Dare You To Love Me: A MM Stepbrother YANew Adult Billionaire Enemies to Lovers Romance by Kelly Washington

Author:Kelly Washington [Washington, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

42

MATTHIAS

As Ciaran and I parted at the top of the stairs—he to his bedroom and me to the shower to clean up for tonight’s dinner with Zoey—I didn’t press him for details even though I was dying to know who’d hurt him.

Besides, Franky was humming away in the kitchen, baking cookies. She was always good about playing deaf and blind when it came to my antics, but she might overhear anything I asked. It wouldn’t be fair to put Ciaran on the spot like that.

What I wanted was a name. Who made him feel bad about himself? If he gave me a name, I could start plotting their death two seconds later.

As the shower’s cold water cascaded down my back, I thought about how I’d never wanted to hurt someone like that before, not since Dante and I were younger, when Andy, who was one year older than Dante and eight years my senior, dared us to steal money from our dad’s wallet. Doing it one time wasn’t the issue, but it escalated from there, and got to the point where we were stealing things from neighbors and friends’ houses.

Dante and I would deliver our goods—jewelry, watches, small keepsakes—to Andy, who sold it to someone for cash. Dante thought it was fun, and so did I, to an extent. When Dante and Andy decided to start fencing high value items, like prized heirlooms or famous paintings, I watched from afar. I knew things had become serious when they developed contacts within LAX who offered to trade smuggled airport contraband for cash.

It wasn’t uncommon to see them handling ancient artifacts, illegal ivory, and exotic animals. The fact that it was so easy made it seem like it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Soon, Dante took over when Andy moved away for a master’s degree program. Dante became weary once he realized it took an entire crew to make it work. He brought me, Joan, and Filipe into the operation, but within a year, Dante became serious about working for my dad’s business in Singapore. When he moved away after graduating with a business degree, the three of us took over the scheme.

That’s when we discovered Andy had, over the years, stolen my father’s priceless artifacts one at a time and replaced them with fakes. In my anger, Joan and Filipe physically had to restrain me from confronting Andy in person. They made me realize I was the biggest hypocrite of all. How could I justify my anger when I was stealing from others myself? It made me take stock of my actions.

What we were doing was wrong, plain and simple.

But I also learned there was a huge underground business in creating fake artifacts so authentic looking that they could fool most professionals.

From that point forward, we went in a different direction with the operation.

Instead of fencing the contraband for our own gain, Joan, Filipe, and I tried to restore the goods back to their rightful owners while also conducting our own version of a sleight-of-hand swap.

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