“Come for me, baby.”
“Mmm…I’m so close,” she moaned, her breath hissing out in short bursts between whimpers.
“Now,” I ordered.
Her muscles squeezed my cock before I even finished the word, and my balls clenched as I let go, filling her up with my hot release as she panted and moaned. She collapsed onto my chest a second later, her face and hair dripping with sweat.
“Did I tell you that I love you?” I murmured into her ear.
“Not yet. But I know.”
“Gonna leave me hanging, woman?” I said, messing up her hair even more.
She leaned back and laughed softly, then affected a more serious gaze. “You know I love you too.”
Those were by far the sweetest words I’d ever heard.
***
Sophie had accompanied her Mom to surprise my Dad at his private airfield upon his return with his favorite cheeseburger and fries combo from a little café down the road from our old house in Redmond. It had always been his favorite spot for takeout meals when I was growing up, and even though he was accustomed to much finer dining now, we all knew he still appreciated the occasional carb and fat blowout.
While they were out, I was hunting through my Dad’s home office for a necklace that used to belong to my mother. I knew he kept it in one of his safes, and he’d always told me that when I found the right girl, I could give it to her. Seeing as Sophie and I were planning on telling our parents about our relationship tonight, I figured I may as well demonstrate to my father just how much I cared about her by giving her the necklace.
If only I knew the damn combos to either one of his safes. There were two of them, side by side behind his dark cherry-wood desk, and I racked my brain. I could have sworn he’d mentioned the codes to me once. Finally I remembered that the code for the left one was a combination of my birthday and my mother’s middle name. I had no idea what the combo for the right one was, but hopefully the necklace would be in the left one.
Shit. As the little door swung open, all I could see was a stack of files, papers and…hang on. What the fuck was this?
On top of all the files were two plastic Ziploc bags. One contained a comb with several strands of hair still in the teeth, and the other contained a half-empty bottle of cologne. It was an old Armani fragrance that they’d discontinued several years ago, and I wondered what the hell was so special about it that Dad had locked it away. As I held the bags in my hand and gazed at the dark strands of hair stuck on the comb, a horrifyingly cold sensation began to crawl up my spine.
Realization.
No. No fucking way. I must have been mistaken. I needed to investigate further before jumping to any wild conclusions.
I carefully put the bags on the floor and grabbed the first file. There were papers detailing the sale of Marie’s land to a small development company called Haynes, and underneath it were more papers detailing the acquisition of Haynes earlier this year. By my Dad’s company, no less.
I pulled out another file. When I opened it, the first thing I saw were petition to divorce papers along with another few sheets of paper with messy handwriting all over them. It looked like a child’s attempt to learn to write each letter of the alphabet, but as I looked closer, I saw that they were practice sheets. My father had been copying someone else’s writing style and attempting to emulate it, and I turned one of the papers over to see that he’d actually gotten really good at it towards the end.
Fuck.
I dug deeper and found an old letter written by Sophie’s father some eight years ago, before he’d disappeared. The handwriting was exactly the same. So my father had been learning to write exactly like him, using the old letter as a guide. It was him who’d written all those threatening letters in the last several weeks, going so far as to stick old hair in the envelope and even spray cologne on it to make it as convincing as possible. He’d known Marie kept her ex’s old stuff up in the attic…it wouldn’t have taken him too long to get his hands on it all.
That fucking duplicitous bastard. Sophie’s father hadn’t come back to demand they sell the land at all. He had died in that boating accident. My Dad had been emulating him and pretending he was alive just to terrify Marie and Sophie enough to convince Marie that she had no choice but to sell the land. The land might have only been worth a million or so on its own, but developing it would make my father way more than that. Maybe even a hundred million. He must have been planning this whole scheme for months, and I was willing to bet the chance encounter that got Marie and him together in San Francisco in the first place hadn’t been a coincidence at all. No wonder he’d married her so fucking fast.
I knew my father was capable of some sneaky shit, but this was beyond the pale. He’d literally married a woman just so he could scam her out of her land and make bank on it. He knew Marie would never have sold the land otherwise, so he’d come up with what he obviously thought was an ingenious plan to force her to sell it off. He’d only offered to pay her ex off to make himself look good, and he knew she’d be too proud to accept. When she’d asked him to handle the land sale as he anticipated she would, he’d sold the land to one of his own smaller companies that she wasn’t aware of. He’d even swindled her out of the money she’d made from selling the land by pretending to send it to a secret offshore account to ‘pay off’ her ex, who of course had actually most likely been dead this whole time. Lastly, all he had to do was divorce her, and considering he’d probably made her sign an ironclad pre-nup, she wouldn’t get a cent of the money his company eventually made from developing the land, seeing as she’d signed over all her rights to it when she sold it.
All this for a few more million in the bank.
The worst part was that he didn’t even need more money. His company had been increasing its profits by a substantial margin every year since it had started. I seethed, unable to believe my own father was such a fucking prick. He’d gone to so much trouble to deceive Marie, and yet he’d been stupid enough to keep some of the evidence in his own safe at home, where I’d easily found it. That was the main weakness of rich, powerful men like him. They thought they were totally invincible and couldn’t even imagine a world in which they might actually get caught, so they weren’t always careful like you’d assume they would be.
