DONKEY: A Stepbrother Sports Romance (With FREE Bonus Novel Charged!)

by Stephanie Brother

  It wasn’t always Isabella. Pandora was a scheming trouble maker, and clever enough to know how to piss him off. Gracey seemed like the only one keen to behave, but even she got under his skin from time to time, and wasn’t completely free from castigation.

  As Leighton got older, and Philip realized the moment had passed long ago to become the father he had always wanted to be, as Isabella went from year to year never showing any signs of improvement, as he fell out of love with a woman he never was in love with anyway, and as the children he never wanted got more and more under his skin, Philip’s punishments increased in measure and he grew ever distant from himself and the reality that he was living.

  No-one got it worse than Isabella. Gracey saw more violence exacted upon others than she received herself, and Pandora just seemed like she enjoyed it too much for it to be all that effective. There was something about the middle child, something about the way she carried herself that made Philip enjoy punishing her.

  He didn’t like himself, but it didn’t matter. He convinced himself that this was who he was always meant to be. A successful business man, a billionaire and a misanthrope. The only people he loved taken away from him and impossible now to bring back.

  Chapter 24

  Philip had lived a successful, tortured life. If asked at which point he felt like he had stopped advancing, at which point he had reached the top of the mountain peak to slowly descend the other side towards the blackness of the clouds beyond, the uncertainty of what was impossible to see, he would have answered without question, the moment in their brand new flat, when Isabella and he made love to bring life to their only son. He was nineteen then, and that moment seemed like more than a handful of lifetimes away.

  Philip knew he was sick. He knew he’d spent a good portion of his adult life depressed, shut away from the rest of the world and hiding from reality. He had begun to see the ugliness in things almost as soon as he’d begun to experience success as a businessman, and he saw that ugliness nowhere else more pronounced than in the family he had been forced to raise instead of his own.

  His marriage to Alexis was never a good idea, but it wasn’t Alexis alone who was the problem. Philip marked his life by the series of tragedies that befell him, moments he could never fully recover from, and instead of seeking help, all he did was bury the issue inside and throw himself headlong into the only thing he seemed to be good at - making money.

  Philip was a billionaire by his 40th birthday, although the numbers by that point had long since stopped making sense to him. It was chasing money for the sake of the chase, to keep him busy, to divert his attention from the mess of a man he had become.

  Pieter, Philip’s one guiding voice of reason, had finally succumbed himself to the pressures of a turbulent life, long after his only son had stopped listening to him. He was seventy two years old. Philip wouldn’t even make it to fifty.

  In the last five years before Philip’s death, when he’d essentially semi-retired and spent little time at all outside of the house, his weight ballooned, his drinking increased and his health declined even further. Had he not been murdered, and continued instead at the rate he had grown accustomed to, it’s unlikely he would have survived at all beyond a couple more years. Philip died the day he lost Isabella, it just took them another thirty years to put him into the ground.

  Philip wanted to explain to Leighton the origins of his birth, the reasons he gave him up, and why he felt as though he couldn’t approach him personally on any of the hundreds of occasions he watched him from afar, but there was no way that he could do it now, and certainly not while he was still alive. Leighton had a right to know, and Philip was the only one who could tell him the full story. It took him almost a decade to gain the courage to begin writing, starting eventually when he felt like he was close enough to death not to want to risk missing the opportunity. When he began, he thought the content may be best delivered in a letter, and when he was finally done, a year and a half later, he had almost written a book. Philip hid this secret project from everyone, deciding to leave the final document with his legal team and a duplicate copy in a safe that even Alexis didn’t know the existence of, with instructions to deliver that content to Leighton, after the will had been read and the inheritance had been settled.

  That three hundred and sixty seven page document, explaining in huge detail the heartache that Philip felt when faced with the impossible decision to give away his only son, the years he watched from afar, the circumstances leading up to his birth and the location of his mother’s treatment facility, amongst other huge revelations about his existence, was meant to be given directly to Leighton at the official will reading.

  Due to a clerical error in an inventory log due to a server shutdown, the manuscript was never taken to the house. When the error was realized, the legal team had to wait until the temporary injunction had been removed until they could act. In light of this complication, it was finally agreed that the document should be couriered to the address Leighton used as a business headquarters, to ensure a record of its delivery was officially noted, in case there were further issues with the inheritance further on down the line, and while Leighton sat in a police interview room, waiting for legal representation to join him, Esmeralda, having taken delivery of the item earlier in the day, began to turn her attention to the mysterious package.

  Philip was on his fourth scotch when the door went. Just from the knock he could tell who it was.

  Gracey pushed the door open gently, careful not to disturb him, hooking her head around the door as though momentarily bodiless, until he beckoned her into the room.

  “Sorry”, Gracey said apologetically, and Alexander went up to her immediately to say hello. “Were you busy?”

  Philip was sat at his desk. It was where he was to be found almost all of the time he wasn’t sleeping.

  “Checking accounts”, Philip mused, holding up a sheet of paper as though to indicate it. “Your mother’s spending. Please come in.”

