by Emma Vikes
Plus, I knew he wasn’t the biggest fan of spending money. I knew this because I was aware of how much he spent on a yearly basis. I’d lived with Lara for four years and the number of times she always gushed at dad about how responsible Patrick was with his money was way too much.
“So, are you ever gonna tell me what we’re gonna do?” I asked the moment I heard the bedroom door open. Patrick had been getting ready in the living room and was kind enough to give me the bedroom and the bathroom to use. He was always so thoughtful in that way.
He didn’t respond to my question and just blatantly stared at me. There had been moments that I had caught him staring at me and every time I had successfully gotten his attention, he would say something rude about my outfit or my face. I wondered if he was going to do the same thing now. I walked over to where he stood and tapped his shoulder.
“Patrick?”
He blinked twice before he finally looked me in the eyes. I waited for the rude comment but all I got was a lazy smile and a kiss on my forehead. “You look beautiful.”
That wasn’t the first time that had Patrick complimented me. We never had the cat and dog kind of relationship. We only ever argued when I began dating Morgan so compliments coming from him weren’t exactly new to me. But at this moment, I felt the sincerity in his tone and I could see it in his eyes and if I could have melted into a puddle, I definitely would have by now.
“If you have a lot more compliments up your sleeve, I suggest that you don’t say them anymore because we probably would never leave this apartment.”
Patrick laughed and then grabbed my hand. “Then to answer your question, I want our date to be a surprise. I want it to be special.”
He was almost shy when he said it and it was so adorable! I didn’t say anything more and we headed out of the apartment. Patrick had rented a car to use here indefinitely and, during the entire car ride, we were just casually talking about our childhoods before we’d met. “So why did you end up going to that boarding school before my mom married your dad?”
I leaned against the door of the top-down car he’d got, letting the wind blow my hair and relishing the freedom that it brought. “I wasn’t at boarding school the first year I left. I had...issues that I had to deal with after mom’s death.”
My mother died when I was just 11 years old. She discovered she had cancer when I was eight. Dad did everything he could to keep her alive. Every option that was available for my mother, my dad didn’t hesitate on spending money on even if it meant sucking his bank account dry. I could still remember the hospital visits, the fragile state of my mother during her remaining days, her sunken face, the way she trembled under my touch.
It was so painful to see someone you once drew strength from look so weak.
“Dad was grieving. So was I. But I...I looked so much like my mother that he couldn’t bear to look at me for a while. He sent me to live with my grandmother. I was eleven at the time, Patrick, heartbroken over my mother’s death and pissed at my father for sending me away.” I’d never really recounted this to anyone. I never really wanted people to know that there was this broken side of me that I’d tried to keep hidden. No one knew the truth of why I went to boarding school. They thought I went there because New York reminded me so much of my mother that I couldn’t bear it.
They didn’t know that I’d been sent away because I reminded Christopher Baldwin of the wife he’d lost and he couldn’t handle the reminder.
“I went into a private school at New Jersey for a while because that’s where Nana lived but I was acting out. I was flunking all of my classes, I talked back to teachers, I bullied people. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing except that I needed my father’s attention because I needed him to comfort me and tell me that we could make a life without mom, but he just did the exact opposite.”
My father and I’d never discussed this. It was like the years that he’d sent me away were something we had swept under the rug. “Wait, Chris actually did that? I thought you were sent to boarding school because...”
“Because I needed fresher air to breathe and not the polluted air that my mother took her last breath of?” I smiled wryly at Patrick and then sighed. “That’s what dad told everyone because then he didn’t need to explain to everyone else or do damage control because it would’ve been a hot issue. He wins father of the year every time but no one even knows how he’d just abandoned his own kid for a while.”
Patrick turned the car to the right and, after a while, put it into stop. I looked at where we were. “This is the beach park.”
I’d been to Cambridge and the beach park was something I’d always been to. Patrick didn’t say anything; instead, he got out of the car and then opened my door for me. “They say that being chivalrous earns you extra points.”
He led me to the back of the car and then he opened the back door and my eyes widened at the sight. He had a blanket and a bunch of pillows in there and, at the corner, I spotted a basket that I was sure was filled with our dinner. I looked at Patrick in awe. This was by far the sweetest date that I’d ever been on and I couldn’t be any gladder that it was with him.
I grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him close to me and kissed him. I knew his stand on having sex in public but I was ready to jump him at that moment. Patrick laughed and pulled away from me, much to my chagrin, and then placed both of his hands on my forearm. “I want you to enjoy this date, Brit. I feel like all the dates you’ve gone are all fancy. I give you a normal one.”
“Normal dates are movies and then eating at diners. This isn’t a normal date, Pat, but this is the sweetest by far. Thank you.”
“Will saying that Alex helped me out on this ruin the moment?”
