Cruel Legacy

by K. A. Linde

  “Because you left me!” he said, throwing his arms out.

  “Yes, I did. And it was the right thing to do after the bullshit you pulled on me, Penn. We could go around and around in circles about all of this if you wanted. But the fact is that the crew fucks everything up between us. And…and I don’t want that.” I huffed out a breath as the words…the truth escaped me. I wanted this. I wanted Penn.

  Penn stepped around his desk and let down his defenses. “I don’t want that either. I guess I’m still mad that you were with Lewis. Just like you’re still mad about the bet. We’re not over it. And I shouldn’t be surprised. It was fucked up on all accounts.”

  “It terrifies me to think that you went to see them. I don’t know what that could mean. Or why you’d hide it from me.”

  Penn threaded our fingers together. “I shouldn’t have hidden it. And nothing happened. Except a whole lot of posturing between me and Lewis, Katherine sore from kinky sex with Camden, and Rowe getting a boyfriend, who you’ll meet tomorrow.”

  I blinked. “I did not need that image of Katherine and Camden.”

  “Tell me about it. That was all of us.”

  “And Rowe has a boyfriend?”

  “Yeah, he told us that he’s bisexual. Though we’d always guessed. We had just been waiting for him to come to us. Which I honestly never thought would happen, considering it’s Rowe.”

  “For sure.” I shook my head to clear all my loose thoughts. “I hate that I jumped to conclusions about all of this. I don’t want this to keep happening.”

  “We both have issues with trust, Natalie. It’s not going to go away overnight. We have to try to keep the past where it belongs.”

  I leaned forward into his chest, and he wrapped his arms around me, cocooning me in his warm embrace. I should have come straight to him. It felt as if this argument had been brewing for weeks. Longer even. Maybe it had been brewing all along.

  He pressed a kiss into my hair. “I don’t want to do anything to hurt you.”

  “I know,” I whispered. “I know.”

  His hands slipped under my jacket, sliding the material over my shoulders and then carelessly tossing it onto the chair. He tilted my head up until I was looking at him. “I won’t hurt you.”

  I nodded with a hard swallow at the depth of affection I saw in his gaze.

  “This isn’t like before. I’m not leaving you. I’m not lying about our relationship. This is just me. I’m not perfect. I’m still working on me. And I’ll probably fuck it up again, Nat, but I’m willing to try with you. For you.”

  I stood on my toes and pressed a firm kiss to his lips. “I might continue to jump to conclusions,” I said against his mouth. “I’ve been hurt a lot, and it scares me. This scares me.”

  “As long as we go through this together, then we’ll be fine.” Penn slipped his hands down my arms, and I winced as he ran across the upper arm that Lewis had grabbed earlier. Penn glanced down at my arm with a crinkle in his brow. Then he got a look at my arm, and his concern flipped on a switch. “Holy fuck! Did he do this to you?”

  My eyes followed where he was holding my arm out. And there, in a perfect arc on my upper arm, was a growing, mottled bruise.

  “Oh my god,” I whispered. “I knew it’d hurt when he grabbed me. I didn’t realize that I’d bruised.”

  Penn released my arm, and his hands balled into tight fists. His chest heaved as if he were fighting with himself from throwing that fist right into the wall since Lewis wasn’t here to be the punching bag.

  “You have to file a restraining order,” he got out through gritted teeth.

  “What? No way.”

  “Natalie, you have a bruise on your arm from him. What if you see him again and I’m not there? This is serious.”

  “I can’t,” I whispered, staring down at the bruise.

  “Look, you can use my attorney. Even just to get a temporary one to show him that you’re serious. We can assess whether you need a permanent one after we see how he reacts to a temporary order.”

  My eyes bulged. “Penn,” I said, fear creeping into my voice.

  “Please,” he said. I could see he was trying to even out his breath. To try to be calm and rational in this moment. “Please, do this, Natalie. Because if he thinks he can get to you, he will.”

