Ice Cold (An MMA Stepbrother Romance) (20 page)

After lunch Elizabeth, Anne’s daughter, and I went for a walk along the grounds.

“He’s a bit of an asshole, isn’t he?” she asked me as the sounds of the adults, some of whom had had a martini or two too many, began to fade into the background and be replaced by the sounds of rustling leaves and birds that were deciding to brave the winter rather than move south.

“Who’s that?” I asked, playing dumb. I knew who she meant.

“Kiegan.”

“Oh, him. Yeah, I guess so.”

Elizabeth looked at me and smiled.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you think that. He is an asshole. I’ve known him my entire life, and he’s always been that way.”

“I’m so glad someone else realizes it.”

“Yeah. You’re right that no one in that family does. They’re very good at pretending problems don’t exist. Of course, it helps that this is the first generation with actual problems. My mom and Isabella grew up together, they’ve been friends for years, and apparently their parents kept them in line. All those kids were poster children. But when Kiegan’s mom died I don’t think any of them knew how to handle him. Elton is way too soft on Kiegan, and he grew up to be an absolute terror.”

“So I’m not the only person he’s mean to?”

Elizabeth smiled. “Well, I didn’t say that. My guess is he always wanted a little sister to pick on. His grades aren’t great though, and he’s regularly getting into trouble.”

“Really? But he seems so… perfect.”

“His life is perfect. He’s rich, he’s gorgeous, and he is actually smart. He’s on the lacrosse team, he’ll get into whatever college he wants because his parents will pay for it and his name alone will be worth it. And if he works at it, he’ll get better grades than everyone else. But Elton has had to hide his fair share of scandals.”

“Good. I’m glad mister fucking perfect isn’t perfect after all.”

“No, he’s not. Definitely not. Last year he stole a motorboat and went joyriding along the coast. Then he rode it aground and the owner was going to press charges, until Elton paid him off.”

“Holy shit!”

“That’s not even the worst thing he’s done. He hasn’t been arrested yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Don’t worry. Daddy won’t be able to protect him forever. I saw him ordering you around. You won’t have to wait forever. My guess is before he graduates from college – if he ever graduates – he’ll either have changed completely, or be in jail. And my money’s on the latter.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked Elizabeth, glad for her company. Her mom seemed like such a horrible person.

“Because I can read people pretty well. I want to go into psychology after I graduate. And it’s obvious you’re uncomfortable, it’s obvious you hate this life, and it was obvious who was the cause of most of your problems. I just wanted you to know that it’ll get better. And he’s just an asshole in general, it’s nothing to do with you.”

“Thanks,” I replied with a smile. “You’re right. About everything. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong at Moreton.”

“None of that is true. The secret to Moreton is that while most people have more money than God, they still have the same insecurities you do.”

We walked back to the house in silence. I thought about what Elizabeth had just told me. My brother was actually a bad kid, one of those rotten apples, despite his upbringing. I wondered if she was right, if he was going to end up in jail. I had no idea that the heir to the Hunt family fortune and name was a total bad apple.

One month later, my mom announced to me, just before my fifteenth birthday, that we were going to move in with Elton.

Kiegan never stopped bullying me. And the worst part was, he always got away with it. And it didn’t affect my life for the better.

I never went back to the track and field team. Whenever I had a class with Kiegan in it, I made sure to sit as far away from him as possible, and did my best to avoid asking questions. At lunch I’d scan the cafeteria and make sure he wasn’t near where my friends were sitting before I’d feel safe eating my lunch.

Elizabeth had been completely right. The more time I spent around Kiegan Hunt, the more I realized he was completely coddled by his family. And at the same time, he rebelled against them. He didn’t show up to functions, I would hear him sneak into the house at three in the morning – my room was right next to his – or catch him throwing out empty alcohol bottles when he was still sixteen.

There was no one I could talk to about the bullying, either. Usually it just took the form of snide comments about my weight. I tried dieting, thinking that if I lost ten, maybe fifteen pounds he’d lose interest, but it didn’t work. It turns out revenge isn’t exactly the best motivation to lose weight, at least not for me.

