At least not for me.
He’s right. He owned me tonight. In some ways, he’s owned me for six years. I fear that he still will when I leave this city, no doubt now without him, but deep down, I know that’s for the best. There are things back in Denver that divide us. Things I forgot by coming here. If he goes back there, he will ruin them, or they’ll own him. That means this was never going to work. He strokes my hair, a gentle, regretful touch like he’s thinking the same thing as me, but he doesn’t speak.
He pulls out of me before rolling away and sitting up to toss the condom in a trashcan. I suddenly feel naked and exposed but it doesn’t matter what I feel. It doesn’t matter how much I don’t want to push him. No thought I just had about this being a bad idea matters. There are reasons it can’t matter. I have to push him. I start to roll away to get dressed and ready for battle, but he’s already back, catching my arm and now we’re both naked on our knees on the bed, facing each other.
“Running away?” he challenges.
“No. Not at all. I need your help. I know how much you hate them. I know they deserve it, but I’m desperate and I didn’t sleep with you for help. I know it might seem that way, so you know, fucking the princess bitch seems just fine to you, but it’s not that to me.”
“That’s not what this was to me,” he says.
“It was. It was at first and you know it.”
“No. It’s me not wanting to get fucked by you as an extension of them.”
“I’m not them, but I need help with them.”
“I won’t help them.”
“Help me.”
“I will. Come here. I’ll give you a job at double the pay you make there and there are no conditions. If we never fuck again, we don’t fuck again. I can place you in any state, or several countries, for that matter. I’ll get you a new start.”
“My mother—”
“Take her with you.”
“She won’t leave him,” I say. “She married my father young. They were in love. Losing him left her devastated. Your father took over her life and her money when she was vulnerable and not in a good way. I can’t leave her. Not in the way you suggest.”
“You said you were going to leave.”
“Before the recalls,” I remind him. “Before she could end up in trouble with the rest of them. I have to go back. Go back with me.”
“If I go back there, I’ll finish them off. I won’t save them. Still want me to go with you?”
“Yes. I do. Because I don’t believe you’re the bastard you want everyone to believe you are or you would have already done it.”
“You’re wrong.” His jaw sets. “And there’s nothing more to say, at least not by me.” In other words, there’s more to say, and I’m the one who has to say it. And there is, but I’m not sure any of it changes anything. It might even make it worse.
He releases me, leaving me cold and aching for his touch. I want this man. Some part of me needs him beyond logic. Maybe it’s the connection to something we both want to be home that never really can be home. Maybe it’s more. I really don’t know or want to understand. It doesn’t matter. He’s no longer touching me and maybe he never will again.
He’s already dressing and somehow that feels like a slap. Me naked on the bed while he dresses certainly feels cold and done. He’s done. He’s made his decision to leave, probably before he ever arrived. He wanted to fuck me. He wanted to own me. It was all part of what he’s just declared. He wants to ruin his father and brother. I’m nothing more than an extension of them. God, I’m a fool but what did I expect? The minute I got naked with him, it must have seemed like I was fucking him to get a favor.
Embarrassed, I scramble off the bed and find my sweats, pulling them on. Once we’re both dressed, he walks to my room service tray and opens it. “Macaroni and cheese,” he says.
“My favorite food,” I reply and I have no idea why this feels almost as intimate of an admission as anything else between us tonight. I regret sharing this part of me with him, but then, why wouldn’t I? I’m just a revenge fuck to him.
He walks to me and I tell myself to back away. I tell myself to end this now, but I can’t stand the idea of never touching him again. I can’t resist the need to feel his hands on my body just one more time. I suck in air, waiting for it, wanting it, and when he slides his hand under my hair to my neck, I feel this man, who would be my enemy by his own definition, everywhere, inside and out.
“Just one of the many things,” he says, “that I would have liked to have known about you, Harper.” He kisses me, a light brush of lips over lips, and then he pulls back. “But that can’t happen. There’s something you haven’t told me. You haven’t been honest with me and that makes you one of them.” He releases me and walks to the door.
