Mistake: A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance (17 page)

"I didn't know," I said, chagrined. Dwayne was right, I should never have come to Miami. Running away was just kind of a habit of mine. "Okay, point taken, no slapping required. What's the other part of your mind thinking though, before I go and book a flight to Chicago?"

"The other part of me wants to cut you at least a little bit of slack. Julian, the reason you and I bonded so closely all those years ago is that we both identified with being pissed off at our fathers, although I was angry with both of my parents. But, your anger was always hotter than mine, it was almost always an incoherent rage. Hell, I kept expecting to read you'd really gone off the deep end and gotten yourself killed because you were so pissed off at the world, when really at the time you were pissed off at John Castelbon. Ironically, while my anger was legitimate, yours was misplaced, but I've been the one to come out the other side of my anger stronger and better than I was, or at least earlier than you have. It took almost losing the best thing to ever happen in my life to understand that, and to set aside my anger for the love of Erica. That's still so new for you, I can understand you making a mistake. Did you know that after my mother and father found out about me falling in love with Erica, we went almost four months without talking to each other?"

"Whoa, no shit?" I noticed that around Dwayne, the cursing, foul mouthed Julian was coming back, and I reminded myself not to let it go too far. Dwayne may have been a friend, but that didn't mean I wanted to go back to the way I was.

"No shit. It was Erica in fact who came to me, and found me in Chicago. I also found out she was pregnant with Liz, and that one fact, that she came to me and loved me, gave me the strength to risk it all and stand up to my father and mother."

"Yeah, well, the problem is Dwayne, that I don't exactly have anyone to stand up to. My father is not the bastard I thought he was, and while I think Sandra probably wants to shoot me right now, there is no reason for me to hate her."

Dwayne nodded, conceding the point. "Perhaps, but there is someone you need to stand up to and confront."

"Who?" I asked, perplexed.

Dwayne finished his glass of juice and pointed at me. "Yourself. You need to stand up to who you were. Julian, I'm going to take a big risk here, but only because I saw strength in you when we were younger, strength that I think if harnessed the right way, would do you good. Just that you've made as much progress as you have over the little time you've fallen for Krystal tells me that I was right."

"What risk? Dwayne, I'm planning on going to Chicago and trying to get Krystal back. The rest of it is secondary."

He nodded, then looked me in the eye. "I have a new resort that I'm building. My current markets are pretty well tapped out, and while I could take the chain international, or at least more international than it already is, quite frankly I'm not in a mental space right now to deal with the governments of the South Pacific. Those guys make the slimiest on the take politician in the US look like a saint. So, instead of another sun and sand resort, or in the ski areas of the Rockies and the Appalachians, I'm expanding into New England. I've got a new resort scheduled to open next summer near Kennebunkport, Maine. Right on the ocean, and I think I can get a lot of the summer tourists that find my Florida and Caribbean resorts too hot, and the winter tourists that aren't interested in skiing might like the place too."

"Okay, that sounds pretty nice, but what's that got to do with me?"

Dwayne set down his juice and looked me in the eye. "How far are you willing to go to prove to yourself and to Krystal that you are the kind of man she deserves to have?"

I didn't even need to think of my answer. "As far as it takes. I love her, Dwayne."

"Good, because if we do this, we do it all the way. Here's the deal. My resorts are famous for not only having top of the line rooms, but some of the best, top of the line facilities as well. So I'm going to put that rep at a bit of risk. You enter the Forrester Hotels management training program. And yes, before you ask, it is a real program that we've had in place for decades. Normally I save it for talented college students who come from underprivileged backgrounds, although in my father's time it was a way to make sure buddies of his got their kids into good jobs along with the occasional feel-good PR piece. It's a three year program, and in that time you're going to bust your ass learning the ins and outs of how to run a hotel. You'll start as a section manager. I'm thinking with your background, you'll be the manager of the guest fitness center. I'll even let you do personal training there if you want, although you'll have to wear long sleeves and cover those tatts while on the job."

