A child completely unaware of anything different from what he’d always known.
Because really, my childhood had been good. I’d been a happy kid. I’d felt loved. I never remember feeling like I was set apart within the family, so I couldn’t fault her for excluding me in any way that had been recognizable to me as a child. She’d sent my brothers off to boarding school when they were ten, same as me. My sisters, too, when it was their turn. So, she’d hidden her resentment well. I guess my dad had loved me enough for the both of them. I was curious about my birth mother, though. She had been a British girl like my Brooke. Melody Rainford—a pretty name. I wanted to know more about her.
As I came out of my mental fog, I felt Brooke touching me, letting me know she was still with me as she rubbed my back with one hand and held my face with the other. She tugged on my cheek so I would turn to her. “Caleb, my love, how are you?”
“I am surprisingly well.” I gave her a small smile because I really felt it. “If I have you, I am fine.”
“You have me.”
“I love you, Brooke.”
She smiled back at me and offered up her lips to kiss me sweetly. “As I love you, my darling, and I want you to look around and see the whole roomful of people who also love you without question. It is a forever love, Caleb, that they all feel for you and you don’t ever have to doubt, okay?”
I regarded each of them. Lucas and Wyatt who looked completely shell-shocked; Willow and Winter with tears leaking out of their eyes; Herman and Ellen who seemed peacefully calm; my cousins who looked about on par with my brothers; James offering his unwavering support without question. Brooke was absolutely right, though. Nothing was going to change my relationships with any of them. They were still my brothers, my sisters, my uncle, my cousins, and my friend—my family would always be my family. Even Madelaine was still my mother—she was the only one I’d ever known and ever would know. Sadly, there was no changing that fact for either one of us.
We’d both have to deal with it and go forward. In time I hoped we’d be able to meet in the middle and find some peace. I’d had no choice in any of it, but I needed to remember that she did have a choice all those years ago. She could have told my father no and yet she hadn’t. She’d taken on the role of mother to her husband’s bastard love child for better or for worse.
It was all a pretty heavy concept for me to delve into right at this moment, but at least I didn’t feel like something was missing anymore. That odd sense of feeling lost but not really. All my life I’d sensed I was just a little bit off course from the rest of my family but with no real reason to justify why I should feel that way.
Still a savage mind fucking, though.
For everyone—not just me. I couldn’t forget that.
I stood up from the table and knew it was time to share with them all the real reason I’d wanted them to come tonight.
“I realize that was a helluva lot for everyone to take in just now. Not at all what I was expecting tonight when I invited you all here to share in a new venture. So let me just get this out there first, and then we can begin the lovefest, okay?”
Someone laughed.
Lucas broke the tension with, “I’ll always be your younger and much hotter brother!” in a salute with his beer bottle from across the table, and I knew it would all be fine.
I lifted my chin to let him know I appreciated his timely interruption and then focused.
Deep breath.
“My lovely wife has helped me to find a world I was missing out on before she rescued me.” I squeezed her hand and looked down at her sitting so elegantly and beautiful in her turquoise dress with our son growing stronger inside her every day as she waited for me to share her genius idea. I could never pay back fate for the gift of her into my life. I knew I would be forever in fate’s debt, so this was just one small way in which I could begin to even the score.
Everything I needed to live was right beside me.