His Custody

by Tamsen Parker

  Jasper looked like he’d swallowed a bug, his normally implacable expression marred by widened eyes and, if she didn’t know any better, a faint flush. “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He studied her, gaze wandering over her face. She knew she was a bright pink. Blood always rushed to her face when she was angry. And she was angry now. Not to mention starting to feel self-conscious under his scrutiny. But she wasn’t going to let a blush get in the way of getting to the bottom of this. “Tell me, Jasper.”

  “You sure you want to know?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t like being lied to. It was one thing for him to sand off the rough edges of corners she might bump into trying to make it through the day. But she knew about those. The clothes she wore were curated, the food she ate was picked for her, the appointments she went to weren’t of her own making. But he wasn’t hiding any of that, and for as much as she knew she shouldn’t be, she was grateful for it. This was different though, it felt like it was behind a curtain. Or maybe a steel padlocked door if Jasper’s reluctance were anything to judge by.

  “You should sit down then. Can we go to the den? Or the library?”

  “No. I’m not giving you a chance to distract me. Tell me now.” She plunked down into one of the chairs on the far side of his desk and was immediately sorry. These chairs were not comfortable; they made her feel like she was in the principal’s office. No wonder Deja always stood to the side of the desk instead of sitting. That and because it was one of the few times she got to stand over Jasper. That man was too tall. No one needed to be that tall.

  “Your money . . . is yours. A hundred percent, no strings attached. I help your financial advisors manage it, but it’s yours. Do you understand me?”

  “Yeah.” Of course it was hers. She’d had a trust her whole life. It hadn’t been a secret. Her parents had set it up so she’d get access when she graduated from college or when she turned twenty-five, whichever came first. And then of course there was her parents’ estate. Jasper had explained that it would take a while for all of it to make its way through probate court, but damn straight it was hers.

  Jasper stared over her shoulder and she wanted to snap her fingers in his face. But a second later, he blinked his eyes to hers.

  “When your parents died, there was not as much money as you’d expect. There were also larger debts than I’d anticipated. Once their estate makes its way through probate court . . .” He looked at her, grey eyes somehow intense but still filled with compassion. “It’s possible there won’t be anything left.”

  What? That didn’t make any sense. They had houses, they had cars, they had money. A lot of it. She’d always had anything she could wish for, and then some. She’d never heard her parents fight about money, nor had they ever asked her to rein in her spending or tell her they couldn’t afford something. Ever. “That can’t be true.”

  “It is true. I can show you the documentation if you don’t believe me, but I’d rather not. I don’t think you want to see it. Hell, I didn’t want to see it. Mostly Deja’s been dealing with it.”

  “Does that mean I owe people money? I can pay them.” There were millions of dollars in her trust if nothing else. Settling debts wouldn’t be an issue. Money was something she’d always had. She had other problems—bitchy girls at school, finding the perfect dress to wear to the next formal, nailing that essay on Pride and Prejudice—but money had never been one of them.

  It shouldn’t have mattered, but this somehow had rocked her world in a serious and unpleasant way. Like the foundation her life was built on had cracked. She didn’t like to think she was shallow enough to consider money a key aspect of her personality, and she would’ve never said before that it defined her, but now, faced with its lack, she felt unsteady. Unmoored. She did not like it.

  “No, you can’t.” Jasper flexed his hands on the table, the muscles of his arms bunching underneath his dress shirt, the sinews in his neck standing out. “Or I should say, you couldn’t have. There wasn’t a trust, Keyne. There was nothing. But the debts that aren’t likely to be covered by their remaining assets have been settled so you don’t need to worry about it.”

  “Settled by who?”

  “I told Deja to use money from my parents’ estate. It’s not a problem, and I don’t want you thinking about it. It’s done.”

  “But you said I have money.”

  “You do.”

  “If it didn’t come from my parents, where did it come from?”

  He looked away from her again and she swallowed her own discomfort at how uncomfortable this conversation made him. He might even be breaking a sweat.

  “It’s Gavin’s trust. Was Gavin’s trust. Now it’s yours, like I said. It was mine long enough to move it and I have no claim over it. It’s set up to come under your control when you turn eighteen, although when it does, there’s going to be a seventy-two hour hold or you’ll need me to co-sign on withdrawals of large amounts until you’re twenty-one. Then it’s yours to do with as you please, free and clear.”

  The magnitude of her situation started to dawn on her. “So I’m at your mercy? I have nothing.”

  “No.” Jasper was shaking his head and raising his hands as if to placate her, but if he thought it’d be that easy, he could think again.

  “But I had nothing, and I have something now because you gave it to me.”

  “Keyne, I don’t think of it like that. It was never mine. It was Gavin’s and now it’s yours. He would’ve wanted it that way. He cared about you so much, he’d want you to have it.”

  “Not like my parents. Who left me with nothing.”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “How could they have even gotten away with that? It doesn’t make any sense. We had the houses, and the cars, and . . .” It didn’t make any sense. Everything she’d known was a lie. The life she’d led was one giant fake. What the hell?

