We weren’t even related, and we’d first hooked up before we even knew our parents were getting married, so it wasn’t fair that our relationship would be stuck firmly in the territory of ‘forbidden, wrong, and disgusting’ by anyone who discovered it. There was nothing wrong or disgusting about what we were doing.
It was love, and that could never be wrong.
Having said that, I still had no idea how we were going to go about revealing it to the world, but now wasn’t the time to worry about that; another day when my head didn’t feel like it’d been hit with a baseball bat would make a better time. As my Mom launched into a spiel about how I was going to have to file a police report about the accident to help her with the insurance claim, I looked at Cade again, and he smiled and gave me a half nod. I knew he was thinking exactly what I was thinking.
As soon as I felt better, we needed to come clean about us.
***
By the next day, I already felt a lot better; the medication had worked wonders. I still allowed myself to have a nice sleep-in, though, and by the time I finally dragged myself out of bed, it was past twelve, and Mom was knocking at my door.
“Charlotte? You feeling okay?”
“Much better already,” I called out. “Sorry, give me a sec…”
I padded over to the door to let her in, and she reached over to brush a stray strand of hair behind my ear as she studied my appearance. “Oh my, you really do look much better. All that sleep was good for you.”
“Yeah, it was really nice. Plus the medication was like nirvana for my nerve endings.”
She laughed. “That’s good. But you can’t take any more without food, remember? Keith, Evan and Cade are downstairs at the dining table—I’ve made us all a nice big lunch. We were just wondering if you were going to join us.”
I nodded, suddenly ravenous. “Just let me put some clothes on, and I’ll be right down.”
Mom had made a roast chicken with lemon and herb marinade, and there was gravy, roast vegetables and bread rolls to go with it. She’d even made my favorite side dish; green beans with a sauce made from fresh chopped basil, tomato paste and butter.
“Dig in, everyone!” she said brightly as I sat down, my mouth watering at the sight of the food.
Cade was sitting to her right, looking even more mouthwateringly appealing than the food, and I bit back an ‘I love you’ as I looked at him. God, how I wanted to shout it from the rooftops, but right now I couldn’t do that; not when we hadn’t admitted our relationship to anyone yet.
We both knew it was going to cause trouble, and our family lunches would never be the same again once everyone knew. We had shame sitting on our shoulders and counting down till the moment we revealed the true nature of our closeness, but the meal was still wonderful anyway. We laughed and joked and talked with everyone about what our upcoming weeks were going to be like, and we happily pretended like everything was right in the world, even though we knew it could all crash down at any moment.
And then it did, but not in the way I’d expected.
As lunch drew to a close, Evan excused himself from the table to use the bathroom, and Keith wiped some gravy from the edge of his lips and looked at Cade. “While he’s gone, there’s something I wanted to ask you. Are you able to help me unload the cabinet later?”
“What cabinet?” Cade asked, his eyebrows drawing together in confusion.
Keith nodded towards the door that led down to the basement. “My gun collection. I love my hunting, but after what happened to your brother, I know he doesn’t feel comfortable having them in the house, and it would reflect poorly on us to have them anyway, given the events of the wedding. So I’m giving them to an old friend of mine. You remember Bob Hill?”
“Yep,” Cade said quietly. I knew if it were up to him, the guns would simply be destroyed; he’d never been a fan of them, or of hunting in general. “So he’s taking all of them?”
Keith waved his hand. “Only the proper hunting rifles. I’m not sure what to do with the two little burners I’ve got in there. Hmm…perhaps Mason Prescott will take them off my hands,” he mused.
My head shot up at that, and I stared at Keith. “Sorry to interrupt,” I said, my heart racing. “But what’s a burner?”
I’d heard him say that word before in what he thought was a private phone conversation to Greg, and I’d assumed he was referring to prepaid burner phones, much like what Cade and I had been using to secretly text each other with over the last few weeks. But from the context of the conversation Keith had just used the word in, I very much doubted he was referring to any sort of phone.
Keith smiled. “Sorry, Charlotte, I keep forgetting you don’t know all this terminology. A burner is just a slang term some folks use around these parts for ‘handgun’.”
What?
I could practically feel the blood draining from my face as he finished speaking, and I was grateful that I was sitting down, because otherwise I knew my legs would’ve given out from under me.
“Honey, are you all right?” Mom asked. “You’ve gone awfully pale.”
“My head suddenly started hurting again,” I lied. Then I forced a genial smile. Thank you for lunch, it was delicious. I think I better go take some more painkillers.”
Mom waved her hand at me. “Oh, yes, off you go. Poor baby,” she said before turning to Keith. “Darling, would you like another drink?”
I managed to drag myself to my feet, willing my body to stay upright, and as I did so, I saw Cade staring at me with his eyes slightly narrowed. He knew me well enough to know something was up, and as I turned and headed for the stairs, I heard him excuse himself as well. He caught up to me in the second floor hallway.
“Charlotte, what happened?” he asked, touching his hand to my arm. Before I could speak, he sighed. “It’s my Dad, isn’t it? He said something. I saw your face when he was talking.”
