Married To My Ex's Brother

Chapter 3: The Brother Nobody Wanted

Rhys.

I had been watching Emily since the wedding sign stopped her cold in the foyer, though I told myself for the better part of an hour that watching her was not the same as caring about what happened to her.

I stood near the back wall of the ballroom with a glass of champagne I had no intention of finishing, doing what I had trained myself to do at every one of these events. I watched.

Nobody had said my name all night. Not Desmond, not Vivian, not one of the cousins or aunts who kept drifting past me with polite, blank smiles. I was not on the guest list as a Kessler, and no place card anywhere in that room carried my name.

I was here because Anton Norwood had invited me himself, one investor acknowledging another, not a father acknowledging a son.

Two years ago, Norwood's shipping accounts had come across my desk almost by accident, a smaller position I picked up when nobody else wanted the risk.

I had spent enough time in his ledgers to know things about his business most people at this wedding did not, including one detail that had been sitting wrong in my chest all evening.

Eighteen months ago, Norwood had quietly moved a significant sum into Kessler Holdings, dressed up as a joint venture, at exactly the moment my father's firm should have been filing for restructuring instead.

I had wondered for months when that rescue money came from. Standing in this ballroom, watching Desmond raise a glass to his son, I finally understood the price of it had been Julian's marriage, arranged before either of the two people getting married had any real say in it.

I had not decided yet what I intended to do with what I knew. I told myself I was only here to watch it play out, the way I watched everything this family did, from a distance, without asking for a seat at their table.

That had stopped being entirely true somewhere around the time the coordinator, in answer to a question dressed up as small talk, told me the caterer's name was Emily.

Desmond had found me earlier that evening, before the ceremony, which was unusual on its own. "Rhys," he said, and the use of my name alone told me something was wrong. "Good of Norwood to bring you tonight."

"He seemed to think I should see how the deal gets celebrated," I said.

His jaw worked once, like he was chewing on a sentence he had decided not to say. "There are things about tonight you do not understand yet," he said. "Things I have not been ready to explain to anyone."

"You have never been ready to explain much of anything to me," I said, and he had only looked at me a moment longer before walking away to take his seat, leaving the sentence unfinished.

I understand it now. He had not been able to look me in the eye while I stood close enough to the truth to smell it.

The commotion near the service hallway pulled me out of my own head before I finished the thought.

Julian stepped into a side corridor with a purpose that did not match a man simply passing through his own reception, and I moved closer without deciding to make a habit of it.

"I need you to understand something," Julian was saying, voice pitched low. "If you say one word tonight, one word to anyone, it will not stay contained to me. Think about what you are risking before you decide to be dramatic."

"I have already told you," she said, steadier than I expected from someone who had just found out her fiancé was marrying another woman. "I am not staying quiet. I am choosing when."

He stepped back as she had struck him, and then he walked away without an answer, because he did not have one.

I stood in the shadow of that hallway with two facts sitting side by side in my chest. Julian's marriage had been bought with a rescue nobody wanted to know, and the woman he had just tried to threaten into silence was the one person in this house who had already decided not to give it to him.

I thought of my mother, working doubles at a diner off the highway so I could go to a decent school, never once letting me believe Desmond Kessler owed us anything, even though we both knew he did.

I thought of thirty-two years of never being invited to a single holiday. And I thought, with a clarity that surprised me, that a woman willing to blow up Julian's wedding on principle might be the only person at this event with the same appetite I had for watching this family's carefully built story come apart in public.

I told myself that was the whole of it. Leverage. Timing. A common enemy.

I did not move fast enough to stop myself from stepping directly into her path a moment later.

“Hello, Emily."

"How do you know my name?" she asked, still holding a tray of empty glasses like they were the only steady thing left in her hands.

"I asked the coordinator earlier," I said. "Before I understood why I wanted to know it."

She studied my face, and I watched her place me the way most people eventually did. "You are the one they were talking about," she said. "The brother."

"Depends on who is doing the talking." I had heard worse and made peace with hearing it. "Desmond Kessler is my father. Nobody at this wedding will introduce me that way, but that is what I am."

She set the glasses down on a side table, hands finally steady. "So you heard all of that," she said, meaning the hallway, meaning Julian's voice telling her a scene would cost her more than it cost him.

"Every word," I said. "And I think you meant it when you told him you were choosing when."

Something shifted in her face, surprise first, then something sharper underneath it. "What do you know about it?"

"More than you do, right now." I let that sit a second, watching her decide whether to be afraid of it or curious about it.

"Enough to tell you this wedding was never about love. If you want to know exactly what it was about, and exactly when the truth would hurt Julian the most, I can tell you. But not standing in a hallway where anyone could walk in on us."

She did not step back. That told me more than anything, she said. "And what does that cost me?" she asked, low enough that I had to lean in to hear it, close enough now that I could see her pulse working fast at her throat. "Nothing in this house comes free. I have learned that much tonight."

"A drink," I said. "After your shift. No promises attached, no strings I have not told you about."

She looked at me for a long moment, close enough now that the noise of the ballroom seemed to fall away behind us, and close enough that I could feel her breath change when she finally answered.

"Fine," I said before she could. "One drink. But you are going to tell me everything, starting with why a man who was never invited to a single holiday in thirty-two years knows more about my not-happening wedding than I did."

I had not expected her to be the one who set the terms.

I found, standing there with her that close, that I did not mind it at all.