Legally Yours (Spitfire Book 1)

by Nicole French

  Knowing he watched my every move, I did my best to ignore him as I set the water to boil and dug through the cabinet for my favorite black tea. I removed the small tray Jane and I kept above the refrigerator and loaded it up with two mugs, honey, spoons, and a small pitcher of milk. By the time the kettle whistled, all I had to do was pour it over the tea leaves in the pot and let it steep as I carried everything over to the coffee table in front of the couch.

  “Thanks, Skylar. This is really nice.”

  Continuing to ignore him, I went about pouring myself a mug full of the deep black liquid and mixing it with honey and milk. I liked my tea strong, sweet, and approximately the color of butter caramels. Brandon followed my model, but it was clear by his awkward movements—the clash of his spoon against the porcelain mug, the way he dripped both honey and milk onto the tray—that he wasn’t used to fixing his own beverages. Typical, I thought ungraciously. I made no move to help him, just sat back in the small college-issued armchair next to the couch with my feet curled under me, mug clasped between my palms.

  Before he sat back, he pulling a wad of crumpled papers from his back pocket and set them on the coffee table next to the tea with a solid thump. We both stared at them for a moment before he sat back too. Our sips echoed through the room. Although I was determined not to break the standoff, my impatience got the best of me after a few minutes had passed.

  “What’s that?” I asked quietly, nodding at the papers.

  “My divorce agreement. Or it was until this morning. Now she won’t sign.”

  The accusation wasn’t explicitly there, but I felt it anyway. Something had been ruined the second that woman had walked in on me and Brandon.

  “What—”

  “We’re separated,” Brandon cut me off. “We’ve been legally separated for over three years, since I originally filed for divorce.” He glanced over his mug with a raised eyebrow. “I’ll show you them if you want, Red—I’m mean, Skylar. We could look online right now.”

  “Maybe when we’re done,” I replied woodenly. We took a few more loud sips of tea, each of us waiting for the other to speak. Once again, I was the first to break.

  “Three years is a long time to be just separated,” I remarked. He knew what I meant. As in, why aren’t you divorced yet?

  Brandon sighed. “She doesn’t want a divorce. We never had a prenup…I know, I know, but we were kids when we got married. I wasn’t worth much, and I was an idiot. And now, she wants half of it all. It’s not that I mind paying her off, but I’d either have to dissolve a bunch of my assets, which would mean a lot of people losing their jobs, or I would have to make her an executive board member of Sterling Ventures, which I’m absolutely not going to do.” He ran a hand through his hair, causing one side to stick out. “Thank God the company isn’t public yet. Then it would be a real fuckin’ mess.”

  I bit my lip, considering the thick stack of papers on the table. “Because a three-year divorce isn’t a mess.”

  He looked up with a wry smirk. “It’s never been tidy, that’s for sure.”

  I sighed and sat forward to set my mug on the table. “So what happened? Why did you file for divorce?”

  He stared down at his mug, still almost completely full—it was clear he wasn’t actually much of a tea drinker. Ana made him coffee every morning.

  “Miranda’s father owned a fund where I got my first job out of college. The one I told you about, where I made my first bit of cash for Ray and Susan. The story I told you is true…but that’s not all I was doing back then.” He looked up, his expression regretful. “You’re probably not going to like this other story, Skylar.”

  I twisted my lips to the side. “Well, I don’t like you very much right now anyway, so you might as well spill. It can’t get much worse.”

  Brandon snorted. “We’ll see.”

  He set his mug down on the coffee table and then sat back in the couch, bracing his hand on the arm tightly, like he was passenger preparing for a collision.

  “Like I told you before, I originally started working part time at the fund, learning the investment game. But I was still only a teenage shit, and when I was finished at MIT, part of me gravitated back to the old neighborhood. I don’t know why, maybe to prove something to myself, like that I hadn’t sold out my roots for some money and a fancy degree or some bullshit like that. I caught a lot of flak from neighbors when I chose to stay with the Petersens, like I told you. So maybe I was trying to make up for that. I don’t really know. Anyway, when I wasn’t at the fund, I was usually getting into trouble down south.”

