Quid Pro Quo: A dark stepbrother romance

by Nenia Campbell

  She could feel her face heating up anew remembering that flicker of dark interest that had lit up his eyes as he studied her in the diner. He was going to destroy her. He nearly had before, but his vanity and his egocentrism had rendered him too myopic to truly see into the heart of her and do the damage that he'd craved. This time, she would not escape unscathed; he was going to make her suffer and do it so well that she might even grow to crave it—until it sent her plummeting. Until it left her broken and bleeding.

  Until he ripped her heart out.

  The bell jangled overhead and Lily waved from her desk, her face curious. Jay didn't have time to speak with Lily, though, because Owen was waiting for her, too.

  “Jay!” He beckoned her to his office, which she only went into when transcribing a meeting or delivering coffee. “Come in, come in. Tell me how lunch went. I want to hear all about it.”

  Well, you see, Mr. Parker, my stepbrother just blackmailed me into sleeping with him because my mother got posthumously disinherited by my stepfather for fucking the pool boy, and she really, really wants her cut—so she pimped me out to him, which kind of sucks. But the food at the restaurant was great, so over all, I'd give it a C-?

  “Where did you two go?” Owen was asking. “Did he seem happy with the company? Were there any difficult questions? Any pain points?”

  Oh God. “It was great,” Jay said, not entirely evenly. She could feel her face beginning to heat. “We went to the Green Grill. I think . . . uh, I think he'll invest.”

  “That's great news.” Owen looked so heartened that Jay wanted to cry. “Great work, Jay.”

  Jay felt her phone buzz and peeked at it. Send me your resume.

  “Um.” Jay swallowed hard as the walls began to tilt. “There's more.”

  “Oh?” Owen was still smiling but now it looked cautious. “What is it?”

  “He kind of offered me a job and it sounds like he wants me to start right away.”

  “I see.” In a neutral voice, Owen asked her, “How soon is right away?”

  “Like . . . tomorrow.” Jay hung her head. “I'm sorry. I had no idea that he'd hire me.” I had no idea that he would come here at all.

  She braced herself as Owen's face flickered in a way that she was unable to interpret. But then he laughed. “I guess I couldn't hide the best-kept secret in San Francisco forever.”

  Jay blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “I'm not going to lie, Jay. When Beaucroft said he wanted to meet with you directly, I did wonder if perhaps you'd been applying elsewhere on the sly.”

  “I wouldn't—” This is better. Let him think this. “I'm sorry.”

  “More time would have been better,” Owen admitted with a sigh. “But I think Lily can pick up the slack while we interview other candidates to fill your position. You've done excellent work for us, Jay, and even though we'll miss you dearly, I think I speak for everyone at this company when I wish you the best at what is sure to be an exciting new opportunity for you at this stage of your career.”

  “You're being—” Jay swallowed “—incredibly understanding about this.”

  “Landing an investor on your way out certainly sweetens the sting,” said Owen, which made the color drain from her face. “My best wishes to you, Ms. Varens. Feel free to use me as a reference.”

  Jay left Owen's office feeling stunned and sat at her desk unblinkingly.

  Lily wandered over, sipping on a drink that was an alarming neon purple. “What's that?” Jay asked, turning her head to stare at the other woman and the drink. “Is that glitter?”

  “It's a unicorn frappuccino. I got connections.” Lily took a long, slurping drag. Jay could smell the sugar coming off the concoction from here. “How was lunch with Mr. Tall, Dark, and Scares the Shit Out of You?”

  Jay laughed in spite of herself because it was really the perfect description of Nicholas. “He offered me a job at double my salary.”

  Lily's eyes flew open. “What?”

  “It's in L.A. County,” said Jay. “I start tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “Also, I'm stealing Prince Harry away from Meghan Markle. We're eloping tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” Lily slurped another sip. “Well, that's no surprise. I always had you pegged as a secret gold-digger.”

  Jay could not quite hide her flinch. Fortunately, Lily didn't seem to notice.

  “Seriously, Jay—what the hell. What happened at that lunch?”

  “Um.” Jay stared at her desk, which, it just struck her, was quite impersonal. It was as if she had always known on some level that she would eventually be leaving. “I guess we hit it off. Also, I had a, uh, personal connection.” Very personal, a small voice whispered.

  “Lucky.” Lily sighed. “Now you get to go to sunny L.A. and Work From Beach while I have to double down on everything, short one friend, as Owen rocks himself in the supplies cabinet.”

  “He wasn't upset,” said Jay. “He was actually very weirdly understanding.”

  “Jay.” Lily patted her hand. “He's losing you. Of course he's upset.”

  With that puzzling statement, Lily sashayed back to her desk, still slurping. For the rest of the day, she played Vitamin C's “Graduation” on repeat until Jay threatened to go over there and kill her.

  “I'm going to miss your threats,” said Lily. “Let's go mourn the end of an era by getting all gross and nostalgic with drinks.”

  “Okay, but I don't know any good bars.”

  “Let's go to Bana,” said Lily, sending a ripple of something down Jay's spine. “It's this hot new Turkish place that opened up just around the corner. I'll ping Sheridan and Owen. I bet they'd like to come, too.”

  “Oh, they're both so busy, though,” said Jay. “They aren't going to want to see me off.”