"Go on," I said, feeling for the first time in days a bit of excitement. It was a challenge, but not a negative one. Instead, a challenge that Dwayne was laying out for me because he wanted to help me out. "What else, because knowing you, there always is something else."

"Yes, there is. One of our corporate bylaws is that all executives in the company must, and this is set in stone, must have at least a Bachelor's degree or its foreign equivalent for those from overseas. You don't. So, in addition to your duties for the hotel, I'm going to pull the right strings, and get you enrolled in a university. It'll most likely be online, since I doubt you want to go to the Univeristy of Maine at Ogunquit, but don't think it's going to be some pushover. Even Harvard and Stanford are offering online courses nowadays. You're going to graduate that program, in four years, with at least a
cum laude
."

"And if I don't?" I asked. "I'm not saying no Dwayne, but you don't lay out a challenge like that without some sort of both reward and punishment."

Dwayne nodded. "Reward is simple. If you do it, at the end of four years you'll be made a Vice President of Forrester Hotels, and you can choose your area to work in. We still have offices in Chicago, if you want to know, I couldn't move everything to Miami. You'd be on the third tier down in the company. I'm the top tier. My sister Elizabeth, despite selling me her shares and starting her own law firm, is the second tier down according to corporate structure. If I died today, my shares would go into trust for Erica and my daughter, and Elizabeth would take over as Chairman and CEO. You'd be on the level below her, along with about ten other people. You'd command a handsome salary, though I'm not sure you really need that. Frankly, it's hard to keep that third tier staffed because as soon as I do, someone else comes in and offers them a shot at the top tier in their chain. Half of my biggest competitors worked for Forrester at some point or another.

"More importantly than that though, is that you'll be what Krystal deserves. You'll have made something of yourself, and whether you take my job, go back to Castelbon and work with your father, or strike out on your own, you'll be successful. The stick, well, I don't really need one. The stick will be looking yourself in the mirror if you fail. Your punishment will be denial of your happiness, forever. The stick will be looking your own child in the eyes, because from what you tell me, I suspect this Gina woman will want you involved, and telling them not to follow in your footsteps, that their father is nothing more than an overgrown child."

Dwayne's words hit me hard, he was never one to pull any punches. Could I do it? Could I take on this challenge? Could I do all that and be a good father to Gina's baby? Could I be a man, and not an overgrown child, as Dwayne put it? I swallowed hard, and made my decision. "Alright, I'm in. On a few conditions of my own."

Dwayne nodded for me to continue. "Interesting negotiation tactic, considering I seem to be the one with all the power in this, but go ahead."

"First, that you let me work with whoever you have pulling the strings to decide what I'm going to study. I'm not being forced into studying business administration just because I'm working for you."

"That's easy enough I suppose. I've found some of my best managers came from totally non-hotel backgrounds. What else?"

"Second, that before I sign anything, I get a chance to go back to Chicago and try and get Krystal back. I'm doing this for her, and whether she still loves me, hates me, or whatever, I need to look her in the eye and apologize, and tell her about this."

"And if she tells you to fuck off? No offense Julian, but it would be a remarkable woman to take you back, not only because you had sex with and impregnated her aunt, but then you ran away like you did."

"Regardless of if she tells me to fuck off, I still need to tell her, Dwayne. I'll then go into the program at least knowing that I tried, and that failing out means more than just letting myself down."

"Okay, deal. The resort doesn't open for months anyway. I was planning on having you start by interning in Chicago, if that makes it any easier. If she tells you off, then you intern here in Miami. Anything else?"

I grinned sheepishly and nodded. "Yeah man. Can you give me a ride to the airport after I get tickets? I walked to the beach because my license is suspended still. I can't drive legally for another seventy four days. And I don't think I can stomach walking back to the airport from your home. Where are we in Miami anyway?"

