Page 11 of Morally Black Betrothal

Dog forgotten, Ronan leaned over the bed. “God, look at him. He’s a ghost.”

For once, there was no joke in his voice. Just the same shock that had rippled through me when I had entered the room. We quieted then, staring at the body—no, theperson, because our father wasn’t dead yet, was he? Watching his weak chest move up and down. Listening to the slight sound of his breathing and the beeping coming from his machines.

Ronan, of course, was the one to break the silence. “Anyone else suddenly feel like Death just walked in? Should we sayhello? Ask him to play cards? Looks like he was in the middle of a good game of solitaire.”

“Ronan, come on.” Liam shook his head, looking embarrassed.

“Well, no one here is going to fucking cry, so we might as well laugh. The bastard sure as shit wouldn’t want us bawling over his corpse.”

“Ronan, shutup,” Owen snapped.

I was too preoccupied to join in. I looked around for the woman I’d yelled at a few moments ago, but she was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t stay. I never asked her if she would. I never answered her any questions at all.

Maybe Simone really was an angel. A figment of my imagination in a moment where I needed that salvation the most.

Or maybe I was just going crazy.

I smelled the arrival of the next member of our family before I heard her soprano trill. The sickly sweet odor of Givenchy L’Interdit preceded my stepmother before she took one step into the room. Violeta never left the house without dousing herself in it.

My brother sniffed and looked up.

“Three, two, one…” Ronan counted down, then pointed to the door just as our stepmother burst in, followed by Shea.

“Darlings, I’m here! Oh, my Niall, look at you.”

Though she had lived in this country for close to thirty-five years, Violeta’s thick Spanish accent hadn’t softened a bit. She entered the hospital room like one of the catwalks she’d graced back when she’d charmed Dad into walking out of his marriage and down the aisle with her.

Today, she was decked out head-to-toe in a feather-covered dress almost certainly designed by Rosado, the fashion house Dad had gifted her for their tenth anniversary so she couldbecome a “designer.” It didn’t matter how many celebrities they bribed into wearing her monstrosities; Rosado was an irritating loss against the company’s bottom line. Even more irritating because it fell under my purview.

Dad always said “just fuckin’ fix it” whenever I brought it up. And Violeta didn’t give a good goddamn. She only wanted all eyes on her, all the time, and refused to reduce the seventy-thousand-a-month fuckingplantbudget.

Owen turned his glower away from her. Ronan went back to eyeing the Queen of Hearts, Liam rolled his eyes, and I checked my phone to see if Ruth, my assistant, had gotten back to me.

She hadn’t. I crossed the room to greet my sister as she followed Violeta inside, along with Mac, our head of private security, who must have been tasked with rounding the two of them up. By this point, we were all crammed around the periphery, except for Ronan in the bedside chair.

“Shea.” I gave her a kiss on the cheek, then nodded at Mac. “Mac.”

“Sir.” The big man swept the room with his eyes, then stepped out to take his customary place by the door.

“Big brother.” My sister tossed her dark auburn hair over a sun-kissed shoulder that told me she had been spending some time in the sun. Probably in St. Bart’s, on the family yacht. “You look like shit.”

“Good to see you too.”

With almost twenty years between us, Shea sometimes seemed more like my kid than my kid sister. While Ronan and Owen had always been, at best, apathetic toward her, I’d been old enough to appreciate the difficulty of being the only daughter of the Black dynasty. I’d also been around enough to take her under my wing until she left for boarding school, then university.

She had come home from college with a Valentino suit and a freshly bribed business degree and told everyone over breakfast that she was ready to take her place with the rest of us at Blackguard.

Violeta had cooed with pride.

My brothers had laughed.

Dad had gone back to reading theJournal.

And like a balloon, Shea had deflated completely.

I’d offered to find her an entry-level position in the investment division, but she had turned me down. Since then, she had only appeared at Blackguard for mandatory board meetings and spent the rest of her time gracing the gossip columns, touring the world’s most expensive beaches, or messing around with the West Coast music scene.

“My darling!” Violeta shoved her way to Dad’s bedside, forcing Ronan to vacate the chair so she could play the worried wife. “Oh, my baby. What happened? How could I have missed it?”