Page 73 of Always Been His

“So,” I echo.

“So, you still get the roll.” She looks at me sideways, and the last of the held tension in her face releases all the way. What’s left underneath is just Iris. My Iris. The one who knows every version of me and has never once asked me to be a different one.

“I’m going to need the full Dom story,” I tell her, breaking off my own piece. “Right now. Every detail. Don’t spare me.”

“Okay.” She nods. “But I want you to know going in, that it was entirely by accident.”

18

GRAYSON

Six miles and I’m still thinking about the fifty million dollars Sienna needs to break her contract before next week. She only has eight days.

I should’ve taken the turn home four miles ago. But home means sitting with the fact that Sienna’s label has her by the throat, and she won’t let me fix it, and I’ve been running north along the tree line for the better part of an hour trying to burn through the caged feeling that comes when I cannot solve something I should be able to solve.

I could pay the money. One call to Douglas Corp legal, one wire transfer, roughly five-hundredth of my net worth, and Joshua Eds will never set foot on my property again. Fifty million dollars is not a number I would feel leaving. Honestly, if her contract was worth everything I have, I would give it without blinking. If it means she is free, the cost is irrelevant.

Sienna told me not to buy her label. She said nothing about buying out her contract.

My phone buzzes in my armband.

SIENNA: Chatting with Iris. update soon. Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.

Great, one problem down.

I’ve been a bad brother about this and I know it. I didn’t consider Iris’s feelings when Sienna was standing in the yard with her hand on my chest saying I love you. I was only thinking about Sienna. I’ve been thinking about Sienna since the night of the bonfire when I took her virginity, and somewhere in the consuming weight of my love for her, I forgot that my little sister was going to be collateral damage. It isn’t something I’m proud of. Iris has spent her whole life in the peripheral of my decisions, and this time, I didn’t even have the decency to consider her until she was already hurt, and that is on me.

Now, the only personal matters left to contemplate are my father and Sienna, two things so far out of my grasp that I can’t control even if I wanted to.

I pocket the phone and jog the rest of the way home.

I push through the front door and go straight to the kitchen for water. I’m already at the cabinet reaching for a glass when I hear papers shifting at the table.

“You’re a sweaty mess,” Maggie says. “I’ll never understand why you go for runs in this heat.”

“Because it feels good, Mags,” I say, grabbing water out of the fridge. “What are you and Dad up to today?”

Dad hasn’t recognized me since they got back from their cruise, but he seems to be hanging on, that zest for life that he always had before his diagnosis, making sure that he keeps fighting.

“I was thinking of showing him Roman Holiday again. It really jogged his memory last time.” She smiles.

I drop my gaze to the papers in her hands. The sharp font of Douglas Corp across the front, and my stomach drops.

“You have papers from the company?”

“You have papers from the company, actually,” she corrects, her eyes moving from the table to me and back.

“Maggie.”

“You’re going to want to sit down,” she says, sliding a stack across the table with a pen on top.

I drop into the seat across from her and pull the first page toward me.

I skim the words. It’s an ownership transfer document for my family’s existing seventy percent stake that is split between me at ten percent, Iris at ten percent and my father at fifty. They expect me to take control of the remaining fifty percent that belongs to my father so I can have a majority control. The document also includes an authority transfer for the remaining controlling interest, pending Richard Douglas’s authorization or incapacitation clause activation. Board ratification signatures have already been collected, six of them, dated last week.

They’ve been busy.

“The board wants a decision by the end of the month,” Maggie says, without looking up from her legal pad. “Henry called me yesterday. He didn’t say it was urgent, but he said it twice which, with Henry, means the same thing.”