Just like I had wanted.
But with one little twist.
There would always be a mistress or a hookup. Someone whose company he actually enjoyed.
It was the most humiliating shock of my entire life and I felt the depth of my stupidity. My gullibility.
“Thank you,” I said, my voice trembling slightly.
I thanked him, as images of the stationery my mother had ordered for me danced in front of my eyes. Mrs. Bella Rose Alexander.
Such a classy name, my mother had said.
Because classy was everything.
At the moment I didn’t feel classy.
In my head I was raging. I was slashing tires and setting his golf clubs on fire and howling like a wild animal. I was tossing back whiskey and throwing the glass at the fireplace while wearing the world’s sluttiest lingerie set ever. Inside, I was strong and powerful and confident, and he would never stray from me because I was so damn good in bed.
But outwardly I thanked him for wanting to marry me. Outwardly, I was pathetic, passive. God, it was cringeworthy. Disgusting.
And I fought the urge to shrivel and shrink and cry, and instead plotted my next move.
The future I had planned was gone. Destroyed. I could never get it back.
But I could get even.
When Bradley left my room with a smile, I texted Christian Jordan.
Can I see you?
My fingers were trembling.
Sure. When?
Tonight.
I was running out of time. My wedding was in seven days.
That wasn’t a lot of time to turn myself into a sexual ninja, humiliate Bradley the way he had humiliated me, and call off my wedding.
* * *
—
I had put Bella from my head already. Dismissed the idea of stripping her naked and showing her who was really in charge. I didn’t need her bullshit—like the shit she’d pulled in the bar the night before—but I didn’t need this reserved, polite facade she’d given me today either. Or her judging my brother. Cain was a fucking mess, but only family could say that. Everyone else could suck my dick.
Bella might be beautiful, but she wasn’t dick-sucking material. She was an uptight princess used to getting her way.
Yet I wasn’t even halfway to the restaurant I had told Ali to meet me at when I got a text from Bella. She wanted to see me. Tonight. Interesting. Whatever her douchebag of a boyfriend had said to her, it had sent her straight to me. I didn’t even hesitate. Fine. I’d listen to what she wanted.
Because while I wasn’t sucking down a bottle of Jack a night, I was just as destructive as my brother in my own way. I might not be damaging my liver, but trouble was like a red flag being waved and I was the bull. I charged toward it every fucking time.
Like Ali.
She was sitting in the seafood restaurant staring at her phone, her long blond hair tossed back over her shoulder. Ali was a beautiful girl. Similar coloring to Bella, though her face was a little rounder, her tits a little bigger. She didn’t move with the confidence of a rich girl either. That reserved expectation that people will wait on you. Ali was a hustler, always had been. Hell, she’d hustled me big-time.
We’d grown up together, her, me and Cain. Ali’s father was a maintenance man at the five-star hotel in town and her mother had been a teacher until she died of breast cancer when we were in grade school. Ali was on her own too much after that, and learned how to manipulate first her father, then other men to get what she wanted.
Including me.
I still to this day had no idea why she had lied to me and said she and Cain were broken up when they weren’t. Or why she thought it made sense to hook up with me, unless she had just been out to hurt him. That was all I could figure, because I wasn’t in her head. I had to admit, if you wanted to fuck with someone’s head, fuck his identical twin. Props to her for going through life not giving a fuck about anyone but herself.
“Hey,” I said, sliding into the chair across her.
This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have. Truthfully, I never wanted to see her ever again. I had never thought of Ali as a sweet or selfless person, but I had never thought she was capable of abandoning her son either. When I thought of Camp and his innocence, his arms held out to me for a hug, I hated her for being such a cruel bitch. My son was everything to me. He was the only reason I wanted to be a better man. His smile, his solemn but sweet personality, gave me a joy like I had never known in my entire life.
And Ali had chosen to walk away from him. It was very hard not to rage at her. But I had to stay calm, for Camp’s sake.
It did my son no good for me to piss off Ali. Knowing her, she’d decide to go for joint custody just out of spite.
“Hi.” She gave me a smile. “You don’t look too banged up.” Her fingers drifted over mine, caressing my bruised knuckles. “Who won the fight, you or Cain?”
I jerked my hand away from her touch, disgusted. She looked smug that we had been fighting. My resolve to be cool wavered. “Nobody won, don’t you get that? Especially Camp. He’s the biggest loser in this whole fucking mess.”
“Why? He got good genes. We made a supercute kid, Christian.” She honestly looked bewildered.
I wasn’t sure if she was way stupider than I had ever known, or truly that narcissistic. I suspected it was a little of the first, a lot of the second. I wanted to swear at her, explain that she needed to be serious about all of this, but I reined in my emotion. “My mother is going to sue you for child support, on my recommendation. And if you want to see Camp, it will have to be at court-appointed times. I don’t know if you’re staying in town for a while or not, but no dropping over at my mom’s unannounced.”
Her jaw dropped. “I’m not paying child support! I’m his mother. Only fathers pay child support.”
She was not that dumb. She was just way too used to playing dumb to get what she wanted. “That shit isn’t going to work with me. My mother is his guardian. We share custody and I pay support to her. Now you are going to pay too.”
