“I’m not getting any younger,” she declared curtly.

“And he hasn’t put you in his will,” Toby guessed.

“I don’t need your money,” she spat.

The other thing you didn’t do with Johnny Gamble.

You didn’t spit words at his brother.

Johnny shared this by pushing his chair back, standing and announcing, “Okay. We’re done here. You’re not gonna be straight with us, give us answers we fuckin’ deserve, this is over.”

“We fought, my . . . my husband and I. He wanted me to get a divorce so he could marry me. We had to wait until . . . until I was ready. Then Lance passed unexpectedly, and I was free. He had to . . . make arrangements so Lance’s investigators couldn’t find me. All of that annoyed him. But I didn’t want to see your father again,” she told them.

Shit.

Fuck.

With the way his dad treated women, Toby wasn’t sure he wanted to hear this.

Johnny was always sure of their dad.

“Why?” Johnny demanded.

“If I did, he might make me see you.”

Everyone fell silent.

Sierra broke it.

“I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t . . . wasn’t . . .” She shook her head hard. “I’d walked away from you. I wasn’t ready—”

This wasn’t about Lance Gamble.

This was about Sierra Whoever the Fuck She Was.

“For this,” Toby finished for her. “You weren’t ready for this. You weren’t ready for us to learn you’re a narcissistic, money-hungry bitch. You left mills and shacks and garages and four-bedroom houses to have BMWs and work done on your face when it was needed. And you’re so up your own ass, you couldn’t handle us not worshiping you because you couldn’t handle some of Dad’s attention shifting from his wife to his sons. It’s gotta be about you. With him gone, you think you can pretend to eat shit and that you want to meet Johnny’s fiancée, and we’d be so relieved you were back, it’d be all about you. A very Merry Christmas, Mom’s finally home. Dad couldn’t say shit, he’s gone. It’s your story to tell. Problem with that, Sierra, is we both got dicks. We’ve met women like you. So you’re not foolin’ anybody.”

“I cannot believe you’d speak to me that way,” she said in a hushed, offended tone.

“Did you leave Dad for your current husband?” Toby demanded to know.

“Yes, but I’d been in love with him for years,” she answered sharply.

Fucking hell.

“Get out.”

Toby’s head shot back to look up at Johnny when those words came from his brother.

“Johnny, you don’t understand. I’d loved him for years and his wife left him. Please—” she started to beg.

“Get out,” Johnny repeated.

“This wasn’t supposed to—”

Toby stood. “Sierra. Go.”

She stood too. “You’re aware that Phil won’t live forever, and neither will I, and you both have chosen women and will likely make families, so if we work things out you’d be in line to inherit—”

“Woman, Dad expanded the garages, so did I, and bought property, and other shit. Toby and I got millions. Don’t let the mill and Tobe’s condo, and us actually working for a living we don’t need to work for fool you. We don’t need dick from you,” Johnny shared.

And that was news to her if Toby read her head giving a weird shake and her chin going in her neck right.

She’d expected that to be collateral. The carrot she could dangle to insinuate herself into their lives.

And she was not only thrown that it was not, she was thrown that they had what they had, which was what she would have had if she’d stuck around. He could tell this just by looking at her.

“He was . . . wanting to concentrate on you boys, not building up the garages, when we—” she began.

“He changed his mind,” Johnny told her.

For some reason, the woman kept trying.

“There are things you don’t understand. Even at your ages, so young, you boys were very into your father. Three peas in a pod. I was just the little woman. I cooked food and did laundry. I wanted girls. Lance said we could keep having babies to try for a girl. He wanted to do that. Tobias was getting older and your father was putting pressure on, he wanted a daughter, or another son, he didn’t care. But he kept talking about having a little girl, giving his sons a baby sister. I didn’t want to have more babies. What if they weren’t girls? Phil has girls and—”

Christ, their dad had wanted more kids.

Fuck, but that was a punch in the gut.

And it all finally came out.

Like usual with women like her.

She buried the lead.

His father’s expectations were that he was happy, loved building a family with her, and wanted more.

Instead of saying no, which he would have accepted, she found some sugar daddy who’d kiss her ass and do anything she wanted, like wait nearly three decades to marry her and probably pay off investigators who came looking for her.

“You aren’t making this any better,” Toby warned in order to stop the woman from talking.

“Can you imagine your own children treating you like a nurse and a maid and a cook?” she demanded to know.

Jesus Christ.

Was he hearing her right?

“For shit’s sake, Sierra, we were five and three. We were treating you like our mom,” Johnny said impatiently.

She lifted her chin. “Phil’s girls didn’t treat me like that.”

“This man’s girls were not five and three,” Johnny pointed out. “They were old enough to no longer be as dependent. For shit’s sake, at our ages, neither of us could even reach the washing machine, much less should be using it, or probably even knew what the damned thing was.”

“And did you have a maid?” Toby asked the second his brother was done.

She didn’t answer Toby or Johnny.

She’d had help.

But none of this shit mattered.

She was what Addie said she was.

A pathologically self-absorbed waste of space.

“Right, so good. Thanks, Sierra. This is good. It’s appreciated,” Toby declared.

“It . . . it is?” she asked with surprise.

“Yeah, because you were right. Though it wasn’t about not knowin’ how to be a mom. It was that you were just a shit mom. You split. Saved us from your . . .” he flipped a hand to her, “whatever and left us to Grams and Margot. So we got what we needed.”

“That’s another thing,” she stated coldly. “Your grandmother and Margot treated me—”

Oh no.

Johnny got there before him, which was good.

“Do not say another goddamned word,” Johnny rumbled.

She read right away that was a line she couldn’t cross and clamped her mouth shut.

“Toby’s right. We got what we needed from you. It’s jacked, but at least it’s answers. So now you can go,” Johnny declared.

She looked between them.

And again.

Then she said, “I still don’t think you understand.”

“Nope. We understand perfectly,” Toby told her.