Love Triangle: Six Books of Torn Desire

by Willow Winters

  Christopher appears out of nowhere. “Come on, there’s a car waiting.”

  I’m too frantic to even ask a question, like where we’re going. He could say we’re driving into the depths of hell, and I’d probably still follow him, taking Mom by the hand, pulling us both into the cocoon of a darkened limo. The press see us as Christopher moves to step inside, running toward us with their microphones outstretched and video cameras hot on their heels as the door shuts. Then the limo eases forward, taking us far away.

  “Thank you,” I say, feeling both numb and exhilarated.

  Christopher glances out the back window, his expression grim. “Damn him,” he mutters. “He should have given you some warning at least.”

  Damn him. I cling to those two words like they’re a life preserver. Like when Christopher helped me break into the artist studio. We’re together, aren’t we? “You won’t help him, will you?”

  My mother runs a shaky hand through her hair. “I’m ruined. No one will have me after this. Half the town knows what happened by now. There’s probably a YouTube video.”

  I hate that she’s right. Daddy did more than make sure she couldn’t get his money. In that one public moment he made sure she would never marry well again. Everyone will say there must be something wrong with her, for Daddy to omit her this way. She’ll be the laughingstock of high society. Those rich husbands of hers, they didn’t only marry her body. They married her position in society. Her connections. The way she could host a dinner party with senators and billionaires. It doesn’t matter if I become a world-renowned artist, my mother will never get another society invitation again.

  The limo turns onto the highway and speeds up. I’m sitting next to my mother, and I reach across the supple leather to take her hand in mine. Across from us Christopher looks haggard. He stares out the tinted window where the city speeds by.

  I squeeze my mother’s hand. “It will be okay.”

  “How?” Her mouth forms the word, but no sound comes out.

  “Christopher will help us,” I say, the words like a tether. The red and white life preserver for me to hold on to when it’s too hard to swim. He’s always been there when I need him. Why would this time be any different? “He’s the executor, so he’s the one who decides what counts as being for me or for you. He’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

  God knows there’s enough money in that trust fund to take care of my mother twenty times over, in the most extravagant ways she can think up. I didn’t expect Daddy to leave me empty-handed, necessarily, but I also didn’t expect to get every terrible cent.

  The entire St. Claire fortune, minus the yacht.

  I look at Christopher, but he hasn’t moved. I might as well have turned him to granite, the same way I did to my father at the exhibit. I don’t feel like I’m cursed and full of rage. My dirty-blonde hair doesn’t slither and hiss, but the men around me are as cold and hard as stone.

  “You’ll help us, won’t you? It’s too cruel, what Daddy did. It’s wrong. If the money is mine, I can spend it however I want. Why shouldn’t Mom get some of it?”

  It won’t matter if none of the rich assholes who think they own the world will marry my mother, not if she’s already taken care of. It will hurt her to be shunned by her so-called friends, but at least she’ll be able to live comfortably.

  The strong profile and ebony hair does not move a single centimeter even as the limo exits the freeway and turns toward our hotel. Through the windshield I can see a small crowd gathered at the front door. The press. Not the hard-hitting journalism that exposed the corruption at my old school after my Medusa painting. These are the tabloid freelancers and gossip bloggers. We aren’t celebrities in the way that a musician or a model is, but everyone likes to see the rich brought low. They’ve come to gloat at my mother’s pain.

  “Christopher!”

  He speaks in a low voice to the driver, who turns before we reach the crowd. There’s already a uniformed cop waiting to direct us into the parking garage. An entrance for celebrities and politicians, I realize. Someone set this up ahead of time. A way into the building without having to run the gauntlet of paparazzi.

  Someone who knew we would need this.

  “You,” I whisper, my chest crushed by a thousand-pound weight.

  Christopher finally looks at me, and I can’t contain my gasp as I see the resignation in his eyes. “It’s his last request, Harper. The only thing he ever asked of me. How can I say no?”

