Legally Yours (Spitfire Book 1)

by Nicole French

  The door shut behind them, and I pull a clean towel from the hall closet before ducking into the bathroom with a spray bottle of Lysol. Immediately I turned on the water so I wouldn’t have to listen to the giggling coming from Jane’s room again and jumped into the shower as soon as I had scrubbed them off the cracked porcelain tub.

  ~

  This time I was waiting outside of my building when Brandon pulled up. Even though I was excited for this date, I opted for a more comfortable look instead of getting as dolled up as I had last time. Jane’s fairly loud recreational activities hadn’t done much to distract me from the sexual yearning I now felt coursing through my body, a fact that irritated me right along with turning me on.

  Since I wasn’t planning to repeat the last time Brandon had come to pick me up, I wore clothing that was a lot harder to remove: a pair of black cigarette pants, a black, silk blouse that hung provocatively off one shoulder, and black ankle boots that Jane affectionately called my “shit-kickers.” I was tucked cozily into my wide-collared, black wool trench coat, and my hair, which I had only had time to dry at the roots, now lay about my shoulders in natural, haphazard waves that were still frizzing just a bit around the crown of my head. I normally didn’t wear a lot of makeup anyway, but I had taken the time to line my eyelids and apply a few coats of mascara to make my green eyes pop. I felt confident. And still fairly hard up.

  “Hi David,” I said to Brandon’s driver as he stepped out of the car and opened the back door for me.

  “Ms. Crosby,” he replied with a brief nod. I slid in to the backseat, and he closed the door behind me, enclosing me with the car’s other occupant.

  As soon as I saw him, I wondered briefly if I had forgotten just how gorgeous he was in six short days. Because I immediately my libido went from simmering to almost boiling over. Was going to be like this every time I saw him again?

  Like me, Brandon had also gone substantially more casual for this date, likely predicated on my request to simply get to know him. He was only slightly more dressed up than the last time I saw him, wearing a light gray Oxford shirt over his dark jeans instead of a Henley, his dirty blond hair combed back in soft waves instead of mussed around his face. Finished with a navy wool pea coat and his brown boots, he looked sexy, polished, and relaxed all at the same time.

  “Red.”

  His deep voice rumbled in greeting as he leaned over to kiss me gently on the cheek. The combination of men’s aftershave, a slightly almond scent, and that something else that was entirely just Brandon made my toes curl in my boots as our cheeks brushed together. As he sat back, he tucked a strand of my hair back behind my ear with a shy smile.

  “Gorgeous as always,” he said.

  We stared at each other, suddenly caught in the spell of each other’s presence. The longer I looked into those bright blue eyes, the more the memory of his last kiss burned itself into my brain. Was he thinking the same thing? Just as I was about to launch myself at Brandon, David awkwardly cleared his throat from the front seat. Shit! I had completely forgotten about the driver!

  “Ah, where to, sir?” he asked.

  Brandon jerked his head towards the front of the car, as if he had also forgotten about David’s presence. “Ah, Mass Ave to Albany, please. Thanks, David.”

  I looked out the window as the car began to move, pressing my nose lightly on the cold glass. If this were a normal date, we might have been lost in each other as some anonymous cab driver took us to our destination; or, even better, we could have walked by ourselves to the train and enjoyed each other along the way in dark corners made for kissing. Did dating someone with this much money mean there would always be someone to witness our intimate moments?

  Brandon reached a gloved hand out and took my fingers in his. I turned back to look at him, and the crooked smile on his face wiped away all negative thoughts. He was clearly so glad to be there with me, and I felt the same. It was better to take it somewhat slow, I told myself. Right?

  ~

  He had promised me earlier that he’d planned a special date, but that it wouldn’t be anything too fancy—just that we’d be going someplace important to him and that we’d definitely stay in the city. So when the car pulled onto a familiar road off Kendall Square and stopped amidst the darkened buildings of a college campus, I turned to face Brandon curiously.