“Why doesn’t he live with you?”
The waiter came over and I ordered a Jack Daniel’s. I’m not one to day drink, but fuck me. I was going to kill her if I didn’t get a grip. “Because I’m a bartender. I work nights. I can’t afford a babysitter. It makes more sense for him to live with my mom, in a stable environment.”
“But your sister lives there too and she’s a stripper.” She said it disdainfully.
That was ironic.
And at least my sister was stable. She stuck around, paid her bills, helped me out with Camp. It was just a job, and it ticked me off that Ali would slam her for being a dancer when Ali was a liar and a cheat.
“And you’re a model citizen?” I asked, fighting the urge to say something stronger. “Miss Morality Maine?” I also wanted to ask why Camp didn’t live with her, but the truth was I didn’t want her to get some bug up her ass that it might be a good idea and go for custody, because it was actually a shit idea. I would fight her to the death for custody if it came to that. “You didn’t worry about right versus wrong when you lied to me and told me you and Cain were broken up.”
I had no excuse for having sex with her, other than a lifelong crush on her, but full disclosure, I had thought my brother was done with her at the time.
“We were broken up. He just didn’t know it yet.” She shot me a grin, like this was all hilarious. Her and me sharing an inside joke.
The waiter brought my drink. “Thanks, man.” I took a sip, trying to regain my composure so I didn’t say something I would regret.
“So is Cain really dating that brunette? She’s so plain.”
Sophie was a cute girl. And she appeared to have sparked something in my brother. An interest in something other than booze. She seemed smart as he
ll and not into playing games. I didn’t know what their actual relationship was, but I didn’t like the curiosity Ali was displaying in it. “They’ve been spending a lot of time together. She goes to Harvard, you know, and is supersmart. But why would you care?”
Ali lifted one bare shoulder. Her top exposed twin ribbons of flesh on either shoulder. Once I had thought she was beautiful. I had envied Cain for scoring the girl of my teen fantasies. I had even thought briefly that I was in love with her. Now all I saw was a selfish brat.
“I don’t care,” she protested. “I mean, it’s whatever. But she’s just…I mean, ick. And her sister is a hot mess. She puked in the bathroom last night.”
There are a lot of things that annoy me. I have just as many anger issues as Cain, I just don’t let them explode after a full night of drinking or walk about pissed off all day. I hide them under a smile and snark. So maybe Ali had no idea that I was raging inside. That I felt the anger coursing through my entire body and I had to keep my fists clenched under the table so I didn’t say or do anything that would jeopardize my parental rights to Camp.
But I was fucking livid.
I could not believe that she had not even asked to see her son. She had given plenty of thought to the appearance of Sophie and Bella and who Cain was dating, but she had not asked one question about the baby she had abandoned.
“And like her friend criticized my extensions, but not everyone has thousands of dollars to drop on their hair like they all do.”
I drained the rest of my whiskey and dropped money on the table to cover it. I stood up.
“Where are you going?” she asked, clearly startled. “I haven’t even ordered yet.”
I needed to get away from her or my head was going to explode. “Buy yourself a sandwich. I don’t see what we have to talk about. You’ll be hearing from the court about child support.”
Ali looked astonished. “That’s it? You can’t even have a friendly conversation with me?”
“You’re fucking delusional,” I said before I could stop myself. “No one wants to be friends with you. You didn’t go to Europe for the summer and come back. You abandoned our baby.” I took a deep breath, stopping myself from really letting loose with a rant. “Stay away from me, Ali. For real. Anything you need to say to me can go through the lawyers.”
“You’re a dick,” she seethed. “How dare you talk to me like that?”
That just made me snort and shake my head. It must be nice to walk around so blindly confident in your own delusional lies.
I was walking away when she said, “I am going to get Cain back. Just so you know.”
That was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. Cain would slit his throat before he took Ali back. He was also going to be en route to rehab soon, but I wasn’t about to share that information with her. “Good luck with that,” I said. “You’ll need it.”
Craving fresh air, I decided to walk to my mom’s house. I wanted to see my son. Reassure myself that Ali hadn’t somehow abducted him for leverage. I knew that was completely irrational, but that little guy was just so amazing. He was the only reason I had for working hard toward my goal of owning a bar and financial freedom. When I looked at that kid, and he smiled, I didn’t regret anything about Ali and me, no matter how fucked up it was.
The house I had grown up in wasn’t exactly a dump, it was just unkempt on the exterior. The interior never changed. It was dated and drab and gloomy. As a kid, I had always been self-conscious about being the family with the dad in jail and too many kids. None of my friends had four siblings like I did and a mother who cleaned houses. Only my oldest brother, Camden, had felt the way I did. Cain, Cord—my second-oldest brother—and my sister, Charlie, hadn’t given a shit what people thought, and I had envied that.
Still did. I still felt the urge to punch anyone who looked down on me.
Or fuck them. Like Bella Bigelow.
The intriguing uptight Bella. I was curious to see what she wanted. More than I should be.