"I live on Fischer Island. Which, by the way, is why you should probably stay indoors as much as possible until I give you a ride to the airport. You happen to have slept with two of my neighbors, and their husbands don't like you all that much."

I shook my head in true regret. "Jesus, all this shit from my past is really starting to catch up to me. I know you weren't quite as bad, but how did you ever get past it?"

Dwayne shook his head. "Considering that I know I could never even think of opening a resort in Macau, Hong Kong, or for that matter anywhere else in China due to what I did with a certain ambassador's daughter, I can't answer that one for you."

I
woke
up the next morning driven from sleep by the grumbles of my stomach. Rolling out of bed, I made my way into the kitchen, where I looked at the scraps in my fridge. It's a little known secret, but most chefs don't have a lot of food at their homes. We tend to eat bits from the restaurant prep, and are so tired by the time we get home that cooking is the last thing on our minds. When Julian was living with me, I kept the basics, but we'd cleaned out the fridge before going to Castelbon Manor. All I had in the fridge were some condiments, a half gallon of milk, some strawberries, and a tub of cottage cheese.

"Guess I'm going European today," I said, grabbing the cheese and the strawberries. I could turn the strawberries into a quick sauce, chill it, and combine it with the cottage cheese for something that would at least give me some energy, as well as distract me and give me something to do.

Poking around my cupboards gave me some balsamic vinegar, and I had what I needed. I took my stick blender to the strawberries, breaking them down quickly before putting them in a sauce pan with some balsamic vinegar. A few more ingredients, and viola, a strawberry sauce. I poured the sauce into a shallow pan and put it into my mostly empty freezer to chill and thicken up. It was right where I wanted it to be in twenty minutes, and poured it over the cottage cheese. The plating was a total mess, but I really didn't care, plopping it all in a bowl which I sat down and devoured in about two minutes of gluttony.

After my stomach was finally quiet, I thought about what I was going to do. Being fired from Alinea was not what I'd planned, especially the way it had gone down. While I might have been able to recover, the fact was that any chef that called Alinea to check my history would hear that I got fired for mouthing off to Shannon. It would keep me out of a lot of kitchens.

I was still pondering when my phone rang, and I saw that Kimberly was trying to call me. I picked it up. "Hey Kim."

My voice must have been a warning, because Kim didn't start with her normal cheery jibe or joke. "What happened?" she said, her voice heavy with concern.

"Would you believe that in the course of three days I've lost Julian, lost my job, and I don't even have a decent breakfast in my pantry?" I said, laughing hollowly. "So I've had pretty much the worst couple of days in the course of history."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes," Kim said, and my phone went silent in my ear. I knew better than to call her back and argue, Kim's stubborn and dedicated. There was no way I'd stop her, she was most likely out of her apartment already.

I was right. Kim was outside of my apartment twenty five minutes later. I'd given her the security code to the front, so she only had to knock on my front door. "Tell me everything," she said after giving me a hug. "And tell me why I should get my b-tard friends on him now."

It was no idle threat. In addition to all of her legal hacking skills, Kimberly was an active member of the hacker group Anonymous, as well as the prankster subset of 4chan, known as the b-tards. She was well respected by both groups, and had turned them loose twice in the time I'd known her. Both times, the targets were utterly devastated both professionally and financially. One of them, a politician who'd done something to get on her bad side, had so much dirt unearthed on him that the Department of Justice ended up indicting him. So when Kim threatened to unleash the b-tards, she wasn't joking around. "No, he doesn't deserve that. Besides, Julian didn't get me fired from Alinea, I did that all on my own."

"Give me all the details," Kim said, "and take it slow."

I started with the morning of Gina's arrival, telling her as much as I could remember. Kim listened, pausing me only once to get her smartphone out and start typing a few notes. I didn't know what I'd said that caused her to do that, but she had me continue, right up to the point where I'd told Shannon to fuck off.