  “They’d never touch my trust, they wouldn’t.” But as she said the words, she wondered if that weren’t true. Her dad had been a generous person. He loved to be the center of attention, lauded for his charity works, his largesse. Maybe his need for praise and adoration had gotten the better of him?

  Or had he been helping Sean even though he swore he wouldn’t? Or maybe worst of all, had he been just like his brother and gambled their life away? You saw it on TV, people getting in too deep with bookies or the mafia, and then getting bones broken or property torched. Is that what had happened to the boat? Was that why her family was dead? And Jasper’s? But no. He’d said, they’d determined it was an accident. Just a horrible accident.

  “What happened to it all?”

  Jasper’s blocky features looked like they were carved out of stone, and the way they tightened when she asked, Keyne thought they might shatter. “A lot of it was bad business decisions.”

  A lot wasn’t all. “What about the rest?”

  “I can’t say for absolutely sure just yet, but it looks like . . .” Again with Jasper’s eyes boring into her. Was he trying to see exactly how much more she could take before she broke? But knowing he was there, holding up pieces of her world even when the rest of it was crumbling around her—that helped. She could take more.

  “Looks like what?”

  “Like when things started going solidly downhill, your father started gambling with what was left. Probably trying to make back his losses. He borrowed money from some friends, everything I know about has been paid back and if anything else comes to my attention, it’ll be taken care of. You have my word.”

  God, how desperate would her father have had to be to do that? Turn to the thing that had destroyed his brother? Jasper looked like he was holding something back, but fuck it. This time she’d let him. She needed time to mull this over, shake this out in her head. “Is there anything else I need to know?”

  “No. That’s everyt
hing.”

  “Swear?”

  “On everything I have.”

  His gaze raked over her, as if his list of possessions included her. Which at once delighted and infuriated her. She wasn’t a thing, but feeling as though she was Jasper’s . . . it was nice. Safe, because she believed him. When he’d held her at night, it was as if nothing could touch her. If she was his, he’d take care of everything. And the way he looked at her . . . there was a flicker of something there. Something like hunger, want, and it made some long dormant coals inside her glow. But he blinked, and the wicked spark guttered.

  He started to rise out of his chair, probably to offer her comfort, but she couldn’t have that. Didn’t deserve it. So she shoved her chair back, almost knocking the thing over, and held up her hands to ward him off, even though she ached to be contained by him.

  “I can’t right now, Jasper. I need to go.”

  “Keyne.”

  “Just to my room. I won’t do anything, promise. I need to . . . I don’t even know.”

  “Okay. Hey, before you go . . . can you look at me, please?” Could she? The shame and guilt was eating her up from the inside but Jasper wouldn’t judge her. Had taken her in, had taken care of her, had kept her after he realized the truth, had tried to protect her. Had tried to protect her father from her knowing the truth.

  She turned around in silence, not trusting her voice.

  “I’ll take care of this,” he said, tapping a finger on the discarded newspaper. “It’ll be done as soon as possible. For your money and mine. No matter what the cost. Cross my heart.”

  His promise softened something in her jagged insides. “Thanks.”

  Chapter Twelve

  November

  It had been almost six months since Keyne had come to live with him. In some ways it felt like she’d only been there since yesterday, and in some ways it felt like this was how things had always been.

  They had similar habits, which made some of the awkwardness of sharing space with another person go away. They both needed significant amounts of silence, which didn’t mean they wanted to be alone—they regularly sat in his office after Keyne got home from school and did work together until Ada called them for dinner, and then finished up afterward. Whoever finished first would grab the book of crosswords and hunker down until it was Keyne’s bedtime.

  She was doing well in school and had even been talking about college. While it was a relentless drumbeat in the back of his head—you have to go, you have to go, you have to go—he’d tried his utmost to be casual about it. He wanted it to be her idea, a thing she wanted for herself, because then she’d work harder for it. So he couldn’t cheer out loud when he noticed a list of potential schools on her desk.

  And to be honest, he’d miss her. A lot. It was nice to have someone to come home to at the end of the day, to talk to, to share with, and now that she’d managed—with help from her therapist, and maybe Alice—to dig herself some out of the dark hole she’d been in since May, she was funny. He’d never realized how funny she was before. Probably because he’d never spent this much time with her.

  She’d even started hanging out with friends from school, something she hadn’t been able to stomach before. He couldn’t blame her. Most of the kids she went to school with seemed like vacuous, shallow morons with too much time and money on their hands and not enough sense to know what to do with either one.

  On the one hand, he didn’t approve of the company and it was hard for him to understand why she’d want to spend time with them—she seemed far more mature than her peers did. He liked spending time with her as a person, and not just someone he was responsible for, and he wouldn’t be able to say the same about the other kids in her class. On the other, Keyne wanting to socialize was a good sign. So be it. Until he picked her up on a Sunday morning from a sleepover.

  Keyne looked terrible as she slid into the front seat, crossed her arms over her chest. He had to remind her to buckle her seatbelt and she hardly said a word to him while they drove to the gym.

  He parked the car and laid a hand over hers as she went to free herself.

  “I’m not letting you walk in that gym until you tell me what’s going on.”