I couldn’t help but laugh but I was glad that Alex had given him advice. I knew how good he was as a boyfriend to Lauren and Patrick had never been in a serious relationship. I wasn’t saying that whatever was between us was serious but if it turned in that direction, then I was confident that he had someone good to give him advice.
“Nah, you’re good. I’ve always admired how sweet he is to Lauren. Kind of made me jealous sometimes because I never had a boyfriend as sweet as him,” I replied, and then climbed into the back of his car and settled myself into a comfortable position. Patrick climbed in after me and pulled me close to him and kissed my forehead.
“I know it’s going to ruin the moment but I hate that Chris left you to grieve alone. But it’s kind of how I handled Paula’s death too.”
I’d almost forgotten about Patrick’s sister. She was never really brought up in conversations anyway. It was like she’d never even existed. There were no pictures of her at home and, sometimes, I think Lara forgot that she once had a daughter. Patrick never talked about her either, not that I could remember.
“Mom became different after Paula’s death. Worse after dad left. She was around but it felt like I was abandoned too so I know the feeling. No one deserves to feel that way.” He took my hand, his fingers slowly wrapping themselves around mine. He looked at me with his bright green eyes and I’d never seen him look that vulnerable. “Your father sent you to be with someone who still took good care of you and loved you in every way. I had to live with a mother who was a stranger to me until she met Chris. That day changed my life, Britney, not because I thought I’d got my mother back or that I had a new family, but because I met you.”
He touched my face gently with his free hand. “I think meeting you meant that I would never be alone again, nor abandoned because I was meant to meet you and maybe this is meant to be. Fate can be a funny thing after all.”
Chapter 9
Patrick
THE MORE TIME I SPENT with Britney, the more I found myself falling in love with her and I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad one. I knew that one of the reasons I agreed to do this for my mother was because I wanted to be with Britney in this way, I just didn’t think that it would head in this direction. I was aware of what I f
elt for Britney but I underestimated how strong it actually was which meant that the more I fell for her, the more screwed I was.
It didn’t help that I had no one to talk about this with because, if I told anyone, I would be screwed even more.
Britney was at Harvard. She’d decided to start her program early since she was already there. We’d been in Cambridge for almost three weeks already and I’d been doing work back at the apartment and had been asked to foresee the new branch that the company I worked for was building here. It was amazing how things just seemed to fall into place because had the company not chosen Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be the place where the new branch of the company would be, I would have been asked to return to New York sooner than I wanted to.
Britney was currently at Harvard. She has a class until after lunch but had promised me that we would still have lunch together if I was okay with that. Of course, I was. I loved spending time with her. Alex had teased me that we were in the honeymoon phase because this was all too new for the both of us. I’d never been in a serious relationship. The closest thing to one was the relationship I’d had with Kath but it wasn’t even serious. The only problem with what I had with Britney was that there wasn’t any label for us because we’d never discussed it.
A knock on the apartment door startled me and I got up, wondering if Britney had left her apartment key. But when I opened the door, my mother was waiting on the other side.
Lara Cunningham looked like the refined Upper East Sider that she was. Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder how she’d fallen in love with my father who was the kind of man she usually wouldn’t be caught dead with. “Mom?”
She smiled at me thinly and then kissed both of my cheeks. She entered the apartment and removed her sunglasses to look around. I could already see the distaste in her eyes over my living conditions. “Hello, son, it’s nice to see you again. I haven’t heard from you since that phone call 2 weeks ago.”
I hadn’t called her because I didn’t want to be reminded that this was a mission and not something, she gave me her blessing to pursue. Lara Cunningham had no idea that her son was in love with her step-daughter and she believed it was the other way around. She thought that Britney was in love with me, which I wasn’t entirely sure of. Maybe she just liked me because I was hot and she fantasized about me for too long and agreed to be with me or maybe she was like most girls in New York who wanted to be with me because I was Patrick Cunningham.
Or maybe she really was in love with me and I was in love with her and neither of us knew about it because we were too scared to put our feelings into words and settled on whatever we had at the moment.
Mom walked further into the room, looking around. “Your father still has such bad taste. The rustic style...it’s all him. He thinks it’s amazing but it’s the exact opposite.”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes as she cautiously sat on the couch like the couch was made out of disgusting material. It wasn’t that I hated how pretentious my mother was. I’d grown used to it. I’ve lived the kind of life she was basking in; I wasn’t a stranger to women like her. It was just, the majority of my life I thought that women in our society were all pretentious and uptight, bred to be prim and proper, but Britney was different. She didn’t just rise above her peers because of her beauty or because she was Christopher Baldwin’s daughter, she used her personality to rise above her last name which was something that other girls had never done.
“I kind of like it,” I commented, taking a seat on the chair across from her. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, mother?”
I remembered how her eyes had softened when I called her mother that night, she told me she was going to marry Chris, but now she wasn’t even fazed. “I was worried about why you hadn’t called. I thought that you were getting deeper into this mission than necessary and I needed to make an appearance to remind you of why you’re doing this in the first place.”