"You were right about one thing," Kimberly said as she finished her typing. "You did get yourself fired from Alinea all on your own. Although I want to look into a few things before I say anything else. There might be grounds to challenge your dismissal based off of what Horst said to you at the end."

"I don't want to, even if you're right," I told her. "It'd just cause more poisoning of the waters. Getting a reputation as a disrespectful hothead in the culinary world can be bad. Getting a reputation as a disrespectful hothead who then whined and gamed is even worse."

Kim held her tongue, and nodded. "All right then, so what are we going to do on our day off? I've got no projects that can't be put off until tomorrow, and I'm not letting you sulk and brood around this apartment all day. You're no fun when you're broody."

I knew she was serious, and I thought about it for a bit. "Wanna grab our gi's and get an extra training session in?" I asked. "I'm feeling the urge to work off a lot of angry energy. Hell, I'm feeling lethal, honestly."

Kim smiled. "That's the spirit! Tell you what, go shower and get your stuff while I make a few phone calls, and you can run me over to my place in your car. We're splurging today, no mass transportation for us. And after that, we're getting chocolate and Mexican food."

"Okay, sounds good. I'll be ready in fifteen minutes." I headed off into my shower, rubbing the exhaustion from my body vigorously. Have you ever seen the old musical
South Pacific
? Mom took to it once, and there's a song from it, with the line "I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair." I didn't really like most of the musical, but that song, yeah, they got it pretty right. Lathering and working the shampoo through my long black hair helped a ton, and I came out of my bedroom only five minutes late, but feeling about a thousand times better.

Kim was nodding and talking on her cell phone with someone when I came out. "Yes. I'm surprised you guys didn't see that yourselves. Yes. Okay. I know, I'm just telling you because I can't do anything on my end. Okay. Thanks. Good-bye."

"Who was that?" I asked, as Kim put her phone into her backpack. I had my jiu-jitsu bag ready to go, and was dressed simply in a t-shirt and shorts. "Business?"

"Yeah, kind of," Kim replied. "Let's go."

The jiu-jitsu gym I train at is pretty famous, having produced multiple black belts and quite a few high level competitors on the national and even world stage. That morning, the instructor was Roberto, one of the older Brazilians who had helped found the gym back in the late 1990's. Kim and I arrived only two minutes late, so we didn't miss anything as he walked everyone through the setups for the leg locks he wanted us to drill and work on. Honestly when it came time to partner off, I felt bad for the guy I worked with. I mean, is it fair to work with a woman when the name of the maneuver is called the "banana split" and the variation called "make a wish?"

About a half hour into class, the rolling practice started. This sort of controlled sparring is what I love about jiu-jitsu class, as each time you change opponents, you're faced with a new set of problems, a moving chess game that requires brand new adaptations to new challenges. And that day, I was keyed up, and had a lot to work off my mind. I was a lot more aggressive than normal, in the end even catching one of our brown belts by surprise and getting him face down on the mat, rear mounted and more or less rubbing his face into the surface when the bell denoted the end of the round.

After practice, Kim did everything she could to make the whole day a girl's day out. Twice her phone buzzed with text messages, which she quickly checked then replied to before putting her phone away, but other than that, she was totally committed to getting me out of my funk. I'll be honest, by six that evening I was feeling pretty good. She'd even talked me into cooking dinner for the two of us at my place. "Hey, you may currently be unemployed, but that doesn't mean you have to let your skills dull," she joked as she pushed the cart around. So I'm going to sit back, use my laptop to do some surfing and stuff, while you plop yourself in your kitchen and whip me up some five star quality grub."

"Michelin only rates up to three stars," I said, grabbing a box of couscous. "I regret befouling my heritage by using this junk, but I don't have any of the good stuff at home, and I doubt you want me to spend an hour steaming it the proper way if we can find it. I know we can't find the Turkish variety."

"Nope, instant is fine with me," Kimberly replied. "I mean, I still use Minute Rice at home."

