For the last few days, every call I had made to Drew had gone to voicemail, and his secretary said he was on vacation somewhere with his fiancee and probably wouldn’t be back until the reunion. I had forgotten about it until then, and it was hard to believe it had been a year since the last one. I tried to attend the annual reunions when I could, and told myself it had nothing to do with hoping I might catch a glimpse of Ellis. He never showed, and it had never really surprised me.

Knowing he’d been living in town all this time, I realized it was a matter of avoidance more than simply having better things to do.

At work, he kept a polite distance and he’d quickly shut down every attempt I’d made to talk to him after he’d stormed out of the shop while we were eating. I kept my father’s advice close at hand and reminded myself that I had no right to press him. I was the one who’d done the damage, and I couldn’t force him to rehash it now just because I was finally ready to make amends.

The idea of it became laughable the more time wore on. How could you make amends for something that could never be undone, anyway? I had ruined what should have been the most carefree years of his life. Just because I’d spent mine tormenting myself unnecessarily in the closet didn’t mean I had to take it out on him, but I had. Just because I was sorry now didn’t mean he had to let me in, and he wasn’t.

Even knowing what the right thing to do was, I felt like I was spinning my wheels and I’d never been a patient man. I wasn’t going to burden Ellis with the truth, but I couldn’t stand the distance between us without at least trying to close it. Now that he was fully in control, he was busier and more productive than ever, and my excuses for remaining at Stover Electronics were dwindling more each day that passed. I had to do something, and the look on my father’s face when I’d told him I wanted to invite Ellis over to family dinner made it clear just what he thought of that idea.

After considerable effort, I had convinced him that my intentions were mostly good. The possessiveness was becoming a bit much to handle, and proximity was the only cure, even if it was purely platonic. I also wanted him to get the chance to meet the rest of the family in a no-pressure situation so I wouldn’t end up dropping two bombs on him at once. Besides, I got the feeling that he’d feel a little better about our intentions with the company if he got to know us as the weird, loud and occasionally dysfunctional family we were rather than the mustache-twisting villains who sat around all day plotting the overthrow of hardworking small business owners I was pretty sure he saw us as.

Convincing Ellis to come was a bit more difficult, but I’d assured him that we invited all the CEOs of companies we had acquired over to dinner and he’d reluctantly agreed. Now, all I had to do was prime my family to not be themselves. No big deal.

“Okay, so again,” I coached as the adults were all gathered by the door while the children had already been put to bed. It was by far the quietest my house had been in years. “Be nice, but not too nice. Polite, but not overly formal. Just make him feel comfortable, but not…”

“Too comfortable?” Jayce offered dryly.

“Yes. Exactly.”

Jayce’s mate, Wren, gave him a wry look. “I think we’re going to need clarification on what nice but not too nice means,” he said in that way that made it clear he was mocking me. He’d taken a while to warm up to the well-intentioned assholery that characterized our family interactions, but now he was fluent in it.

“Yeah,” Dylan chimed in. “Is that like where we offer to take his coat and then drop it on the floor instead of putting it on the hook?”

“I’m glad you find yourselves so amusing,” I grumbled.

“They’re just teasing, Reece. We’ll all be on our best behavior,” Luis promised, touching my arm. The fact that he wasn’t joining in with the rest of them made me instantly suspicious.

I narrowed my eyes at my father. “You told him, didn’t you?”

“Told him what?” asked Gray.

My father cleared his throat. “That Ellis was having second thoughts about staying on with the company, and we all need to put in every effort to make him feel welcome. Just not too welcome,” he said with a smug spark in his eye.

I breathed a sigh of relief as that seemed to satisfy the others’ curiosity. Luis gave me an apologetic smile before going into the dining room to make sure the table was set. Dad followed him.

I looked up as the doorbell rang and lunged for it only to stop and second guess answering right away. If I didn’t stop acting like such a fruitcake, I was going to be the one who scared him off, not my family. When I opened the door and saw him standing there in a blazer that brought out the color of his eyes and his hair, pulled back as usual, I froze and stared.

What were manners, again? And how had I ever convinced myself that I wasn’t attracted to males when there was one who looked like that walking around?

The look on Ellis’ face went from wary to concerned and I realized the whole not being a fruitcake plan was going down the drain fast. “Uh. Hi?”

“Are you going to let him in or just stand there like a weirdo?” Jayce asked, coming up beside me. He pulled the door open wider when I proved incapable.

“Please, come in,” I muttered once he was already past the threshold.

“So this is the omega who’s been giving our dad a run for his money all these years,” Jayce mused, giving Ellis’s hand a firm shake. He cocked his head and studied him. “You’re bigger than I thought you’d be.”

“And you must be Jayce. You’re a lot shorter than I thought you’d be, considering your brothers.”

