“He was just making sure I really wanted to get married,” my mother soothed, taking my father’s hand in hers.

“Wait a minute,” I spoke up, all eyes turning to me.

Before I could even say anything, my father groaned loudly.

“I told you he was going to pick up on it,” my mother told him.

I lifted an eyebrow, looking between my parents. “You gave me … us,” I corrected, taking Destiny’s hand in mine, placing them on the dark wood of the table, “shit for eloping on a yacht when you two ran off and got married in Vegas? By an Elvis Presley impersonator, no less? You always told us you’d both gotten married here at Townsend Manor.”

“We did,” my mother quickly responded.

“A year after our Vegas wedding,” my father clarified.

“So your anniversary date isn’t September 19th, 1979.”

“It is. We always told you the right date, just not the right location.”

There was a collective sigh around the table. The wrong date would’ve thrown a monkey wrench into my brothers’ and my plans.

“Anyway, back to my original question. What was with you giving me crap for our quickie wedding when you’d done it yourselves?”

“Tyler, watch your language at the dinner table,” my mother scolded.

“Apologies.”

“And please, I didn’t give you half the sh—” My father paused, looking toward my mother who glared at him, eyebrow raised. “… difficulty my father gave me. Not that it made a difference either way,” he added coolly.

We’d always known that my father hadn’t had a great relationship with his own father. My grandfather had passed before I was born, so I never met the man, but from the little I did know about him, I wasn’t a fan. However, I do know that some things he’d taught my father had stuck with him until this day. He’d even passed some of those lessons on to us.

“They really didn’t give us a hard time, babe,” my wife interjected. “Resha was more upset than your parents when she found out we’d gotten married.”

I glanced down, grinning at Destiny. Her cousin and best friend, Resha, had indeed been pissed off when she found out Destiny and I had married, just the two of us, on a yacht in the Bahamas.

“I can’t believe you kept that secret from us all of these years,” Joshua added, the rest of the family nodding their heads in agreement.

“Some things aren’t your business,” my father stated with a shrug.

“Your wedding day isn’t one of those things, Father,” Aaron added, surprising most of us.

He of all people was one to talk about secrets. The man had had an ongoing relationship with his wife that produced two children long before any of us knew about it. Granted, he didn’t even know about the children until they were five years old, but still.