by Lucy Leroux
Sitting down, Alex frowned. “She’s not my sister. And I won’t be saddled with her. Elynn’s a nice kid, but I doubt I’ll see her very much at all.”
Chapter 1
The doorman’s message that his father was on his way upstairs caught Alex off guard. He rushed his current paramour, a well-known model, out of his penthouse with a haste that deeply insulted her.
“Don’t expect me to be waiting by the phone when you call me again. I won’t forget this,” she seethed as he hustled her out.
When he didn’t fall at her feet to apologize, she stalked out the front door, slamming it for good measure. Alex sighed and poured himself a drink. It was Sunday evening, and he’d just gotten back into town late last night after a long and grueling business trip. It had seemed like a good idea to call Mela and blow off some steam, but outside of the bedroom, he had little interest in what she did or said. And though she clearly enjoyed her time in his bed, he was already finding the sex a little stale. If she broke up with him now, it would only save him the trouble of doing it himself.
Costas was probably here to give him an earful about missing brunch earlier today. Since that first summons a few months ago, his father had been quite insistent that Alex join in the new Sunday tradition whenever he was in town. Only travel was an acceptable excuse, though Costas was accommodating enough to cart everyone to exclusive restaurants near his penthouse to make it easier when Alex’s schedule was heavy.
Watching Elynn in those restaurants was one of the few pleasures Alex had in life. Tasting new gourmet dishes had inspired an interest in gastronomy. She dissected dishes like a super-taster and often requested to speak to the chef to question him about his methods. Her knowledge of culinary technique and exotic ingredients always impressed the chef, but few others outside the family.
The few times Costas made the mistake of inviting friends with young daughters Elynn’s age to join them, the snobs treated her condescendingly while simultaneously trying to flirt with him. The last one, Anastasia, had been a really spiteful little cat. She subtly put down all of Elynn’s friendly inquiries and comments while attempting to engage with Alex like a seasoned socialite trying to pique his sexual interest. And she had sneered at Elynn while speaking to him in a manner that implied they were sharing in a private joke at her expense. After that, Alex had put his foot down and told his father to stop inviting others outside the family to brunch.
He felt guilty for missing it today, but he shrugged off the feeling when his father came in with his ‘I’m about to give you a lecture’ face.
“Don’t start Dad. I just got back into town yesterday and I was too tired to drive all the way out to the house for brunch,” he said before offering Costas a drink with a motion to the bar.
“Too tired, huh? But not too tired for models,” his father chided. “At least that’s what the young lady who I saw leaving in such a huff appeared to be. Unless she’s another starlet. Not that it matters,” he added dismissively as he accepted the whiskey Alex offered. “I just came by to deliver this invitation for Mary’s birthday dinner and to offer to drive the girls into town for brunch next week,” he said holding up an envelope and putting it on the table.
Alex shook his head. “Dragging them to town isn’t a good idea when Elynn has a test, and she has one next Monday,” he said with a frown as he poured his own drink.
Costas raised his eyebrows. “I’m surprised you know that much about Elynn’s schoolwork.”
“Just trying to be a good big brother,” Alex countered with a touch of sarcasm.
“I’m not buying that,” Costas said drily. “Besides, Elynn’s test next Monday is calculus, and she’s going to ace it. Not everyone has to struggle with it,” he added with a teasing smile.
“I didn’t struggle,” Alex said, annoyed, as he sat down on his soft leather coach with the Scotch he’d poured himself.
He’d had some problems initially, but he conquered it like a Viking and ended up with the highest marks in the class.
“You did at first. But don’t worry about Elynn. She has an innate grasp for all things mathematical. She could be a professor if she wanted,” his father added proudly.
“I’m sure she could,” Alex replied with a hint of a grin, but there was a distinct lack of edge to his words.
If his father had made such a statement a few months ago, Alex would have probably resented it and the girl in question. But Elynn was just so harmless and sweet that he didn’t begrudge her a bit of parental pride.
“You didn’t come all the way out here to just to deliver this?” Alex asked as he reached for the envelope.
Costas shook his head. “Mary and I are meeting some friends for dinner in town. In fact, I need to get going, or I’m going to be late. I just wanted to remind you of my offer to work around your schedule regarding brunch and about the party. I hardly see you now that I don’t go to the office every day,” he said, rising to leave.
There was a tiny hint of a plaintive note in his father’s voice. Now that Costas was almost officially retired, they really didn’t spend as much time with each other as they used to. It was quite a change after working side by side for so many years.
Feeling guilty, Alex nodded. “I’ll make it to brunch next time,” he promised.
“And the party?” his father asked hopefully.
“If I’m in town,” Alex promised reluctantly before walking him out.
****
Rain poured down in sheets the Wednesday before Mary’s birthday. Alex had to leave for a business trip the next day and was going to miss the big event. Though he wouldn’t have thought twice about missing his stepmother’s party, the handmade invitation in Elynn’s handwriting his father had delivered made him feel bad enough to agree to drive out to the house for dinner before he left.
Costas was pleased he was making an effort to spend more time with the family and had asked him to come over early, so Alex wrapped up his last meeting at two. He had his driver take him out to the estate soon after. He usually preferred to drive himself but always used a chauffeur driven car on the days he went into the office so he could work and make calls.
