KNOCKOUT

by Nikki Wild

  I suppose it was all those soap operas she watched that first gave her the idea as to how she could better herself once again. I was to be part of this charade, perhaps even the most important part—I’d be playing the role of the sophisticated, well-educated daughter who deserved more than the American education system could provide. My mother, by comparison, was the widow of an English attaché who’d perished in the September 11th attacks. Mother was nothing, if not opportunistic. I think her family crest might say something like, “Never let a good tragedy go to waste.”

  This ruse meant I’d had to learn a posh British accent, study endlessly to meet the academic benchmarks of a “gifted European child,” as my mother put it, and endure countless etiquette classes meant to train the upper crust in exhibiting their classist natures with style. This started when I was barely old enough to read, but my mother spared me no leniency, nor did she spare me the back of her hand. Among other things.

  I shook my head, trying not to think about it. She’d changed after she met her new husband, let go of that chain she’d wound around my neck, if only a little. I was still expected to never embarrass the family or sully her name, even indirectly. How a woman so frigid could conceive a child at all was beyond me.

  But apparently one thing had led to another, and now not only was I going to be a big sister, but I was also expected to act the part. I was a busy woman, a woman who had better things to do than help my mother especially on any kind of emotional level—if my mother could even comprehend any emotional help I could offer.

  I looked deep into the crystal wineglass in my hand, pondering the ripples that this one little event would have on the rest of my life—hopefully not much, seeing as I was not even set to inherit my stepfather’s assets or title. But there was still a sensation in my gut that filled me with an unexplainable sense of impending dread, as though this small little thing would change more than just the number of heirs my parents had at their disposal.

  I took a long, slow drink from the deep red liquid, letting the taste of the wine flow over my tongue before setting the glass down on the table. I sat there in the dark of my office wondering just how much of the bottle I’d already managed to tear through.

  This shouldn’t be bothering me as much as it is, I thought, leaning back in my comfortable office chair. I let myself become wrapped in the stillness and silence of my empty office. I’d sent Tina home early after the debacle with Lord Adderby, she’d had more than enough to deal with and we were thankfully free of any other appointments that day. I had more than enough time to sit by myself and collect my thoughts after being blindsided so thoroughly by that horrific news.

  Why was I getting so upset about this? It was my mother’s issue, and whether I made it a point of being in my soon-to-be half-sibling’s life was mine. Maybe I felt sorry for the half-formed fetus gestating inside of my emotionally distant mother, wondering if—given his place as a male aristocrat—she hoped that her new son would give her some sense of pride that I could never have done. It was that thought that prompted me to pour myself another glass of wine.

  I closed my eyes and breathed in the quiet air, trying my hardest to fall into a sweet drunken oblivion. At most this was an inconvenience, a minor hiccup in my life that would hopefully affect me only in the slightest of ways. I had my own life apart from my mother and I intended to keep myself out of her silly little play at being the mother of a noble.

  * * *

  ***

  * * *

  I was startled from the gentle twilight between waking and sleep by a harsh knock on my door—no, my office door… I was still in my office! I’d almost forgotten where I was, my brain still addled by the copious amounts of wine I’d imbibed before.

  How long have I been asleep? I wondered. I glanced over at my desktop only to find that it was somewhere close to two in the morning.

  Another knock on my door brought me closer to the surface of reality, and I began to wonder who in the world would be at my business at this late hour. And for that matter, how had they gotten past the door by the front desk? If it was some kind of burglar then I doubted they’d have the courtesy of knocking.

  “We’re not open,” I called out to whoever was intruding upon my quiet and somewhat sad round of lonesome drinking. “You’ll have to come back another time, I’m afraid.”

  I strained to listen for whoever might be out there, expecting a reply but only silence followed. I’d almost begun to think that they’d simply left, surprised that one of England’s upper class had been satisfied to have been turned away so easily. However I was soon proven that none of my wishes were going to be honored.