  Chapter Twelve

  INHERITANCE

  It takes me forty-five minutes and a Valium to get my mother to relax in her bedroom, her lashes still damp from tears of anxiety and grief. Light batters my eyes as I step out of her bedroom and close the door gently behind me.

  “Have you always taken care of her like that?” Christopher asks from the large windows that frame the city, his hands behind his back, looking out.

  How dare he judge? He doesn’t know her, or he wouldn’t even be considering doing what Daddy asked him to do. And he doesn’t know me, if he thinks I would speak to him ever again. “I’m sorry that not everyone in the world can live up to your exacting standards. I suppose we should all be so heartless as to put money before family.”

  He glances back, his eyes flashing. “Is that what I’m doing?”

  If I were smart, I’d heed the warning in his voice, but he’s the one with the GPA and the plans to take over the world. I’m the troublemaker. “Aren’t you?”

  A hollow laugh. “Is that why you think I stopped kissing you that night at the studio? Because you’re my stepsister? Because I think of you like family?”

  The way he says family it might as well mean nuclear waste. “I mean, yeah. But now I think maybe it was something else.”

  Those black eyes that hold so many secrets, they look over my body from the top to the bottom with such slow, obvious hunger that it seems impossible I would not have seen it before. “You aren’t my sister, Harper St. Claire. And I have never, not once, thought of you that way.”

  My skin lights up under his stark perusal. “Then how do you think of me?”

  He stalks forward until my back hits the wall of the suite. “Like you’re the daughter of the only man who ever gave a damn about me.” His mouth is only two inches away from mine…an inch…and then I can feel the gentle caress of his breath against my lips. “You were completely off-limits, when he was alive—” A rough sound. “And even more so now that he’s gone and asked me to do this thing that will make you hate me.”

  “Then don’t do it,” I beg softly, and it’s almost a kiss, my lips moving near his.

  “You have no idea, Harper. No idea what you’re asking me.”

  “He was wrong to make that rule!”

  “Maybe so, but I don’t know what the hell happened between your mom and him. It’s not my place to judge whether he should have done it or not. It’s his money, and this is how he wants it spent.”

  “It’s my money,” I say, my voice made imperious with impotent rage.

  He huffs his amusement. “Spoken like a true St. Claire.”

  “Christopher, I don’t know if you think we’re only in this for billions of dollars. I don’t care about that. We have nothing. She has nothing. All she needs is enough to live off of. You can have the rest.”

  He steps back as if I slapped him. “You think I want your inheritance?”

  Something wavers inside me. Did I go too far? Christopher is going to let my mother starve because he wants to honor a request that should never have been made. That’s wrong. Not me standing up for her. “Everyone else in that room wanted it. And you were there.”

  It’s like watching ice form over a lake in a matter of seconds. The water had seemed deep and unnerving, but now he’s simply impenetrable. “The only reason I went to that damn reading is because the lawyer called me this morning and said I should come. And something in his voice told me it was going to be bad, so I had the car waiting for us and the hotel o
n standby.”

  My throat feels scratchy, like I’m near tears. “I didn’t thank you for that.”

  “I don’t want your thanks. I don’t want that fucking yacht, either. And I sure as hell don’t want a single cent from your inheritance.”

  “We’ve been living in a motel.” The words burst out of me, ugly and hushed so my mother doesn’t wake up. “Every day Mom takes one of her jewelry pieces to the pawn shop, where they give her a few cents for every dollar that it’s really worth. That’s how we pay the bill so we have a place to sleep that night.”

  My words crack the ice around him, at least enough so that I see the old Christopher looking back at me, the one who would have dived into the ocean to save me. “Hell.”