I want to scream at him that I’m not one of them, but I don’t, I can’t. Because in ways I don’t want to be, I am. I have to let him walk out the door and he does. He’s gone. I’m alone, but no matter how I connect to his family, I’m still a fish in a sea of Kingston sharks, and I’m going to have to grow my own teeth.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Harper
In life, there are people who really are like two ships passing in the sea never meant to stop or know one another, but what happens when they do?
The idea of leaving New York City and Eric behind is brutal, as if I’m leaving a piece of myself, and that’s just nuts. Last night was sex, nothing more. Six years ago was also sex, nothing more. He came. He made me come. He left. He didn’t look back. And yet here I am, fretting over leaving without seeing him again, to the point that I’m pacing my hotel room and contemplating skipping my flight with a deep need to see Eric again clawing at me.
I tell myself it’s because I need his help, but I know this runs deeper for me. That man affects me and if I wanted closure that allowed me to move on from that party six years ago, and him, I didn’t get it. I just got more of him and more seems to feed my need for even more.
The doorman knocks on my door, which means I’m out of time. It’s officially decision time and for me, that comes back to one key thing: Eric was right. I haven’t told him everything and I can’t. I can’t look him in the eyes and tell him that I have. I can’t lie to him the way everyone else has, but if I tell him everything there is to tell, his words will prove true: he’ll ruin the Kingston family and that means my mother and my father’s legacy along with it. I was playing with fire coming here, thinking I could stay silent. I need to just go home before I do something stupid. I let the doorman in.
An hour and a half later, I’m on a plane, and when I should be trying to decide how to move on without Eric’s touch, I’m thinking about him—every touch, every kiss, every word we’d shared plays in my mind over and over again and my regrets are many. I should have said more. I should have stopped him from walking out that door, but I remind myself I couldn’t. He saw too much and you don’t expect a genius who sees too much to stop seeing too much. You don’t ask a genius to help you see what you can’t and expect him not to see everything.
By the time I’m on the ground, it’s early evening, and when I walk into my downtown home, I strip down to sweats and a T-shirt, order Chinese food, and sit down at my computer. It’s time to focus on what’s before me. My cellphone rings with Gigi’s number and I let it go to voicemail. I need a plan before I talk to her. She’s no spring chicken and the idea of Eric helping us seemed to have calmed her down. I need to give her another rope to hang onto. Heck, I need to give myself another rope to hang onto. I need to hire help and that help has to be someone that can’t be bought off by Isaac, and Isaac has a lot of money. I have limited resources.
My mind reaches and I grab my purse and pull out the business card I’d grabbed from Eric’s desk. His cellphone and his email are on it. I pull up my email and before I can talk myself out of it, I start to type:
Eric—
I grabbed your card from your des
k. I wanted to call but it felt like you were pretty finished when you left. I wasn’t, but that just seems to be how things work with us.
I stop myself. What am I doing? This isn’t a personal email. I should delete that. I start again.
Eric—
I grabbed your card from your desk. I wanted to call, but I thought you might welcome an email more freely. I know that your history in Denver runs deep and dark. I shouldn’t have asked you to come back here in the first place, but I need someone to help me figure this out. I need to hire someone and Isaac has money and resources that I don’t. I need someone I can trust who can’t be bought off. So, this is me asking for help one last time. Who would you hire to investigate Kingston Motors? Just a referral would be appreciated and I don’t even have to mention your name.
Harper
I read the message and there’s more I want to say, so much more, but I don’t. I hit send and hope for a reply. In the meantime, I start researching and looking for someone I can hire to help me solve these problems at Kingston. I make a list of operations outside of Denver who will be less influenced by Isaac and my stepfather, who may or may not be a part of what’s going on. Until I know, I can’t talk to my mother. She will tell him everything.