  “What kind of trouble?” My voice was strangely calm, but a red flag was waving internally. Considering my dad’s struggles with minor criminal activities, I had no desire to come anywhere near Boston’s seedy underground or anyone else who did. When Brandon mentioned his friends to Messina, I had thought he was bluffing, just naming a few names to ingratiate himself. Maybe not.

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Stupid kid stuff. Fights, mostly, and hustling billiards. Standard young hooligan shit.”

  The pool table set up in his house suddenly made more sense. Although it had obviously hardly been used, the room was like an open invitation to his old gang of friends who, for whatever reason, never accepted the offer.

  “So what happened next?” I asked.

  Brandon rubbed his face as if he were in physical pain, but continued. “So that was my life: trading by day, hustling at night. I was kind of a wunderkind at the firm, and Stan—that’s Miranda’s dad—liked me. Took me six months to double his holdings, so he didn’t give a shit that I showed up hungover half the time or in the same wrinkled suit as the night before. After my first year was up, he promoted me to a vice-president position, and that’s when I met Miranda.”

  He had met his ex-wife at a company mixer held on Stanley Keith’s expansive estate in Chestnut Hill. All of the fund managers brought their families for the afternoon shindig, which was typical New England, right down to the white wine spritzers and croquet games for the kiddies. All the men wore khaki pants and polo shirts; the women wore pearls. And Brandon had shown up half-drunk after a late night at the billiards hall in jeans and a t-shirt.

  “Miranda thought I was some asshole on the catering staff, come late to the party, and started chewing me out for it.”

  He smiled ruefully, looking over my shoulder at some invisible memory. I curled smaller into my chair.

  “She didn’t get along with her old man. They fought like crazy, and she was at that age when all she wanted to do was piss him off just to do it. So when I told her to go fuck herself, she yanked me into the kitchen pantry and had her way with me. It wasn’t until she dragged me out to show her dad what she’d done that she found out I actually worked for the bastard and was probably one of his most valuable employees.”

  I grimaced, not wanting to imagine him with the angel-faced woman I’d seen today, but finding myself doing so all too easily. She was everything I wasn’t: tall and lithe, delicate-boned with skin like porcelain. Genteel. And very beautiful. In her early twenties she must have been stunning.

  “But I was still from far enough on the other side of town to be the bad boy she needed,” Brandon continued, pulling me from my thoughts. “I didn’t give a shit about anything in those days—not my life, not the world around me, and certainly not Stan Keith. We served a mutual purpose for each other—she was a distraction for me, and I was her way of getting her father’s attention.”

  “But she fell in love with you?” The words clipped at my heart as I said them, but I could see where the story was going. It was a damn Billy Joel song. Uptown girl falls in love with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks and tries to make him over.

  Brandon nodded regretfully. “Unfortunately, yes. And as fucked up as I was, Skylar, all I knew was that it felt really good to have someone like Miranda—someone who was beautiful, who came from a good family, a person of substance—love me. She knew where
I was from and she still loved me. Maybe she even loved me because of where I was from.”

  I could see it. I didn’t like it, but I could see it. Brandon had struggled all his life for approval, still so clearly yearned for the kind of unconditional love he should have gotten as a kid. I could completely understand how at nineteen or twenty he’d confused the way a girl made him feel about himself with genuine love for her. But was that my own assumptions talking? I didn’t really want to know the truth, but I had to ask.

  “Did you love her back?” My voice was soft, with a slight waver.

  He shook his head, his eyes full of pain. “Poor Miranda. Sometimes I think Stan was the real genius. He knew I was no good from the get-go, but I wonder if that’s why he actually encouraged my relationship with his daughter. He knew I’d fuck up enough one day to the point I’d need him and his family to get me out of trouble, indebting me and my brain to him for good. All he needed to do was wait and use his daughter to move me into the right position.”

