CALLIE (The Naughty Ones Book 1)

by Kristina Weaver

  That left Peter, and that point confused me most of all. Why would Peter insert himself into the wedding preparations? What reason did he have to ruin the relationship that our parents shared together?

  “Gemma? Are you there?” My mother’s voice was so tenuous. She was so unsure of herself, and it broke me. I shored myself up and made my decision.

  “Mom, I’m going to call you right back,” I said. “You stay near the phone, okay? I’m going to get this figured out for you.”

  “Okay.” She sounded so lost, but I knew exactly where I was going, exactly where I had to go to get this all straightened out — or at least to extract the truth.

  I marched out of the conference room and straight toward Peter’s office.

  Chapter 12

  “Explain something for me,” I said, none too politely, as I interrupted a conversation Peter was having in his office with another man, one I’d only seen in passing during my time working here.

  Peter frowned apologetically at his colleague and looked at me, his brows drawn together. “Will you give me a moment to finish this up?”

  “You need to address this immediately,” I informed him. “As in, right now.”

  “I’m aware of what immediately means, thank you, Gemma,” Peter said tightly. “Would you excuse me?”

  The man laughed and murmured something I was too angry to hear, and swept by me and out of the office. I didn’t even wait for the door to close to launch into him.

  “The wedding’s off,” I all but shouted.

  “What wedding?” Peter asked, but I rolled my eyes at him. He was so transparent.

  “You know exactly which wedding I’m talking about. The one where my mother’s marrying your father.”

  “Can we talk about this later?” he asked me, scrunching up his face. “This is rather a busy day for me.”

  “Not too busy for us to have a little office hanky-panky earlier,” I reminded him, raising my eyebrow.

  Peter was quiet for a long time. “What do you want me to say, Gemma?”

  “I would like you to explain just where you get off meddling in my mother’s happiness,” I said, the force of my anger tinging my words in steel. I’d been puzzled and up in arms after ending the call with my mother, but now I realized just how enraged I was.

  “What did she tell you?” It made me even angrier to see how calm Peter was.

  “She called me, crying, mind you, to tell me that Frank told her it was off. Something about private investigators. Something about him being convinced that she was only marrying him for the money.”

  My rage gradually built as I watched him consider this calmly.

  “Is she not?” he asked finally, and I exploded.

  “Of course she’s not, you asshole!” I yelled. “For some reason, she fell in love with Frank. He was all she talked about for months and months. You saw how happy she was with him at dinner — even when they very nearly caught us ‘working’ right here on top of your desk.”

  Peter smirked at the memory, but it didn’t help how angry I still was at him.

  “I would love for you to tell me just why you think this is so fucking funny.” I glared at him, and he leveled a look right back at me, apparently not impressed by my attempts to show him just how upset I was with curse words. I’d grown up around them when they were flung around dispassionately, heard the cooks and bartenders use them while I was a cocktail waitress, but it was always my experience that their weight was felt more completely when used sparingly.

  “I don’t think it’s funny at all, actually,” Peter informed me. I usually loved his accent, but right now, I felt like it was one of our many differences, a sign that we were from two very different worlds and would never bridge that gap. It made him sound cold and distant, when it was usually so warm and inviting.

  “Well, at least you understand that this isn’t a joke,” I said, my anger not slackening in the least. “Would you care to explain just what you were thinking? Just what in the hell put the idea in your head that my mother would be using your father for money?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “You did.”

  I actually laughed at him. That’s how ludicrous that idea was. “And just what makes you think that?”

  “The other day,” he said easily. “When we were so rudely interrupted in this very office by our parents. You mentioned that your mother was in it for the money. That she was a gold digger. Do I misremember?”

  My mouth had fallen open. “Peter, that was a joke.”

  “I thought so, too, at first,” he admitted. “But it bothered me and bothered me. My father…is not a handsome man. He’s been burned in love before for this very reason. Women half his age throwing themselves at him once they catch wind of just how much he’s worth, how much his estate is worth, how much this business is worth.”

  “My mother isn’t half his age,” I spat. “And she didn’t throw herself at him. They met. At a dinner party. The attraction was mutual.”

  “Then there was the text message from you,” Peter continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “Showing your mother in that ridiculous gown. Bragging that she’d asked for the most expensive dress in the entire store.”

  I could not have been in more shock if I’d lost every drop in my body. How could a misunderstanding go so badly?

  “That was also a joke,” I said slowly, as if over-pronouncing the words would help him understand where he’d gone wrong. “I made two jokes — perhaps in poor taste — and you have absolutely blown this entire thing out of proportion. You need to call your father immediately and set the record straight. My mother is beside herself.”

  “The driver commented that the two of you were giddy about money.” Peter gave me his back and went to look out the window as if he were pulling his arguments out of the air just outside. “That you were giggling at the prospect of spending and spending for the wedding.”

