and the Cains exchanged more awkward glances before Dalton gave her shoulder a little squeeze. “The letter was sent anonymously from a woman claiming to be your mother. She explained that she had born him a daughter many years ago and that she had purposely kept it from him to protect the girl. To protect you. But that she wanted him to go to his grave knowing that he could never get his hands on you. She was taunting him.”
Meg frowned. “My mother couldn’t have sent that letter. She died when I was a child.” Plenty of people in her life hated Hollister, but none hated him enough to track his health obsessively just to drop that bombshell when he was on his deathbed. “I don’t know anyone who would have done that. You don’t think I did it, do you? Because—”
“No,” Dalton said quickly. “We’re not worried about that. The woman who wrote the letter knew Hollister well enough to know it would drive him crazy—the fact that he had a daughter who was forever beyond his reach. So he set a challenge for the three of us.” Dalton gestured to indicate his brothers. “Whichever one of us found you and brought you back into the fold would get his entire estate. If no one found you before he died, everything would go to the state.”
“Excuse me?” For a long moment, that was all she could say. She couldn’t even think clearly enough to process what he’d said, let alone to comment. Hollister was worth...well, she didn’t know the precise numbers, but it was a buttload of money. Hundreds of millions at least. Finally she said, “What kind of—” she barely restrained herself from using the word asshole “—man sets up a crazy landgrab like that among his sons?”
Dalton just nodded. Griffin smiled grimly.
Cooper actually chuckled. “Yeah, exactly. Way to encourage sibling bonding, right?”
Except when she looked around the room, they did seem to be close. There wasn’t even a glimmer of animosity among them.
“You seem to be getting along awfully well when there’s so much money at stake.”
Griffin shrugged. “We decided early on it was better to share information and split the money. Four ways, obviously. Besides, you’ve been pretty hard to find, given that we had zero information to go on.”
“Except now that you’ve come to us—” Griffin looked around the room “—I guess we need to come up with a new plan. Should we give her the bigger share?”
“Wait, what? Her who? Her me?”
Laney smiled. “Obviously they were always planning on giving a quarter of the estate to you.”
Panic shot through her and Meg lurched to her feet. Even though she didn’t know exactly how many hundreds of millions Hollister was worth, it was a lot. Any way she looked at it, a quarter of a lot of millions was a lot of millions.
She held up her hands, palms out, and started backing toward the door. “I don’t want any of Hollister’s money.” Okay. That wasn’t true. “I only want a tiny bit of money.”
Laney stood up too and pulled out the Snow-White-coaxing-the-forest-creatures voice. “You seem upset by this news. Maybe you should sit down.”
Sit down? Sitting down, with all the Cains staring at her, was the last thing she wanted to do. What she wanted to do was bolt from the room, hop back into her sensible Chevy and get the hell out of Dodge.
But with panic racing through her veins, she suddenly felt as light-headed as Portia had looked right before she’d fainted. That thought alone was enough to get Meg back in her chair. She wasn’t a fainter. She never had been. Not even when she’d been pregnant. Not even when she’d been pregnant and working twelve-hour days at the bakery.
Nope. Not her.
She was tough. She wasn’t a skittish purebred like Portia. She was strictly blue-collar, working stock.
She was not meant to be rich.
Rich people were assholes. Everything in her upbringing and her life had taught her that.
As her thoughts raced, she drew breath after breath into her lungs, desperate to find a way out of this. She had come here expecting to do a little light blackmailing and that...well, that was disconcerting enough. She hadn’t expected things to get so out of control so quickly.
And then she slowly became aware that at some point she’d sat down and was cradling her head in her hands. When she looked up, it was to see all six of the Cains staring at her in total surprise.
Yeah. Clearly, they weren’t used to people who were afraid of money.
It was Sydney who spoke first. “You know that Hollister is your father. But you seem surprised that anyone else knows or believes that you’re Hollister’s. And you don’t seem to want the inheritance that is rightfully yours.”
“I don’t!” she said quickly. Thanks to the helpful pages of the Houston Chronicle, she’d seen what their lives were like. She was smart enough to know that kind of money came with strings a mile long and as strong as Teflon-coated titanium. She didn’t want any part of that.
“Then why did you come?”
“I came because I need money.”
Dalton gave her an impatient look. “You do realize that the inheritance from Hollister is worth a lot of money, right?”
“I’m poor, I’m not an idiot.” She stood and marched over to the windows, staring unseeingly at the pristinely manicured lawns. From the corner of her eye, she might have seen Griffin punch Dalton in the arm. “I don’t want an inheritance from Hollister. And I don’t need money in two years or five years or wherever Hollister dies and the estate goes through probate. I need money now.”
“How much?” asked one of the guys—she didn’t know their voices well enough to know which one.
She glanced over her shoulder to see who had asked, and was surprised to see all three of the men reaching for their wallets. As if they’d just whip out two hundred thousand dollars in small bills.
“About two hundred thousand.” She automatically rattled off the number she’d settled on to cover all of Pearl’s expenses.
“For what?” asked Dalton after only a brief moment of silence.
“That’s something I’ll discuss with Hollister. When the time comes.” This was getting her nowhere. “Now, if you could just tell me where I can find him...”
Griffin stepped forward. “He’s not here now. He just left for Vail. But when you meet him for the first time, one of us should be with you.”
“So you can claim you found me and secure your inheritance?” she asked archly. Why the hell couldn’t she have come to Houston on a day when Hollister was at home? It would have been so much easier dealing with one greedy bastard instead of six.
“Actually,” Sydney said, “I think Griffin was offering more to protect you.”
“I don’t need protection from a dying seventy-year-old man.” At least, she assumed she didn’t. She was picturing Hollister as fairly weak, since they’d just described him as being on his deathbed. On the other hand, she was planning on blackmailing him. Which would probably