Strolling up the driveway to my mom’s house, I realized I should probably cut the grass for her. It was getting high, and that was the least I could do. She had sacrificed a lot of her time to care for Camp and had never judged me for the circumstances of his conception.
Then again, she wouldn’t. She had her own demons in her past—secrets that only I knew and none of my siblings had any clue about. About her and my father.
I opened the kitchen door and called, “Hey, anybody home?”
Charlie was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal. “Hey, what’s up?”
She clearly had just rolled out of bed, her hair looking crazy, dressed in a baggy T-shirt and pajama pants. Given that she worked nights, that wasn’t surprising, yet it was still late afternoon. Kind of late even for her, but it was Saturday. Friday night must have been a late one. “Where’s Mom and Camp?”
“Camp is napping. Mom is driving Cain to Boston.”
“Already?” I asked, surprised. It had just been that morning that Cain had said he wanted to go to rehab. Right after he and I were bailed out of jail for fighting the night before. “I thought it would be next week or something.” For some reason, it bothered me that I hadn’t been able to say goodbye to him. We had cleared the air a little bit that morning, but it didn’t feel like it was enough. Then again, it would probably never be enough. There was some shit you couldn’t ever totally put behind you. And that was on me.
“There’s no reason to wait. He’s not in a good place, you know that.” She slurped cereal off her spoon. “He was here last week loaded and polished off one of Mom’s boxes of wine. He’s at the point where he can’t even control it.”
“What about Sophie?” I asked, opening the fridge, hoping to score a soda.
“Who?”
Mom’s fridge was damn near empty. “His girlfriend.” I slammed the door shut.
“Oh. That rich girl? I don’t know. I thought she was just a hookup. Summer lovin’.” Charlie ran a hand through her dark hair. “Can you stay here with Camp tonight? I have to work and Mom is not going to be home until tomorrow. I was just going to call you.”
I didn’t hesitate. “Sure. Fortunately, I have tonight off.” I was supposed to be meeting Bella, but she could either come here or it would have to be another night. “I’m going to order a pizza. I’m starving.”
First I wanted to peek in on Camp though. I went down the hall to my old bedroom and carefully opened the door. Nothing had changed in here either. It was still the same obnoxious bold blue, now scuffed with wear. The bunk beds Cain and I had shared were still in there, Camp’s crib shoved into a corner. The shelves and dresser were piled with both our ancient abandoned possessions and Camp’s toys. I really needed to get in here and clean some of this shit out. Part of me had been in a holding pattern, thinking something was going to change and I could have Camp in my apartment, maybe that I’d even somehow magically end up with a girlfriend.
But this was reality, and none of this was going to change. Ali was a bitch and I was never going to end up with a nice girl because I was drawn to women that I couldn’t have, because that was easier than attempting and failing at a relationship. So I needed to make the situation better for my son. Crossing the room as quietly as possible, I stared down into the crib at Camp. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, his arms thrown up on either side of his head. In his sleep his cheeks had grown pink, his blond hair damp. His breathing was even and reassuring. God, I loved this little guy. I didn’t deserve him, but I did love him.
He was adorable. Ali was right on that. We had made a cute kid, no question about it.
I knew there was a very real possibility he was actually Cain’s child, but we would never know the truth. So I just told myself he was mine.
It was reassuring to see him there, perfectly healthy, oblivious to his mother’s
poor behavior. I dreaded the day I would have to explain to him why she wasn’t around. It kicked me in the dick every time I thought about it.
I texted Bella.
I have to stay with Camp tonight, so if you want to talk you have to come to my mother’s house.
That’s fine. Just give me the address. Eight?
That works.
Whatever she wanted, it would be amusing to see her reaction to my mother’s house. I was pretty damn sure Bella had zero experience with how the other half lives.
Given how late it was, I decided to gently shake Camp awake. If I let him sleep, he’d be up until midnight. My mother had him on a good schedule. Nap at one, bedtime at eight. Charlie had clearly put him down later than usual. He roused slowly, blinking up at me. I bent down and lifted him out of the crib, resting his head against my chest. “Hey, little man. Sleepy boy, you gotta get up.”
When I brushed my lips over the softness of his hair, I thought about canceling with Bella.
But she was the red flag and I was the bull.
An elusive tease to my snorting, lumbering self.
And I wanted to catch her.
Chapter 3
My palms were sweating as I pulled up to the address Christian had given me. It was a lonely-looking house set back from the road behind overgrown shrubs. It needed a coat of paint. The sun hadn’t set yet and it looked empty, no cars in the driveway. I felt stupid and nervous going up and knocking on the door.
I called my best friend, Kennedy, who was staying in a hotel with my other bridesmaids. “If anyone asks, I’m with you tonight,” I said after she said hello.
“What? Why?” She sounded salty, and I knew she was still upset with me for throwing up on her the night before.
“I have to do something and I can’t tell anyone what it is.”
There was a long pause. “You’re not going to like do something dangerous, are you?”
“No! Of course not.” I bit my fingernail, then dropped my hand in disgust. I hadn’t bitten my nails since my mother had broken me of the habit at six years old by dipping them in rubbing alcohol. “Why would you even say that?”
The Breakup Page 3