Jayce’s eyes widened in surprise, but he laughed loudly. “I like you. This is my mate, Wren,” he said, draping an arm around the omega’s shoulders as Gray came up for his turn to shake Ellis’s hand. Wren smiled and waved, clearly amused by the whole thing. Especially my erratic behavior.

If everyone but Ellis figured out I’d imprinted by the end of the evening, I would consider it a success.

“Good to see you again, Ellis,” Gray said, stepping back to introduce Dylan and Luis. “This is my omega, Dylan, and my father’s mate, Luis.”

“It’s a pleasure,” said Luis.

“It is,” said Dylan. “We’re all glad you could join us.”

My father finally emerged from the kitchen, took one look at Ellis and smiled kindly. He had an entirely different demeanor around omegas than he did with Alphas. I just hoped Ellis wouldn’t pick up on it.

“Ellis Stover,” he said warmly, shaking the omega’s hand. I decided to be relieved he hadn’t gone with an old-school kiss to the back of the hand. “It’s an honor to finally meet you. You’re something of a legend in the family business.”

“How kind,” Ellis said in a voice dripping with irritation. “You’re certainly something in ours.”

Dad chuckled. At least I didn’t have to worry about Ellis offending him. He was used to being despised. Sometimes I was sure he thrived on it, like a vampire who fed on the jealousy and hatred of his enemies instead of blood.

“Come, have a seat,” he said, leading Ellis over to the table. “I’m sure we have a lot to talk about.”

As I started carving up the main course, dad launched into the smalltalk that qualified as a life skill. I could tell Ellis was still pissed, but at least he seemed slightly more relaxed than he had been when he walked through the door, no thanks to me.

“He’s gorgeous,” Wren whispered, leaning over to me.

I gave a nervous laugh, trying to pretend like I’d just noticed. My eyesight wasn’t that bad. “Yeah, I guess he is.”

“I wonder if I could set him up with my dentist,” he mused. “Their abs would get along.”

I shot my brother-in-law a look that was a bit more menacing than I’d meant it to be, if the way Jayce started glaring at me in turn was any indication. “I don’t think he’s interested in being set up,” I muttered into my drink, reminding myself that it wasn’t my family’s fault that I’d never given them any indication I was attracted to males. It was easy to be in denial, as long as I kept the one man I ever had been attracted to at a distance.

“Isn’t that right, Reece?”

I looked up when I heard my father asking a question and realized I’d been staring at Ellis again. “Sorry, what?”

“I was just telling Ellis that I was looking over the auditor’s reports you gave me the other day and I’m stunned at how much the company has managed to grow in such a short time,” he said calmly.

“Oh. Right, yeah. Very impressive,” I said, clearing my throat.

“Maybe we can make a clone of you to send to a company I just bought in Tampa,” Gray muttered. “For a tech company, you’d think someone would know how to implement some decent quality control measures. What’s your secret?”

“A buzzer built into the factory floor that shocks the workers every time they make a mistake,” Ellis said in that flat, humorless tone he only used when he was joking. I’d gotten used to it over the last week, but how had I never noticed what a great, dry-witted sense of humor he had? Looking back, there was a lot I hadn’t noticed.

The others laughed, but Dylan choked on his wine. “Oh my God.”

Gray laughed, putting a hand on his mate’s shoulder. “I’m pretty sure that was a joke, honey.”

“In all seriousness, we switched to random interval checks instead of a scheduled quality control assessment,” said Ellis. “When I came onboard, my only job was re-evaluating the entire factory for quality and safety, and that required a complete overhaul of the measures we’d been using.”

“And personnel, I’m sure,” said dad.

“Actually, we only lost two full-time employees during the transition and they were ones who left because they didn’t feel like they could adjust to the new system.”

“Surely you fired the old foreman,” dad said, blinking.

“No.” Ellis glanced at me and I realized he was talking about Kaden. No wonder the man was so loyal to him. “It would have been the easy way out to make him a scapegoat for what was honestly an executive-level mistake. He was doing the best he had with what training was made available to him, so I had the entire factory extensively retrained, including management.”

“But what about accountability?” asked Gray. “Didn’t the shareholders want a paradigm shift after all the bad press?”

“Shareholders are like cavemen, they see a storm on the horizon and their first instinct is to grab someone to throw on the pyre as a sacrifice to the nature gods,” Ellis scoffed, sipping his wine. “I told them to give me three months while the retraining was going on, since it was going to be more cost-effective than the six-month program for new employees. They agreed, and within that timeframe, we had a twenty-percent improvement on quality control over any other factory of comparable size in the region.”

“Twenty percent?” Gray asked, choking on the words. “That’s insane. Has that stayed level over the years?”

