the hall. I followed.
We landed in the kitchen. She paced the length of the room with one hand hovering as if ready to gesture. “Why didn’t you trust me? That’s the issue here. I want to help you. If I’d known just how much you needed the land—all of it—I might have approached this in a completely different way.”
“Trust? You say you want to help me but you let your family steamroll over you. They were always going to have the upper hand and you know it.”
She stopped pacing and fired a fierce look at me. “Are you saying I gave up on you? We needed to come to an agreement over this house before we could even consider discussing the land. Believe me, I tried. Only then we find out there’s more to the story. Thatyouknew about.”
My frustration let loose. “We should admit this idea was never going to work. I was the dumb one to believe it might.”
We fell silent with only voices carrying over from down the hall.