I rolled my eyes at her good humored culinary blasphemy, and we checked out, carrying out over a hundred dollars in fresh ingredients. It was enough food for ten people, but I was grateful that Kim was letting me indulge. I put the bags in the back of my car and drove home, parking underneath the building as I normally did. Taking the elevator up to the lobby, I was shocked when I saw Julian standing there, waiting for me.

"What are you doing here?" Kim said, stepping forward aggressively, a plastic bag filled with lamb brisket in her hand. She looked like she was ready to beat him with it.

"Please, I... I just want to talk," Julian replied, his face sorrowful but still determined. His skin was a dark, angry red, like he'd been severely sunburned, and there were patches starting to peel from around his forehead. "Just hear me out."

Kim looked at me, then at him, then back at me. "What do you want to do?"

I sighed and nodded to Julian. "Come on up. I'm making dinner."

* * *

I
stood as crammed
into the corner of the elevator as I could while on the way up. I hadn't meant to surprise Krystal, but I figured that just going into the apartment itself would have been wrong, so I'd waited in the lobby when she didn't answer her phone. As it was, Kim still stared daggers at me the whole way, standing in between us like a bodyguard.

It was the same inside the apartment, as Kim kept herself positioned between us constantly. I could barely even get a full view of Krystal, at least until I went to the complete opposite side of the room and sat down on the sofa. "So what did you want to say?" Krystal asked after putting the groceries away.

I read her face, and could see that she was still pissed off at me. She was still angry, but I was hopeful, because I could also see that underneath all that anger, she still loved me. It was in the way her voice said it, that she was angry, not resigned or sorrowful. She didn't want to let go of me either. I chose my words carefully, but spoke from my heart.

"Krystal, what I did..... I'm sorry. I was stupid, I was immature, and I was flat out wrong. I should have told you, even before I told you how I felt about you, that I had been with Gina. I should have told you about my original plan, and I should have told you how you stopped me from going through with it, because I fell in love with you. I should have done all of that, but I didn't."

"Damn right you didn't," Kim said heatedly. "What did you expect, that the two of you would go the rest of your lives without Gina ever seeing you together and going
Hmmm, maybe I should tell my niece that her boyfriend and I hooked up at her mother's wedding?"

I sighed and nodded. "I don't know what I was thinking, Kimberly. After admitting to myself that I was in love, then with my own other problems, and then learning the truth, and then Krystal and I coming together..... I don't know what I was thinking half of the damn time. So for all of that, I'm sorry. Then after you found out, I made it worse by running away instead of trying to make it right and talk to you, that's just as bad, and I apologize for that too."

"Is that it?" Krystal asked. "You just wanted to say you're sorry, and maybe hope that I take you back?"

I shook my head. "No. Krystal, that's not all. I need to continue on the path that you set me on, and I know I've said that before, but my actions are just proof of it all. Well, I've been offered a a second chance."

"How so?" she asked, a bit of curiosity coming into her voice. "And does it have anything to do with you looking like a brick?"

"In a way," I said. "After I left, I took the first flight out of Logan I could, which happened to be Miami. I walked to the beach and just sat there for two days, and probably would have been dead by now if it wasn't that an old friend found me. Right around sunset on that second day, Dwayne Forrester found me and took me home. He cleaned me up, and he talked some sense into me."

"You know Dwayne Forrester?" Kimberly asked, still angry, but at least somewhat interested. "What, did you two raise some hell together?"

"Yeah, for about three months around the Caribbean," I replied honestly. "Dwayne though, he's matured, he's grown up. He has a wife now, and a beautiful daughter. Looking at the photo he showed me, I realized that unless I change, I'm never going to have that life. So I asked Dwayne what I should do. He told me the first thing was to come here and set things right, to beg your forgiveness. But then he offered me a lifeline."

"You haven't done much begging yet," Krystal noted, "does that start soon?"