I was still kneeling on the floor in shock when Sophie and Marie walked in.
“There you are! We’ve been looking for you all over. Your Dad’s back. He accidentally spilled his fries all over his lap, so he’s gone to take a quick…wait, what are you doing?”
Sophie gazed at me, uncertainty marring her features as she saw the Ziploc bags next to me.
“Is that…is that my Dad’s cologne?”
Before I could stop her, she kneeled beside me and gazed at all the papers. She came to the same conclusion as me a lot quicker than I had, and she abruptly stood up, a horrified expression on her face.
“None of this was real. He is dead. Holy fuck!”
She gathered up all the evidence and put it on the desk for her Mom to see, and Marie’s face turned pale as a sheet. I didn’t know what to say, and I simply stood there, my heart hammering in my chest like crazy.
“Did you know about this? Did you know your Dad was only using us to get the land?” Sophie demanded, her eyes flashing as she turned to me.
I didn’t reply for a long moment, unsure of how to respond. I had thought that my Dad and Marie’s marriage had been very sudden, and I had suspected a while ago that he might want to get his hands on her land…but I’d had absolutely no idea just how far he would go with the whole thing. Fuck. I should’ve told Sophie of my suspicions weeks ago. Then I wouldn’t be standing here looking so damned guilty right now.
That moment of hesitation was what sealed my fate. There was no way she’d believe that I hadn’t been in on the whole scam now. A totally innocent person would have professed their innocence immediately, rather than standing there looking as guilty as a thief like I was currently
doing. They’d literally caught me red-handed with all the evidence, which did nothing to help matters.
The hurt look on her face pierced my soul. “Hurting me is one thing. But my Mom...”
“Wait…” I tried to stop her, but words suddenly failed me. What could I say? ‘I didn’t know, but I’m sorry my Dad scammed your Mom’? Yeah, that’d go down well.
Her voice trailed off, and she knew she’d made her point. “Come on,” she said, grabbing her Mom’s hand and throwing an icy glare in my direction. “Let’s go home. Our real home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
SOPHIE
My heart was a black hole.
The last week had been a living nightmare. Mom was an inconsolable wreck, and I wasn’t much better. The look on Drew’s face when I caught him with all that stuff…God, was there any way he hadn’t known what his Dad was up to? He hadn’t exactly denied it, and I’d spent the last several days in a haze. I hadn’t even cried. Every part of me was numb. Just when we’d made a total honesty pact with each other, I’d discovered that it meant nothing – he and his father had been scamming us the whole time. He’d only pretended to love me to distract me from finding out what was really going on.
The first few days, I’d been in total denial. I’d sat here and waited, wishing and praying for Drew to show up on our doorstep begging me to believe that he hadn’t known what his father had been up to, and that it was all some massive misunderstanding. But he hadn’t shown up. He hadn’t even sent me so much as a text, which pretty much confirmed for me that he’d been in on it.
Those Buckley men were some twisted fucks.
My Mom sniffed and blew her nose again as we sat at the kitchen table with Lana’s father, Kevin. He was a divorce lawyer, and he’d agreed to help us out. My poor Mom had barely stopped crying since we’d left the Buckley house that night. We hadn’t even gone back for our things. Tony had packed it all up and had it delivered two days later, and he hadn’t even bothered contacting us in any other way since then.
“Firstly, I’m going to try to get your marriage annulled,” Kevin said, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose. “He essentially tricked you into marrying him. That’s fraud, and it’s grounds for an annulment.”
“Okay.”
“As for the matter of getting your land back, we’ll also go after him for fraud. The manner in which he deceived you into selling it is despicable, if I say so myself. He defrauded you, and that’s going to be our argument. The problem is proving it.”
My eyes had been on the table, but they shot up immediately at that. “What do you mean? We saw it! It was all there, in his office!”
“But did you take any of the evidence you found with you?” he asked.
Mom shook her head. “We just left. We weren’t exactly thinking straight.”
Kevin sighed. “He’s probably gone and destroyed it by now, or come up with some ridiculous explanation as to why it was there. I’ve been speaking with some of my associates at the firm, and they have a fairly solid idea of how Tony’s defense team are going to play this.”
“How?”
“They’ll claim it was your first ex-husband sending those letters. They’ll also claim you knew full well that you were selling your land to one of Tony’s companies, and seeing as you did sign the papers, it’ll be your word against his. They’ll also call the police and CSIs to the stand, and they’ll all testify that the DNA found on the letters matches that of your ex-husband.”
“They can’t do that.”
“Unfortunately, they can. The DNA does match. Tony made sure of that, as you know. They’ll also say you’ve suffered some sort of mental breakdown in recent weeks, and that’s why you’re accusing Tony of what they will probably refer to as utterly ludicrous charges.”
My Mom’s eyes widened. “But it wasn’t just me. Sophie saw the things in the office too.”