“I…um…” I wanted so desperately to tell him, but I didn’t want to upset him again, like I had yesterday.
“Tell me,” Cade pressed. “You know I’ll listen to you. I’ve learned my lesson from yesterday, and I’m not going to act like an asshole again when you have something to say, even if it’s about my family.”
I took a deep breath, then pulled him into my room, where we could speak without being overheard by anyone else. “Remember how I went to one of your games early in the semester, and you threw the football at my head?” I asked.
“How could I forget?” Cade said, rubbing his chin. “I’ve never felt like more of a dumbass.”
“Well, after it happened, I went to the bathroom. On my way back, I ran into your Dad. Well, not so much ‘ran into’ as ‘overheard’. He was on the phone, in this little vestibule outside a room. He didn’t actually see me, and no one else was around, so I guess he thought he had total privacy.”
“What was he saying?”
“It sounded like general work stuff, something about hiring someone. Someone called ‘Adams’ although he sounded unsure of the name…so it could’ve been Adamson. And he was definitely talking to Greg, because I heard him say his name too. And then I heard him saying something about Greg needing to get a ‘burner’ for this new hire. At the time I didn’t think much of it. I thought they were just talking about burner phones, which I thought was a bit shady, but hey, that’s politics, right?”
Cade’s body stiffened, and his face blanched. He didn’t say anything, and I continued.
“So I guess maybe there’s a chance they were talking about burner phones that day, but just then at lunch, when I heard him act like the more common use of that word around here is for a gun, I just…”
My voice trailed off, and then I took another deep breath and began again. “Cade, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to start accusing your father of anything again after how our last conversation went, and I swear I’m not lying to cause trouble. I just think it’s all too much of a—”
Cade pressed a finger to my lips, hushing me for
a moment. “Charlotte, don’t say any more,” he said, looking me right in the eyes. “I believe you.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cade
That fucking snake.
He’d done it. He’d actually fucking done it.
Charlotte had been right all along. Her last few sentences had left me with no doubt; there was just too much going on for it all to be a big coincidence. My father and his political consultant had set up the wedding shooting together, all for attention, and I felt sick to my stomach at the thought. They’d obviously paid off Adamson to shoot my little brother and take the fall for the whole thing, and my stomach roiled with revulsion as I pictured Evan lying in the hospital. He was the sweetest kid in the world, and he’d been left physically and emotionally scarred by what had happened to him. Who the fuck could actually do that to their own child just to further their own agenda?
A total psychopath, that’s who. That’s exactly what my father was.
He’d engineered this whole situation to make himself look like a hero in order to boost his profile in the eyes of the general public, and he’d even manipulated me and my brother into respecting him more after it happened. I’d fallen for all his bullshit about wanting to spend more time with the family, and I’d even started to think that I’d been too harsh on him all these years that I’d thought he was a control freak asshole. Hell, I’d even been the one to finally go to him and tell him he needed to run for president…when of course, he was already planning to do it all along, and only pretending he wasn’t going to so as to not draw any suspicion to himself. It was all a set-up, and I’d played right into his hands like a fool, giving him exactly what he needed to look innocent in all of this.
The thing that bothered me the most was that he’d chosen to hurt Evan. Why not me? I was bigger and stronger. I could’ve handled it better. But I guess having a younger, smaller child being injured seemed more sympathetic to certain members of the public, and that was why he’d chosen Evan to be the target.
I stared out the window in Charlotte’s room, still mulling it all over in shock.
Now we knew why Adamson had aimed so badly. He’d been told to. No doubt my father and Greg had told him exactly where to aim—close enough to graze Evan so that he was hurt enough to get media attention, but not enough to maim or kill him. And of course Adamson could do exactly that—he was an expert marksman, as we all knew. He was already heading for jail anyway, as he’d had several arrest warrants out for him before it all happened, and he had a history of mental illness which would vilify him in the eyes of the media, making him look guilty before the dust had even settled.
He was basically the perfect man to hire for the job; no doubt he’d wanted the money for someone else in his life, seeing as he couldn’t exactly use it himself in prison. A sick relative or pregnant girlfriend, perhaps. I also didn’t doubt that Greg and my father—and whoever else was in on this whole disgusting scheme—had coached him on how to present himself during and after the attack in order to convince people that he’d truly had a psychotic break, when he was actually stable and coherent.
It was sick. Too sick to even imagine. And yet they’d all dreamed this plan up together, like the fucking pieces of shit they were.
“What are we going to do?” Charlotte asked, her eyes wide.
I squeezed my hands into such tight fists that my knuckles cracked, and I stared at the floor. “I don’t know. But I want to fucking kill my father.”
“I know. But you’d only be dragging yourself down to his level if you did that. And besides, we need to know for sure that it’s true.”
I jerked my head up to look at her. “What do you mean? Of course it’s true. You’re the one who realized in the first place and brought all of it up…please don’t tell me you’re going to play devil’s advocate now.”
She held her hands up in a ‘calm down’ gesture. “No, of course not. All I’m saying is that we need solid proof. Otherwise how can we expect to do anything about it? We can’t just go to the police and say, ‘Hey, we have this theory about a presidential candidate, but we can’t prove any of it, oh and by the way it sounds like something straight out of a B-grade political thriller movie.’ They’d laugh us out of the building.”