  It didn’t take long. After dating Miranda for six months or so, trouble found him and his Dorchester crew when a billiards game went bad.

  “We got cocky, even though we were starting to get attention. For me, I didn’t give a shit if we made money at that point—I was only doing it for kicks, you know? And when we started to gain a rep, I was ready to bow out. But some of the guys were starting to depend on it, especially the ones who couldn’t hold down a job. So we kept doing it, even though we knew better.”

  One night he and his friends were challenged at their regular pool hall by an unknown player named Ricky O’Neill, who himself showed up clearly looking to hustle. When Brandon beat him, Ricky lost his temper and pulled a knife. He left after the bar owner tossed them all out, but that wasn’t the end of it.

  Brandon leaned forward over his knees as if to focus. His accent had been thickening steadily the entire time he’d been telling his story—now it was noticeably strong.

  “Later that night, when we’re all hanging at Mickey and Doug’s place, there’s this knock at the front door. We all look at each other, knowing this ain’t good news, since it’s fuckin’ three in the morning. We’re drunk, of course, and before we get our act together enough to duck out the back, the door busts open and Ricky comes chargin’ in with five other guys, all of ‘em Westies.”

  Ricky ended up being a member of the now-defunct West End gang, the criminal group headed up by Whitney Bulgar in the eighties. They didn’t do much now, but those who still ran around did pay homage to local Mafia and even to some of the heads in New York.

  I shivered. “So what happened?”

  Brandon bowed his head, speaking into his palms. “About what you’d expect. They had guns, we had a few too. They killed my friend John, but we got Ricky before the cops showed up and we all had to bail out the back alley.”

  They had run away from the two dead bodies lying in the ramshackle apartment in Field’s Corner, but the cops had caught up with two of the men from Ricky’s crew, and both of them had sang like canaries under the pressure of mild interrogation.

  “Did you kill—”

  “No,” Brandon said flatly. He looked up, eyes unblinking and hard. “No. I promise you that, Skylar, I never killed anyone. But I did throw a few punches, and I was definitely a witness, you know? Or an aid to murder, depending on which side of the prosecution you’re on.”

  Suddenly chilled, I pulled a blanket from the back of my chair and settled it around my waist, kneading the soft knit fabric in my hands. “So what happened next?”

  “Well, Stan got what he wanted. While Doug and Mickey had to make do with burnt out public defenders, Stan bankrolled my criminal defense. In exchange, of course, for a ten-year contract at the fund and non-compete agreement for just as long if I was fired.”

  “Ray and Susan couldn’t help?”

  Brandon shook his head. “Ray’s a poor professor and Susan doesn’t work. No, they couldn’t help, but honestly, they were fed up with my shit by that point anyway. So when Stan stepped in, I would have been a fool to say no. But here’s the real kicker: he didn’t just pay for the lawyer. He had Miranda act as my alibi.”

  He looked up at me, and fine lines around his eyes suddenly seemed more evident. I gripped the blanket, resisting the urge to go and wrap my arms around his shoulder, pull his head into my lap, and smooth the anguish that was so clear across his rugged features. But I needed to hear the rest of this story. So I stayed put.

  “It wasn’t right,” Brandon continued. “I know that. He traded his daughter for the promise of millions in revenue. He knew what I could do better than I did. But I was nineteen, and for the first time in my life, really fucking scared. My friends were too good to rat me out, and Miranda’s alibi made the Westies’ testimonies sound like petty gang rivalry. I didn’t want to get locked up, so I let her cover for me and I signed the agreement. And while my two best friends got time—Doug got two and a half years for assault with intent while Mickey got stuck with twenty for voluntary manslaughter—I got off scot-free.”

  Well, that explained why he didn’t go see any of them anymore. He’d told Victor that they were both still in jail—Doug must have done something else after getting out the first time.

  “So you married her because she served as your alibi.” I stated the obvious, considering it as a I swirled the small bit of tea still left in my mug.