“They’ll say she’s lying for you.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Mom murmured, putting her head in her hands.
“Wait,” I said. “What about the money from the land sale? Can’t you trace where that went? If he just put it in his own account, that’ll prove it was him behind the whole shady shit-show.”
“I already did that. It was sent to an anonymous Austrian bank account and withdrawn a week later. So far, we haven’t been able to trace where it went after that. We have no way of proving that it was Tony and not your father who accessed that money, Sophie.”
I wanted to slap myself in the face for not grabbing everything I could from Tony’s home office before we left that night. Then again, Drew would have stopped us anyway. The thought of his name alone made a cold shiver run down my spine, and I felt sick to my stomach to the point where I thought I might actually vomit on the table.
“Do we have any hope of winning this at all?” Mom asked, her entire body already sagging in defeat.
“I won’t lie. It will be very difficult. He has a stellar defense team, and he’s set it all up very well. I’ll keep digging, but right now the only thing that will really help our case is if we either prove that your ex-husband is definitely dead and has been for years, or if we get someone to testify against Tony.”
“And that’s not going to happen. Even if someone knew what he was up to, he’d probably just pay them off.”
“Exactly.”
My heart sank. Kevin was a good lawyer, but we were still going to be up for a big, lengthy court battle against a whole team of legal sharks, and we’d probably end up losing.
Mom’s eyes filled with tears again. “Where do I find these men?” she said. “Am I just a magnet for horrible people, or is it my fault?”
Kevin put his hand on hers and gently patted her. “It isn’t your fault, Marie. You were vulnerable, and Tony took advantage of that. He probably spent a lot of time planning this.”
“No, it is my fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gotten married again so fast. We were only dating for five months before we ran off to Vegas together like a pair of idiots. Except I was the only idiot in this scenario, apparently.”
“It’s not your fault you trust people, Marie. I’m surprised you found it in yourself to trust anyone again after what your first husband did to you,” Kevin said. “It’s not a bad quality to trust people, but the scum of the world will take advantage of it if they can.”
“Well, I don’t think I’ll be trusting anyone again after this,” she mumbled, putting her head back in her hands.
Kevin asked us a few more quick questions, and after he’d left, I quietly made my Mom a cup of tea. She stared at me over the top of her mug for a minute before speaking.
“I wasn’t the only one fooled by a Buckley man, was I?”
“What do you mean?”
“I know about you and Drew,” she said. “When we had coffee the other day and you said you had something to tell me, I thought you were finally going to come clean.”
I was aghast. “You knew?”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, Sophie. You two weren’t exactly good at hiding it. But don’t worry. I never told Tony. I kept it to myself until you were ready to talk about it.”
I cast my eyes down. “Oh.”
“I’m not angry at you, Sophie. I wasn’t surprised when I realized what was going on. Drew was your best friend when you were a kid, and he certainly grew up to be a very handsome young man. Unfortunately he’s just like his father.”
She reached over and squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry you had to find out the hard way, honey. Not all men can be trusted, and it seems like Drew is one of them. Like father, like son, I guess.”
Tears sprang to me eyes, and every bit of emotion I’d been trying so desperately to hide from her welled up all at once. “I really believed him when he said he loved me. He was so…he was so perfect.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “Oh, Sophie, it’s not your fault. I guess you inherited your ability to be too trusting from your old Mom
here.”
“You aren’t old.”
“I feel old. I think this situation has aged me about a hundred years. I even found a grey hair the other day.”
For some reason, that sent her over the edge, and she dissolved into tears all over again. I held her for a while, crying as well, and when we were finally out of tears, she stood up.
“I think I need a nap,” she said. “I’m just so tired.”
“Good idea,” I said. “I might do the same soon.”
Ten minutes later, I was in the bathroom, sitting on the cool tiles of the floor. As a final cherry on top of the crap cake that was my life, I’d missed my period. It was probably just the stress from the last few weeks making me miss it, because according to all the magazines I’d read, that sort of thing happened to women all the time. It made total sense. That had to be it.
The two pink lines on the pregnancy test said otherwise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
DREW
My fucking prick of a Dad was going down.
I’d been lying low for a week now, because he had no idea it was going to be his own son who took him down. I wanted it to be a surprise. I wanted to see his mouth drop open in a perfect ‘O’ when they called me to testify against him and tell the judge exactly what he’d been doing.
You shoulda heard the way the bastard tried to explain things to me when everything had blown up in his face. He’d just gotten out of the shower when Marie and Sophie went tearing out of the house, and his face was ashen when he’d seen me standing in the study with all the evidence of his deception.
“Son, this is all a misunderstanding,” he’d said, his face twisted in faux sadness. “When I found that toothbrush to give to the police a few weeks ago, I went back looking for more stuff in the attic the next day to see if there was anything else that might help prove it was Marie’s ex-husband who wrote those letters. I found the comb, an old letter and his old cologne. I thought that’d help prove it was definitely him, and I took it to the police but they said they already had enough. I kept it, just in case they ever did need it.”
Dare: A Stepbrother Romance Page 14