  “You’re taking me to MIT for our first date?”

  He shrugged as the car stopped. “I got it, David,” he said, stepping out from his side and jogging around to open by door before I could get to it. He told David he would call when we needed a ride again, and then held out his hand to pull me out of the car with a smile.

  “You wanted to know me,” he said as he shut the car door. The Mercedes sped off down around the campus road, and was soon out of sight. “Well, this is where I spent most of my time between the ages of twelve and eighteen.”

  He tucked my hand into the crook of his elbow, and as we walked down the street, he gave me a mini tour of the buildings we passed. There were few students on campus this time of night, although more than one light burned in a few of the strange mish-mashed buildings that surrounded us.

  “Right there is the student shop where I used to mess around with the leftover lab equipment while my foster dad taught his labs. And over there is the auditorium where he lectured. I’d sit in the back a lot and do homework. My high school let me take some MIT courses as a non-matriculated student before I graduated. I finished the high school curriculum kind of early.”

  I snapped my head to look at him.

  “You were taking advanced math classes at MIT when you were in high school? Why didn’t they just skip you a few grades and let you finish early?”

  “Well, um, they did.” He gave a bashful half shrug that I would later recognize as signature move of his, one that meant he was slightly embarrassed of an accomplishment only few could reach. “I graduated when I was sixteen.”

  I gawked. Brandon was a genius. Like, a legitimate, Einstein-level genius.

  “And you went here after?”

  He nodded. “Ray—that’s my foster dad’s name—pulled some strings and got me into the Electrical Engineering program.”

  “Is that what you majored in?” At this point I wouldn’t have been surprised if Brandon had a degree in astrophysics besides being one of the most powerful lawyers in Boston.

  “I thought about it,” he admitted. “But no. The stuff they work on is really cool, but I wanted to do more than just work on unsolvable equations and fiddling with wires all day long. I ended up double majoring in Economics and Finance instead.”

  “Because those aren’t numbers-heavy fields,” I remarked dryly.

  He snorted. “I know. Ray still thought they were a joke. It was a major beef between us back then. But they seemed more…concrete at the time. I wanted to make some money, and I wanted to do it as quickly as possible.”

  It wasn’t hard to understand what drove him. He’d grown up with little in the way of stability, going without or depending on the gifts of others his entire life. Middle-class academia had probably seemed like a waste when he knew he could make a lot more money using his skills in the finance sector. His plan, he told me, was to get an M.B.A. after finishing, and game the stock market using an algorithm he’d developed while he was at MIT.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t work a bit before going to business school,” I said, kicking a rock with my toe as we continued past several oddly shaped buildings. It was uncommon for people to pursue M.B.A.’s without some other experience.

  “I wanted to,” he conceded. “But I wasn’t quite twenty when I graduated from here. The small investment firms were nervous about taking me on full time that young, and my foster parents wouldn’t agree to let me try my luck with the firms in New York, adult or no. That was when I started investing on my own, in the year before I started business school.”

  It had been a frustrating year, he told me as he steered me down another campu
s street that was lined with much taller buildings. Despite having a degree from one of the best schools in the world, he barely got a job as an assistant at a hedge fund downtown while he waited for graduate school to begin.

  “I don’t blame any of them. Imagine me: an eight feet tall, skin-and-bones teenager with acne, spouting what probably sounded like conspiracy theories about the marketplace.” He chuckled, and his laughter was contagious. “I wouldn’t have hired me either.”

  His foster parents, sympathetic to his plight, had allowed him to continue living with them rent-free so he could try his hand at investing the small salary he made.

  “They sound like they really believed in you,” I said.

  “They’re good people,” Brandon agreed. “I don’t know where I’d be without them. I lived in a few homes before them, but with people who already had about five kids and were just looking to collect welfare.” He looked grim at the memories, but quickly shook them off. “I was supposed to go to a group home when Ray and Susan took me in. They couldn’t have kids of their own, but Susan felt very strongly that they should help kids like me, the older ones who weren’t likely to be adopted.”