I sighed and nodded. “Shit. You’re right. And knowing Dad, he has plenty of connections in the police force anyway. If we tried to go to them and say anything, I bet one of them would alert him, and then he’d know that we know.”
“Same with a few members of the media, I assume.”
“Yeah. Fuck.”
Charlotte chewed on her lower lip for a moment, deep in thought, and then her eyes widened. “I know what we can do. Remember how you told me that your Dad used to have nanny cams all over the place to spy on your nannies when he wasn’t here?”
“Yep. If you’re thinking we should confront him and use something like that to record him admitting it, it won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Because the minute we confront him, he’ll know that we know, whether he admits to it or not, and that’ll give him time to do damage control. He could twist or suppress the story somehow, and he could probably do it a lot faster than our attempts at getting it out there.”
Charlotte nodded, her shoulders slumping, and then she perked up again. “I have another idea. It’s similar, but it’ll get the story out immediately—with proof—before he can do any damage control. We just need three things.”
“What?”
“One of the old nanny cams, or something similar. Some sort of camera, anyway,” she said, holding up one finger. Then she held up a second. “We’ll also need a decent Wi-Fi connection, which we have already. And thirdly,” she continued, holding up another finger. “We need Nicki.”
“What?” I replied, my eyebrows practically shooting to the roof at the mention of our ex-friend. “Why the hell would we want or need her around?”
“Well, so much crap has happened within the last two days that I haven’t had a chance to speak to you about this yet, but I ran into Nicki the other day, and we made up.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“She apologized, and she seemed genuinely sorry, Cade.”
“I don’t care. She was fucking awful to you.”
“I know, and she’s well aware of that. But I was so sick of holding onto crap from the past. All I could think about when she apologized was you. Remember how long I hated you and held onto all that anger when I thought you’d been the one to ruin my life back in school?”
“Yeah.”
“It didn’t get me anywhere, Cade. It just made me into a bitter, angry person. I don’t want to be like that anymore, and I don’t want you to end up like that either. Trust me, it isn’t worth it,” she said. “Nicki knows that I’m still upset about what she did, but I told her I’d be willing to forgive her and move on if she promised to never hurt someone like that again. And she promised.”
“So you believed her?”
“Yes. Some people don’t deserve a second chance, but some other people do. I think Nicki is one of them. The things she said to me when she apologized….she wasn’t just trying to save her ass and worm her way back into the friendship group. She was genuinely remorseful and understood why she’d lost a lot of friends.”
“I see.”
“After we made up, I asked her to speak to you too, because she betrayed you as well as me. She said she would, but she was worried you’d never forgive her like I did.”
I sighed and sat down again. “I guess that explains the text I got this morning, then. She messaged me asking if we could meet up to talk. I just ignored it.”
“Well, now’s the time to stop ignoring her. You don’t have to forgive her if you don’t want to; obviously that’s your prerogative. But please at least think about it.”
Charlotte then went on to outline her plan to catch my Dad out in all his bullshit, and by the time she’d finished, I knew she was right—we’d definitely
need Nicki’s help to pull it off. She was a computer science student, so she’d be able to ensure everything went off without a hitch.
As well as that, Charlotte was also right about holding grudges. Nicki had done a shitty thing, but she’d mostly done it to Charlotte—and if she could forgive her for it, then who the hell was I to not even consider it for a second?
I picked my phone up. “All right. I’m calling her.”
Nicki answered on the third ring, and I could hear the surprise in her tone. “Cade?”
“Hey, Nicki,” I said gruffly. “I got your text, and I spoke to Charlotte.”
“Oh. Cool. I just want a chance to talk to you so I can tell you how sorry—”
I cut her off. “I know. But that can wait. Right now we really need your help with something.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “You…you want my help?”
“Yes. You’re the only person we know who’s smart enough in this particular field, and we don’t want to try to do it ourselves in case we screw up somehow. If you help us with it, then it’ll go a long way towards us repairing our friendship. And for the record, that’s platonic friendship only.”
“Of course. Whatever it is you need, I’ll help.”
I gave her the general gist of what we needed her to do, but I didn’t tell her exactly why, just in case. As far as she knew, we were simply trying to record my father admitting to some other lesser scandal; something like an affair.
When I’d finally thanked Nicki and hung up, I turned to Charlotte. “She’s on her way here now, and she’s stopping by the mall to buy the right kind of camera and cable for the job. When she arrives, I’ll keep Dad distracted by helping him unload the gun cabinet in the basement while you guys set it all up.”
“And then we’ll be ready to go. God, I hope it works.”
Instead of replying to Charlotte right away, I pulled her onto my lap, and before she could react, I leaned in and kissed her, tasting the sweetness of her lips and the heat of her mouth. She kissed me back, hard and insistent, blanking out all coherent thought for a moment. I let the taste and scent and her warmth wash over me, drowning in her, and when she finally pulled back, I breathed deeply and nodded at her.
Tease - A Stepbrother Sports Romance Page 17