Oh snap. This cannot be good. Grant had already made it known to me he was an only child and his mom had abandoned him. He hasn’t shared his thoughts on this tragedy or told the tale of what happened. And here a woman stands, claiming to be his…sister.

I rub my hand up and down Grant’s back as his entire body goes ramrod straight.

“I don’t know who you are or what kind of game you’re trying to play, lady, but you’re not getting a dime out of me.” He points his finger at her, and she cringes.

Her husband’s eyebrows rise up toward his hairline, and shock blankets his features.

“Um, Grant, maybe you should try to talk about this…” I attempt.

He scoffs. “There’s nothing to talk about. People have tried to blackmail me before. It happens in my position. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“I’m not lying!” Greta chokes out on a half sob.

Brett holds her in his arms. “You don’t know what you’re saying. We’re not trying to blackmail you.” He sneers. “We don’t want anything from you or your dickwad father. Bunch of scumbags, the whole lot of you.” He shakes his head as he pulls a now fully crying woman into his arms.

Grant’s head jerks back, and then an eerie calmness overcomes him. “Right. Gotcha. Have a nice dinner. Luna, we’re out of here.”

He turns on his heel, pulls out a stack of twenties, and tosses them on the table. Far more than enough for our meal and drinks.

“I don’t know what to say. He obviously didn’t know about you.”

“No, he wouldn’t. But we know everything about him.” Greta looks out the window, her eyes following Grant as he storms to the car.

I make a split-second decision. “Do you have a card? I’ll talk to him. Perhaps I can have him reach out when he’s digested this information. You see, his mom is a hot-button item for him. She abandoned him…”

“Yeah, when she was pregnant with me. A baby not created through love or the man she was married to.”

Oh, yowzers. This is not good. Not good at all. “Uh, the card?”

I rush back to the table, grab my purse, pull out a free yoga session card, and hand it to her. “It’s the only thing I have with my information on it.” I smile and hear a double honk coming from Grant’s Aston Martin.

Greta hands me a card from her purse with a shaking hand. “I’ve never wanted anything from Grant, other than to know my brother. Please tell him that for me.”

I nod and stop, at a loss for words. “It will be okay. Eventually.”

“Eventually,” she repeats. “Thanks for trying, Luna.”

“Yeah, bye.” I wave and rush out the restaurant, around the building, and to Grant’s car. The second I get in, he backs out and stops abruptly.

“Seat belt,” he grates through his teeth, as if he’s seconds away from losing his mind.

I stop, get out of the car, and walk around to the driver’s-side door.

He pushes open the door. “Luna, what the fuck! Get in the car.”

“Get out. I’m driving. You are in no state.” I cross my arms, prepared to wait it out if I have to.

“I am perfectly capable of driving my goddamned car, with my goddamned woman sitting in the passenger seat where she belongs.”

I shake my head. “Nope. Not happening, buster.” I open my palm and close it, gesturing for him to give me the keys.

His eyes are like ice daggers ready to strike at any moment as he stares at me. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

With a firm shake of my head, I respond, “’Fraid not. We protect each other. That’s what you do when you’re in a relationship with someone you care about.”

He curses under his breath and maneuvers his big body out of the car, takes a wide berth around me, and then gets into the passenger seat.

I get into the car, adjust the mirrors, and move the seat up a half a foot.

He huffs and sighs as I put the car in drive and head out of the lot. “Do you want me to take you to your apartment tonight?”

“No.”

“I could give you some space, let you sleep in your own bed?”

“My bed sucks,” he snarls.

I nibble on my bottom lip and head toward my loft. “Okay, will you talk to me about what happened in there?”

“You heard what happened. Some nutjob thinks she’s my sister and probably wants a free ride on the Winters’ money train. Won’t be the first time someone’s attempted something outlandish.”

For a minute, I allow myself time to think about how I want to respond. He’s upset, possibly even angry, and downright hurt. Anything regarding his mother is a sore spot for him, but he’s got to talk about it.

“Can you tell me about your mom?”

He sighs and puts his fingers to his forehead. “Not much to tell. We were a happy family. At least in my five-year-old brain we were. I honestly don’t remember much about her now. Just that she had beautiful red hair”—he turns in his seat and fingers one of my curls—“like yours but much darker. Maybe more auburn, whereas you’re far more copper colored.”

I enjoy the attention he pays to my hair, has always paid to my hair, and maybe I know a bit more now about why he adores it. Because his mom was a redhead. He hinted at it at the charity dinner when he bickered with his father, but he never confirmed anything one way or the other.

“She also has light eyes. Same color as mine.”

“Same color as Greta’s,” I toss out to see where it lands.

“Her eye and hair color did not escape my notice, lamb. That does not make her my half sister.”

“No, no it doesn’t. Continue with your mom.”

He groans. “I don’t know. One day she was there, and life was good, and the next she was kissing me goodbye, told me she’d always love me and would write to me.”

“Did she?”

“Not one letter.”

“What did your father say?”