  “Daddy paid for my tuition and my private dorm room directly, but that’s it. If I had asked for anything more, he would have had his investigators look into us again.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”

  The words spill from me, more careless with our secrets than I’ve ever been. No, not careless. Trusting him to do what’s right. “When I was nine, Mom was between husbands. We had this shitty apartment on the outskirts of LA and ate ramen noodles every night. It sucked, but I didn’t really care. But I cared when Mom said we couldn’t afford to get more paint, so I called Daddy.” Tears sting my eyes, and it’s such a twisted feeling to mourn him right now, to love him and hate him at the same time. “He came down on us like freaking Zeus from Mount Olympus. He took me to New York City until she had enough money to come get me, and that was only when she had found this asshole director who wanted her as his side piece. She did that for me, so that I could come back.”

  Christopher stares at me as if testing the words, weighing them the way he must weigh every sentence spoken in his crazy-smart Emerson business classes, the way he must gauge everything around him with that stone-cold confidence. And he must see in me the desperate truth, because he stalks back to the window and curses under his breath.

  He’s not even facing me, but I’m utterly and completely exposed. I could strip naked in this suite and still not be as naked as I feel right now. This is something I don’t talk about with anyone, least of all with a man who’s saved me twice. It’s something of a pattern already, and that should be enough for me to make it stop. I can’t depend on anyone, even him.

  But I can’t let my mother go back to arguing with the landlord for a few extra days. Not when I’m living like a princess at Smith College in the dorm Daddy paid extra to get. I can’t let her whore herself to some asshole with money when I’m the heiress to a freaking fortune.

  If I’ve convinced Christopher, the shame I’m feeling would have been worth it.

  Please let it be enough.

  He faces me, and he’s so fully Christopher, so much the person standing beside me with his forearms on the railing that I breathe a sigh of relief. This man, I know him. He’s the one I can count on to catch me when I’m falling.

  “Harper,” he says. My throat squeezes. He sounds like he’s facing a firing squad. “Maybe it’s wrong to use this against you, but you told me about that husband, the one who owned the job website. The one who climbed into your bed. And that makes me think your dad was right.”

  “No,” I whisper, because this isn’t going to end the way I hoped.

  “He knew, okay? Your father knew that I’m a man of my word. He knew how much that meant to me… and why it means so much to me.”

  “Why?” I whisper, even though I know he isn’t going to tell me. This is a man who hoards secrets the way a dragon keeps gold and jewels in his lair.

  I would rather have no money than have a trust fund I can’t use to support my mother… which Daddy probably knew, too. It was a final fuck you to the woman he could never get over. I accepted that weakness from Daddy a long time ago, but having him use Christopher to do it makes my stomach turn over.

  I would be pissed, my friend had said once. Like he’s trying to control you with money, even though he has so much. And for the first time I do feel pissed.

  “He appointed me as the executor, and not the hundred other men he knows could have done it. Because he knew I would have to do it, if he asked me. And that I would never take a single cent out of the damn trust fund for myself or anyone else.”

  “Isn’t there something more important than keeping your word? Isn’t there doing what’s right?”

  A dark laugh. “Not to me.”

  “Don’t do this.”

  He’s made of stone again, any semblance of vulnerability turned hard. “It’s already done, Harper. It was done before today. Before the art studio. It was done when your father sat down and wrote the will, knowing exactly what would happen.”

  “You’re giving him all the power.” All the power to ruin whatever was between us. That kiss standing beneath Medusa’s wrathful gaze. Maybe we had been doomed from the beginning.

  “It’s not his choice anymore, Harper. Not even yours. It’s mine. And I’m going to do this for you, because he asked me to, and because it’s the only way I can protect you, even from yourself. You’ll give away every cent if you think it will help someone.”

  “Protect me? This isn’t the Massachusetts Bay! I’m not sitting on the damn rail.”

  “You told me to leave you alone then, too. And I’ll never regret staying on deck so that I could dive in after you. I’ll do it again if I have to.”