  Gracey ventured past the door with a smile, closed it behind her and perched herself on the edge of the leather sofa that sunk down on one side from Philip’s increasing weight.

  “She’s always been good at it”, Gracey said.

  “Don’t I know”, Philip quipped. “How can I help you?”

  Gracey’s look told Philip all that he needed to know.

  “I can come back if it’s a bad time.”

  Philip sighed and then took hold of his scotch glass, swirling the contents around and watching as though an answer might be bequeathed from within. “You know I never went to University.”

  “I’ve been looking at courses”, Gracey said. “It’s not as expensive as you think. I mean, it doesn’t have to be.”

  Philip drank what remained in his glass, his eyes heavy and bag-ridden. “I need another drink”, he said, levering himself up with his hand on the back of the chair.

  “I’ll get it”, Gracey said quickly.

  Philip eased himself back down, the huge effort enough to make him short of breath. A second later his glass was refilled and back between his hands.

  “We’re going to have to do something about Alexander”, Philip said, changing the subject. “He’s off his food.”

  “How are you, Philip?” Gracey asked, concern lilting her voice. “I know the others don’t care, not even Mom, but I do.”

  “What do you care about me for?” Philip’s voice sounded more challenging than he intended it to be. “I’m just a pot of money aren’t I? Isn’t that what I’ve always been? An endless pot of money.”

  “To Mom maybe”, Gracey said, “not to me.”

  Philip let the whisky warm his tongue. “I’m fine”, he said eventually. “Fine.”

  Gracey knew he wasn’t telling the truth, but she really didn’t want to push it. Philip was volatile enough not to need any encouragement. It had taken her long enough to get him to gain enough confidence to allow her into his office, let alone question his hea
lth. She’d have to leave it at that.

  “Find the course and find the university”, Philip said. “but before all that, make sure you find the right reason to want to do it first. It’s no good doing something just because everyone else has done it before.”

  “Seriously?” Gracey said, a huge smile stretching out across her face. Philip was as deadpan as ever.

  “Just don’t come crying to me if it doesn’t work out for you.”

  “I won’t, I promise I won’t.”

  She wanted to hug him, but she knew that if she did, there was a high probability he’d rescind the offer. Instead, she just smiled like a moron and kept saying thank you.

  “I wish your sisters were more like you”, Philip said, the whisky making his whole body warm.

  “I thought you didn’t agree with University.”

  “I don’t”, Philip said. “I was talking about the way you are with me. Polite, respectful, deferential. Your sisters don’t know their place.”

  The comment made Gracey mad, but she wasn’t going to speak out of turn just in case he took back his offer. Philip was prone to moments of exaggeration, especially when he’d been drinking, and Gracey just felt like this was one of those moments. He probably didn’t mean what he said, it just came out the wrong way.

  “All Pandora cares about is fucking”, Philip said, “and as for Isabella, I have no idea what’s going on in that woman’s head half the time.”

  “Isabella has never known what she wanted to be”, Gracey said. “At least Pandora makes no apologies for who she is, I thought that might have appealed to your proactive side.”

  Philip’s sudden laugh shocked them both. “She’ll end up like her mother”, Philip said. “A parasitic drain.”

  “Why didn’t you divorce her?”

  Philip’s stare immediately made Gracey feel like she’d overstepped the mark. She was expecting Philip to launch into one of his trademark tirades, but nothing came.

  “Because I loved her”, Philip said. It was the frankest Gracey had ever heard him being. “Stupid, huh?”

  Gracey didn’t know what to say. Shaking her head didn’t seem like it was enough, so she added, “No, not at all. Mom loves you too, or at least she did”, but it didn’t feel convincing. Whatever she said, she knew the conversation was already over. She wanted so much to stay and talk to Philip, to pull the reasons for his sadness out of him like splinters from a bear’s paw, but today was not going to be the day that would happen. For a long time growing up Gracey had wanted him dead. She fantasized about it. She hated him more than anything in the world right up until she was old enough to understand that the way he behaved was because he carried around pain in such quantities, there was no other way for it to manifest itself. She began to feel sorry for him, and then she wanted to do everything she could to help. She sometimes saw glimmers of the man that Philip used to be in the private conversations that they had begun to have in his office, and she was convinced that little by little she could change him, that little by little she could bring out the good that used to exist in him in huge quantities. Philip’s past life intrigued her, even more so because she knew so little about it.

  “Was there anything else?” Philip said, shifting his body weight away from Gracey so both of his legs were back underneath his desk.

  “No”, Gracey said, shaking her head. And then, spontaneously, “Do you want me to take Alexander for a walk?”

  Philip seemed to contemplate this offer briefly and then let out a large sigh as though resigned to it, even if it might have been beneficial. “Don’t let him roll in fox shit”, he said. “And let me know if he eats anything. I haven’t had to fill his bowl in days.”

  Isabella watched her sister disappear into the grounds around the house, every once in a while picking up a stick and tossing it for Alexander to chase. When she made sure that Gracey had disappeared beyond the tree line, which represented a fifteen minute hike back up to the house, she gathered her things and took them into her sister’s bedroom. The digitalin had been much easier to make than she had expected. The foxgloves grew naturally in the countryside around the house and the internet at the library had provided her with a step by step guide on how to extract the poison.