He shrugs. “At first, that Mommy went away. Later, as I got older and demanded more information, he said she’d abandoned us. Just up and left, never to return.”

“That’s it? He didn’t try to find her, with all his riches?”

Grant lays a warm hand on my thigh. “Lamb, when someone doesn’t want to be with you, leaves you and your five-year-old child…” He shakes his head. “I get why he didn’t chase after her.”

“What about you?” My heart hurts as he squeezes my thigh, his fingers digging in, as if he’s anchoring himself to me.

“What about me?”

“Did you chase after her? Um, later, when you were, you know”—I wave my hand in the air—“master of your own domain and all that jazz.”

Grant inhales, long and deep, as if the weight of the entire world was just laid upon his shoulders. “No, I didn’t.”

Without being accusatory, I gentle my words but know I need to ask the question in order to get to his frame of mind. “Do you mind if I ask your thoughts on why you came to that decision?”

He licks his lips, and I put my hand over his on my thigh in a show of support.

“I thought about it. A hundred times over. I came to the same conclusion each and every time.”

“Which was?”

“If she didn’t want me at five years old, she most certainly wouldn’t want me at twenty or twenty-five or thirty or even thirty-five.”

“Honey, you don’t know that.”

“Lamb, nothing has changed in my world. My father still lives in the same house he brought my mother home to when they married. The same home they brought me home to a year later. I lived in that house my entire life, until college, but he still lives there. If she wanted to reach out, she could have a million times. She chose not to. We didn’t leave her. She left us.”

“Fair enough.” And it was. He made a solid point. Why go chasing after someone who didn’t want you? Still, it begs the question, what about Greta? The second I laid eyes on the woman, it was like looking at a female version of Grant, only…well…female. There were other subtle differences. Her skin was really pale, almost ashy. Her nose a bit smaller, more rounded, perhaps like Gretchen, Grant’s mother.

“Can I ask you another question?”

“You can ask me anything, lamb.” This time he turns his hand over so our fingers can interlace and our palms touch. He lifts my hand to his mouth and presses it to his lips, staring out at the traffic on the freeway as we glide back toward Berkeley.

“What if she is your sister?”

His jaw firms, and he kisses my hand.

“When you stormed out, I got my purse, and we exchanged business cards. Just in case.” He moves to speak, to chastise me, but I rush my words so he can’t. “I had to. At the very least, if she is your sister, you’ll want to know, right?”

“Of course. I just… I can’t believe it. Why wouldn’t I know of her existence, but she knew of mine?”

“She said your mother was pregnant with another man’s child when she left you.”

He snorts. “What else?”

“I didn’t get much, but she said she knows everything about you.”

“Yeah, I’ll just bet. How much money my company brings in…”

I clear my throat. “I didn’t get that impression. She seemed genuine. Made it sound like she’d been watching you, or at the very least following your life, for a long time. I don’t know… It’s worth investigating.”

“You got her card? We know their names, Greta and Brett Tinsley. I’ll have my security officer look into her first thing tomorrow.”

“That’s a good plan.” I smile. “It would be nice to find out you have a sister.”

He sighs and looks out the window once more. “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know…maybe.”

“Family is everything,” I whisper.

Grant squeezes my hand. “Not mine. Though the one I one day want to make with you…yes. That will be the day family is everything.”

A rush of happiness coated in this dreary mood has me blinking back the tears and focusing on the road.

I love you.

In my head the words are so clear, but now is not the time to share them.

* * *

A full week passes before Grant brings up his possible sister. He tosses his jacket on his boring couch, and it instantly disappears, the black blazer on the black couch.

He moves mindlessly into the kitchen, releasing the buttons at his cuffs and rolling his sleeves up his forearms. I can hear him pulling out wineglasses and the distinct sound of him searching through the bottles in his wine fridge.

“White or red tonight?”

“I’m feeling red this evening. There was a chill in the air today.”

I go over to my two bags, both of which he didn’t utter a word about. Which is awesome because I pull out some of the loot I bought him at the thrift store. Four new throw pillows, two a sunshine yellow, two a muted yellow, gray, and white. The multicolored ones have a pattern of arrows running in vertical lines. As I suspected, they look fantastic on his pristine couch, but they also add a touch of color. I have a bunch more colors to add before I’m done.

“What does a chill in the air have to do with red versus white wine?” he hollers from the other room.

“When it’s warm out, I prefer white. It’s cool and refreshing. If it’s colder out, a warm red just feels better going down the throat and into the tummy.”

Grant enters the room as I’m arranging the pillows. He hands me a glass of red. I toast his glass, but he looks away.

“Wait!”

He turns around abruptly as if I’d just screamed. I mean, I kind of did.

“You have to look me in the eye when you ‘cheers’ me before sipping, or you’ll have seven years of bad sex.”

He chuckles and eases into the white leather lounge chair about to lift the glass to his lips.

I frown.

“You know that’s absurd, don’t you?”

“You want to risk it?”

