Spoiled by Four Billionaires novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Three Brothers

Nessa learns she is Vanessa Ardmore and that three brothers and a mother have lit a candle for her for nineteen years, until a man arrives at the door.

His name was Alister Ardmore, and he drove me to Beacon Hill himself.

I kept my hand on the door the whole way.

"If this is a scam, I'm twenty-four and I have eleven dollars," I said.

"It isn't a scam."

"Then why do you keep staring at me?"

"You have my mother's eyebrows," he said, and his voice cracked on the last word.

He pulled over at a red light and pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes.

I looked away to give him a minute.

The house was brick, four floors, with lights in every window.

A woman stood at the top of the steps in a cardigan, silver hair pinned up, her hands wrapped around her elbows.

She watched the car pull in.

Alister opened my door.

"Mom," he said. "I think I found her."

She came down the steps one at a time, gripping the rail.

She stopped a foot from me.

She looked at my face, then my braid, then my hands.

She lifted one of mine and turned it palm up, and I saw her thumb find the scar on my wrist.

"A boiling kettle," she said. "You pulled it off the stove. You were two."

I hadn't known that.

Nobody had ever told me how I got the scar.

"I don't remember," I said.

"I do." She laughed, and it came out as a sob. "I ran you under the tap for twenty minutes."

Then she held me.

I stood stiff as a post for three seconds.

Then I put my face in her cardigan and smelled lavender and wool, and something broke loose in my chest that had been tight for nineteen years.

"I'm sorry," I kept saying, though I didn't know what for.

"No," she said into my hair. "No, you have nothing to be sorry for."

Inside, the front hall was bigger than my whole apartment.

There was a framed photo on the wall of a little girl in a yellow raincoat on a man's shoulders.

I knew the coat.

I couldn't have told you how.

Two more men came through the kitchen door at once, arguing.

"I said we wait for the lab before anyone gets emotional," said the first, a broad man with curly brown hair and flour on his sleeves.

"You're crying into the soup, Linus," said the second, who was younger, sandy-haired, with a split lip.

"I'm not crying. It's onion."

"It's soup that's already done."

They both stopped when they saw me.

The curly-haired one put down a wooden spoon with great care.

"Hi," he said. "I'm Linus. I'm your brother. I make a very good lasagna, and you look hungry."

"I'm Bram," said the younger one, grinning hard. "I'm your other brother. I'm also the one who put a frog in your crib once. I'm sorry about the frog."

"I was a baby," I said.

"You screamed so loud the neighbors called."

"You were seven," Alister said.

"Still sorry."

I laughed.

It surprised all of us, including me.

A courier came an hour later and took a cotton swab from the inside of my cheek.

Alister stood over the man the whole time.

We waited at the long kitchen table with a pot of soup nobody ate.

Linus kept filling my bowl.

Bram slid a plate of crackers across and then, without a word, a second plate of crackers.

"You can ask us for anything," Alister said. He sat at the head of the table, hands flat. "Money, a room, a lawyer, a driver. Name it."

"I don't want anything," I said.

"Nessa."

"I want Dean Ketterman on his knees."

Everyone looked up.

"The man from the roof," Alister said slowly.

"He took four years of my life and called it a loan. He stood in front of forty people and said I was a step on a staircase."

"I can ruin his career by morning," Alister said.

"I can burn down the restaurant he proposed in," said Linus.

"I can break his arm," said Bram, "but I'd have to find out which one he writes with, so I'm sorry, that takes a day."

"No," I said.

They waited.

"I don't want him quietly gone. I want him to stand in front of everyone he lied to and hear them know."

Bram whistled.

Alister's mouth twitched at one corner, the first thing I had seen on him.

"That's an Ardmore answer," he said.

"Is it?"

"Dad would have loved it."

My phone rang then, a number I didn't know, from the lab.

Alister took it, listened, said "Yes" twice, and put it down very gently.

The kitchen went silent.

Our mother came to stand behind my chair and put both hands on my shoulders.

"Ninety-nine point nine nine," Alister said. His voice was rough. "Welcome home, Vanessa."

Nobody moved.

Then Linus started crying again, openly, into a dish towel.

The doorbell rang.

Our mother straightened and wiped her face with her sleeve.

"That'll be him," she said. "I called him the minute Alister texted."

"Who?" I said.

She went to the door, and I heard a low voice in the hall, one I had never heard before.

A man came into the kitchen doorway.

He was tall, dark-haired, in an open-collared shirt, and his gray eyes went straight to me and stayed.

"Hello, Nessa," he said. "I'm Cullen Bowdoin. We've been engaged since you were three."

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