RICHARD (A BAD BOY ROMANCE) (52 page)

“You have one more thing lined up
this morning,” she said, swiping her finger across the screen in her hand.
“Though I’m not sure if you’d like to put it off until later this afternoon.”

“It can’t be as bad as what we just
endured with his lordship. What is it?” I asked, motioning for Tina to follow
after me as I headed into my office proper.

“You mother would like you to call
her,” Tina said, and I noted the pained grimace on her face.

“I was wrong,” I laughed as I sat
down at my desk. “That is so much worse.”

“Shall I tell her that you’re
engaged until later this afternoon?”

“No,” I sighed, resting my head in
my hands. “I’ll call her now. No point in putting off the inevitable, is
there?”

“No,
marm
,”
Tina affirmed.

“Would you do me a kindness, though,
Tina?”

“Of course,” she said.

“I would kill for a cup of coffee.”

Tina nodded wordlessly, moving out
of the room, her clacking heels echoing out into the hallway beyond, leaving me
alone with only myself and the looming prospect of having to talk to my mother
to keep me company.

Lady Wolfe, otherwise known as my
mother, was not always my favorite woman in the world. That was not to say she
was a bad person… though perhaps she could have been described as a
bit
power hungry. My mother was one of
those people who craved authority and recognition, though not always at the
expense of others. She was motivated, determined, and at times, a little pushy.
I didn’t blame her for the way she was—my mother was an impressive woman and
one that I’m sure that many others girls could look up and aspire to be like.
Just not me.

I reached toward the phone with a
sigh, putting the receiver to my ear as I dialed her number. While both my
mother and I were of a similar cut, sans the moderate lack of empathy on my
part, I had a hard time holding a conversation with her that didn’t infuriate
me. Everything from my sense of style to my choice in clothes was exactly the
opposite of what she’d ever have chosen for me, something she never failed to
comment on whenever we had the chance to speak, much to my chagrin.

The phone began to ring. Once,
twice, three times before I heard the clatter of someone on the other line.

“Good morning, Gwendolyn,” my mother
said in her usually cool tone. “How are you, dear?”

“Just fine, Mother,” I answered,
leaning back into the comfort of my high-backed office chair. “And yourself?
Tina had mentioned you wanted to speak.”

“I always wish to speak to my
daughter, dear, when the time permits.”

I closed my eyes and fought to keep
my tone even. While my mother might
wish
to speak to me, that was never the same thing as actually doing so. The time,
as she said, never seemed to permit. I’d grown up dealing with this sort of
behavior for years, and had always come to expect never actually being the kind
of priority I’d always wanted to be in my parents’ lives. I wasn’t my father’s
blood relation, and therefore was not in line to inherit any of his estate or a
title—not that I was sorely missing it, to be honest.

“And what is it you’d like to
discuss with me today?” I asked after a brief silence.

“Well, Gwendolyn, I have some news
that I may need you to be sitting in order to hear.” Already I didn’t like the
way that this was going, much less the way my mother seemed almost
giddy
as she spoke. My mother was not
the kind of person to
ever
express
anything so base as to be giddy over anything.

“I’m sitting down… go on,” I said,
unable to shake the sense of dread that was pooling in my stomach.

She drew it out anyway, as though
she’d rehearsed this moment for prime effect, pause and all. “I’m pregnant.”

Chapter 2

After Afghanistan, I thought I’d
seen it all—the myriad of horrors the universe held, all the pain and suffering
that could possibly be inflicted in this world. I’d experienced more than my
fair share of shock and awe, seen the misery painted on the faces of my
brothers-in-arms. I’d never been allowed on the front lines, of course—I was
heir to a rather substantial duchy, after all—but one didn’t have to be
eye-to-eye with terror to get caught in its illimitable hold.

But when my father told me his new
wife was pregnant—and with a son, no less—that made all the darkness I’d seen
in war seem like a children’s TV show, by comparison.