His eyes shift to half-mast. “Touché,” he says before holding out his glass.

I touch the edge and listen to it sing and then lift it to my lips while my eyes are focused on him. “You were about to tell me what you found out about Greta Tinsley?” I turn for my bag and pull out a chenille throw in a masculine hound’s-tooth print of red and black. Once I’ve shaken it out, I lay it over the back, folded neatly but lengthways so that it adds some color to the boring couch.

Grant watches me work but doesn’t comment.

“Greta?” I urge, going back to my bag and riffling through it to find yellow, red, and white vases in varying sizes and a gray, leaf-shaped bowl.

“Oh, well, her birth certificate was verified. She is my mother’s daughter.”

“And how can they confirm that?” I place the leaf-shaped bowl in the center of the glass table, dig through my bag, and pull out a variety of circular decorative balls. A couple of them are like twine, another speckled black glass, a mirrored one, and a couple yellow paisley ones to offset the throws.

“Social security numbers match both mine and Greta’s birth certificates for the birth mother of record. The father’s name on her birth certificate was blank.”

“Either way, she’s your sister,” I confirm, grabbing the three vases and putting them on one corner of the boring, plain white marble fireplace mantle that matches the white boring walls. I adjust them until they are in size order, the tallest being farthest from the edge.

“Appears so.” He takes a long sip of his wine as I go back to my other bag and dig through to find the stained-glass candle holder I had at home. I was sure it would look way better at his place. It’s a variety of red tones and absolutely stunning. I set it on the other side of the mantle, back up, and survey my work.

“What are you going to do?” I ask, trying not to make a big deal out of it, even though it has to be destroying him on the inside.

Back to my bag, I pull out the last item I brought to liven up the place, at least for now. It’s a photo of the two of us, taken at the charity event we first attended. Technically, our first date. Also, the first night we slept together. Even though we just slept.

A photo of us appeared in the Sunday newspaper, and one of the yogis brought it to my attention. Me being a dork, I contacted the newspaper, hunted down the reporter, and had him send me the picture. He did, and now we both have one. Of course, he doesn’t know that, but I like knowing he has a piece of me in his home. A piece of us.

“I don’t know. Can you sit down? Besides, what are you doing?” He finally looks at the pillows, the coffee table, and the mantle. He stands and walks over to where I’d just set the picture of us in the center of the mantle, the lights above providing the perfect illumination.

“Do you like it?” I hold my hands at heart center, hoping and praying I haven’t overstepped his boundaries.

“Like?” His voice is low and gravely.

“Yeah.”

He turns around with a smile. “I fuckin’ love it.” He sets his glass on the coffee table and pulls me into his arms, where he kisses me breathless. “Feel free to spruce up the entire place.”

“You mean you noticed you have no color in your life?” I chuckle and trace a line with my finger, starting at his forehead and along the bridge of his nose to his lips.

“Not until you showed up, no. Now, I’ve got all the color I need…in you.”

I grin and kiss him silly, giving back as good as I get. When I pull away, I hold on to his face. “Really, though, what are you going to do about Greta?”

“Call her into my office. Talk to her. Hell, I’m not sure how to go about this.”

“Are you going to tell your father?”

“Fuck no!” he says harshly.

“Okay, well, whatever you need from me, I’m there. If you’d like me to sit in, I’d be happy to. If you want to meet her out, maybe for a meal, or have her over here, and I’ll cook. Whatever you want to do.”

“You would do all that for me?” he whispers, his eyes misting over as he swallows.

“I’d do anything for you. I love…”

“You love?” He cocks an eyebrow.

I lick my lips and chance a glance at the now pretty mantle.

He moves my chin with his thumb. “Oh no, you don’t. Eyes on me. You love what, lamb?”

“These pillows?”

He grins.

“The centerpiece?”

Grant tips his head sexily, lasering me with his gaze. “I don’t think that’s what you were going to say,” he teases.

“The mantle with the sexy picture of me and my man?”

He hums. “It is awesome, I will admit.” He taps against my mouth with one finger. “However, I do not believe that was what you were going to say. Just tell me…” he murmurs against my lips, his tone almost pleading.

“I love….”

“Yes. You love…” he reiterates.

“Grant.” I squirm in his arms. “I’m afraid,” I whisper against his mouth, my eyes closed so I don’t have to look into his eyes.

What if he doesn’t love me back?

“Be brave, lamb. I’m right here with you. I won’t let you down.”

His words pierce the fear inside my soul, and I open my eyes. I focus on his sapphire gaze, eyes I could happily swim in for days on end.

“I love you.”

He smiles huge. I’m talking super-duper ginormously wide. His entire face lights up as he runs his hands down my back, over my ass, and lifts me up so I have to circle my legs around him, and we’re nose-to-nose.

“I’ve been dying to hear you say those words,” he admits dreamily, as if I’d stunned him.

“Why?” I nuzzle his nose and kiss the tip.

“Can’t you see, Luna? I’ve been in love with you since you uttered your name the very first time I laid eyes on you.”