  I paused as his words hit me. He was right. I’d been reckless, thinking that I could deal with Lewis’s stalking alone. He’d proven that he wasn’t capable of letting me go, of not getting his way. And I didn’t want to wait to see if something else would happen.

  “Okay,” I said softly. “Okay. I’ll talk to a lawyer.”

  “Thank you,” he said, pressing his lips hard against mine. “Thank you for letting me take care of you. We’ll go in the morning.”

  I nodded, my throat tight. I couldn’t even believe this was happening to me. “In the meantime, I…think I’m going to need to figure out how to cover this for tomorrow night.”

  “Ah, the gala. Are you sure you still want to go?”

  “I have to go. I already have the dress.”

  He cracked a smile. “What is this world doing to you?”

  “Brought me you,” I said, kissing him again. “Can’t be all bad.”

  “Definitely not.” He whirled me around so that my ass rested against his desk.

  “My, Professor, are you having inappropriate thoughts?” I teased.

  He grinned. “My sexy girlfriend is in my office after-hours. What do you think?”

  “Girlfriend?” I raised my eyebrows.

  His hand went to the waist of my cigarette pants and slowly undid them. “What would you call yourself?” He hooked his thumbs in them, tugging them over my hips. “Partner? Would you prefer I stick to something more gender neutral?” He bent down and removed my aching feet from each of my heels and then slid my pants and thong off of my body. “I can use pet names if you like. Babe, baby, sweetheart, boo…bae?”

  I laughed. “Not bae. Definitely not.”

  “But you don’t object to the rest? Just girlfriend?” His pants slipped down his hips.

  “Maybe…maybe girlfriend would work,” I said tentatively. I’d been trying and failing to keep him at a distance. What other word really was there? I was very obviously his girlfriend.

  Penn reached behind me and slid all his books and papers and pens off of the desk. Then he hoisted me up, laying me back on his now-empty desk. My eyes widened as he hovered over me.

  “That’s what I like to hear,” he said, grabbing my legs and tugging me toward him. He leaned forward, pressing a fierce kiss onto my lips. “You’re my girlfriend. Mine,” he growled, palming his cock in his hand and spreading my legs further apart.

  “Yes,” I groaned. “Yes.”

  He entered me in one clean stroke, and my body rocked backward on the desk. I reached behind me and gripped the other side for leverage as Penn straightened to his full height. Then he seized my thighs and thrust deep into me again. And again.

  My eyes rolled back as he took me right there on his desk. My…my boyfriend. Christ, he was my boyfriend.

  It was almost beyond belief after all that we’d gone through. That either of us could get past what we’d endured to get to this moment.

  That my heart was mended enough to fall so hard again.

  So utterly and helplessly for this man. This wonderful, complicated, messed up genius of a man. I was his, and he was mine. And we’d set fire to the world. Burning up so completely that we were starting anew.

  Chapter 18

  Natalie

  I met with Penn’s attorney the next morning. She was young and sympathetic to my concerns. I’d been expecting some stodgy, old man who thought that one bruise wasn’t enough to get a restraining order. Or order of protection, as the lawyer called it.

  But I confessed everything that had happened. Showed her the proof of his stalking and the file that he’d kept on me. We’d taken pictures of the bruise on my arm, and she said I defini
tely had a case. I didn’t know if that made me feel better or worse.

  What it really made me feel was furious. Like I was some statistic. Poor girl in a domestic violence situation. Afraid of some man because he was bigger and had more power than me. It made me want to look deeper into his background to find some way to make him hurt like I was. To expose him for the entitled dick he was. Not to stop at a restraining order that a judge might not even give me permanently if Lewis put the weight of his name behind it.

  “Are you finished in there? We should get going,” Penn called from the living room.

  I stared down at my arm. No bruise. The makeup artist I’d hired for the event had done such a perfect job that I couldn’t even see a hint of it. It made me happy and irrationally angry.

  “Yes,” I said, stepping out of his bathroom in the low-cut lilac dress Elizabeth had sent over this morning. It had a soft, almost-water-like texture to it with an empire waist and a high slit to reveal the nude Jimmy Choos I’d paired with it. My silver hair was pulled to one side in loose waves that draped over one of the skinny straps. “What do you think?”