  What would it take for this man to see me as a woman? As someone that can make her own decisions instead of as a maiden who needs saving. But I don’t think it’s even about me or what I need. He already told me, didn’t he? It’s his choice, and he would rather be a white knight whether it helps me or not.

  “Christopher,” I say, my voice low and desperate. “That kiss.”

  His black eyes sharpen. “What about it?”

  “It means something to me.” Even if I have to slash my skin to pieces. That’s how much Christopher is worth to me. It’s more than a girlish crush, the way I feel about him. The feelings that are wavering like a drop of water on a petal, about to slide away.

  “I told you it was a mistake.”

  I swallow hard. “I think you’re lying. I think it meant something to you, too.”

  His eyes are more opaque than ever, obsidian and shining. He twists his mouth into a look that’s worse than dislike—into pity. “You’re young, but I didn’t think you were stupid. A kiss doesn’t mean anything.”

  My father’s death should have been enough to break me, but somehow I was whole. Until now, when I’m in a million pieces at Christopher Bardot’s feet. “No.”

  “I felt bad for you, to be honest. That’s why I wrote you back.”

  “You’re lying,” I say, hating the tears in my eyes.

  “You weren’t a sister to me.” His words are cold, his eyes unfeeling. There’s no doubt he means those words. “You meant nothing to me. Just a poor little rich girl, all along.”

  Betrayal knots itself in my stomach, so tight and so deep I’m not sure I’ll ever be free of it. “Then why don’t you walk away, if I mean so little? Let me manage the trust fund, and you never have to talk to me again.”

  “Obligation. This is something I have to do out of respect for your father.”

  Not out of respect for me. Never that.

  Both men and money have a way of disappearing when you need them most. It’s something I learned early, but clearly I needed to learn it again. Neither my stepbrother nor the inheritance were anything I could count on.

  Neither of them were anything I could trust.

  SURVIVAL OF THE RICHEST

  Chapter One

  BUSINESS PARTNER

  The paper in my hand has been crushed in my fist and smoothed out with shaking hands so many times the ink has almost faded. Almost, but I have the words memorized anyway.

  “Where is he?” I ask the pretty receptionist without introducing myself. It must be obvious who I am, unless Christopher Bardot l
ikes to torment women all over the country. He might have given her a heads-up; Like, “by the way, I have a stepsister who hates my guts.” Maybe they laugh about it before she gives him a blow job from beneath his desk.

  That seems like exactly the kind of thing he would do.

  “He’s in a meeting,” she says, clearly planning to block me. But her eyes give her away, her gaze darting to the frosted-glass doors to her right.

  “Don’t bother buzzing me in,” I tell her, already heading in that direction.

  When I push open the door, I’m confronted by a large conference room with dark wood paneling and leather chairs. There’s only one man inside.

  And it’s not him.

  Where Christopher’s hair is dark, this man’s is a deep gold, as if it’s been turned that way from hours spent in the sun. Instead of eyes black like obsidian, this man has blue eyes that look as bright as the sky on a hot summer day.

  In so many ways they’re opposite, but there’s something about him that’s similar. The strength inherent in their bodies. The hunger for more than what he has. I recognize an ambitious man the way a gazelle lifts her head and senses a tiger nearby.

  This man takes his time examining my body. I shiver a little in the cool office air, goose bumps on my skin. It’s only the air-conditioning that makes my nipples turn hard beneath the cotton T-shirt, at least I think so, but it’s embarrassing either way.

  “May I help you?” he says, and in those four words I hear a deep Southern drawl. While his eyes express acute interest, his tone is considerably more reserved.

  “I’m looking for Christopher Bardot.” My voice comes out strong, which is impressive when you consider the carnal appetite in this man’s eyes would make a siren blush. If I weren’t riding high on righteous anger I’d probably stammer and stumble like every other female of the species must do when faced with a man as clearly alpha as this one. Some evolutionary instinct grabs hold of my ovaries and says, this man will hunt and protect and fuck.