Mr. Smith, that’s the name of the lawyer. A plain name for a rather plain man. He looks like he would follow the letter of the law down any path it would take him. Quite the rule follower, and it makes sense that Daddy would have used him for this purpose. Lord knows there are a large group of people who would love to contest even the smallest loophole. It’s standing room only, the wood door propped open to let wives seven and eight peek their heads in from the hallway.
It’s actually as much of a circus as I feared, with my mother and me being granted the dubious honor of the two chairs in front of the desk. It also means everyone can watch us.
Christopher is here, standing in the corner, looking as if he’d like to be anywhere but here—which must be a lie, because he didn’t have to come. Unless he wants the fortune.
Acid burns my throat. So, he’s as money hungry as everyone in this room. I wish I didn’t know that about him. It would have been better not to come, if only to avoid facing that fact.
That Christopher wants Daddy’s fortune.
“Thank you for gathering today,” Mr. Smith says in a voice dry as leaves in the fall. “While many wills are handled via mail, this is a rather unusual case. I have asked any interested parties to attend so that we may all have closure and put an end to the numerous inquiries to the firm.”
In other words the phone must be ringing off the hook with people wanting some of Daddy’s money. My stomach feels inside out. Did he know what kind of mess he would leave behind? He must have thought about it when he wrote whatever’s on that piece of paper the lawyer’s holding. Did he think of how it would feel to be surrounded by so many ex-wives and stepsiblings, all of whom are essentially strangers?
Did he know that Mom would be holding her head high, certain he would stand by her in the end? I sure as hell hope so. We’re about to find out in the most public way.
A violent, hacking clearing of the throat. And then Mr. Smith begins to read. “If you’re reading this, that means I’m finally at peace. And though I’ll miss a good many things on this earth, one of them won’t be the exorbitant amount of money I’ve paid lawyers over the years.”
There’s a nervous laugh from the side that’s abruptly silenced.
In the same monotone Mr. Smith continues, “To the son that I never had, Christopher Bardot, I bequeath Liquid Asset as well as a small trust with which to care for her. I wish we could have sailed together more than once.”
I’m jolted out of my grief-stricken stupor at the sound of his name. A ripple of excitement runs through the room. Christopher isn’t his biological child, which means there’s hope for everyone else in this room.
“As for the rest of my assets, both liquid and otherwise,” Mr. Smith reads, “I bequeath them in entirety to my daughter, Harper St. Claire.”
There’s a gasp in the room, and I’m painfully aware of the looks of pure venom being shot in my direction. All I can do is stare straight ahead, shocked at hearing my father’s final words, even if spoken in a voice so unlike his own. It’s strange that hollowness can feel so solid, a physical sensation that threatens to bend me at the waist. Daddy, come back.
Nothing is so cold and so calculating as money in a void where love and hope had been. I don’t want his billions of dollars, or however much his fortune amounts to. I never did. If there’s one upside in all of this, it’s that Mom will finally be able to relax. A small comfort.
“I have a stipulation for Harper, who is still young and impressionable as I write this. The money will be placed into a trust, which will only transfer to her when she turns twenty-five.”
A heavy hum of conversation pierces my haze. That’s seven years away. Seven years before I can return to Smith College. Seven years before my mother can stop marrying whoever will have her.
“Of course I don’t want to cause undue burden to her, so she may access money as needed for her education and living situation. But only for her. No one else may use the money, including my ex-wife.”
“No,” I say, my voice rusty. “Stop.”
He can’t do this to her, not in front of all these people. How can he humiliate her this way? He must have known. God, he must have known.
Mr. Smith gives me a pitying look before reading on. “To that end I name Christopher Bardot as the executor of the trust. I know that he will make sure my wishes are honored and that my only daughter is well cared for in my absence.”
The paper has barely brushed the gleaming wooden surface of the desk when the room erupts into chaos. There are demands to confirm the validity of the will, insistence that they will contest it. When I bring myself to look sideways, I see my mother has turned to stone—she’s frozen in place, a look of polite acceptance on her face.
It’s too horrible.
I grab her hand and drag her from the room, pushing through people I don’t even recognize in my quest to reach the wide marble hallway. How are we even going to find a taxi in this mess? We’ll be flagged down, caught on camera. This is what rich people have bodyguards for, but we’re not rich regardless of what just happened in that lawyer’s office. We have nothing, maybe not even a way to pay the hotel bill. I spin in the hallway, useless. There’s nowhere to run.
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?”
12
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 on 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 Ch
ristopher, 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.”
Naked Love Page 24