The Charade: A Billionaire/Fake Relationship Romance (Eden Falls Academy)
The Charade: Chapter 31

‘ARE you trying to say that your mom got pregnant with you at her high school reunion?’ I asked Elyse and Ava after they explained to me why July twenty-ninth was such a significant date to them. ‘Are you saying that based on the fact that our parents dated seriously in high school and then ended up in a few photos together at their high school reunion, it means my dad was the guy who helped her out with that?’

‘We’re just saying that he’s the strongest candidate we’ve ever found,’ Elyse said, watching me with wary eyes, like she was worried I might explode if she said the wrong thing.

And I guess she wasn’t far off. Because if I was related to the girl I’d just been making out with a few minutes ago—if I was the brother of the girl I’d had fantasies about more times than I’d ever admit—I might just punch a hole through the wall.

Or throw up.

I couldn’t decide which urge would win out at the moment.

‘So you’re saying that our parents slept together this night, and that my dad either didn’t know about your existence until very recently, or just chose not to take care of you for the past eighteen years because of some reasons we don’t know about?’

‘I don’t know.’ Elyse raised her hands in the air. ‘I’m just figuring these things out right now.’ She sighed. ‘It’s just what makes the most sense. And with your dad’s history of sleeping around and making babies he didn’t know about…I guess it’s not too unbelievable.’

Even though she was talking about my dad and not me, it almost felt like she’d slapped me in the face.

‘My dad had a fling one time. That doesn’t mean he had unprotected sex with every woman he was mildly attracted to.’

‘I’m not saying he did,’ Elyse hurried to say. ‘But don’t you think that if they were both single and unattached at the time, it’s possible that they could have gotten carried away when they ran into each other again? Especially when they only broke up the first time because of distance and not because they didn’t still care about each other?’

‘I don’t know.’ I ran a hand through my hair, my breath coming in short bursts as I tried to think of some kind of reasoning that would prove my dad couldn’t have slept with their mom that weekend.

But I was coming up blank, because while my dad was a family man now and had eyes only for Dawn, he’d said before that when he got my own mother pregnant, it had been a time in his life when he’d been a lot more careless.

He’d dated a lot of women that year he and Dawn had been broken up because he’d been trying to numb himself from the pain of losing the woman he loved to her ex-husband.

He and Ava’s mom had history. And there was no denying that she was a beautiful woman. She had dark hair, brown eyes, and light brown skin, which was exactly my dad’s type.

And even though it wasn’t something I’d do now that I had Ava, if Sofia had come back to me last summer and tried to hook up, I probably would have been tempted. Because I didn’t know Ava back then and therefore wouldn’t have known how much better of a connection I could have had with someone else.

Someone else who might be my sister.

I glanced at Ava, and when our gazes locked, I saw the same fear I felt pulsing throughout my body mirrored in her eyes.

‘I’m going to be sick.’ Ava clutched her stomach before sitting down on her bed. She leaned forward and rested her head in her hands.

I wanted to comfort her, to rub her back and tell her that things would be okay, but I suddenly didn’t know if doing any of that was even appropriate anymore.

Had I just been making out with my sister?

With someone who was related to me just as much as Cambrielle?

I walked to the corner of the room and sat myself down in one of the chairs, resting my head in my hands just as Ava was doing because this was too much.

Elyse sat on the bed beside Ava and rubbed her back in the way I had wanted to a moment ago. And even though Ava and I weren’t thrilled by the prospect of being related, I realized that for Elyse at least, this was probably exciting news. Because for her, she finally solved the mystery she’d been wondering about for years.

This wasn’t a bad thing for her. She had no reasons for not wanting my dad to be her father. He was a good guy. She’d seen what a good father he was to me and my siblings, so having him as her father probably was an appealing idea. He was a billionaire. A family man.

He wasn’t some creep who had abandoned her mom.

He’d just been the guy who hadn’t known about them, just like he hadn’t known about me for the first eight years of my life.

Sure, it wasn’t a great look for Joel Hastings to have spread his seed so much when he was in his early twenties. But at least with Ava and Elyse’s mom, he’d been in love with her at one point. So it wasn’t a random fling.

There was still the question of why their mom wouldn’t have told him about them, but maybe she had her reasons.

The room was silent for a while as everyone seemed to be processing everything, but then Elyse said, ‘It does make sense though, right? I mean, Carter’s dad did seem really interested in us when we met. He was asking us all sorts of questions, wasn’t he? Asking us about our mom and what grade we were in.’

Ava turned her head to look at her sister, and when I saw her eyes rimmed with red, it tore at my heart because I didn’t want to see her crying. She sighed and said, ‘I don’t know anything right now. I just know that I don’t know what I’m going to do when everyone finds out that I’ve been dating my brother for the past three weeks.’

She shifted her gaze to mine, and when our eyes locked, I felt nauseous with dread.

This was going to be a nightmare.

I’d thought that having everyone know Sofia dumped me for a prince was humiliating. But how much worse was it going to be when everyone found out that Ava and I had to break up because we were siblings?

It was going to be a massacre.

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