  Isabella hated her stepfather with a passion. She’d wanted him dead for a long time, and decided that now was finally the time to do it. She hid the vial at the back of one of Gracey’s clothes drawers, deep enough for it not to be easy to find. Killing her stepfather was one thing, but framing her sister another completely. If she could, she would have done it without implicating anyone at all, but she knew that the police would continue to poke around until they’d found the culprit, and Isabella just couldn’t take the risk. Besides which, she resented Gracey. She resented her for being the intelligent one when that label could just as easily have stuck to her. Gracey wasn’t more intelligent than anyone else in the house, she just liked to think she was because she read books and wore glasses. Pandora had been a bitch too, but at least she’d stood by her younger sister, which was much more than Gracey had ever done, especially so recently, in what Isabella saw as a direct attempt to befriend the man that had made their childhood such hell.

  With the vile in place, and a separate quantity decanted to a pipette, Isabella went to her stepfather’s office, to slip the fluid brazenly into his drink with every intention to kill him. She had measured an amount that would take effect some hours after she’d given it to him, when Gracey would definitely be back from her walk. She thought about leaving the house and giving herself an alibi, but the potential to be around when he choked seemed like a much more favorable option.

  For the second time that night, Philip invited a guest into his office. He hadn’t expected Isabella, and despite telling her he was busy, the girl rudely barged into his room.

  “It will only take a minute”, Isabella said. “But I think it’s something you should know.”

  Philip eyeballed her sternly.

  “I have a confession.”

  “Well”, Philip said, already irritated by this intrusion.

  Isabella paused theatrically. She drew breath and rubbed her hands. “Well what is it, girl?” Philip demanded.

  “I think you better have a drink before I tell you”, Isabella said.

  She hadn’t planned how to get the poison into his drink, but knew it wouldn’t be too difficult. There were two things Philip couldn’t resist in life, drink and money. His immobility was the thing that played the biggest part, however. Isabella had his glass in her hand before Philip had even thought about taking it to the drinks cabinet himself. Philip never kept the bottle by his side because he considered it vulgar. He thought it would make him look like an alcoholic.

  Philip reluctantly let Isabella take his glass, holding it momentarily before she pulled it out of his fingers.

  “This better be good”, he said, looking up to her suspiciously.

  “Oh, don’t you worry”, Isabella said, “it is.”

  The poison was squirted into his glass with the expertise of a CIA assassin. A twist of the spoon melded the two liquids together. Had Philip been about to drink his first and not sixth glass of the day, he may have noticed the subtle difference in flavor, as it was, he barely raised an eyelid.

  Isabella watched avidly as the liquid slipped past his lips, and then couldn’t help but smile as she watched him greedily gulp it down.

  “Well?”, Philip commanded.

  There was that pause again. That theatrical, manipulative hesitation. “Mom’s having an affair.”

  Philip studied the girl closely, and then sucked down the rest of his drink.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Isabella shrugged her shoulders. “I thought you would want to know.”

  “Is that it?” Philip said.

  “She’s fucking him right here in your house.”

  “Get out of here, Isabella.”

  “In your room”, Isabella said. “Everyone can
hear it.”

  “Out”, Philip said calmly, even though he was far from it.

  “I just thought you should know”, Isabella said, already on the way to the door. “It was pretty obviously she was sucking his cock last night too, it’s fucking gross.”

  Isabella closed the door before Philip could respond.

  “Fucking cunt”, Philip spat out.

  Gracey returned with Alexander half an hour later. She noted an increase in Philip’s irascibility but nothing she wouldn’t have put down to drink. An hour after that, on her way to ask for some pocket money, Pandora found him slumped over the floor, his lips dotted with blood.

  Chapter 25

  Esmeralda pulled the huge document out of the jiffy bag cover. It was addressed to Leighton, of course, but anything addressed to her boss was eligible to be opened by his secretary. Leighton knew that. The lawyers who sent it would have known that. Everyone in the world would have known that, except for Philip Mandrake De Vries.

  “Dear Leighton”, Esmeralda read aloud. And then… “Fucking hell.”

  For the second time in a week, her plush white carpet bore the stains of a spilled glass of red wine.

  Part Four.

  Present day…

  Chapter 26

  For the sake of expediency, Leighton had agreed to have legal representation provided by cell phone conference call, which he broadcast into the room by speaker phone. He tried to do the same for Gracey, but had no way of putting his team directly in contact with her. For all he knew, she was at a completely different police station on the other side of town, with her cell phone already taken away from her and dispensed in a locker until she was finally let out again. The best he could do was give them her name and hope that they could find her in time. He didn’t really know how it worked at all, beyond what he’d seen on TV and films.

  The only thing he could be absolutely certain of was their innocence, what he had to do now was prove it.

  “Pandora and Isabella have confirmed that they saw you at the house on the evening of the fourteenth, can you tell me what you were doing there?”