It wasn’t even the thought of my dad
actually fucking someone that sucked the blood from my face, or the idea that
his crusty sperm still had some vitality left in them. Those were repulsive
enough ideas, but not the ones that made my stomach threaten to splatter at my
feet.

It was knowing how this would change
the course of the rest of my life that made me want to gag—a knowledge that no
one but me, and my father, had.

Though I supposed now his wife knew,
too. Why wouldn’t she? Dear old Dad would be only too thrilled to share this
particular news—that his screw-up of a son wasn’t
actually
entitled to anything now that a legitimate heir was on the
way. Yes, I was my father’s bastard, and in more ways than one.

Ever since I was young I’d been made
painfully aware of my father’s thoughts when it came to my illegitimate standing,
though as his only heir I would be the one to claim everything on the moment of
his death. That was, of course, something that he had always begrudged,
especially since he had—until now—been unable to repeat the miracle of my own
conception. Everyone had thought him sterile, and that my birth had been a
fluke of nature, or as my father liked to refer to it: a curse.

My mother had been young—barely into
her twenties—when they two of them first met—he, however was most certainly
not. Already approaching thirty-five himself, my father took advantage of the
doe-eyed young lass while summering in the southern part of the country and one
thing apparently lead to another. When all was said and done, my mother was
dead and my father swore up and down that the girl had been nothing but a slut
and that the child was not his.

One short paternity test later, and
I was quickly named the bane of my father’s good name, a title I took to very
readily and with much cheer. I learned to hate the old man, and took a certain
satisfaction in the fact that I was the last person who he ever wanted to
become the sole beneficiary of his estate. That was at least until I got the
news that I’d have a little half-brother on the way within the next few months.

He’d decided to drive home this
particularly devastating news over lunch, as he most often liked to do
anything. I’d only just come back from my last tour when I received the sudden
and prompt invitation to meet him the following day at one of his favorite
restaurants,
Coldwell’s
. I was rather
shocked to see him when I first arrived, thin as a rail and looking almost
deathly. If it weren’t for the fact that he was stuffing his face with the dish
in front of him before I even sat down I would have thought that he was
starving himself. For the briefest of
moments
I felt
something akin to sympathy for my father, even wondering whether my father had
contracted some kind of horrible disease. Sympathy however soon turned to
hopefulness, wishing that such a thing might actually come to pass.

“Ah, you’ve arrived—late as usual,”
he muttered between bites. Every time I saw him eat I pictured a vulture
gorging itself on a carcass. That was what I’d always seen my father as, a
scavenger that made his name on the backs of people who came before him. “Sit.”

I held in a vicious snarl. How a sod
like that had gotten my mother pregnant, I’ll never know—nor did I want to. I
was thankful to have missed out on the majority of his repugnant features,
genetically speaking, leaning more heavily toward my mother’s looks than
anything else. At least I’d gotten that much of her. At times he still chided
me, claiming he still wasn’t even sure that I was his at all and that “the
trollop” had made it all up. It was those times where I’d been on the verge of
violence. I hoped my father would keel over in his seat.

“Your letter was already enough
exposition than I really needed,” I said as I sat down, waving the waiter off
as he swooped in to take my order. I had no intention of sharing my meal with
that bastard sitting across from me, especially since I felt that a death from
some manner of poison would be all too imminent. “Why do I need to hear it
again?”

“Because I damn well want to see the
look on your face while I say it,” the old crow snarled. He loved seeing others
crushed beneath him, it was a sick delight for him that I always thought was on
a list just before chocolate and just after sex. “The boy inside of Evelyn will
inherit everything. After all this time, I can be free of you and the
horrifying prospect of leaving my legacy to a damned degenerate.”

“And if I put a fight up on the
matter?” I asked, my fists clenched in an attempt to maintain a civil tone. I
hated this charade that my father and I had to put between one another in
public, hiding the venom we felt toward one another was almost a torture in and
of itself. “What then?”

