Forever Golden: Dark High School Bully Romance (Kings of Cypress Prep Book 3) by Rachel Jonas (books like beach read txt) 📗

flushes red and I’m biting my tongue, hearing her voice in my head, screaming ‘I’m not a kid, Blue!’. Only, she is to me, and I probably won’t feel any differently about that when she’s thirty.

The triplets are staring Linden down almost as harshly as I am. Like I said, they slipped into big-brother mode pretty deep.

“Well,” Scar starts, “I’d have to say… a guy’s hands.”

Linden tilts his head and mouths something and I can’t hear him, but I swear I just read his lips saying, “For now.”

My lips part, ready to rip him a new asshole when Boone steps into the room.

“West, got a moment? Figured we should talk before I get too much bourbon in my system. I have some things I need to show you,” Boone announces.

West passes a glance toward me before meeting his grandfather’s gaze. “Sure, we’re just hanging out.”

He stands and I wasn’t expecting to be invited, but he has my hand, gently tugging me to my feet.

Before making an exit, I put Joss in charge of watching over Scar, then we leave the group behind and head into a dimly lit room at the end of the hallway. There’s a box with folders stacked inside, which means at least some of Vin’s truths are about to be revealed.

I don’t know whether I should be relieved or afraid, but either way, there’s no turning back now.

Chapter 28

BLUE

“I presented all this info to your ma twenty years ago and a whole lot of good it did,” Boone sighs, resting his fists against his waist while staring at the folders laid out on his desk. “Not sure it’ll help you kids all that much, seeing as how it wasn’t enough to stop Pam from marrying that sorry S.O.B, but at least you’ll know everything I know.”

West says nothing, but slowly approaches the desk. He picks up the folder his grandfather placed there and stares at it.

“I can walk you through it if you want,” Boone offers, prompting West to nod.

Once he hands it over, Boone begins to thumb through the documents.

“Well, your daddy wasn’t exactly Rockefeller when he started sniffing around your ma, but he wasn’t destitute either. He flashed enough cash around when they’d come down to visit that I had my investigator start there, following the money. I wanted to know how he made it and what he did with it,” Boone explains.

“My guy found an old buddy of Vin’s up there in the city, one willing to share what he knew. Cost me a pretty penny, of course, but it was worth it. I mean, it didn’t stop your mom from selling her soul to the devil, but we can’t win ‘em all,” he adds with a laugh.

“Anyway, the friend told the investigator he grew up on the same street as Vin up there in Cypress Pointe, and that as long as he’d known him, Vin had been well-to-do. The guy never saw Vin’s mother work a day in her life, though. So, it seemed to him that they lived off some sort of inheritance.”

“Was it maybe something left for him by his grandparents?” West asks.

Boone shakes his head. “That was my first thought, but his mother grew up in the foster care system and didn’t have any family that she knew of.”

I’m so confused, and judging by the look on West’s face, he is too.

“So, where’d it come from?” he asks.

Boone breathes deep, then drops down into the armchair near the bay window overlooking the yard.

“Vin ever tell you boys anything about his father?”

“Only that he grew up not knowing who he was, and never got to meet him,” West explains.

“Well, I suppose that’s true to an extent, but he definitely knows the man’s name,” Boone reveals. “It’s right here on his birth certificate.”

He hands it over to West to scan and I fight the urge to peek.

I study West’s face as he reads, growing even more intrigued when tension gathers in his brow.

“This doesn’t… it doesn’t make any sense,” he stammers, seemingly at a loss for words.

“Augustin was a married man when he had an affair with your paternal grandmother, Liza Golden. That affair resulted in the birth of your father,” Boone explains.

West, keeping his gaze trained on the birth certificate, inches back toward the wall and leans against it.

“Augustin wasn’t in Vin’s life, but he provided for him financially, which explains why Liza never worked. She wasn’t living in the lap of luxury by any means, but her basic needs were taken care of. She was what we used to call a ‘kept woman’,” Boone adds. “But from what the source revealed, Vin spent most of his life believing his father was deceased, which I’m guessing was an arrangement made between Augustin and Liza. Only, years down the road, on Liza’s deathbed, she apparently told Vin everything because she couldn’t stand the thought of him being alone in the world, without family.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” West says, seeming to share his thoughts out loud.

Waiting until he tells me on his own isn’t working. The suspense is killing me.

“What is it?” I ask.

I expect him to just share what he sees that’s so shocking, but he hands it over instead. I study the document and it only takes three seconds to understand why he’s speechless.

“Holy shit.” I peer up at Boone. “Excuse my language, it’s just… this says Vin’s father was Augustin Ruiz? Is this legitimate?”

“It’s as real as I’m standing in front of you,” he answers with a nod. “Why? That name mean something to you?”

“It… yeah,” I stammer, eventually just zoning out on the document.

Growing up, Ricky was practically his grandfather’s shadow. They went everywhere together. So much that I spent several of those early years thinking Gus Ruiz was his father, only to discover at around age nine that his actual father had passed away a little over four years prior. Not too long after Shane was born.

Now, according to this birth certificate, it appears Vin is