Page 15 of Second Chance Wedding
Ana nodded that it was true, her mind reeling with the change in direction. She was stretched thin financially, and while she could take money from the nest egg she’d managed to scrape together, the repairs would empty the account. No emergency fund, no secret stash. She’d be scrambling to get by just like she was in the early days when Ben was a baby.
Alec glanced from Benjamin to her before he sat back in his seat and frowned. He studied Ben a long moment in silence, and she grew more nervous due to the man’s expression.
“You know, we sponsor the basketball team because Coach is one of my best friends from high school,” he said with another glance at Analise. “I don’t remember seeing you around when they did the car wash here last week. But you’re saying Coach will confirm you’re on the team?”
Her body turned ice cold. Surely Benji hadn’t….
Benji didn’t answer, and Ana turned to look at him, noting his face was red once again. “Benj-ah, Ben?”
The silence lengthened, and her worry increased.
“No,” Ben said finally, “‘cause I quit.”
The air left her lungs, and a wave of disbelief passed through her. “Practice just started. When did you quit?” How had she notknownthis?
“When I realized I suck and wouldn’t get to play,” Benji said, sliding her a disgust-filled glare.
“When?” she demanded.
Benji shrugged his shoulders. “A couple weeks ago. I don’t know.”
She huffed out a breath that did nothing to quell the anxiety she felt. “So we can add lying to your list of offenses. Where did you go all those evenings when you said you had practice?”
Benji smirked. Smirked!
Her fists tightened to the point of pain, and she fought off a dizzying wave of embarrassment.
In her peripheral, she noticed Alec laced his hands over his stomach and steepled his fingers. Brooks sat there with a fierce frown on his face, and Cole seemed to split his attention between her and her son, unnervingly silent yet watchful.
Judging, no doubt.
And who could blame him? She felt like a fool. All she could do was sit there and drown in the fact she knew almost nothing about her child. She’d been too busy working over the years to provide for them and live independently of her controlling parents while trying to keep a roof over their heads. Painfully long days working multiple jobs as she built her dream from the ground up. First as a pop-up, then to a tiny fixed location by renting vendor space and then moving into a lease of her own before finally scoring the opportunity of a lifetime with Rhys’s hotel.
Benji’s grades had suffered last year, declining because he said the subject matter was difficult. But was that why?
She wasn’t one of those parents that expected straight As. She expected him to do his best, and if his best was a C in a subject he found difficult, then she would accept the C wholeheartedly and proudly and encourage him to keep at it.
But once again, he’d lied to her, deceived her,playedher, and she’d discovered it while surrounded by Cole and his brothers. That rankled.
She wasn’t foolish enough to think her child wouldn’t keep secrets from her. She certainly had at his age. But hers were secret crushes and copying someone’s homework when she hadn’t gotten hers done so she didn’t get a bad grade. Not…stealing cars and doing God knows what.
At a loss, at least momentarily, Ana glanced at Cole and found her gaze captured and held by Cole’s deep ocean blue. His eyes were such a dark blue; they sometimes looked black. Like…an angry ocean churning its depths.
All the Blackwell siblings carried the same dark hair and tall, lean builds, but Cole was the bulkiest and most muscular of the four brothers present.
The boy she’d known had grown into a man with laser sharp vision that stripped her emotions bare and left her floundering.
She finally tore her gaze from him, unable to handle the censure she felt and just as quickly found herself under Alec’s perusal.
As the oldest of the nine siblings, Alec had carried the weight of keeping his brothers and little sister together under one roof after their parents’ deaths. That stress now appeared in the tiny lines around his eyes and between his eyebrows, and the hint of gray dusting his temples even though he was only three years older than Cole, who was thirty-five to her thirty-three.
Alec carried himself with a quiet, observational stealth, but maybe that confidence had been ingrained into him as the one in charge of such a large household.
“Ben,” Cole said in a low voice that brought them back to the present. “Your mother asked you a question. Where were you when you lied and said you were at practice?”
“I don’t answer to you.”
“Yes, you do,” Alec said. “We are your bosses for the foreseeable future until you work off your debt to us so let’s be clear— Youdoanswer to us.”