My father laughed, cawing like a
buzzard. I hated everything about that laugh. It was cruel and
harsh,
the laugh he’d used to give whenever he’d watch me
fail. Ever since I was a child I’d heard that high laughter whenever something
would happen to cause me harm while I was out playing or involved in some sport
or another. It had felt much worse back when I was so desperate for his
approval, before I learned that nothing I did would ever be good enough.

“The only way that a bastard like
you can hope to inherit while there is a legitimate heir living is by being the
first to marry a respectable woman before I pass—something that you with all
your ‘prowess’ couldn’t even manage.” He chuckled as he looked at me over his
food. “I’ve won, Tristan. And for the rest of your days you’ll know that a
fetus was more worthy of my love than you ever were.”

He was right.

He’d found a way to take everything
that I had hoped to gain in my life and put it into the arms of a shriveled
little fetus. It was as though something that I had waited for all of these
years was ripped from my fingers just as I was about to see it be mine. I
wanted to scream, to flip over the table and send his food flying, and stab him
in the eyes with the fork in his hand. I felt myself getting red in the face,
heat rising at the back of my neck as his chuckle turned into another round of
raucous laughter.

“That look,” he laughed, throwing his
head back as food fell from between his lips. “That has made me a happier man
than anything ever has in my life.” The old man shook his head, a smile cut
across his face from ear to ear. “I’ve wanted to see that look on your face—to
tell you that you get
nothing
from me
after I’ve died—for as long as you’ve been alive. Now you can go off to where I
hoped that whore of a mother would have; out of sight and out of mind.”

I wasn’t sure how I managed to keep
myself under control, to stop myself from leaning across that table and
drowning him in his soup, but somehow I managed. I could hardly feel my face,
let alone tell what kind of expression I was making as I watched my father
laugh as though he’d just heard the best joke on the face of the planet. I was
sure that all was lost.

But then I realized that I had a
chance—a slim one, but a chance none-the-less.

I could get married—find a woman to
settle down with and before my father could kick his proverbial bucket—I would
be the one to inherit everything. All I’d have to do was find a woman willing,
but therein lay the problem in its fullness. Who would be daft enough to even
consider marrying me? Especially with the kind of reputation that I had. I
couldn’t deny that I was a lover of women, and having that kind of reputation
tends to make one undesirable for the purposes of matrimony. But then again
there were always those women convinced that they could change men like me, fix
us and teach us to be tied down and contained. The thought of it made me squirm
but if I could use that to torture my father one last time before he died then
it would all be worth it. After all, divorce was always a viable option.

I couldn’t help but smile as the old
man continued to cackle madly, all the while totally unaware that he’d given me
all I needed to make him eat every last one of those words. The old bat didn’t
think I’d ever be able to keep a woman long enough, that my appetite for the
tender company of women would drive any decent find far away; but I knew
exactly the person to help me—my father’s own stepdaughter, Gwendolyn.

“You’re right, Father. I must
concede defeat,” I said, a wily smile crossing my face. I watched as my
father’s expression fell, unable to see me sulk over the news of this
injustice. I’d snatched his victory and I’d snatch it again before he even knew
what was happening. “Congratulations. You’ve beaten me in our little game. No
use being a poor sport about it. I must be off, however. I have an important
appointment and I mustn’t delay with something so trivial as our wife’s
prenatal status.”

I wanted so much to giggle at the
fury growing on his face as I trivialized what he considered to be the greatest
victory of his life. It was the mark of a petty man that the suffering of
others be their own comfort, and my father was most certainly king of all that
was petty.

I stood, flashed him a venomous
smile and turned on my heel in military fashion before heading out the doors
and out into the street to call a cab. For my plan to work I would need to be on
my best behavior, keeping myself out of the spotlight as much as possible to
keep the public and most importantly my father out of the loop as I prepared to
ruin his entire plan for his future. Before that child was born, I would make
sure that I’d make my father regret the day
he
was born—I know that I certainly did.