Page 68 of Rival Hearts

“Yeah, my brothers are good guys. We work together, though, so there’s always some form of competition. Gabe is a good friend. There are no buts involved with him. He’s just himself, and I think that’s why I like hanging out with him so much. He doesn’t know what it’s like to come from a shit ton of money, so he doesn’t act like he shits gold.”

I laughed at his description.

“That’s not entirely true, you know.”

“What?” He widened his eyes. “Are you telling me hedoesshit gold?”

I burst out laughing. “What the hell, Alex.”

Alex just grinned at me, closing down a little again.

“I’m serious, though,” I said, my laughter fading. “We came from money. I mean, we’re not Blackwood billionaire rich”—I nudged him a little—“but we didn’t have nothing.”

Alex watched me, staying silent so I would tell him more.

“My dad had a lot of money. He was one of the big guys in town, you know, someone with a say about which way the town went.”

“That was in Texas?”

I nodded. “Didn’t Gabe tell you where we’re from?”

“He doesn’t like talking about home,” Alex said.

I didn’t blame my brother.

“Aransas Pass. It’s a coastal town close to Corpus Christi. It’s the kind of place where everything is warm and charming and sweet and bad things don’t really happen, you know?”

“It sounds really beautiful.”

“It is,” I said. “Or at least, it was… I don’t know what it’s like now. I haven’t been home in years. You see, they were going to open some factories, and the cash injection it would give the town would be pretty good, but it also meant that it would heavily impact the environment and be a threat to the fishing industry, in particular. The tourism, too. My dad was the one who had the power to stop it, but instead he advocatedforthe change.”

“Oh, wow,” Alex said softly.

“Yeah… it was the first time I realized that money trumps everything else. I mean, we’d all grown up with the environment being a big deal. When your town relies on tourism and fishing, keeping the water and the beaches clean is everything. It was almost everyone’s livelihood.”

“And that’s why you were so upset with me, saying that I was just chasing money.”

I nodded and bit my bottom lip. “Yeah. I know it wasn’t fair. I just haven’t had the best luck with people who have a lot of money, people who think that their checkbooks make the world go round. Because for so many people, it really does, and they don’t care about who they have to step on to keep their perfect little world turning.”

Alex put his arm around me and squeezed a little tighter. We’d been huddled up together, but now he held onto me, a welcome warmth flowed from him.

Not just physical warmth but emotional, too.

“You know about our mom?”

Alex nodded. “Yeah, Gabe mentioned that she left. I’m so sorry.”

I shook my head. “It’s okay. I mean…” I chuckled bitterly. “It’s not really okay, but it’s what we had to deal with, you know? But I keep thinking that if she’d stayed, maybe my dad wouldn’t havedone it. Maybe he would have done things differently, would have thought twice about it.”

“People can be assholes when they’re hurting.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you see… if he wanted someone to be good for, someone that he felt like he had to be a better man for… he had me and Gabe, right? He could have done the right thing forus.We just weren’t enough.”

A lump rose in my throat, and my eyes suddenly stung with tears.

“I have no idea why I just said that,” I said quickly and tried to blink the tears away.

“Hey.” Alex put his hand under my chin and lifted my head up to look at him. “Just because he was a dickhead and couldn’t see what he had right in front of him doesn’t mean you weren’t good enough. It meanthewasn’t good enough. You’ll always be good enough. You’re a good person, Charlotte. You’re too good for this world.”