  I heard the sounds of the lock scraping and clicking, and within a moment I saw my door start to swing slowly inward, the scant light pouring in from the waiting room outside. To say that I was furious would have been an understatement. Someone had just walked into my own office without my permission, much less a word of greeting. But something in the back of my head told me that I should be more than annoyed, I should be panicking. Who had just done all this? Was I going to be murdered? The alcohol pumping through my blood made those important questions seem so very trivial as I looked at the masculine silhouette highlighted against the open doorway.

  “I told you that we are closed!” I said, standing shakily from my chair. “Please leave! Come back during normal business hours.”

  The man laughed, a cocky chuckle that brought thoughts to my head that I’d seldom had since I was only a teenager. A shiver ran down my spine. I recognized that laugh, having heard it so many times when I was younger, but it was the face I was having trouble placing. Where did I know that laugh from?

  And then it hit me all at once like a ton of bricks, practically smacking me right in my forehead as I saw that gorgeous face as clear as the last day I’d laid eyes upon it. It couldn’t be him, not after all of this time, not after the fight that he’d had with his father—my father… Well, stepfather, anyway.

  “Tristan?” I asked, squinting my eyes against the light beyond the door.

  “You do remember,” he said, stepping farther into the dark room and closing the door behind him. I was thankful for the darkness, the beginnings of my hangover already starting to rear their head. “And here I thought that you’d forgotten me, after all of this time.”

  Forgotten? Forgotten?

  I was lucky that after several years of my stepbrother’s absence, my thoughts of him had become limited to only once or twice a day.

  Good Lord—forgotten him. As if I could ever forget my first real crush. As if I could forget how badly I’d wanted him, even when I told myself that I didn’t. How he’d made me tremble in the kitchen of our old house, my breath thick in my throat, his voice husky in my ear.

  Come on, love. Don’t you want to piss your mother off?

  “How am I supposed to forget my stepbrother after the exit that you made?” I asked, trying to keep my mouth from hanging agape. Tristan’s sudden rush to join the military was something that none of us had expected—me most of all. And the night that the two of us had nearly... I fumbled for something to discuss other than that time we’d nearly fucked. “That fight you had with your father was legendary. I think there are old women still scandalized by it to this very day.”

  Lord Wolfe was in a rage like I had never seen before in my entire life, bellowing at the top of his lungs, spittle flying from his mouth as Tristan and he stared one another down face to face. Not that fighting between the two of them was uncommon. In fact I almost thought that they both too a certain pleasure in angering the other, seeing how far they could go to push one another into another argument…. I wasn’t sure how Tristan could have stood for that all of his life.

  “What can I say? I like to make a spectacle of myself,” he chuckled again. It was a sound that had angered me so when we were teens together. The way that he could turn anything into a joke.

  Tristan always seemed to have that arrogant smirk on his face
, as though he was always one step ahead no matter what. It drove me insane when we were younger, always acting like he knew everything, and yet all the while utterly oblivious to the fact that I had harbored the deepest crush for him than anyone else I’d ever known.

  It was an illicit thing, of course. For all the inbreeding that had plagued the royal lines in the past, the aristocracy was doing its best to rid itself of that image now. The fact that Tristan and I weren’t blood-related hardly mattered when reputation came into play. So I’d weathered the storm of my hormones and tried not to think too hard about my stepbrother’s lilting accent, the mischief in his eyes, or the way his lean muscles rolled when he took off his shirt to go swimming in the lake near his father’s estate.

  But then, there was that one time—that fleeting moment we’d had before he left for the military. The night I’d been certain Tristan was going to undo me, a silly little eighteen-year-old virgin, right there in the pantry well after we were supposed to be in bed…

  I physically waved the memory away. No. Now was not the time to think of that. We were adults now, and we knew better. Or I hoped I did, anyway.

