Tempest: A Stepbrother Romance

by Brother, Stephanie

  Philip’s life had changed too. He’d turned himself around completely. He’d finally had success with one of his projects, and he’d made the million that he always promised Isabella he would. Buying the house that looked out onto the park seemed churlish without his childhood sweetheart there to enjoy it with him, and besides which, over the last decade, he’d grown tired of the city completely.

  He visited Isabella once a year on her birthday. It had taken a long time for him to get over what had happened to them, and once a year seemed like just about enough time for him to be able to cope with the journey back into their past. Isabella had her moments. She had good days and bad, happy moments and sad, but seemed content enough with the life that she had been forced to lead, and stable enough not to try and take it away from herself. Philip had moved her to a private facility, which offered almost resort like facilities, and it was a far cry from where she had begun. It wasn’t exactly the house over central park, nor indeed the flat they had shared in Coney Island, but it was the best that was available, and appreciated greatly by Isabella, even if she was unsure of the details of its provision.

  Isabella greeted him like an old friend. They talked about the past as though they were still living it, and every once in a while she would smile like she used to when he would juggle apples or try to impress her. She never once asked about Leighton, nor referred to the period of time they had spent living in Coney Island. It was as if that year never existed for her.

  Philip never fell out of love, even though he knew the person he loved was buried so deep inside this one, she might not have existed any more at all. It was a pain he had grown to deal with, like a birthmark or a distinguishing scar. It was something he knew would never fully go away.

  Kids began to filter out of the school, running into arms of waiting parents. It had taken Philip a long time, and a considerable amount of money to find out where he was, and as he waited patiently and watched, he felt like he could hardly breathe.

  It had been ten years since he’d seen him. A whole decade for the boy he gave up to grow older. The photo they’d given him made his heart leap. It was somehow everything he expected and nothing at all like it all at the same time. It was definitely their son, but somehow more than that. A life and personality of his own.

  For a while the kids kept coming, they found their waiting parent, shared a moment of conversation and went on their way, until there were fewer and fewer parents waiting, and fewer and fewer kids left to be collected. When all of the parents had gone, Philip thought he’d somehow missed him, until one last kid trudged slowly out of the school gates, shrugged his shoulders up into his neck against the biting cold and turned directly towards him.

  Philip’s heart skipped a beat and his skin went cold. There was no doubt about it, this was Leighton. This was his son.

  Leighton walked to the curb where Philip’s car had pulled in, peered at it with the curious interest a ten year old boy has in droves, and carried on up the street.

  Philip caught a breath, and then leaned forwards against the window, concentrating hard not to pass out.

  “Do you want me to follow him, Sir?” Philip’s driver asked him.

  “Take me home, Anthony”, was all he said, and while Leighton disappeared up the street, kicking autumn leaves as he went, Philip headed home to his Chesapeake estate, and the new family he’d somehow agreed to let share it with him.

  Chapter 22

  Over the next eight years, Philip watched Leighton grow up from afar. He attended sporting events, theatre productions, school outings, and parked up countless times at the school gates, far enough away not to be noticed, just to get a glimpse of him. His intention was always to present himself, or approach him and reveal who he was, but the longer he left it and the older Leighton became, the harder it was to do so.

  Alexis and her three daughters knew very little about Philip’s past life and nothing at all about his rediscovering of his estranged son, nor how much it tore him apart not to be able to make a connection with him. Alexis probably wouldn’t have given two shits, but Philip had no interest in revealing his secret daytime activities for fear she’d somehow scupper them, or even worse, have something over him she could use as a means of control. The kids were too young to understand, and didn’t need to know anyway.

  Philip had met Alexis at a charity event sponsored by one of his companies, and he’d been impressed enough by her balls-out attitude to want to meet her again. It was a whirlwind romance that saw them married only six months after they met. It hadn’t taken long for Philip to be convinced. Beyond an immediate mutual attraction they both found difficult to deny, they were both go-getters with a clear idea of what they wanted. It was only later on in the relationship that Philip began to realize that Alexis’s motivation came only from the money he was able to provide for her and not from love. It was an aspect they ended up both sharing.