For over two years I had to deal with that shit. I had to deal with it each and every day. And there was nothing I could do about it. Our parents got married, and he was my brother. We were supposed to be equals, but we absolutely weren’t. I knew I wasn’t
really
a Hunt. My name had been changed, and I was now Tina Hunt, but no one in the family, or outside it, really considered me to be a part of them. They were too good for someone like me.

The worst thing that Kiegan ever did to me was two months before I left the family forever. I was about to graduate from Moreton Academy, top of the class. I only had one more semester to go. I’d been accepted to a few colleges, was waiting on application results from others, but I was looking forward to leaving the Hunt estate and going out on my own at college.

In particular, I wanted to go to Harvard. When we lived in Boston I had never dreamed of being able to attend such a prestigious school. After all, not only did I figure they wouldn’t take someone from a pretty low level public school, but even with scholarships and financial aid it would have been a very tough call financially.

But now, I was part of the Hunt family, and that meant some access to their huge fortune, as well as having a transcript from the most prestigious school in Boston. Surely that had to help, right?

The last part of the application process had been to send in an essay about a challenge that I’d had to overcome in life and how it had made me a better person.

I’d worked my ass off on that essay. It was the last shot, the last thing I had to do before getting in, and I wasn’t going to let anything get in the road of that.

A full week before it was due, I gave the letter to Mr. Andrews to send out with the rest of the family mail.

For three weeks I waited on tenterhooks to find the results of my application. Every day I’d rush home after school and check for mail. Finally, the letter arrived. The packet was thinner than I’d hoped, but I knew that didn’t really mean anything these days. A few of my acceptance letters had been small, then a bigger package sent in the mail later.

I forced myself to treat the letter like glass, when really I wanted to just rip open that envelope and devour the contents like a starving woman in the desert who just found a bag of chips.

Dear Ms. Hunt,

Unfortunately, as we did not receive your final essay in time, we are unable to accept you into Harvard University at this time. We receive thousands of applications every year and blah blah blah

Of course,
blah blah blah
wasn’t actually written in the letter, but that was where I’d stopped reading. I let the letter fall from my hands as the words on the page sunk in. Then, I picked up the letter again to re-read it. Surely I must have read that wrong. Surely. There was no way.

“Mr. Andrews!” I called out. He came immediately.

“Yes, Ms. Hunt?”

“Do you remember when I gave you that letter to send to Harvard?”

“Of course.”

“Did you actually mail it off?”

“Yes. I put it in a pile with the other things to be mailed that day in Mr. Hunt’s study. It would have been sent out with the day’s mail.”

“They say they never got it.”

“Oh… dear. Well I’m sorry, I imagine the letter must have gotten lost in the mail.”

I ran to my mom, who told me to call Harvard. I did, and while the lady on the other end was sympathetic, I was told there was nothing they could do.

By that night, it had sunk in. Somewhere along the line my essay had disappeared, there was nothing anyone could do about it, and my dream of going to Harvard was dead.

I had come so close, but no cigar. I was going to have to go to college somewhere else.

It was like a giant weight was crushing down on me. An unbearable pain ran through me all the time. My grades, my education was the most important thing to me. I didn’t have anything else. And now my biggest dream was gone.

I tried to reason with myself. I would get over it. I would go somewhere else. I would still go to a great college, I would still get a great education. But it didn’t matter. Nowhere else was Harvard, and that was where I really wanted to be.

I moped around the huge estate for a few days. I felt like total shit. I had no motivation to do anything; even with schoolwork I’d ask myself
what’s the point?
and just play with my pen for a while, doodling on the sides of pages.

One day, I saw Kiegan standing in front of my door. He had that dumb grin on his face, and I knew he was here to gloat about the Harvard thing. I knew he didn’t care about his grades, about college, or anything. After all, he was getting a free ride. I noticed a new tattoo under his shirt, and that part of me that never quite got over him swooned inwardly.

Then I noticed the envelope he was holding, and my blood went cold.

“I heard you were looking for this,” he told me, holding up the yellow rectangle.

“Fucking give me that,” I hissed at him, running over and snatching it from his grasp. He laughed that cold, hard laugh as I looked at the meticulously accurately printed address. Harvard University, Admissions Department.

