Gracey was in a good place. A year on from a moment in her life when she thought she’d never see the outside world again, things were looking up. Yes, her sister was in prison, and Pandora and her mother were still barely talking to her, but she was happy. She had the perfect boyfriend in Leighton Tempest, the perfect home in the Chesapeake estate and the perfect future in the bundle of joy that was very close to saying hello to the world. That wasn’t all she had to look forward to either.
Leighton had proposed. He’d flown Gracey to an Italian villa that looked out over lake Como, got down on one knee and asked the shocked but delighted girl to marry him. And in broken syllables, which she had to repeat twice, Gracey had, of course, said yes.
There was nothing more that she needed. Leighton, her baby, a wonderful home and true love to fill it. She missed her step-father and her own family from time to time, but she was ready to make her own.
With everything that had happened in her life so far, Gracey finally felt complete.
Pandora and Alexis
Pandora, dressed in a thousand dollar Prada jumpsuit, Manolo Blahnik heels and expensive chunky gold jewelry, leaned on her rake and smoked a cigarette. Community labor did not suit her. She just wasn’t cut out for it.
Litter picking was meant for the proletariat, not the bourgeoisie. Despite her recent conviction, Pandora saw herself very much in the latter category.
“Pandora Logan!” The event organizer, an ex military official called Steve, called to her, apoplectic with rage.
Pandora saw him storming over. She rolled her eyes and thrust out her chest.
“Is there any reason why, Miss. Logan, you seem not to grasp the principles of this exercise?”
Most of the other workers had stopped now to look over.
“My back hurts”, Pandora complained.
Originally given two hundred hours by the judge, it had already increased to three hundred and fifty for various outbursts of insolence. They had her painting over graffiti, cleaning up dog shit from parks, serving food in a soup kitchen and accompanying elderly residential home residents on an outing to the bingo, none of which she actively participated in. The litter picking was at the end of a long list of tasks she refused to do.
“If you don’t work, I’ll be required to report you”, Steve informed her, his mustache twitching.
“Whatever”, Pandora said, taking a long puff on her cigarette and giving him a sultry look. It wasn’t outside of the realms of possibility, that Pandora would fuck this man to get a tick on her sheet and a pass for the work. It wasn’t like it hadn’t happened already.
Like Gracey, Pandora and her mother had moved on. They were also, despite the fact that Pandora seemed like she would never finish her community service - even with the amount of government officials she fucked - in a much better place.
They had left the fortunes of Philip Mandrake De Vries behind, only to sink their talons in that of another. Another two to be precise. Father and son, Albert and Ernest Rathsburger. Alexis’s capabilities for finding billionaires showed no bounds, and for Pandora, the match of athleticism, intelligence and abundant wealth, literally in Ernest, proved a combination too powerful to resist. Love was of secondary importance. The mother and daughter team relocated to the other side of the river, Pandora took over one entire wing of their seventy two room mansion and Alexis made sure she knew both where the drinks cabinet was and that it was regularly restocked. After years of bitter solitude, Albert and his son, couldn’t have been happier.
Steve didn’t know how to cope with her. It was almost as if the girl was doing this on purpose. Shouting didn’t seem to help, nor did she seem fazed by his various threats. What they had was a standoff, and the longer it went on, the redder Steve’s cheeks were getting.
“Just tell me when you’re done”, Pandora said eventually, letting the litter picker drop to the floor as she wandered away. “I’m going to sit down for a while.”
And with that, Pandora went off to find a bench, and Steve could do nothing more than mutter his disgust, and mark her contribution in his ledger as zero.
When Pandora’s parole officer found out, a man she was also attempting to engage in nocturnal activities as a way to end the ridiculous mess she had unfairly found herself in, the only thing he could do was increase her required hourly commitment. After lengthy investigations and a back and forth with the state, he found he didn’t have any power to send her to prison or put her back up in front of a judge.
There was one piece of good news, however. A new opening had come up and needed to be filled. Pandora’s name was instantly put down on the top of the list, and no matter how much she tried to win him over, he wouldn’t allow himself to be dissuaded. Pandora could complain all she liked. The new sewage treatment works over on the East of the city would be allowed to make their mark on the uncooperative and workshy girl. Pandora had four hundred and fifty hours to commit, and he knew exactly where she was going to spend every single one of them: cleaning out tanks of the finest shit Baltimore residents could offer.
Leighton and his mother
Almost two months passed before Leighton finally sat down to read the near four hundred page handwritten document his father had left him as part of his legacy. His excuse was that he wanted to wait until the complications around Gracey’s trial had been satisfactorily concluded, and his fiancee had been set free with her name rightfully cleared. Really, it was because he was more scared of the truth than anything else he ever had been in his life.
It had stayed sealed in the jiffy bag until the night Isabella confessed, when he finally decided enough was enough, and reasoned it was time to get it out of the way, bury his father once and for all, and move on with his life. He read it through in one sitting, unable to stop himself once he had started. It was not at all what he expected.