  Also, approaching thirty, he felt like it was probably about time he thought seriously about settling down again. Since Isabella, he’d kept himself away from women for a long time, but with Alexis, he finally found someone he didn’t feel guilty about being with, and who he felt he had the potential to fall in love with and build the future he had always wanted. Alexis not only seemed keen, she came with a ready made family, baggage from an ill thought out marriage that had long since crumbled to dust. There was only one issue that Philip felt like he had to overcome. Alexis’s middle daughter, for reasons beyond Philip’s comprehension, shared his long lost love’s first name.

  He thought he was big enough not to let it bother him, but as the years passed, he began to resent the child simply for having the audacity to be called Isabella. To be alive where she was not, and to be here, living with him, in his house and under his roof, paid for by money he had fought hard to earn to provide for his Isabella, the real Isabella, without any understanding of how lucky this fake one was.

  Chapter 23

  Isabella rocked on her chair, tilting the thing back to balance on the rear two legs, while her knees wedged up against the table and held her steady. She was a cute girl, but hadn’t shown the focus or drive of her older sister, nor the intelligence of her younger. She was a disappointment to Philip, who felt like his hatred for her was easier to draw on than the hatred he felt for the other two. He’d not intended to hate them at all, but the more distant he felt from his own son, the more he resented having these three ‘hangers-on’ around. And to him, Isabella felt, at times, like a cruel joke.

  “Sit properly, Isabella”, Philip rebutted.

  Isabella did nothing but laugh. Resentment went both ways in this hackneyed family. All of the girls harbored a special kind of dislike for the man they never wanted to call father, who punished them for little other than looking at him the wrong way, who might have once been funny and charming but never seemed to be anything other than serious now, and who was quick to raise his hand and even quicker to close it before it came in contact with them. They might have lived in a big house, but they never once felt like they couldn’t have been better off without it. They complained voraciously to their mother, sometimes exaggerating the stories, sometimes not even needing to, but Alexis wouldn’t hear it. Her husband provided for them, and despite being over excessive sometimes in his idea of control, he was definitely a good man, and each of them had to do their duty and standby him.

  “Are you going to tell her?” In the absence of Isabella’s compliance, Philip directed his complaint to her mother.

  The man that he was becoming, would have shocked his Isabella to the core. It had happened so slowly over such a long time, it would have been impossible to see the change day by day, but now, he was nothing like he had been when they had grown up, or lived together in Coney Island.

  This Philip was full of hatred and bitterness, driven only by the desire to make money and be the best he could in his business. Losing Isabella had destroyed him and darkened his heart. Finding Alexis was an attempt to pull himse
lf out again, and for a while it seemed like that would be the case, but it was the opposite that happened. What he mistook for love served only to sink him further. That bitterness and hatred for a world he saw take away his first love and his only son, and the fear that kept him from rectifying that, Philip channeled into an assault on his family that only served to separate and isolate himself even more.

  “Isabella, do as your father says.”

  “Why? And he’s not my father anyway.”

  Isabella smiled, fully aware she was pushing her luck. Pandora looked at Gracey, and Gracey, a face full of fear, looked at her stepfather.

  “Just do it”, Alexis snapped.

  She didn’t have time to either question him again, or move her knees out from under the table to position herself and her chair more appropriately. The rage had built up inside Philip so often, he knew it was coming before anyone else did. Isabella copped a slap across the back of the head that pushed her face forcefully into her plate and broke a wobbly front tooth.

  “Philip, fucking hell”, Alexis shouted, two of her daughters ghostly white with shock, the other a bloody and screaming mess. “You’ll pay for this”, she said, turning to him in shock herself. “you’ll fucking pay for this.”

  “Control your fucking children and I won’t need to do it myself”, Philip spat before pushing the table away and spending the rest of the evening in his office, his hands shaking from what he had done.

  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 realised 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 realised, 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 health. She’d have to leave it at that.