Max: A Stepbrother Romance (12 page)

Tempest: A Stepbrother Romance Part 3

Tempest: A Stepbrother Romance Part 4

H
e had been lying face down, hand still gripped around the stem of a crystal glass that contained the remnants of a 1962 chateau petrus, eyes glassy and lips glossed with coughed up blood for over an hour. Alexander, the faithful family hound was the first on the scene, perhaps too faithful to do anything other than lie next to the motionless man as though assigned there for guard duty.

Pandora, Philip's eldest stepdaughter, was the one to eventually break the news to the staff, some time after she’d realized, somewhat disappointingly, that although her filthy rich stepfather may have been temporarily indisposed, he wasn’t quite fully dead yet. Pretending she hadn’t found him at all was something that repeatedly crossed her mind as she was googling on her smart phone how to check for a pulse.

It took thirty minutes for the private ambulance to make it’s way to the vast estate on the edge of the Chesapeake river, two minutes of which was spent negotiating the ambling drive. When they lifted him into the back of the modified car to cart him away at high speed to one of Baltimore’s top facilities, Philip had regained consciousness momentarily, but remained completely confused. Pandora, Isabelle and Gracey watched on with varying levels of concern, their mother a darkened shadow in the upstairs window, too involved in something she deemed far more important to come down and wave him goodbye. Alexander watched the ambulance disappear, whimpered, and then curled up at Gracey’s feet.

“About time”, Pandora said, before the ambulance had even got out of sight.

“Good riddance”, Isabella said and put her arm around her sister.

“Come on Alexander”, Gracey said, and led the dog inside.

***

P
hilip Mandrake de Vries was a very rich man. He was also a very fat man, and took up a huge amount of the specially converted, privately ordered double bed he was now lying in.

After regaining consciousness for the briefest of moments to see his stepdaughters standing in a row, framed by the back window of the car he was confused to find himself lying in, he slipped once again into unconsciousness, from which he hadn’t yet had the presence of mind to return from.

Several hours had passed. Philip had been hooked up to various different machines and a pantheon of very expensive and mostly unnecessary tests had been run on him. The results? Largely inconclusive. Philip had suffered a heart attack, and a stroke of some kind, he had swelling on the brain, and he’d broken a tooth and bruised a rib in the fall. They didn’t know why he wasn’t waking up, nor what might happen to him if he did. They were, what they affectionately called in their circles, playing the patient game. The longer he stayed alive, of course, the more value he was to them. A corpse in a private hospital is only a good earner until the men in black coats come along to cart him away to the cemetery, after, of course, all necessary posthumous tests have been carried out. A patient, and a patient in a coma furthermore, was a constant source of monetary donation. A well of giving, if you will. It was in their interests to be vague with the tests and even vaguer with the truth. It was nothing more than what was expected, especially at this level of care.

Philip’s wife, Alexis, a former pageant queen who currently divided her time between cosmetic surgery enhancements, magazine reading and alcoholism, had decided, if this indeed was going to be the last breath her husband was going to draw, that she ought to be there alongside him to watch it and make absolutely sure. Pandora and Isabella felt the same. Gracey was perhaps the only one amongst them who felt any kind of anything but resentment for her recently incapacitated stepfather.

Philip was not a well liked man amongst his household, but as I’ve already said, he was a very rich man, and in the lives of the women that surrounded him, money talked a lot louder than anything else.

After sitting for a while to try and gauge just by looking at him whether the man that held the key to a possible future fortune for her was going to die before dinner time, Pandora gave up and went to find a qualified opinion. If the good looking doctor couldn’t give her that, she thought she’d try and see if he wanted to give her something else instead.

Gracey held her stepfather’s hand. He hadn't always been there for her, but she certainly didn’t hate him for it in the same way her sisters seemed to. Being there at all was a start, and besides which, Philip had only just recently promised to put her through University after the summer, which was something he never did for the other girls. That in itself was worth sitting beside him while he convalesced, hoping he would get better to make good his word.