  “I think it needs one more thing,” Penn said.

  He pulled out a small red Cartier box. My eyes widened in shock.

  “Um…what’s that?”

  “A surprise,” he said coyly.

  He stepped up to me and then cracked the box. My heart skyrocketed. Terror hitting me that he might propose and another stranger feeling…like I might want that one day.

  Settled into the red cushion was a pair of circular-cut drop diamond earrings. They were the most perfectly clear diamonds I had ever seen in my life. A soft gasp escaped me.

  “Penn, I can’t.”

  He plucked the earrings out of the case. “You absolutely can. They go with your dress.”

  “They go with everything,” I blurted out.

  He laughed as he passed them to me. “Exactly.”

  I gingerly took them in my hands as if they were made of glass and might shatter. I turned to the mirror in his living room and exchanged the cheap earrings I’d been wearing with actual, a hundred percent real Cartier diamonds. My hands shook as I finished clasping them, and then I admired them as they shone brightly in the mirror.

  “They are beautiful,” I breathed. “Thank you.”

  He took my hand, as he had that first time we met, and kissed it. Somehow, he still made me flush. “Now we’re ready to go.”

  Penn had acquired a limo for the night to take us to the gala, which was being held at Cipriani Wall Street. The building had been built to look like Greek revival architecture with beautiful columns and intricate moldings. After we stood for pictures with the press and passed a slew of A-list celebrities and models, which I barely kept my cool with, we entered the event. Tables took up much of the space in the dimly lit room, and a stage was against one wall to honor some of the greatest fashion icons of our time.

  We were seated with people that neither of us really knew and were relieved when the ceremony was over so that we could mingle. I’d promised to find Jane and Harmony, but I hadn’t found them in the crowd. And after the long ceremony, I needed another drink.

  Penn and I moved to the bar. As we waited in line for drinks, I pulled out my phone to text Harmony and find out where she was. Penn had his own phone out, and then he glanced up at me, then down at his phone, and then back.

  “What?” I asked, putting my phone back into the pocket of my dress. Seriously, thank god for dresses with pockets!

  “Why am I getting a suggestion to like your page? Since when did you set up an Influencer page?”

  “Oh yeah, yesterday. Harmony set it up. Crap, I was supposed to update it with more pictures. With everything that went down, I forgot.”

  Penn clicked on my page, and his eyes bugged. “How do you have fifteen thousand connections? Are you sure you set this up yesterday?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  He thrust the phone at me, and I stared down at my profile in shock.

  “Oh my god,” I said, jittery with excitement. “That’s insane, right?”

  “I don’t even know how that’s possible.”

  I clicked through some of the pictures and scrolled through some comments. “It looks like Harmony tagged me in a picture, and Elizabeth recommended me to her followers. Because I didn’t do anything else.”

  Penn shook his head. “I didn’t even know you wanted to do that.”

  “Harmony says I should curate my own content instead of relying on the newspapers and tabloids to do it for me.”

  Penn wrinkled his nose. “You don’t want to be like Harmony.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But this is kind of fun.”

  He shrugged indifferently. “All right. If you enjoy it.”

  “I should go find her and ask her about this. I didn’t expect it to blow up like this literally overnight.”

  He pointed toward the corner of the room. “I saw where she was sitting. She’s over there. I’ll wait if you want to go hang out.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “You can handle yourself in a crowd just fine. We already worked on that.”

  “And what are we working on next?” I asked, standing on my toes to give him a quick kiss.

  “Guess you’ll have to wait and see.”

  I laughed. “Well, boyfriend, I will be right over there. Come find me with our drinks.”

  “All right, girlfriend, I will find you,” he said, flashing a dimple.

  His smile was contagious as I slipped out of his grip and headed toward Harmony. I pulled out my phone to check for myself that my Crew page had actually exploded and was just as shocked to see it on my phone as on Penn’s.