  “Because it’s a rush,” I said. “Because it is a lot of money. Because when I was a child, never in our wildest dreams would my mother and I have considered that one day we’d be chauffeured around New York City while planning her dream wedding to a man she loved so much. Because your father told her that money was no object and it made her uncomfortable. It frightened her, so we were trying to laugh it off. Because it is frightening to love someone who cares so little about something we once had so little of.”

  I’d segued from talking about my mother to talking about the relationship I thought I’d shared with Peter. He was silent, giving away no emotions with that back, clad in a navy suit jacket. He never took his jacket off while working, not even when he was alone in his office. I used to think it was a testament to his professionalism, but now I just thought it made him look stiff, overly formal.

  “You don’t understand what it is to want for money,” I told him. “We were so frugal when I grew up. I guess that was a good thing — I didn’t even know how to be extravagant when I moved here to try and find work. But I couldn’t save money, couldn’t pay my student loans, couldn’t even afford to feed myself half the time, had to go without a bathroom in my crappy apartment. And you were delighted when you set me up in the penthouse, delighted that I was shell-shocked by all of the finery and the card I was supposed to use to buy everything I’d never had before, your demand that I couldn’t feel weird about it.”

  “You were also very eager to spend my family’s money,” Peter commented without turning around to address that notion to my face.

  “Because you told me I should be,” I said. “If I knew you were going to throw it back in my face later, I would’ve never agreed to try this relationship out with you. Should I start saving up, Peter? Move back into my hovel so I can pinch pennies to pay you back for your misplaced generosity?”

  He laughed mirthlessly. “You could never pay me back. Do you know how much that penthouse goes for each night?”

  “Tell me,” I spat. “I’d love to know. I’m sure you’re very excited to rub
my nose in it.”

  But for some reason, he didn’t. I was relieved. I knew that place was expensive, but it was beautiful, and it had become my home — my refuge in the city. I could see all the things I loved about New York from that penthouse, and it made me feel like I was really living my dream.

  Even if that dream was quickly shifting into a nightmare.

  “This has been a huge mistake, hasn’t it?” I asked, mostly talking to myself at this point. “We’re from two different worlds, and yet we both care about money a little too much — me because I don’t have very much of my own, and you because you think my family is taking advantage of yours. I will tell you this. Say what you want about me, but you don’t get to label my mother. You have no idea what we…what she has been through. She deserves to be happy, and she was happy with your father — even if that came along with the baggage of having you and all your various hang-ups in the family. You have crushed her with these falsehoods, with these inventions, and I’m leaving to go and try to pick up the pieces.”

  “You’re leaving?” This time, he did turn around, disbelief etched on his handsome face.

  “Did you think I could just stay here, tucked away in the penthouse, while my mother suffered because of you?” I sneered at him. “Just how out of touch with normal human beings are you?”

  Peter sighed, his shoulders slumping. “Gemma, I hired a private investigator who turned up some disturbing things about the way your mother’s been acting.”

  This was even more of an affront. “You’ve had someone spying on my mother’s private life? Does your father know what you’ve done?”

  “The private investigator discovered that my father gave your mother access to his money for her expenses and some improvements on her home, and she’s been funneling the funds into a savings account, one she only just opened, and one she hasn’t mentioned to my father.”

  I was silent for a long time, wondering just how much I should reveal. No — Peter didn’t deserve that truth, and I wasn’t going to give it to him, no matter how compelled I was to be honest with him. He had stabbed me in the back, sabotaged our parents’ happiness, because he could never understand the finer points of desperation. He’d never been desperate over something a single day of his life. He’d always gotten exactly what he wanted. I’d even pushed through my boundaries to give him the kinds of experiences that thrilled him. What had I gotten in return for continuing to feed into his entitlement?

  That ended now.

  “There are things that you will never understand about my family — the way my mother is, the way I can be,” I hissed at him. “Part of that is because you refuse to see. And the other part of that is because you are incapable of imagining suffering because the idea is so foreign to you. You think that no one has a hard time in this world because you’re coasting through it? We all come with baggage, Peter. Ours just doesn’t have dollar signs.”

  How many times was I going to turn on my heel and march out of his office, eager to be rid of the man once and for all, to put this travesty behind me?

  This was going to be my last.

  Chapter 13

  “We make a miserable pair, don’t we?” my mother tried to joke, looking over at me on the couch from her perch on the armchair. We were watching television, but neither of us seemed to be following the story of the program we’d settled on, something about love and torment and ultimate redemption.

  “It’s not the first time the two of us have gone through a breakup,” I offered weakly. “It’ll get better.”

  “God help us if it doesn’t,” my mother muttered, but I still heard her. She was sadder than I was. My mourning was tinged with anger and more than a little guilt.

