“Thanks,” he says, touched.
“I just thought you should know that.”
He nods. “It’s because of you.”
I blink. I meet his eyes.
His hand in mine, he says, “I don’t know if you’re right and I haven’t become that person. But I was before I met you again. Your selflessness ruins me.” He smiles a little. “It’s hard to be as jaded and angry when you’re around.”
I say nothing because in the way I counterbalance his ego, he counters my self-sacrifice.
“I found that out the hard way,” he says.
“How?”
“After you left, I broke up with Samantha.”
“You did?”
He nods. “And I realized I was only with her for one reason.”
“What’s that?
“I don’t like the way I see myself. Sam was bad for me, no doubt, but at least she admired me and what I represented. At least she wanted me. At least she saw me as powerful and strong. And when she was gone, I only had my own eyes. I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror. Who I too easily become, left to my own devices.”
Parker squeezes my hands. I know he’s thinking of our short time together, and the difference in the way he must have seen himself then, through my eyes.
“I’m better when I’m with you.”
He turns to go, but he can’t turn fully because he’s stuck, his hand clasped by a naive little girl whose heart is foolishly breaking.
“I’m better when I’m with you, too,” I say.
He won’t lean in to kiss me. I’ve scared him too badly.
So I take the lead and kiss him first.
ONE YEAR LATER
PARKER
I’M PARKER FUCKING ALTMAN. I can buy and sell people. I’m the meanest, most selfish, most cutthroat son of a bitch in the world. I desire my own destruction. I’m worthless. I’m shameless. I’m abhorrent and wrong and greedy.
I’m thinking this as I watch my beautiful wife sip wine on the patio, near sunset, as our new children’s hospital takes shape in the distance.
I approach from the rear. My hand drags through her long, dark-brown hair, mussing it. She looks up at me with a fake scowl, her exotic eyebrows bunching above her soft eyes. Then she takes my hand and pats it, pulls me close, and gives me a kiss.
“Surveying the empire, I see.”
She nods. She used to bristle at jokes like that, but she’s finally come to realize that’s all they are. Jokes don’t change what we’ve done with her foundation, or our responsible business practices. The irony is that, really, little has changed in the way I allocate funds. Angela’s foundation now gets the lion’s share of my donations, but that money always had to go somewhere. WinFinity always did business responsibly. I learned those lessons, interestingly, from Duncan. He’s an asshole and my best friend, but his family climbed to the top because it understood that good business is always long-term. And I knew from my father that treating people like shit felt awful. Hardly a genius revelation, but it definitely made an impression.
We’ve always believed in win-win. Angela helped me to see the good in what I’d already done. She helped me to be able to look in the mirror and know I was still worth something, regardless of my past.
“Coming along nicely,” she says.
I sit in the chair beside hers. Then I say what I came out here to say.
“I heard from Dad.”
“Just him?”
I nod. Breaking from her mother has been hard for Angela, but it’s for the best. Maria and Bill are still married, but Bill got over himself enough to attend our wedding. Maria refused. Ours was a Hellbound union, she apparently said, for more reason than one. Angela kept the rent secret for as long as we could manage and the one about our relationship for just as long. But the press eventually broke the story and ratted us out. Interestingly, no one seemed to care that we’re technically steps. It’s been mentioned, but in a quirky, almost whimsical way — as if we’re crazy folks doing fun-loving, eccentric, billionaire couple things. Turns out that being family on paper only mattered to Maria.
“Does he want money?”
I shake my head. “Interestingly, no. I can’t decide if he’s playing a really, really long con or if he’s really starting to get it.”
“My mom doesn’t get it.”
I reach out and squeeze her hand. “Your mom thinks the Jews are plotting the world’s downfall. Our patronage of them is just one of many things she doesn’t get.”
“Patronage. Is that what it is?”
I take a sip of Angela’s drink. She pretends to slap my hand away. “Maybe. Or charity. Dad is the perfect amount of proud. He’ll let me keep paying their rent and expenses, without being greedy enough to ruin it by wanting … I don’t know … a Bentley or something.”
“I can see your dad in a Bentley,” Angela says, nodding.
“He’d just keep swearing at it. Telling the Bentley it’s worthless and will amount to nothing.”
She laughs a little, smiling proudly. I’d never have believed there’d be a day when I’d be able to joke about the way my dad used to talk to me, but Angela’s given me the strength to laugh about much of what I see in the rearview.
“So,” she says, “what’s next for this absurd family of ours?”
I look at Angela’s growing belly, where the next generation slumbers, then out across the city itself. My domain. My empire. Our empire.
“Today Los Angeles … ” I begin.
“ … tomorrow, the world,” Angela finishes.
I slouch down, and together we watch the sun slowly set with held hands, dreaming of all our tomorrows together.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
SO … I WROTE A BILLIONAIRE story.
And I wrote a stepbrother story.
But … oh, wait … I wrote a “STEPBROTHER BILLIONAIRE” story.
Now that’s all well and good if this is the first book of mine you’ve read — and even better if you happened on this book before seeing any of the other “billionaire” or “stepbrother” books out there and thinking I’m just incredibly original. But that’s not the truth at all, and I made a specific reminder to write this little author’s note because my readers know me for my straight-talk, no-bullshit attitude. And, frankly, I couldn’t look in the mirror tomorrow if I didn’t explain myself today.
