Page 14 of Forbidden Firefighter

“I only know your side of the argument,” I explained. “I don’t even know this girl to take her side.”

I didn’t know Lyndsey Saunders, and already I felt sorry for her. No wonder the girl never came home. I’d stay away from this train wreck of a family, too, if it wasn’t for my mother.

“Well, you should at least be a little bit more supportive,” Vanessa exclaimed.

Supportive. I might have been supportive of Vanessa at first. Sure, it was painful to watch all your hard work go unrecognized. To see everything you worked toward go to someone else. But there wasn’t anything she could do about it. From what I’d heard, Lyndsey was barely even present enough to steal the business from their grandmother in the first place. And Kyle had done some great things with the matchmaking service, for sure, but he was hardly a saint. Compared to her husband, my sister looked almost angelic.

Despite what Vanessa thought, Grandma Saunders must have had her reasons.

“You didn’t lose anything,” I said, utilizing my calmest voice possible. Something similar to how an unlucky camper might approach a bear. “You and Kyle are still the heads of the company. You still work there. It’s not like all of that goes away.”

Vanessa huffed an exaggerated sigh. “But we don’t get the company and we should have.”

“But it wasn’t yours to begin with. It belonged to Kyle’s grandma,” I explained. “I mean, it’s not like the only reason you took the job there was because she would die and leave it to you one day.”

The silence that followed made me nervous. Vanessa stared down at her food for the first time since we started this conversation, carefully jabbing at the remaining bits of her lunch with her fork.

“Was it?” I asked, unable to hide the horror in my voice.

She tossed down the fork in a flourish, throwing her hands up in the air and heaving another forlorn scoff. “Well, I mean, who else was she going to leave it to?”

“What the hell, Vanessa?”

“You have to seize your opportunities, Hunter,” she said, gripping an imaginary object in her hand and holding it out between us. Though it wasn’t enough to distract from the fact that she was actually waiting for someone to die to take ownership of their things. “And this was an opportunity. Kyle had some great changes in mind for the company, but now we have to run everything through that stupid half of the family. Not to mention the house.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “You already have a house.”

“A starter house.”

“It has five bedrooms.”

“Regardless.” She raised a hand up for silence. “Hummingbird Hollow would have still been the upgrade we deserve.”

Hummingbird Hollow. Where have I heard that name before?

“The plan was to stay in this house for a couple of years,” Vanessa continued. “Start a small family with one or two kids, then eventually move them into Hummingbird Hollow, convert a room or two into a spa, and another into a home office. It would have been perfect. Now, all those dreams are gone.”

I rolled my eyes.

Yes. Her ridiculous dreams of having a home so big she could convert two of the rooms into a spa were now crushed. While her pathetic five bedroom house with a mother-in-law suite and pool was something to be sneered at. I would have been happy with the family part of the house: the two kids and loving spouse.

Hell, after Dad died six months ago, it was all I’d been able to think about.

It was time I got serious about my life. I wasn’t getting any younger after all. I was the new head of the household, the one in charge of keeping this family together, and keeping it going. I wasn’t doing that great of a job as it was. Vanessa couldn’t stop raving about the loss of an inheritance she never had. My mother hadn’t even smiled more than a handful of times in the past few months.

A wedding would make my mother happy.

“Maybe, she’ll sell it to you,” I said, trying to focus on the task at hand.

Was I really ready for marriage? Or was I just ready for some stability?

“Oh, you don’t know this woman,” Vanessa explained. “She is vindictive. She would find some humiliating way to make me pay for this house, rather than just hand it over willingly.”

“No one is going to hand over a multi-million dollar home to you,” I corrected. “I said, ‘sell it to you’.”

“She’ll ask for something outrageous.”

“You don’t know that.”

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