  “You certainly do,” I said, trying to compose myself with all haste. “And still, after all this time, you think that you can just come and go? Leave for years at a time, and not expect me or anyone else to bat an eye?”

  I hadn’t realized that my temper had gotten the better of me, my face still tingling from all the blood rushing to it. Even I was shocked by the suddenness of my ire, so many old memories brought up at once had apparently been more than my self-control could handle. I had been holding these feelings in for all this time, bottled away with the hope that I’d never need to confront them ever again. I never realized that my stepbrother would ever return, not so suddenly, at least.

  I cleared my throat and straightened my blouse before addressing him again. “Is there a reason you’ve broken into my office at the godforsaken hours of the morning?”

  “Well, when I broke into your apartment you weren’t there,” he said, his admittance of his own wrongdoing had me boiling again already, and yet that errant bad boy, blasé attitude that he always seemed to flout also had a more… arousing effect, as well. “I thought that if you weren’t at home then you’d be at this posh new office of yours, working until the break of dawn. That was always the way you did things, after all. Valedictorian. Top of your class, and all that.”

  I hated how after all of this time he still could affect me in the most intimate ways, simply by being in my presence. I wanted to slap him with all my strength.

  “What do you want, Tristan?” I asked, folding my arms over my chest, staring daggers at him from across the room. He was so gorgeous I couldn’t deny how I’d want to drag him back to my flat and tear every bit of those clothes off. It was too bad I also wanted to put him through a blender and burn him in an incinerator. Why did we always crave the people who had always been the worst for us?

  “I need your help, otherwise I wouldn’t be breaking in like some common criminal,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  “If you’d have answered me, then I would have opened the bloody door!”

  “But that wouldn’t have been any fun,” he sighed, shaking his head. The urge to punch him only rose higher inside of me. He was such a damned asshole that I could hardly stand it.

  “What could I possibly do to help you, Tristan? You’ve never needed my help in the past. Why start now?” I set my jaw, my eyebrows furrowed in an attempt to look stern, though every time I looked into those gorgeous eyes I wanted to melt into the floor.

  “Because I need something that only you can help me with, Gwennie.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I snapped, my cheeks filling with color. “I told you never to call me that!”

  “Which is why I do it,” he said in a sing-song voice. I wanted to scream.

  “You’re not making a good case to get my help, Tristan. Whether we’re family or not, I don’t like being toyed with,” I said. “If you want to do business, then we’ll talk business. No games.”

  I watched as his perfectly groomed eyebrows rose, and a shocking expression of... admiration spread across his face before his shoulders slumped ever so slightly. If I wasn’t so determined to be the kind of hard-ass who could stand up to him, I would have been surprised… and practically drooling at the way he looked in that suit.

  “Sorry, Gwendolyn,” he began, clearing his throat. “I really do need your help.”

  “With what, exactly?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. “You’ve never needed my help before—for anything. What’s so different?”

  “I need to get married.”

  My heart flipped and forgot to flop. “I beg your pardon?” I asked, slowly lowering myself back down into my office chair. I didn’t want him to show it, but those simple words had me shaking. Tristan wanted to get married? But what in the world for? He’d never wanted to be tied down—he’d even decried marriage to be archaic and backwards, an institution that should have been left behind in the Middle Ages. “What in the world would you need to get married for?”

  “Because I actually want to claim my inheritance, Gwendolyn,” he said, no shortage of edge to his voice. His expression soured suddenly and he began to pace.

  “I thought that you were already set to inherit,” I said, frowning as I leaned forward, elbows on my desk. “I mean, I know that with the new boy there’s a second heir, but you’d have priority as your father’s eldest son, wouldn’t you? I thought that was how this all worked.”

  “It would be exactly that… if I was my father’s legitimate son.”

  I leaned back, eyes wide as Tristan locked his gaze with mine. I’d known that Tristan’s mother had died in childbirth, but that he was born out of wedlock was something I’d never known. Though as I allowed that information to sink in, things began to make more and more sense, especially Lord Wolfe’s general coldness toward Tristan for all the years I’d known them.