“Do you think he’ll pull through?” Isabella asked, her eyes going instinctively to her mothers in the absence of her older sister.

“I hope not”, Alexis bemoaned. She dug into her handbag and fished around for her cigarettes. “I don’t think I could take the disappointment.”

“Mom!”

Isabella’s cheeks reddened with embarrassment. She may have been feeling it, but she didn’t quite have the balls to say it.

“What?”

Alexis held her thin arms up in defense.

“How can you be so cruel?”, Gracey complained. “He’s right here.”

Alexis rolled her eyes and put a cigarette to her lips.

“Oh I know where he is alright, you can hardly miss him.”

“You know, maybe it’s best for everyone”, Isabella interjected, her eyes going quickly again to her mother’s for appraisal. “You know if he-. I mean, he’s not always been the-”

Alexis nodded. “I’d turn off the machine right now if I could”, she said, filling in where her daughter failed to find the words.

“The machine isn’t keeping him alive”, Gracey noted with disdain.

“I’d still turn it off”, Alexis retorted. “It might help.”

“It’s a monitor. It monitors his vital signs.”

“How do you know so much about this anyway, little miss clever clogs?”

Alexis lit her cigarette, took a deep pull and blew a large smoke cloud out over the bed.

“Mom”, Gracey complained, waving the smoke away. “You can’t smoke in here.”

“If I’m paying for the room, I can do whatever the hell I like in here.”

“Somehow I doubt that”, Gracey said, but quiet enough she hoped for her mother not to hear.

“You think by sitting beside him and mopping his brow like some little goody two shoes you’ll somehow make your way into his will?”

A stack of ash fell onto the bed by Philip’s feet.

“Let me tell you something, darling”, Alexis intoned, leaning over and squashing her surgically enhanced tits against her knees, her smoking hand up for emphasis. “When this fat, horrible man is gone, and Lord knows I hope it’s soon, all of that delicious money will be coming to me. Do you know why? Because I’ve earned it.”

Isabella put her hand up in the air, careful not to break the cultivated silence her mother had contrived to create.

“This is a blessing” she went on. “The sooner he goes, the better. For all of us.”

“Everyone except him”, Gracey said.

Isabella still had her hand up and seemed eager to ask her question.

“Yes, Isabella.”

“Can I have another pony?”

Gracey rolled her eyes.

“Yes you can have another pony”, Alexis confirmed.

Pandora came back into the room, her hair messed up and her make-up smudged. She sat firstly on the edge of the bed, pushing her stepfather over to try and make some room and then hovered by the window when she found she wasn’t comfortable. She knew Isabella and her mother had their eyes on her, much like they always did. She was used to that, used to being the sexiest, most important daughter. Used to getting what she wanted.

“Well, what did he say?”

Gracey took one look at her older sister and felt disgusted. She had nothing in common with this family, which was one reason she felt even closer to her stepdad. If she didn’t know better, she would have sworn she was adopted. The problem was, she knew she wasn’t. She was Alexis’s daughter and the youngest sister of Pandora and Isabella. There was no way she could change that.

“He said thank you”, Pandora joked.

“About this blubber guts, you imbecile”, Alexis chastised.

“Are you going to fuck everyone who smiles at you?” Graced spat out venomously.

“Are you going to fuck
anyone,
ever?”

Isabella sniggered. It was entertaining when her two sisters went at it, and fun to see that do-gooder bookworm Gracey humiliated.

“Have you been smoking, Mom?” Pandora detected.

“Never mind that, what did Dr Kildare say?”

“Who?”

“Oh, It doesn’t matter. Is he going to die?”

“They don’t know yet”, Pandora said. “It depends on the coma. They said being around him might help.”

“What to keep him alive, or to speed up his imminent death?”

“The first one”, Pandora said.

“Then we’ve done all we can here”, Alexis said, already collecting her things. “Come on girls, visiting time is over.”

L
eighton was mid fuck when the phone rang. Shirt half undone, tie still hanging around his neck, trousers barely low enough to let his cock escape. This had obviously been a matter of urgency.