  “Did they ever have any other kids live with them?”

  “Nope,” he said with a lopsided grin. “Just little old me.”

  It turned out to be a good investment for them. He ended up calculating a unique algorithm that predicted certain dot-com stock trends with uncanny accuracy, allowing him to triple his paltry minimum wage salary within six months. He also managed to create a retirement for his foster parents within five years, paid his way through graduate school, and came up with enough capital to start his fund by the time he finished law school.

  Brandon kicked a stray rock on the ground and shrugged again, suddenly bashful the way only certain men can be when they are pleased with themselves. I squeezed his arm, although I was still processing the gravity of his accomplishments.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t just become the next Gordon Gecko, or whatever,” I said, doing my best to make light of his past despite the fact that I was awestruck and a little worried. I had worked next to wannabe Geckos during my time on Wall Street. I had left that world for a reason.

  Brandon just snorted. “It was just a means to an end, and my goals at fifteen, or even nineteen, weren’t really the same ones I had ten or twenty years later. It becomes sad after a while, knowing your only job is basically to play a game—one that’s not that challenging, honestly—with money, a lot of which is legally swindled. I decided pretty quickly after the fund turned a profit that I wanted to contribute something real to the world. I ended up really liking the law for that reason—I like the way justice works in court. Everyone has to be held accountable.”

  He started Sterling Grove with one of his old law school classmates initially to represent the interests of some of his investments, but eventually it became the voice of a company that began working with closely held startups, allowing Brandon and his partners to pick and choose projects that, as he put it, actually made something more than just money. Many of those companies were now closely associated with his investment firm, Sterling Ventures.

  “I guess you could say I have my fingers in a bunch of different pies now,” he concluded, coming to a stop so he could turn and face me. He pulled my free hand into his other one and let our arms dangle, connected, while he studied my face.

  “Which do you like best?” I asked.

  He tipped his head slightly from side to side, weighing the question. “I’m not sure. We funded a couple of instructional design projects that were pretty amazing a few years ago. But lately I’ve been interested more in helping with the research end of some renewable energy ideas that have come my way. There’s this—” He cut himself off abruptly and smile sheepishly. “Actually, Skylar, I can’t really talk about it yet. I trust you and all, but—”

  “I get it,” I interrupted, shaking my head although I desperately wanted to know. “Liability. Don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s just…sensitive. And if I can put certain pieces into place, it has the potential to change everything about the world we live in.” His voice rang with a passion I hadn’t heard in the rest of his story. “When I can say something, I promise you’ll be the first to know.”

  I grinned at him and he grinned back. Then he pursed his lips, looking around at the darkened silhouettes of the buildings that surrounded us and back down at me.

  “This is really what you want?” he asked. “Listening to me jabber on and on while we walk around these ugly buildings?”

  “Is this who you are?”

  “It’s part,” he said simply.

  “Then yes,” I replied. “I want to know whatever there is to know about you. I just want the truth.”

  He squeezed my hands tightly through our gloves and nodded, then let go of one as he turned toward the building where we had stopped, an unassuming brick box that stood a bit out of the way of the streetlights. It didn’t seem like enough to house the brilliance that was undoubtedly inside. We both looked up and down the exterior before looking back at each other.

  “Home sweet home,” he said. “So to speak, anyway. Come on, Red. I’m going to introduce you to the man who raised me.”

  ~

  Raymond Petersen’s office was at the end of a dreary hall on the fourth floor of the building that housed the Electrical Engineering faculty. A slight, hunched man with thinning gray hair and large glasses across a long nose, he wore the stereotypical professor garb: faded khaki pants and a plaid button down shirt rolled up his forearms. A brown sports coat was tossed over the back of his chair. He was obviously engrossed in some sort of problem, and he didn’t stop scratching equations on the notepad at his very messy desk for a least a minute after we entered the cramped office. Although he didn’t look the slightest bit out of place in the halls of an Engineering department, it was still a bit jarring to find that the man who had brought up such an incredible person as Brandon Sterling was so utterly unobtrusive.