Hours later, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. I grab my phone from the nightstand, pull up my email and with the discovery that there’s nothing from Eric, disappointment fills me. Obviously, I was just his bastard and princess conquest he needed to get out of his system, which would make me feel foolish if I hadn’t gone into that night with him knowing that he felt that way. He did. I knew, and for reasons I can’t explain, it felt like something more happened between us, like there was a real connection, something lasting, but clearly, I was wrong. It’s time to move on. And yet, as I fall asleep, I’m back in the past, living that moment by the pool when his eyes had found me, the tingling sensation running down my spine. The lift of my gaze and the force of that man’s attention. I’ve clearly never recovered.
My memory floats forward to me standing on that stage, scanning the crowd for Eric and catching a glimpse of him disappearing back down the path to the cottage. I’d wanted to pull him back.
“Good riddance,” Isaac had murmured next to me. “I hope he’s leaving.”
And he had. He’d left. I’d felt that certainty like a sharp knife in my chest even before I knew. And yet still, the minute I was free of that stage, the minute the world of people focused on my stepfather, not me, I’d hurried to confirm. I’d walked that path toward the cottage, my heart racing in my chest, and found the door unlocked. I’d found the cottage empty. And I’d gone to bed, like I am tonight, with the feel on his hands on my body, the scent of him in my nostrils. Those piercing eyes haunting me, and the two nicknames that define our separation in my mind: the princess and the bastard.
***
Eric
I’m sitting on the slate gray couch of my living room with a whiskey in my hand and my MacBook on the coffee table in front of me, that damn email from Harper open and staring back at me as it has for a good two hours. I down the amber liquid in my cup, a smooth thirty-year I need to stomach anything Kingston before I grab the Rubik’s cube sitting on the table and start turning it, the numbers in my head telling stories that no one else would understand, and doing so every damn moment of my life. Right now, they’re telling the story of the bastard and the princess and the numbers want the woman as much as I do.
I set the damn cube down and stand up, walking to the floor-to-ceiling window to the left of the main living area. I stop in front of the glass and nothing but inky black touches my eyes, a storm on the horizon, but out there beyond that darkness is a spectacular Manhattan skyline to kill for that I worked my ass off to earn. That no one named Kingston gave me. They don’t get to give or take from me ever again. And they did take.
I press my hands to the glass, cold seeping through my palms and sliding up my arms, but there is fire in my blood, memories of the only person that could ever get me to give two fucks about anything Kingston in my mind: Harper.
My lashes lower, numbers exploding in my mind that become her again. That become me replaying exactly ten different moments with Harper in my arms, with me inside her, the scent of her on my skin, the taste of her on my lips. What the hell is it about that woman that makes me need another taste? That makes me remember how she tastes? What is it about that woman that drives me fucking insane? I finally had her. I fucked her, so what if I want to do it about another twenty times? It’s over. That’s how it has to be.
I need help, she’d said.
My lashes lift and I shove off the window. I do not help the Kingston family.
The end.
The princess is part of their clan now, and six years deep. Helping her is helping them, and she wasn’t even honest with me. There was something she wasn’t telling me. She didn’t even deny that truth. I sit back down on the couch and refill my glass. I don’t like unknowns and where the Kingstons are concerned, that gets personal. Especially after they sought me out through Harper.
What don’t I know and what consequences are there to not knowing?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Harper
I waste no time dressing and getting to work, and by eight in the morning, I’m in my office at the Kingston corporate offices. Today my dark hair is tied neatly at my nape, rather than loose the way I like it, a style I see as no-nonsense and all business. I’ve dressed in a black suit, with a pale pink shell beneath it, because I like to remind the world that I’m not one of the guys any more than I’m one of the Kingstons. I need that distinction today, and I hate that part of it is to spite Eric.
I’m not one of them. I need to believe this today. I’m my father’s daughter, and that means I fight for what I believe in and for others. Right now, I just have to protect our customers, my mother, and even Gigi, who hasn’t always deserved being saved. Maybe she doesn’t now. She was horrible to me and to Eric, but seeing someone almost die and then beg for forgiveness has a way of getting to you.