  I wished I didn’t, but the thing I missed most of all was the penthouse. It was a ridiculous thing to miss when I’d had the entire city at my beck and call, getting into nightspots that some celebrities couldn’t even get into simply because I’d been on the arm of one of the richest businessman in the Big Apple. But that penthouse had been so incredible. The view had been stunning, and one that not many people got of the city they lived in. It was beautiful day or night, the skyscrapers around the hotel gleaming in the sun or shining with thousands of stars of their own light, brightening the darkness.

  I’d have been lying if I didn’t say I missed the man I’d cavorted with around New York City, but it was as painful to think about Peter as it was to be a witness to my mother’s suffering.

  I’d left Peter because he told me he was responsible for breaking off my mother’s upcoming wedding — just weeks away — to his father. This was all because of a stupid misunderstanding. I’d joked to Peter, while helping my mother make cake and dress decisions, that she was a gold digger for the family fortune, choosing the priciest options for the wedding. The joke fell flat.

  Troubled by what I’d said in jest, Peter had done some digging and discovered a quirk that he had no way of understanding. My mother had been asking for money from his father for various things, but instead of spending it, she was funneling it into a savings account.

  Her actions made sense to me, but they looked suspicious to an outsider — suspicious enough for Peter to take Frank aside and tell him his bride-to-be wasn’t all that she seemed.

  I was so ashamed that it was my idiot brain that had made the joke in the first place. Peter wouldn’t have hired a private investigator to go over my mother’s life and practices with a magnifying glass otherwise.

  I looked over at her, looking tiny and frail wrapped up in a crocheted blanket whose colors had faded significantly since my childhood.

  Her suffering was all my fault.

  I supposed I couldn’t guarantee that neither Peter nor Frank would’ve eventually run some kind of background check on her prior to the actual marriage, and I didn’t know if there was some kind of prenuptial agreement that would have been drafted up. The Bly family was worth billions, both father and son. It would probably make sense for such a thing to be signed. Net worth that ranged in the billions was a tricky thing. And Peter had mentioned, in that final, nasty fight we’d had, that his father had been deceived before.

  But it had been my stupidity that had made Peter think to dig into my mother, to see if she really rang true. And her savings account, if a person didn’t know her, didn’t know just what had happened to her to make her do it, did look suspicious.

  I was the one at fault for her wedding being called off. My mother had to contact all of the businesses she’d contracted — caterers and bakeries and dress shops and reception hall — herself, informing them that she would no longer be requiring their services. That had been just as difficult for me to witness. She had been thrilled to be marrying again, to throw a wedding to celebrate the love she had for Frank, and I had been the one responsible for all of it being taken away.

  I sighed and tapped at my phone, unable to watch the two happy lovers reuniting after overcoming their differences on the television. I ordered pizza online to spare us the effort of foraging in the kitchen for lunch. The bread had gone bad a couple of days ago, fuzzy blue mold colonizing the loaf, neither of us having much of an appetite after our hearts had broken. We mourned the same way, I realized, spending this time with my mother. We liked to hunker down and huddle around our misery. She preferred the television to distract her, and I escaped into my phone, paging through meaningless memes and quips and quotes on social media. Neither of us liked to eat, or to leave the house. We needed to eat, though, and if someone brought some hot pizza to the door for us, fresh and smelling good and already here, maybe we’d find it in ourselves. It had worked before, earlier in the week. The leftovers had just run out today at breakfast. It would surely work again.

  We did make quite a pair. It might’ve looked pathetic from the outside, but it made sense to the two of us. We didn’t want to see anyone or anything. It was a self-imposed hermitage, a time for us to untangle our lives, examine the places where things had gone wrong, and move forwar
d again.

  I was unemployed and single and homeless all at once. My mother had graciously let me move back into her house, but she hadn’t had much of a choice. I’d shown up at her front door with just my purse, tears streaking black mascara down my cheeks. I hadn’t bothered even packing a bag at the penthouse. I hadn’t wanted anything there. It was full of things that Peter had bought me, or that I’d bought myself, with his money. I didn’t want anything to do with any of that. They were all tied to him, and I just wanted to purge him from my life, from my brain, from my memories and feelings. From my heart, too, but that was proving to be harder to achieve.

  Almost of their own accord, my fingers opened my messages on my phone, tapped on his contact. Still visible was the text that had cemented his suspicions about my mother. It was a photo of her posing sassily in a frilly, fluffy wedding dress. I’d joked that she’d asked for the most expensive dress in the entire store, and he hadn’t answered.

  He’d texted since then. Several times. The most recent of which was yesterday.

  That one read, “You have food rotting in your refrigerator in the penthouse. The bellhop had the room opened up. He thought it was a dead body. That you’d offed yourself in there. You could think of other people for once. Think about what I felt when they called me, when I rushed over there.”

  I snorted. What I thought about was how ridiculous it was for Peter to think that I would’ve killed myself over him. I wasn’t that torn up.

  “What’s funny?” my mother asked.