  At last, he reviewed the notations that took up the entire piece of paper, and looked up with a short smile that briefly softened his otherwise plain features.

  “Bran.” He pushed back from his roller chair and stepped over multiple piles of library books in order to execute a brief, awkward embrace which his foster son, who towered over him. “This is a surprise.”

  “Hey, Ray,” Brandon said as he released his foster father. They both stepped away and eyed each other. I was reminded of a nature show where two wolves circled each other, sniffing. “We were just in the neighborhood and thought we’d catch you after your last class. Susan said you were running a graduate seminar on Friday evenings now.”

  Ray turned toward me at the word “we.” “And who is this?” he asked.

  “Skylar Crosby, sir,” I say, extending my hand and shaking his warmly. He returned my smile, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. I wondered why.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” he said. “Please sit down. Would either of you like some coffee or something else to drink? There might be some dregs left in the pot.” He nodded to a small drip coffee maker on a shelf over his desk.

  “I’ll take a beer if you’ve got one,” Brandon said as we both sat into the two small chairs provided for students. “I know you’ve got a few stashed under your desk where Susan won’t find them.”

  The legs on Brandon’s creaked audibly as he forced his large frame into the small metal seat. Ray opened his mouth as if to argue the point, but instead he sighed, sat back into his rolling chair, and reached under his desk into a mini refrigerator for said beers.

  “Damn woman is on a new health kick. Some Paleo-diet garbage,” he muttered. “I told her there was a reason why cavemen only lived thirty-five years, but she won’t listen to basic science. Would you like one, Skylar?” he asked, holding out three cans of PBR.

  I took one, not wanting to be rude, and we all cracked open our beers and sipped them compa
nionably.

  “So what does the young lady do?” Ray asked Brandon.

  I did my best to hide a frown; it drove me crazy when men talked about women as if they weren’t in the room.

  “I’m in law school, Dr. Petersen,” I piped up. “Finishing up my third year.”

  He glanced at me, and I noticed a slightly hawkish look behind his thick glasses. “Is that so? I’ve never really thought much of lawyers. Always seemed like a lot of rhetorical posturing nonsense if you ask me.”

  Brandon’s grip on the arm of his chair was the only thing that betrayed his response to his foster father’s obvious jab. I wasn’t so good at holding my tongue.

  “I don’t know about that, sir,” I said as nonchalantly as I could. “I like to think of us as necessary interpreters of the abstract social boundaries by which our society operates. Without the law, there is chaos. Like John Locke said, ‘Where there is no law, there is no freedom’.”

  Ray stared at me for a few seconds before turning back to Brandon. “Is she always like this?”

  There he went again. I didn’t care if he was a Fields Medal winner; Raymond Petersen was obviously one of those old white academics who tended to treat women as if they had half a brain.

  “Like what, sir?” I asked politely.

  He rewarded me with a quick glance, but continued to address his foster son. “So outspoken?”

  “Skylar is at the top of her class at Harvard, Ray,” Brandon replied irritably. “She’s preparing to be a domestic violence advocate when she graduates. I’d say her willingness to challenge others will serve her clients well.” He looked at me and reached over to squeeze my hand, provoking a smile I couldn’t control. “I know I like it.”

  Ray blinked between Brandon and me a few times, looking pointedly at our joined hands before focusing back on Brandon.

  “So, is everything all right? What’s going on?”

  Ray’s eyes continued to flicker between the two of us suspiciously. I took a large gulp of my beer. It was an oddly direct question, particularly in New England, where most folks tended to swath their inquiries in pleasantries and passive aggressive behavior. I glanced at Brandon, who just sighed.