I sit down at my desk and pull out my MacBook as well as the pad of paper where I wrote the different companies I want to call for aid, but I can’t help myself. I power up my computer and check for a reply from Eric one last time. I actually hold my breath waiting for my email to load, only to find nothing from him in my inbox. I said I was letting go and moving on, but the enemy of your enemy is your friend. And Isaac and my stepfather have always been enemies, even when I was too naive to heed the warning Eric had given me about being used with no endgame for me but defeat.
I stand up with the intent of shutting my door, only to have Isaac appear in the doorway, and in his ridiculously expensive suit, there’s no way I can avoid a comparison between him and Eric. “I see you’re back to work,” he says, his voice a rich, arrogant accusation as perfectly honed as his body. He’s a good-looking man, his hair perfect, his jawline sharp, clean. He’s refined in all the ways that the rasp of whiskers on my belly reminds me that Eric is ruggedly, perfectly male. A thought that has my cheeks heating with the memory and I cut my stare from Isaac with the ridiculous fear that he can read my mind.
“How was your trip?” he asks, hitching a broad shoulder on the doorframe, obviously planning to stay longer than I’d like unless he’s going to give me the answers he’s been avoiding about the recalls.
“It was a much needed long weekend,” I say, hoping to avoid a topic laced with lies. My lies about why I took off of work.
“Who were you with again?”
“Don’t play coy, Isaac,” I say, fighting the urge to cross my arms in front of myself in a defensive move Isaac is too smart not to read. “We both know I didn’t tell you who I was taking a trip with.”
“And yet, I’m your brother,” he reminds me, an undertone of accusation in his words. He’s suspicious about the trip. I’ve questioned the recalls. I’ve tried to see paperwork he won’t let me see.
/> “My stepbrother,” I say, and then I dare to go to the place I don’t want to go. “One who doesn’t act like a brother and we both know it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have—”
“I get it,” he snaps, straightening, clearly intending to shut me down before I can go down an awkward rabbit hole of unbrotherly love. “You don’t want to tell me who you’re fucking,” he snaps. “I get it, but I want to know this isn’t a distraction from your job.”
“I live for this place.”
“You haven’t been here,” he replies dryly. “And I have an issue that needed to be dealt with yesterday. You weren’t here to handle it.”
“I had my phone with me at all times. What issue and why didn’t you call me?”
“I didn’t call because this problem needs your full attention, and obviously, that wasn’t here.” He doesn’t give me time to reply. “The union’s bitching about the women’s bathroom in the plant. I have no clue what the problem is, but it’s a distraction I don’t need right now. I need you to run front line on this issue—deal with them. Get them pink fucking toilet paper if you have to. They want to start negotiations tomorrow. I’ll email you the details.” And with that, he disappears into the hallway.
Pink toilet paper is what he wants me to handle? He wants me to negotiate with the union, which isn’t my job. We have someone who’s an expert in this area. Angry now, I round my desk and head down the hallway and follow him all the way toward the corner office that he calls his castle, quite literally. He disappears inside and I pass his secretary’s desk, but she’s not there right now. Not that it would matter. Belinda is in her fifties, quiet, reserved, and a mouse in a cat’s cave who couldn’t be more submissive to Isaac. That’s how Isaac likes everyone.
Submissive.
He tries to shut his door and I catch it. “Why can’t the union negotiator handle pink toilet paper, Isaac?” I ask, certain this is all about keeping me busy.
He stares down at me, his green eyes cool and calculating. “You really aren’t good at taking orders.” He leaves me in the doorway and enters his fancy office, rounding his mahogany desk, a grand mountain view and expensive artwork on the walls on either side of us because he’s showy. The entire Kingston family is showy, while my father instilled humility and graciousness in my mind. Though he spoiled my mother in ways that seem to have made a showy appeal to her or we wouldn’t be here now.
The Bastard Page 6