Because, you see, there was this book a while ago (you may have heard of it) called 50 Shades of Grey. I know 50 Shades didn’t invent amazing new things that nobody had done before, but it did evoke a ton of new reader interest in two things:
1. BDSM and
2. Hot rich dudes who sweep ordinary girls away with intoxicating lives filled with all sorts of expensive shit.
Somehow — because every movement needs a name — the second part of that became simply known as “billionaire” erotica — or, if we’re kidding ourselves, “billionaire romance.” And there were all these billionaire stories all of a sudden, some well-written and many cliché-filled crap sacks all over the marketplace, selling remarkably well.
At some point (because who doesn’t like a good taboo), stepbrother stories started to explode as well, giving an incestuous twist to the age-old concept of forbidden love. (Apparently, we girls like forbidden fruit more because stepsister stories are relatively rare.) I think I noticed this second trend around the time Penelope Ward’s Stepbrother Dearest was slapping the Amazon best seller charts around and forcing them to hand over their lunch money.
I write all kinds of stuff and enjoy it all, so decided I should write a stepbrother story if for no other reason than to take advantage of all those people out there searching for stepbrother books. But I flinched at the last minute and couldn’t put my name on such an obvious bandwagon jumper, so (with a little help from my friends) I twisted it and went for the satire angle.
My Stepbrother the Groom (a romantic comedy) was born.
But just as I’d watched Stepbrother Dearest climb the charts, I then
saw Colleen Masters name her book in the ballsiest, most in-your-face way I’d seen since Samuel L. Jackson did Snakes On a Plane. I wasn’t there when Colleen named her book, but I think it went something like this:
Stepbrother books are popular.
Billionaire books are popular.
FUCK IT! This one shall be STEPBROTHER BILLIONAIRE!
That must have worked out because then a new subfetish formed: stepbrother billionaire books, wherein the protagonist wasn’t just the lead girl’s stepbrother … but was a motherfucking billionaire, too.
And I thought, “What kind of an asshole author whores her art out in such an obvious way? In such an unreasonable, unrealistic, insulting, on-the-nose way? What kind of twit would ever write a book about a stepbrother billionaire?”
You can probably see where I’m going.
But there’s something I’d like to say in my defense. And after I say it, if you’d still like to call me a sellout, you have my blessing.
See, my publishing company, above the Lexi Maxxwell imprint, is called Sterling & Stone. Its principles are three guys: Sean Platt, David Wright, and Johnny B. Truant. (I’ve coauthored books with all of them, BTW.) And so I’m not just over here, in Lexi Land, alone and in a vacuum. I’m actually comparing myself to the crazy crap these guys do all the time because we work together.
Sean and Johnny have balls the size of Mars. Once they decided to let the world watch them write a book live, from scratch, from no idea to polished draft, in thirty days. Another time, they wanted to have a book cover made by an artist they liked, but the artist was retiring and only had premade covers for sale. So they took one of the prefab covers the guy already had and invented an incredibly complex 150,000-word literary mindbender to go with it. And those are just two ridiculous, ballsy authorship stories out of dozens.
Watching those two take crazy writing challenges and spin them into gold made me question my gut reaction to my stepbrother billionaire idea.
Because, see, I was only selling out if I wrote a shitty stepbrother billionaire story.
I was only selling out if I wrote something only for the sales … rather than writing something I’m proud of.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’m proud of this book.
Yes, it’s a contrived and possibly tired genre.
Yes, it has a title that I may have to change in a few years so it won’t be dated and laughable.
But damn if it’s not one of the best books, in my humble opinion, that I’ve written … and if in a few years the title is a joke, I’ll change the name and keep standing behind it.
Now, if you’re still doubting me — doubting my ability to take myself seriously as an author after making such a huge bandwagon jumper of a book — I’d like to tell one final story before I go.
I have a pen name. That pen name is Autumn Cole, and Autumn is where I publish everything that I consider sex-first, devoid of more than a pretense of story. Autumn is for single-serving fantasies, for wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am … for just reading to get off and not making any pretense at grand storytelling ambition, in other words.
From the beginning, I knew — knew! — the book you’re holding would be an Autumn Cole title. Because I would be just a little ashamed of it, and Autumn is where I put things that are good for getting jollies, but not much else.
But after the first day of writing this book, I knew I’d be publishing it under my own name.
I knew that — ridiculous, sellout title aside — I was writing a story I connected with and that I knew others would connect with, too. I knew that Parker and Angela weren’t the one-dimensional cardboard cutouts I assumed they’d be — good for greasing poles and plunging holes, but nothing more.
I didn’t have much faith in Parker and Angela before the first page … and sadly, in contrast to Sean and Johnny’s ballsy writing challenges, I didn’t have much faith in myself either.
Turns out I was wrong.
As Parker Altman might say, this is a Lexi Fucking Maxxwell book.
And I hope you love reading it as much as I loved writing it.
Lexi Maxxwell
March 2015
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~ Lexi Maxxwell
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LEXI MAXXWELL IS AN AUTHOR who tells her stories by always wondering how sex fits into bigger question, seeing it as a subject that can frame just about any narrative. Lexi is proud to be Sterling & Stone’s naughty storyteller, and her catalogue of books including, Anticipation, Bitten, Fuck HIM!, Together Apart, and A Temptation in Time, as well as the reader loved series The XXX Files, MILF, The Future of Sex, and the laugh out loud comedy Adult Video, co-written with Max Power. Lexi also writes smuttier stories (where the sex always comes first) under the pen name Autumn Cole.
You can find Lexi online at SterlingAndStone.Net, or LexiMaxxwell.Com. Connect with her on Twitter at @LexiMaxxwell, or send her an email at [email protected].
For any questions about Sterling & Stone books or products, or help with anything at all, please send an email to [email protected], or contact us at sterlingandstone.net/contact. Thank you for reading.
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