After reading it cover to cover twice more, he gave it to Gracey to read. She was in tears after the very first page, crying all the way to the very end of the letter.
It took him moments to find the facility where his mother had been living for almost all of her adult life, and a couple more to be told she was very much still alive with no intention of going anywhere in the near future. It was six months, however, before he gained the courage to finally go and see her in person.
Gracey offered to support him, but Leighton felt like it was something he should do alone. The drive to the facility was absolutely nerve wracking, as was the wait in the reception area while the friendly nurse went to inform Isabella that she had a visitor. Leighton reasoned that it was probably better if he identified himself to the staff as a member of the family, but certainly not Isabella’s estranged son - if he felt it appropriate he could do that to his mother directly.
He didn’t want to cause a scene nor risk getting denied access. It had taken long enough to build up the courage to come here in the first place, something Leighton had got used to not having to think twice about. In business, he was an absolute lion, but when it came to the matter of his parents, Leighton wanted the world to swallow him up. It wasn’t everyday, that at nearly thirty years old, you got to meet your mother for the very first time, and Leighton, well aware of what was at stake, didn’t want to fuck up their first meeting.
“Go on through”, the nurse said with a smile when she returned. “Bella’s out in the garden painting. You’re lucky, she’s in a good mood today.”
Leighton composed himself, walked through the large open plan recreation room, which the reception gave out to, and through the double doors to the patio and acre of landscaped garden beyond. His mother was the only one out there, sat at a wooden table with sketchbook in hand, slowly rendering the swaying trees and distant buildings that lined the edge of the city beyond. He had practiced what to say a million times. He’d gone over it in his head, which included acting out the countless permutations that might present themselves. He was all set to go, when Isabella heard him approach, turned towards him, took off her glasses an
d smiled.
“Hello, Philip”, she said. “I wondered when you’d be back.”
Leighton was stunned into silence. His mother was frailer than he had imagined, almost ghostly in her appearance, but absolutely beautiful, as though she might have just wandered in from another time period. She had light blue eyes like a Persian cat, and thin skin through which you could almost see her blood running. On the table next to her sketchbook sat an ashtray full of cigarette ends, while one recently lit cigarette sent a thin trail of smoke into the sky.
“You look different”, Isabella said. “Come closer, so I can see you.”
Leighton stepped towards his mother. “Isabella”, he said, tears beginning to well in his eyes.
When he kneeled in front of her and took her shaking hands in his, she'd already realized her mistake. “Oh my”, she said, almost choking on the words. “It can't be. Leighton. Is that really you? Is that my son?”
Leighton embraced his mother strongly, her body feeling like it might blow away if a gust if wind came along to take it. Tears dropped onto her sketchbook and neither of them knew who they belonged to. Her cigarette burned out to nothing before they felt the need to separate.
“I waited for you”, Isabella said, holding on to his hands as tightly as she could manage. “I never forgot. Philip didn’t think I remembered what happened, but I never forgot. I knew you’d come back to me, I knew it.”
They walked around the garden together, hand in hand, and Isabella told her son about the center, about her drawings, the other residents, the good nurses and the bad nurses, and anything else that occurred to her might be important. The nurses had never seen her happier, nor as talkative, and when that first visit was finally over, Leighton couldn’t believe that his mother was sick at all. She seemed perfectly normal, absolutely in control of her own emotions and completely lucid.
From his father’s descriptions of her condition, he half expected to find her strapped to a bed in a semi catatonic state or distant and unresponsive at the very least. It was a relief just to see her able to hold a conversation, a pleasure to have that conversation actually mean something to him. That first visit was over four hours long and Leighton went back again the next day to catch up where they had left off. Over the first week he saw her five of the seven days, and on every single one of them she was bright, responsive and excited to see him.
They talked about Philip's life and death, about Gracey’s trial and pregnancy and about the letter that Philip had left Leighton in his will. Hearing the news of Philip’s death was a shock for Isabella, which manifested itself outside of Leighton’s visits. She had said goodbye to her husband a long time ago, but always expected him to return every year on her birthday, no matter what was happening in her life. Knowing that he now wouldn’t was a pain difficult for her to assimilate. Had she not had Leighton to connect to, it could have been difficult to fully recover from.
Leighton introduced his mother to Gracey, and the two women got on well, sharing interests in art, music, dance, philosophy and books. Isabella was an intelligent woman, a voracious reader and had become even more stubborn and opinionated as she’d got older. She wasn’t going to let her illness deplete her of her faculties, even though she felt somewhat dulled by the years of medication. She’d finally accepted that in order to win her fight, she had to place her trust in her medical team, and over the years had at last found peace within herself. As their visits progressed, Leighton was exposed to all sides of his mother’s character, both good and bad. At times he felt like he didn’t know her at all, while at others there were characteristics he saw in her he was used to about himself. He saw her as an incredibly courageous woman, dealt a very poor hand in life, who wasn’t just making do, she was excelling where she could. Isabella was a popular member of the facility, a favorite amongst the nurses and trusted with several responsibilities that not many other patients were given.