I could already feel the tears welling up in my eyes as I pulled out the essay I’d worked on so hard.

“What the fuck did you do?” I asked, my hands shaking with a combination of anger and sadness.

“I guess I saw this here and thought it was a letter I had meant to send but didn’t want to after all. Oops. My bad.”

I completely lost control then. Years and years of bullying all piled up in a rage I’d never experienced before, or since. I screamed and hurled myself at my brother, arms swinging, intending to do as much damage to him as was humanly possible. I wanted to kill him. No exaggeration, if I had been given a gun right then and there I knew I would have shot him. There was nothing more that I wanted on the planet.

Unfortunately, I was still a slightly overweight seventeen year old, and he was the captain of the lacrosse team. He held me off easily, like I weighed nothing, and eventually I ran out of energy and just collapsed on the ground, crying.

Kiegan left with a smile on his face, and I knew from that second on I would never, ever forgive him. And I hadn’t. Two months later I left the Hunt Estate forever, abandoning the family that had given me their name, and I did my best to forget about Kiegan Hunt, or as I’d been calling him for years in my head, Hunt the Cunt.

I tried watching
Person of Interest
, but my mind kept wandering back to my childhood, to my asshole bully of a stepbrother.

In the end, I never would have gone to Harvard anyway. I knew that now. But it still didn’t make it hurt any less that he had purposely sabotaged my dreams.

Eventually I gave up on TV. I closed the tab and opened up Google. Typed in “Kiegan Hunt”. I had to admit it, my curiosity had gotten the better of me.

I opened up the Wikipedia page about my brother. Obviously he’d been busy if he had an entire Wikipedia page about him. Over the last two years I’d made sure to completely avoid any celebrity news or gossip as much as possible, I didn’t want to know anything about my old family.

The more I read, the more surprised I was. I had always expected that after high school Kiegan would have gotten himself into a bunch of trouble. Instead, he graduated, and rather than go down the traditional Hunt family route of getting a good education, took the money from his trust fund that was released to him when he was eighteen and founded a tech company that he sold the year before for seven billion dollars.

Going back to the main page I clicked on a bunch of celebrity gossip magazine articles about my stepbrother.

Kiegan Hunt: Will America’s Most Eligible Bachelor Ever Settle Down?

Kiegan Hunt Refused Entry to Canada After Busted for Pot Posession

Hunt Heir Arrested in Buenos Aires After Bar Fight

Kiegan Hunt in Hospital After Skiing Stunt Goes Wrong in Austria

It turned out my brother was now an adrenaline junky, and still the same old bad boy with no respect for rules that he had been a few years ago. Adulthood, and business ownership, it seemed hadn’t changed him at all.

I scrolled through the first article. It had a list of Kiegan’s girlfriends, all from the last couple of years, and the list was already in the double digits. Plus that was just the ones the media knew about. In one corner was a picture of my brother, his arm around a Victoria’s Secret Angel, together in Rome. I couldn’t help it. I felt a pang of jealousy when I saw his hands wrapped around her waist, his fingers lingering ever so slightly on her waist. Her face was turned towards his in laughter, and he leaned in towards her, like he wanted to be as close to her as possible.

I sighed and closed that article. It wasn’t normal. I shouldn’t have these feelings for the man that made my teenage years hell. I couldn’t explain why I did. How was it possible for someone to feel both lust and rage whenever they thought about a person?

It doesn’t matter
, I thought to myself, closing all the tabs I’d opened.
You’re never going to see him again. You’re never going to speak to him again. And your life is all the better for it.

I did my best to think about other things. But I couldn’t help the anger building up inside of me. It wasn’t fair that the asshole who bullied me all through high school had the looks of a Greek God, more money than God and lived the life of an untouchable king while I sat here in my drafty apartment, thinking about where my next meal was coming from. No, it wasn’t fair at all. As I fell asleep that night, I swore I was never going to look up anything about Kiegan Hunt again. I was going to go on with my life, and he could go on with his, and they were never going to intersect again, ever.

Boy was I ever wrong about that one.