“Don’t you dare”, Esmeralda warned, but she knew Leighton well enough to know he’d already made up his mind. “Fuck”, she complained as he pulled out of her, his cock still hard and slick with her juices.

“When are you ever going to fuck me long enough to make me come?”

Leighton rolled his eyes. With his cell phone in one hand, the other pulling his trousers over his sizable cock, he moved into the kitchen to take the call privately. A lesser man would have looked awkward, embarrassed even. Leighton moved with the expertise of a panther on the prowl.

“Ass-hole”, Esmeralda mouthed to herself as she fell flat against the bed, frustrated to be left hanging. A moment later, Leighton came back to her, and leaned in the doorway until she did him the courtesy of looking up. Even when she was mad at him she couldn’t be for long. She hated that he had that over her, but there was no denying it. Leighton Tempest was a God amongst men. Undeniably sexy, extremely rich and very, very powerful, the man collected superlatives like other people collected parking tickets, and he knew how to get what he wanted. Esmeralda was one of those things, and she certainly wasn’t the first. She hoped she wouldn’t be the last either, but she was intelligent enough to know that probably wasn’t true. No one got Leighton, not for keeps anyway. They just looked after him for a while until the next best thing came along.

Leighton Tempest. Even his name made him sound super-human. Dark eyebrows that perfectly lined stormy, brooding eyes. Lips that didn’t so much beg to be kissed, as demand it, for the sake of humanity. A torso so perfect it looked like it had been chiseled out of stone by a renaissance artist and then brought to life by some visiting deity, only it was somehow better than that. Somehow more perfect than perfection itself.

Then there was his cock, which only the privileged few got access to, and had to be seen to be believed, and his bank balance, of course, which was just as large, and just as exclusive. Esmeralda had heard all of the rumors before she became one of the privileged members, and the rumors turned out to be more accurate than she could possibly have imagined.

“Put your clothes on”, Leighton commanded. “I need you to book me a flight.”

“To book
you
a flight? I thought
we
were on vacation together.”

Leighton raised his dark eyebrows, and even before he said it, she knew that it was coming.

“Vacation just got canceled.”

“Fucking hell, Leighton. You always do this to me.”

“And every time I do, I always make it up to you.”

“How about you make it up to me now?” Esmeralda purred, but Leighton was already buttoning up his shirt. She had no choice but to wait for him to want her again, but she knew better than most the improbability of that ever happening.

Whoever was on the other end of that call was someone more important to him that she was. If he wasn’t even going to finish fucking her, she figured it must have been about money. That was the only thing that could have taken his attention away. That’s what made him so dangerous. When he had his sights set on something, absolutely nothing could get in his way. Making him change was mind was more difficult than turning around the Exxon Valdez.

P
andora spread her arms out and pushed back into the soft velvet of the cushions behind her. To her right sat her younger sister Isabella, a less attractive less intelligent version of her older sister, while their mother, Alexis, occupied little of the enormous space to the left. The VIP section was separated from the rest of the club by an unhookable cord of knotted red fabric, and protected by two large chested bouncers.

“I could get used to this.”

“As soon as he croaks you won’t have to.” Alexis commented. “Why do you think I married him? It certainly wasn’t for his good looks. It was so you three blood suckers could get a decent start in life. I never thought he’d last this long in the first place.”

“He’s definitely going to die though isn’t he?” Isabella asked, thinking about her new pony. “I mean, for real?”

Alexis began plucking at thin, wiry fingers. “Number one, he’s had a massive heart attack. If it wasn’t for someone ringing for an ambulance he wouldn’t have even made it to the hospital.”

Pandora held up her hands but avoided her mother’s glare.

“Number two, he’s been in a coma now for five days, and it doesn’t look like there is any chance of him pulling out of it.”

“Number three”, Pandora butted in while Alexis took a pause to puff on her cigarette. “He’s pretty much brain dead now anyway.”

Now she caught her mother’s glare.

“It’s what the doctor said, when he didn’t have his mouth full, of course.”

Pandora held up her hands while her sister stifled a giggle.