  Brandon leaned back in his seat, the tension in his shoulders releasing now that the story had almost come to an end. “In a way, I guess I did. It’s hard to explain that kind of debt if you’ve never had it. And I seemed to make her happy, especially when I quit hanging out in Dorchester and decided to go to law school with Stan’s blessing. So when she started talking marriage a few years in, I said okay. We had a big affair at Cape Cod. Big white tent, the works. She looked like a princess, and I was the frog dressed like a prince.” He paused, caught up again in the memories. “It seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  I could see him clearly: fourteen years ago, before he’d quite learned the veneer and polish that wealth brought, trussed up in a tuxedo that hung from a slightly lankier frame. I also had no problem envisioning Miranda in a Vera Wang confection, carrying pristine peonies and tippling champagne with equally pristine guests. It was a world I could only imagine from movies and novels—never one I’d ever known, or even wanted, myself. I wondered if, despite his initial desire to escape the threat of the poverty of his youth, Brandon had ever really wanted that kind of opulence too. The kind of opulence that now characterized his life.

  “But it didn’t last.” I spoke quietly, more to myself than to him.

  He looked up from where he was studying the edge of the sofa. “No,” he said. “It didn’t.”

  I didn’t say anything, just waited for him to finish the story. He sighed and kept going.

  “Stan died about five years after the wedding, of pancreatic cancer. Just after instating me as the president of the fund. He signed the business over to me before he died, a sort of mea culpa, I guess, so it wasn’t a part of what he willed Miranda or her mother. By that point I was ready for the challenge. When he died, I disintegrated the hedge fund and used the capital to start my own shop. Miranda…well, she liked the money, but she didn’t like the hours. And when it became apparent that she couldn’t have kids, well…she didn’t like that either. But she’s Catholic, so not as much as she didn’t like divorce.”

  After trying everything short of adoption, they had agreed somewhat tacitly to live their own lives apart while maintaining the pleasant veneer of their marriage to the public. Miranda spent most of her time in the penthouse in New York, only coming back to Boston for family functions or occasionally to see Brandon. I filed that fact aside. Brandon made it seem like the fire had gone out between them long ago—or maybe never been there to begin with—but it was obvious to me that Miranda Sterling née K
eith still was and always had been in love with her husband.

  Brandon, on the other hand, stayed at the house on Beacon Street and continued to invest most of his energy into the firms, which had quickly blossomed into some of the top law and investment companies on the East Coast. They had gone on like that for at least six or seven years, which was surprisingly easy to believe, given the somewhat lonely feel of the townhouse and the hours he kept.

  I set my mug down on the coffee table and sighed. As angry as I was to find that he had a wife, I couldn’t help sympathize with his situation more and more. In the time we had spent together, I had firsthand knowledge of just what kind of passion, kindness, and dedication that Brandon was capable of giving. I could hardly blame another woman for seeing that in him. It was part of what had made me fall in love with him too.

  Jesus. The word rang through my head with the subtlety of a church bell. Love. We had said it to each other only last night, and he had shouted it in front of half of my law school classmates on the street minutes before. The words had been spontaneous, and I hadn’t yet processed exactly what they meant. But as soon as I looked up at met Brandon’s eyes, which implored me for forgiveness with such obvious desperation, I knew that I was still as head over heels as I’d ever been. There was no way I couldn’t love this man, history and all.

  The thought was terrifying. Gripping the blanket to keep myself from launching at him, instead I urged him to finish the story. “So what happened next?”

  Brandon leaned back into the couch again and clapped his hands together over his stomach.

  “Everything and nothing, if you know what I mean. I was having dinner with Ray and Susan one night. Susan made this roasted chicken, which is Ray’s all-time favorite thing to eat on the planet. They aren’t the most affectionate people—certainly weren’t with me either, as you know—but I remember when she set it down in front of him, he gave her this look, and she blushed about ten shades of red.” Brandon smirked. “About the same as your hair.”