  “I never knew you were a…”

  “ ‘Bastard’ is the common term,” he said, shrugging in an attempt to seem nonchalant, though by the sour expression on his face I could tell that the term bothered him. “I am my father’s by-blow from his days as a stallion, bedding women left and right through his years in college. My mother being one of many—though the only one that he managed to get pregnant.”

  “Surely, he took responsibility—” I began, though Tristan’s sharp, barking laugh cut me off.

  “Only because he was pressured,” he said, his tone scornful. “My father didn’t care much for the idea of caring for his illegitimate child any more than I liked being under his watchful gaze. I was more than happy to see him leave for London on business while I stayed behind.”

  “And now, with the child on the way, you need to cement your position as the heir to his legacy,” I said, turning my gaze away from him for fear that my thoughts might again wander to more unseemly places. “Which is why you need my help.”

  “Spot on,” he replied, that smirk returning as though it had never left. “I need to be married to a respectable woman—an honest man with a family of his own.”

  “I have a feeling that you might not get the results that you’re expecting from this, Tristan. I don’t just try to set up marriages, I try to encourage actual relationships. I mean, if you’re expecting to marry this woman in a matter of weeks or months, then I don’t think this is—”

  “Let me worry about that,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “After all is there a woman alive who can resist a man like me?”

  I have, I thought, though I fought the urge to give in to that stunning smile whenever I saw him. I could already feel my heart fluttering, my pulse rising just from the way he moved and spoke. Maybe this was the best thing that I could do for him—and me.

  If Tristan was married off, then he’d be gone and out of my hair. I’d be free from the constant temptation to maul my own stepbrother, begging him to ravage me
just like I’d dreamed of. I licked my lips nervously. This might be the answer to my problem—a permanent solution to something I’d thought solved years ago. Though part of me cursed the thought I’d never get what I’d always desired—desired, but knew that I could never possess.

  “All right,” I said after a brief silence. “I’ll help you, but first we have to get a few questions out of the way.”

  “And before that,” Tristan said, coming just a little too close to me, that smarmy grin on his handsome face, “I think your big brother could do with a hug.”

  Four

  Chapter 4

  “Come here,” I said as I walked around her desk, my arms spread wide to envelop her in a hug.

  I was honestly surprised she’d even agreed to my insane plan, much less the prospect of finding me a wife in such short order. To be truthful I was hardly sure whether my plan would work at all, but I knew little Gwennie liked a challenge. Especially when it involved matters of the heart.

  “I—no! Tristan I can’t—” she tried to say as I pulled her into a tight embrace. I could feel her body tensing as I pulled her against me, and I distinctly hear her let out a little gasp. More like a squeak, really—that same mousy sound she used to make whenever I got too close, like that night in the kitchen before I left for Afghanistan. She’d been making that sound, and so many more, and as soon as I heard it, something dark and primal pulsed through my groin. Was Gwen still hot for me after all this time?

  Interesting, I thought, trying to hide the smirk on my face. Knowing my goody two-shoes stepsister still wanted me was validating, to say the least. And intriguing…

  “Have a seat, please,” she said, her voice stiff as I pulled out of the embrace. Her face was flushed as she tried to straighten her outfit, her hands trembling. I knew I had a mission—a goal that all of this was for—but seeing Gwen after all of this time brought back the thoughts I’d get when I caught her staring at me as we grew up. She’d been so awkward, all arms and legs as a teen, but about the time she turned eighteen something had happened. All of a sudden she had curves and an ass that I would have killed to get my hands on. All of this, however, was stymied by the fact that on no circumstances was I allowed to lay a land on sweet little Gwennie, no matter how much I would have liked to. She was my stepsister, and the scandal alone would have gotten me disowned right before it gave my father a coronary.