  “Natalie!” Harmony said, jumping out of her seat and pulling me into a hug. “That dress is stunning. I am so mad at my mom for not giving it to me.”

  Harmony was in a showstopping yellow number that looked fantastic with her blonde hair.

  “Yours is incredible. I couldn’t even imagine you in anything else.”

  “Aww, thanks, girl!”

  “Also, check this out.” I showed her that my account had exploded.

  “Oh, fifteen-K! So good for a day. Let’s try to get you to fifty by this weekend. Here, take a selfie with me.” She pulled her phone out and snapped a picture of us. “I’ll post it on my Crew page and tell everyone to share the love with you.”

  “You’re ridiculous. Thank you!”

  Harmony was busy Photoshopping the image, running it through a filter, and then adding some special tags at the bottom for maximum exposure when a group of girls walked up and gasped over our dresses.

  Harmony waved her hand at them. “Don’t even. This thing? It’s nothing compared to yours, Fiona.”

  “Oh, no way, Harm,” Fiona said. She brushed her sheet of light-brown hair off of her soft, pale shoulder. “Yours is way cuter. Don’t you think so, Isabel?”

  “Definitely,” Isabel agreed instantly. “Sloane was just talking about how no one could wear canary like you, Harm.”

  “I wish I could pull it off,” Sloane said with a grin.

  “You are too sweet,” Harmony said with a big smile. “You all know Natalie, right?”

  “Oh, Natalie,” Fiona said, “we’ve heard so much about you. You were front row for the Cunningham show!”

  “I was,” I said. “Elizabeth was so generous to offer me the spot.”

  “And who are you wearing?” Isabel asked, fingering the expensive fabric.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Harmony asked.

  “Cunningham, clearly, Isabel,” Fiona said with an eye roll.

  “Ohh,” Sloane said. “That explains so much.”

  “What does it explain?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Fiona said.

  “You look so good in that lilac. With that silver hair,” Isabel continued. “Maybe I should dye my hair.” She fingered her nearly black tresses.

  “That’s why Katherine is in s
ome off-the-rack piece,” Sloane said as if her friends were daft. “Doesn’t she normally wear Elizabeth Cunningham?”

  “She does,” Harmony said with a sly smile.

  “I can’t believe she would show up in that dress,” Fiona said, giving in to their catty behavior.

  “I mean, just look at her,” Isabel said with a shake of her head, gesturing to Katherine standing nearby. “It’s so sad.”

  My eyes found Katherine in a stunning black dress that hugged her curves. I never would have been able to tell that she was in a dress off the rack if I hadn’t just tried on that same dress a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t even know that was supposed to be insulting, except the girls kept going on and on about how humiliating it was. That marrying a Percy was supposed to help her taste and not degrade it.

  To me, she looked like the same old Katherine. Just as beautiful. Just as much a snake. And as Camden approached, he skimmed her backside. She shuddered and stepped out of his touch. The thought of them together made me kind of sick. I swiftly looked away.

  “It’s good to see her knocked down a peg,” Harmony said.

  “I wouldn’t mind watching her fall in the mud,” Fiona said viciously.

  Isabel and Sloane snickered, clearly in agreement.

  And though I was the reason that this had happened, it made my stomach twist at the way they were talking about her. When I’d spoken with Elizabeth after the charity event, she’d agreed to give me the front row ticket that belonged to Katherine and a dress she’d held in reserve for her as well. I was literally walking in her shoes this weekend. And it felt good to see her stumble, to see her socialite status begin to fracture. It was what I’d wanted after all.

  I’d wanted revenge for what she’d done. I’d wanted to take the thing that she cared about. And I had. Or at least, it had begun.

  It was another thing entirely to hear people talking about Katherine so quickly after bringing me into their circle. Like vultures ready to eat away at carrion. And I was the fresh new meat.

  I saw then how sad and lonely it must have been for Katherine on her pedestal. She’d put herself there. And everyone had hoped for her to fall. I was just the only one who had succeeded in making her stumble.