When he arrived, the house was quiet and dark. He checked Costas’ office and the library, his father’s usual haunts, and found both empty. Wondering if Costas was in the master suite, he headed for the stairs and ran into Mrs. Braden, the head housekeeper, coming out of the kitchen with a dishtowel in her hands.
“Have you seen my father?” he asked. “He asked me to get here early but he’s not downstairs.”
“I’m sorry Master Alex, your father was called away to a last minute meeting in town, but he promised to be home in time for dinner,” the cheerful matronly woman said. “Only Miss Elynn is home. She’s watching television in the family room.”
Annoyed, Alex swore in Greek, only to be swatted with the dishtowel. Mrs. Braden clucked her tongue at him, so he gave her his most charming smile before backing up a step. The housekeeper had been with the family for ages, long enough to have picked up enough Greek to know when Alex was swearing. And as a child, she hadn’t been the least bit intimidated by his spoiled rich brat attitude. More than once, she had cheerfully washed out his mouth with soap. But her discipline has always been well-deserved and was normally overshadowed by her warmth. Alex adored her.
“Will you be wanting to set up in your father’s office?” she asked him.
Alex considered that. “No, I’ll look over my paperwork in the family room with Elynn,” he said.
He ignored Mrs. Braden’s surprise as he walked to the family room. One of the new female bodyguards passed in front of the door and continued down the hall. He tried not to frown as she nodded at him before continuing a circuit of the ground floor. Making a mental note to talk to Costas about it, he went inside.
The room was empty. Elynn must have stepped out. A TV tray held the remnants of a sandwich and a half-empty bottle of iced tea. Movie credits scrolled across the huge flat
screen television. He waited a minute, but she didn’t return. He went to the French doors and was surprised to see his stepsister standing outside in the pouring rain. She was staring at a pink cell phone as if it had grown eight legs and tentacles. Confused, he watched her suddenly pull back an arm and throw the phone as far as she could. It landed in the nearby swimming pool.
Alex didn’t hesitate. He opened the doors and stepped out into the rain. “Elynn? What’s wrong?”
She jumped and spun around. Her face was as white as a sheet.
He put his hands on her shoulders. “Who was that?”
Elynn shook her head. “No one,” she said, her face suspiciously blank.
Alex frowned. He didn’t really know Elynn, but he could tell she was lying. “Come on,” he said, taking her hand and pulling her inside out of the rain.
He went to the couch and pulled a blanket off it and threw it over her shoulders. His suit jacket was a little wet, but she was soaked through. And she was trembling, her hands shaking.
“Who was on the phone?” he asked quietly as he pulled off his jacket.
Elynn shook her head again and grimaced. “It was no one. Literally. Just someone breathing. I think—I couldn’t tell for sure. There was no reply when I asked who was there. It was probably a wrong number. I just got weirded out. It was stupid to throw the phone away,” she said with a little self-recriminating wince.
Alex made a noncommittal noise while studying Elynn. Something was wrong. The kid was scared of something. Or someone. Maybe she’d been getting prank calls.
“Well…it was very pink,” he said finally. It had even sparkled. Costas had probably bought it. It was the sort of thing an older man would buy for a young girl when they didn’t know any better. “I don’t really blame you for getting rid of it.”
Elynn snorted slightly, and her shoulders eased. But she still looked a little too pale for his taste.
“Go change and come back down,” he suggested softly. “We can watch TV or something.”
Her expression changed. “You’re staying?” She sounded relieved. He nodded in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. “Costas said you were coming for dinner, but you’re a few hours early,” she added.
“He asked me to come as soon as I was free, but apparently he got called away to a meeting,” Alex said carefully.
“Yeah, I was still at school.” Elynn nodded vaguely before looking down at her wet clothing.
She was still wearing her school uniform, a plaid skirt with a button down shirt. It was by no means anything like the outfit Britney Spears made famous, but for the first time, he could see that Elynn had an incredible figure. It was hard to miss given the way her wet clothes were plastered to her skin. She usually went to great lengths to hide her body. Even when they went out to the most fashionable restaurants, she wore large sweatshirts or sweaters. He was starting to wonder if there was a reason for it beyond normal teenage shyness.
“Go change,” he ordered when she continued to stand there distracted and confused.
She looked up and smiled with a little rueful nod. Picking up the edges of the blanket so they wouldn’t trail on the floor, she left the room.
Alex sat down on the couch with a thump. What the hell was going on? Either Elynn was a particularly paranoid teenager or she was hiding something.
It’s not paranoia. Whatever was going on, Costas knew about it. There had been an undeniable air of tension in his father’s household lately. He wanted to question Elynn further, but she had seemed so fragile standing out in the rain with those huge eyes trained on nothing. He didn’t want to upset her any more than she already was.
While she was away, he snooped on her tablet, but there were no threatening emails on the screen. She was reading a forum thread about ghosts. He was tempted to switch to the mail app and spy, but he restrained himself. They weren’t close enough for him to violate her privacy that way. Or so he told himself, but he was still holding the tablet when she finally came back in.