Mom tilted her head to the side as she assessed me like how she had assessed the apartment earlier. “Why haven’t you given me updates, Patrick?”
“I didn’t think that you would’ve needed updates. I thought we’d agreed that if I was going to be on-board with whatever scheme you have cooked up, I’m doing it on my own terms.” We never really had that agreement. But I had told her I was doing this my own way.
“What are your terms then, pray tell? We discussed that you were going to make her fall in love with you and I’m sure that she has if you’re still staying in the same apartment together. I assume you’re both still together because her scent lingers in your apartment.” Mom placed her hands perfectly poised on her lap as she looked at me. There was this strangeness around her like I was seeing her in a different light. “Have you brought up the topic of Stocks to her?”
I hadn’t even confessed my feelings to Britney, how could I find the courage to tell her that I wanted Stocks all to myself? “I will.”
Mom sighed and then stood up. “Patrick, you need to hurry. Chris has been reconsidering his early retirement lately and I don’t know why. He claims that it’s something about honing Britney to be the best, just as he has honed you and I’m afraid that as he trains his daughter, he might lean towards giving the entire company to her and not even giving you a part of it.”
She was bluffing, but even if she was, why would I care to whom Stocks went to? It was technically Britney’s birthright and my claim was simply because Chris treated me like a son. At this point, with how strong my feelings for Britney were, I didn’t care if Chris changed his mind and gave it to her. “I don’t care, mom.”
She stared at me and then I watched as her eyes narrowed into slits, the irritation evident in the way she looked at me. “What do you mean you don’t care?”
I stood up from my seat, brushing my hair away from my eyes as I faced my mother. “I don’t think this is a good idea. I’ve only entertained it because I did want Stocks for my own, mom. It’s the very company that I aspire to lead.”
“This is why you should stick with this plan...”
“But I’m not going to fool Britney into giving it to me just because you think she’s in love with me. I can’t...I can’t take advantage of her emotions like that.”
The expression on my mother’s face was unreadable as it was unrecognizable. At that moment, it was clear that she was a complete stranger to me. The fire burning in her green eyes did not exude the warmth that I had gotten used to over the past years, nor was it like the fire of betrayal that I’d seen in the years that had followed my father’s departure.
She took a step toward me and placed a hand on my neck. I could feel her nails dig into my skin, the anger in her eyes so clear that it was scary. “You’re going to stick to the plan, Patrick. You’re going to tell her that you could handle Stocks alone and better on your own, that since you’re both in a relationship, she’s simply going to serve as the trophy girlfriend or whatever you kids call it these days. And then once the paperwork is done, you’re going to terminate the relationship.”
“Mom, no...”
She tilted her head to the side and then smirked. “If you don’t want that, Christopher is coming here in Massachusetts for a state visit. I wonder how he’s going to react when I tell him that the reason his daughter started her program early was so that she could elope with some guy she’d just met, how the guy isn’t even a son of an Upper East Sider, with no company to back him up, and how he is gonna be Britney’s ruin.”
I wasn’t getting where she was heading with this. “Britney’s been dating so many guys...”
“That Chris has never been aware of. He announced that Britney and you will be inheriting Stocks, but how will the public react when they discover Britney is so reckless and naïve? This is going to ruin the name that Chris has built for his family; the legacy of Baldwin’s name will be stained. Chris values nothing more than his name; I don’t think he’ll react kindly to that idea. I think he’ll even disown her.”
/> “You’re not doing that, mom.”
She smirked at me victoriously. “It’s that or convincing Britney to hand you the entire company, Patrick. Tick-tock, our clock’s ticking.”
BRITNEY ARRIVED THIRTY minutes after my mother left which meant I had half an hour to digest what my mother had just told me. I knew she could play dirty but I didn’t think she would head in that direction when the opponent in the game happened to be her husband’s daughter. So many possibilities were running through my head as I thought of what my mother could be capable of, the next always worse than the last.
“Patrick?”
I was in the other bedroom, the one that I had ended up turning into an office when I’d lived here when I was studying for my Master’s. “In here!”
The door of the study room opened slowly and Britney poked her head inside. “Hey. Have you been here all day?”
I pursed my lips and slowly nodded my head but didn’t get up from the swivel chair. The computer was turned on but I wasn’t doing any work. Britney must’ve noticed how distant I was being. “Pat, is something wrong?”
I tried to flash her a reassuring smile but I think it came off as a grimace and I sighed. “Just some issues with work. It’s nothing really.”
Britney moved further into the room and then sat on my lap. She placed her hands on my face and then squished my lips together. “How’s the building going?”
I hadn’t gone on site earlier because of mom’s visit. I didn’t want to lie to her and tell her that everything was fine and dandy with the building when I had no clue if that was true. “I don’t know. I’ve been here all day.”