Leighton wanted to take her out of the facility - she was there voluntarily - but Isabella refused. She’d spent most of her life there, and for a long time already it had been her home. Leighton had to relent. His father had chosen her facility well, and his mother seemed like she was at peace with her surroundings.
“It’s an acceptance”, one of the longer serving nurses said during one of Leighton’s visits. “Bella has accepted the fact that this is her place and she needs to be here because of her illness. It took us a long time to get to that stage. I remember your father was the same as you at the beginning. She’s happy here, not all the time is she happy inside her own head, but she’s happy here in the facility. We can’t change that now, not after thirty years.”
Leighton and Isabella had a lot to catch up on, and Isabella, still shy of half a century, had a lot of living to go. The future seemed bright for them both, and Isabella was over the moon that she got to be a grandmother.
For a woman that felt like her life had been on hold for three decades, who lost herself, her partner and her son as a teenager, her life was finally beginning to turn itself around again.
She had never been happier, never felt more alive in her life, just to look at her son and know she’d created him. She was inordinately proud of him, and when she looked inside herself, past her demons and the black moods, she felt truly capable of happiness. She felt complete.
It was a feeling that Leighton and Gracey both shared with her.
Esmeralda
Leighton was indebted to his PA. Esmeralda, despite what had happened, decided to stick by her wayward, itinerant boss. Despite herself too, she even became quite fond of Gracey, and although she wouldn’t admit it to either of them, thought they made a perfect, well-balanced couple. Leighton moved the base of his operations to the Chesapeake estate, and left the New York office completely in Esmeralda’s control. She had already proven herself to the company and Leighton trusted her to step up and move the company forward in his absence, while he took more of a backseat role until life began to even itself out again.
If he was needed for a business meeting, he would conduct it from home. If there was anything he couldn’t attend, Esmeralda went in his place. She became extremely valuable to the company, and Leighton rewarded her loyalty further by giving her a remarkably generous share option.
Esmeralda had almost single handedly kept the company running while the trial was going on, and had managed to turn what could have been extremely negative publicity into something overwhelmingly positive. Gracey and Leighton were technically step-siblings, but the spin that Esmeralda put on the story meant that after the barrage of press releases, Leighton and Gracey’s story sounded like a Disney fairytale. They quickly became the most popular couple in America, trended highest amongst Google searches for a continuous four week period, became twitter sensations almost overnight and were on the lips and minds of almost everyone in the western world who wasn’t living under a rock.
After her romantic fling with Leighton faded spectacularly and almost instantly into nothingness, Esmeralda sought satisfaction elsewhere. She was not lacking in admirers, but no matter how many people she got through, she couldn’t find anyone who had quite the same set of specific abilities as Leighton. She was still in love with her boss, or at least the idea of him, and even though she didn’t want to admit it, hoped that one day he might come back to her. The thought was preposterous, Leighton was in love with Gracey and everyone knew it, but Esmeralda was naturally optimistic and couldn’t help but dream.
It was a distant dream, and not one that held her back in everyday life. It was more a fantasy she liked to indulge in, and not something she thought would ever happen again for real. It had taken a while, several bottles of expensive red wine and one particularly rare piece of sculpture that Leighton held close to his heart for her to get to that point, but she’d got there nonetheless.
Leighton was a Sunday afternoon, sitting-in-the-bath moment of nostalgia, and not the bitter ex-lover that stomped all over her heart. He was her boss, responsible fo
r her ludicrously large paycheck that had bought her the Sunday hot tub in the first place and not her happy ever after. Esmeralda was working on that, and while she was working quite hard on finding her man, she was very much enjoying the frequent and rewarding process of looking. Without any attachments.
Once she’d got over the bitterness that Leighton had left her with, she couldn’t see anything bad in her life. Yes, she’d like to find that one and only, but she was young and there was plenty of time ahead of her. The last thing she wanted was to get pregnant too - she definitely wasn’t ready for that in her life.
Gracey and Leighton were perfect for each other it seemed. It was a fucked up coincidence that brought them together in the first place, but it was love that kept them from being apart. They fought for each other and were reaping the rewards. Esmeralda thought that it was kind of fingers down the throat puke into a bucket sickening on one hand, but super beautiful on another. That was America in a nutshell, she thought, as she sunk deeper into the warm water of her bath, while that evening’s ‘test’ got undressed in the other room. A country where the death of a father can bring two families across two generation closer together, and generate true love between two complete strangers.
It didn’t matter that they were step siblings at all, and that was what Esmeralda had focused on in the press releases. What mattered was what they felt for each other, and that was love. Bare, real, true love. The kind of love that makes old woman nostalgic, young teens quiver, the hardest of men melt, and woman all over the world turn to goo.
Maybe that was what she needed. Maybe she needed to stop fucking all and sundry and find out whether her own mysterious and unknown step-brother was lurking in the shadows somewhere. Maybe that was exactly what she was lacking.
Tempest: A Stepbrother Romance Page 18