“What is this?” he asked gesturing with the tablet, trying to cover up the fact he’d been debating whether or not to read her private correspondence.
“It’s the creepiest thread on Reddit,” she said with a blush. “I shouldn’t have been looking at it. It got me all worked up,” she added almost apologetically while running a hand through her wet hair.
“Why? What’s it about?” he asked, feigning ignorance.
“It’s a collection of posts on the creepiest thing you’ve ever heard a small child say,” she said.
“What can little kids possibly say to scare you?” he asked with a twist of his lips.
“Oh, the most awful things. Like the devil is behind you. Or they point to an empty space and ask who is that?” Elynn said with a little shiver, glossing over the thing with the phone in favor of something genuinely scary. “There are these examples where small children simply knew that someone had died or if they were pregnant. But the most compelling ones are when a little kid mentions details of previous lives out of the blue. There are multiple posts of similar stories in this thread.”
Alex made a face. “Do you actually believe all that?” he asked skeptically, wondering now if Elynn had an overactive imagination.
Perhaps she’d thrown the phone away for nothing. Maybe she had simply overreacted to a wrong number or one of her schoolmates was pranking her. She was a pretty girl. Maybe she had caught some boy’s eye, he thought before remembering she went to an all-girls school.
“I don’t know,” Elynn said with a shrug before lowering her voice to a conspiratorial tone. “But sometimes, when it’s dark, I’m afraid of ghosts. I’ve never seen one,” she added quickly. “But I imagine one is around the corner, and I get a little thrill up my spine. The idea of them just creeps me out.” She ducked her head shyly. “That probably sounds stupid.”
Alex snorted and shook his head. “I don’t like zombies,” he said honestly, getting up to grab a drink from the bar. “And they’re everywhere right now. I’ll still watch the movies, but not by choice.”
“Really?” Elynn asked. Her eyes lit up. “Hey, do you think Jesus was the first zombie?”
Alex nearly choked on his whiskey. “No. I think that was Lazarus.”
Elynn blushed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I’m not offended,” Alex frowned, confused.
“But you go to church,” she pointed out. “I shouldn’t joke about that kind of stuff.”
Alex shrugged. He went through the motions of the Greek Orthodox Church on occasion because it pleased his father.
“I do that for Costas, don’t worry about it,” he said lightly, but he honestly couldn’t remember when he had last had such an intense conversation with anyone, let alone a member of the opposite sex.
“Why don’t we watch a movie?” he suggested, rather than letting the conversation get heavier.
He was supposed to be distracting her, not the other way around. Alex didn’t even talk to his friends about his beliefs. Not even during all of those drunken arguments Calen and Sergei had had about existentialism and the meaning of life. He was more like Gio, less thoughtful when it came to all things spiritual.
“Okay,” Elynn readily agreed, getting up to go over to the DVD cabinet. “Costas got the latest releases from one of his movie industry contacts. Which one do you want to see?” she asked, holding up three Blue Ray discs.
“Not that one,” Alex said, pointing to the latest romantic comedy in theaters.
She glanced at the cover and laughed a little, “Oh, right. That’s one of your exes isn’t it?”
Busted. “And how would you know that?” he drawled, secretly relieved she seemed back to her normal, lighthearted self.
“Costas can’t stop himself from buying the tabloids you’re in,” Elynn said with a teasing smile. “He leaves them all over the place.”
She was right, but Alex wasn’t about to admit it. He chose a blockbuster sci-fi movie that
had just hit the theaters, and they settled down to watch it while he waited for Costas to come home. But the movie was slower than he’d expected, and halfway through, Elynn dropped off to sleep, her head and shoulder twisted awkwardly over a throw pillow.
She was going to wake up with bad crick in her neck. Getting up, he shifted Elynn’s body onto a pillow and reached down to put her legs up on the couch. He lingered with his hand on her ankle, thinking before he straightened, managing not to start in surprise when he saw his father standing in the doorway, a terrible frown on his face.
He started to say something, but Alex cut him off with a nod to the sleeping girl. Costas gestured impatiently towards the door. Picking up his case, Alex followed him out, but not before stopping to put a cashmere blanket over Elynn. For some reason, Costas froze, but Alex didn’t want to stop and ask what was wrong in case they woke her up. He led the way out of the room, and Costas gestured in the direction of his office. On the way Alex noted two additional bodyguards on patrol in the mansion.
After stepping inside the office, he sat in one of leather armchairs across the desk from his father’s chair. “All right. What is going on? Why are there so many bodyguards? And what emergency meeting did you have that I wasn’t aware of?”
His father no longer scheduled meetings without his knowledge. If the meeting had been business-related, Alex would have known.
But Costas wasn’t about to be derailed. “What exactly were you doing with Elynn?”
“We were watching a movie, and she fell asleep. She was all twisted up, so I helped her stretch out.” Alex shrugged. “I thought you were pleased that we’re getting on so well.”
Costas put his hands on his hips. “I don’t like the way you were looking at her just now,” he said with a dark glance. “It was fine when you were being brotherly, but this is different.”
Genuinely affronted, he stared at his father. “You’ve got to be kidding. You are kidding right?”