“For the last eight years,” Ellis replied.

“You must have been young at the time,” Luis remarked.

“I was still working on my Master’s. After that, I went full-time at the company.”

“Impressive,” said Lionel. “Can’t say that’s how I would have handled it, but it’s obvious that it’s worked out for the company.”

“That’s the difference between a small business and a large corporation.” There was an edge to Ellis’ tone, and I could feel the tension in the room. Maybe it was just coming from him, through the link I had only just begin to notice after suppressing it for so many years and filling it with so much distance. “My father always taught me that we built the parts that made machines work, but our employees were the parts that made us work. People aren’t components you can just throw away and rearrange until they work. Everyone needs a second chance at some point, and an employee who knows that he isn’t just going to be tossed aside when he makes a mistake is going to see the company as an investment of his time, not just a place to punch a clock until he gets fired.”

The whole table was watching my father, wondering how he was going to respond to what was almost certainly a challenge of his management style. I was ready to jump in and defend Ellis the way I should have from the beginning, even if it was from my own family, but I couldn’t help but be proud of the fact that he was willing to go toe-to-toe with a man who intimidated everyone from politicians to other billionaires.

In that moment, I realized that even if it wasn’t for our checkered past and the enmity of our present relationship, I was the one who was so far out of my league it was a joke.

“Very well said,” dad replied in a measured tone. “Your father was a wise man, and a brilliant inventor.”

“He was a good man,” Ellis said, standing suddenly. He glanced around the table, a look of apology on his face. For the first time since our recent meeting, he looked the way I remembered. Hesitant, vulnerable. I stood instinctively, compelled to respond. “I’m sorry. You’ve all been very kind, and it’s nothing personal, but I can’t do this.”

“I’ll take you to get some fresh air,” I said, already at his side.

“No,” he said, turning to face me, his eyes lit with determination. “I don’t just mean dinner. I can’t keep working for Stover Electronics. It doesn’t matter if you keep the name, I can’t stick around and watch my father’s dream become a cog in a corporation that stands for everything I stand against.”

“Ellis!” I ran after him through the dining room doors and out into the main hallway, barely catching him at the door. I could feel him tense the moment I touched his arm, but I was desperate. “Please, don’t go. We can work this out. Whatever it is, we’ll work it out, but you can’t leave.”

“Why not?” he demanded. “Because if I delude myself into thinking this isn’t a betrayal of my father’s legacy and you delude yourself into thinking that taking me on as a charity case erases the past, it’ll actually become the truth?”

“That’s not what any of this is about,” I gritted out, still holding his arm. “It’s not a betrayal and you’re not a charity case. You’re more than that. You were always more.”

He stared at me, his gaze so sharp I felt it cutting through the lies. God, I was so close to telling him. I couldn’t tell which way was up anymore, whether confession would put things right or unravel it all. I was a man now, not some idiot kid who didn’t have the first clue how to face what he wanted, so why was it that I had never been more confused or uncertain? “What are you trying to say, Reece?”

That was a good question. What was I trying to say? I knew what my father would say, my brothers if they knew. I knew what I should say and what I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. The truth was on the tip of my tongue, and God help me, it was going to spill over.

“Daddy?” Anika’s small, sleepy voice brought an end to the silence and the words sunk back down my throat. I turned to find her standing at the bottom of the stairs, rubbing her eyes.

“Sweetheart, why aren’t you in bed?”

“I had a bad dream,” she mumbled, wandering over to me in a dreary zig-zag. I lifted her into my arms and turned to catch Ellis opening the door.

“Ellis, please don’t go. Just give me five minutes, we need to talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about, Reece,” he said, his gaze softening as he looked at Anika. “You don’t owe me anything. Whatever absolution it is you’re trying to find, I’m giving it to you free of charge. I’ll stay with the company until you can find a suitable replacement, and I can give you my recommendations if you want them, but after that, I’m done. You win.” He gave me a half-smile that just undid…everything. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, or that I actually mean it, but I wish you the best.”

“Ellis —“

The door fell shut and I found myself torn in two directions. I heard his car start and cursed myself, knowing I had lost my chance to decide. As I carried my daughter back upstairs, I realized I had nothing to offer Ellis anyway. He’d given me absolution, and I’d always thought that was all I needed from him, but now that I had it, I realized his hatred was only part of the weight I’d been carrying all these years. His loss was a weight I couldn’t bear and I found myself wondering how I’d managed for so long.

“What did you win, daddy?” Anika asked, yawning as I tucked her in.

I swallowed the lump in my throat and leaned down to kiss her forehead before turning out her bedside lamp. “Nothing, baby girl. Sweet dreams.”

I closed her door softly and cursed myself in the empty hall. Not a goddamn thing.