  She looked out the window and he wondered if they would sit in the parking lot all day. Fine. He’d apologize to Alice if that’s what he had to do. But his consistency had paid off. Keyne sighed, realizing he would sit there all day so she may as well come out with it if she had any hope of getting to beat the crap out of anything today.

  “Everyone was talking about boys last night. Tara and Dan started dating so she’s all swoony and obnoxious about it.”

  He tried not to show his amusement, pressed his tongue into the roof of his mouth to keep from cracking up. Keyne was so funny when she talked about her peers’ romantic lives. She and Gavin had been like an old married couple practically since they’d been born. It was tragic, in a way, that she hadn’t experienced the rush the possibility of love can bring, the excitement of a new partner. She would, some day, he hoped, but by then she’d be more grown up, the startling intensity of the feelings of a first crush would’ve dulled into a more respectable, responsible affinity. I’m very fond of you as well.

  “Anyway, they were asking me if there was anyone at school I liked.”

  “Is there?” She hadn’t said anything, but he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d kept a crush from him. He didn’t relish the idea of talking to her about boys, either. At least he knew their parents had already talked to Keyne and Gavin about sex, and her school had a decent sex ed class, so he wasn’t responsible for having “the talk.” But it was more than that. A lick of jealousy he tried to ignore when she would mention a guy from school. Which was a dozen different kinds of stupid. Not to mention ragingly inappropriate.

  She scoffed. “No. They’re dumb.”

  “So, no need to start planning a wedding. Got it.” Keyne rolled her eyes at his poor excuse at humor, but at least he’d gotten her to talk to him. He wanted her to keep talking. “That’s not what’s wrong.”

  “They started talking about Gavin.” Her chin wrinkled and her lower lip plumped out. “Honestly, I’d rather they talk about him than act like he never existed. That hurts the most. When they erase him. But one of the girls, she looked me straight in the face and said it must’ve felt like my dog died.”

  As a guy, Jasper had escaped a lot of the adolescent mean girl nonsense, but he hadn’t been clueless about the catty shit that had gone on. But for someone to say that to Keyne . . . that was a line it was hard to believe anyone with a heart could’ve crossed.

  “I said Gavin wasn’t my pet. He was my boyfriend, my best friend, and she couldn’t possibly understand how close we were, how much I miss him every day. She said I led him around like a puppy and he was my responsibility. I let him off his leash and now he’s dead and it’s all my fault.”

  He was going to kill that bitch. He wanted to drag a name out of Keyne, but she wouldn’t tell. Being called a tattletale had been like a fate worse than death for her. Even if it meant getting punished herself because she refused to rat someone out, she wouldn’t do it. She’d take the girl’s name to her grave even though the little shit had hurt her so badly.

  “The other girls told her to shut up and leave me alone. One of them told me later her boyfriend had said I was pretty and that’s why she was being so mean, but . . .”

  “But what, Keyne?”

  “It was my fault.”

  A fissure formed in his heart and he stuffed the voice screaming in his head into the gap. Yelling at her that it was in no way, shape or form her fault their families had been killed wouldn’t be helpful. He needed to listen to her. So he forced the words out, slow and measured even though he could barely breathe.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “He was my responsibility. I loved Gavin so much. He
was the sweetest person alive, but she was right. I practically played fetch with him sometimes. I didn’t think of it that way, but—”

  He grabbed her shoulder, harder than he meant to, but too much pressure on her arm wasn’t going to hurt as much as those voices inside her head. “Hey. Listen to me. Gavin loved you with all his happy-go-lucky heart. He was happiest when he was making you happy and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

  Jasper had never understood service—it wasn’t an aspect of kink that got him off. But he believed with everything he had it was as true a form of love as any other. He’d seen the devotion gleam in a man’s eye as he polished his mistress’s boots, the bliss glow on a submissive’s face as her master rested his feet on her back.

  They got so much pleasure out of serving, from being of use. There could be satisfaction, fulfillment in that. Had it gone that deep for Gavin? Given time and some vocabulary, would he have seen Keyne as a mistress whose needs he was destined to meet? It wouldn’t have surprised Jasper a bit if he had.

  “You were the same age, Keyne. If anyone was responsible for him, it was our parents and me. Maybe even your parents. Not you. And no matter whose responsibility he was, it was no one’s fault. Do you understand? It was an accident, pure and simple.” That had been the final verdict from law enforcement, and though it was hard to swallow, it was all he had. Even if he tossed and turned about it some nights, wondering if they’d missed something, he didn’t want Keyne doing the same so he focused on the matter at hand. “This girl, whoever the fuck told you that, is jealous. She’s jealous of what you had with Gavin, she’s jealous her boyfriend thinks you’re pretty. She’s in for a long life of disappointment and envy. It was cruel of her to say that. You don’t deserve it, and it’s not true. Do you understand me?”

  “I do. In my brain. I know. But everywhere else . . .” Anguish colored her face. Turned her already pale complexion to ash, and he wanted to go on a rampage. Yell in the face of that thoughtless girl who’d hurt his Keyne, and make her feel even a fraction of the pain she’d caused. But he couldn’t, so he did what he could do. Which was talk to the person he was responsible for, who he’d pledged to care for and protect.