  But to Jay's surprise, both executives eagerly agreed.

  Chapter Five

  2017

  ▪▫▪▫▪▫▪

  Jay arrived home from Bana slightly drunk. Even though Lily had only been joking, things had gotten a little gross and nostalgic—in the best possible way. It ended up turning into one of those evenings that made her wish she was the type of girl who went out all the time.

  Bana was one of those places that kept the lights dimmed low and the music turned up loud, forcing you to lean on the small tables to listen to your companions. The setting was incredibly intimate, almost seductively so. With the surprisingly strong drinks, Jay thought it was a little like being stuck in a hazy, intoxicated twilight.

  Sheridan Hawthorne told them stories about spending her childhood summers in the Catskills, adding just enough romantic color that it sounded like she'd lived through her own private version of Dirty Dancing, which had Jay and Lily both sighing. Owen, who was slightly drunker, talked about the time his foot had gotten severely infected after going backpacking in Indonesia while wearing cork sandals. “I was high,” he slurred, self-deprecatingly.

  “What about you, Jay?” Lily asked. “You never talk about your childhood. Did you travel?”

  “I went to Berkeley,” said Jay, side-stepping the question. “I used to hike the Oakland hills all the time. They were beautiful, but one time I almost fell into a canyon. So I guess that made it a can't-yon,” she added, smiling as she took a small sip of her cocktail.

  Everyone laughed—except Lily, who groaned—and the talk turned to other things. And then “Freak Like Me” had started playing on the speakers and Jay had frozen, clutching her drink in both hands as the seductive, up-tempo riffs of the song she had once loved dancing to filled the room.

  I don't want to fuck an angel.

  She must have made a face because Owen was looking at her. She smiled at him, forcing herself to relax, but the memory made her wonder, suddenly, why Nicholas hadn't threatened her with any photos the way he had her mother. Especially if he still had that video.

  Maybe it didn't occur to him yet, she thought. Lost opportunity and all that.

  After a couple hour
s of drinking, she and Lily said goodbye to their bosses and shared an Uber ride home. The driver had been a nice hipster named Guy, which had made them both giggle drunkenly—“Guy the guy!” Lily had cried out, and he had smiled like this was the first time some drunk had ever shouted that from the backseat—and Jay had thanked him profusely as she slid out of his Volvo on unsteady legs, closing the door on the floating strains of Wilco.

  The alcohol buzzing in her bloodstream made her feel all sloshy, like all of the things in her limbs had been replaced with water. She stumbled into her front door and nearly tripped over the rug. Whoops, she thought, pushing herself up and tugging off her sweater.

  While Carbon watched her, clearly disturbed, Jay dragged her suitcase out of the closet and began to pack what she thought she would need for Los Angeles. They really only had two seasons down there: beachy and broiling. In winter, it was a balmy 70 degrees, where it stayed until summer, skyrocketing into the 90s and beyond. The beaches could be cold at night, but once she had gotten older, Jay hadn't spent much time on them.

  She worked mindlessly, not letting herself think too deeply on what she was doing and why. Once the suitcase was full, Jay looked down at what she'd packed and realized she'd filled it with all of her dowdiest, baggiest clothes, already falling into the mental trap of thinking as she had as a young woman in Hollybrook.

  Her thoughts turned rustily to that stupid resort trip. Oh God, she didn't want to think about that—it was where everything had started to go wrong. But once the memories started flooding in, it was like trying to hold back a dam with her bare hands.

  She had been pathetically nervous and excited to go, never having been to a resort before. Even now, Jay cringed on behalf of her eighteen-year-old self. At how desperately she had wanted to fit in and be liked. It was funny how humiliation endured that way, like a wound that never fully healed. Sometimes it would open up and the sting would be as bad as the first time.

  She had been wearing a one-piece swimsuit and a pair of shorts and Nick had been—Nick. Trying to play it off like he didn't care about what people thought of him or how he looked, even though she could tell that he'd tried to style his hair. He'd been wearing the puka shells she had given him, and after how viciously he'd derided them, she'd been surprised to see them around his neck. He had been such a cruel and callous bastard back then.

  Girls had been checking him out since they arrived and he hadn't seemed to notice or care. He'd snapped at one of them on their first day for getting in his way, a little thirteen-year-old clutching her beach towel who'd stared at him for too long. From the look in her eyes, Jay knew she was about to go off somewhere and cry because a cute boy had yelled at her.

  It had made her angry, especially when he'd said, “She's just a dumb kid. She'll be fine.”'

  That whole day had been especially awkward and she wasn't sure why. She had just wanted to go to the beach and veg out in the water. It had started out nice. She'd talked to a nice college guy from Australia who had fetched her hat when it had blown off in the waves, and then she had found a pretty shell on the walk back—and then Nick had gotten into a mood and stormed off.

  And then those other guys had come, almost like they'd been waiting for him to leave.

  “Hey there, baby. How much do you cost?”

  “How'd you like a pearl necklace, sugar tits?”

  “You legal?”

  Even thirteen years later, Jay squirmed to think of it. The incident still made her feel disgusting, as if something scummy were clinging to her skin. The way the men had looked at her, like wild wolves poised to tear her apart, had made her feel like throwing up.

  “Go away,” she had said. “I'm with my brother and he'll kick your ass.”

  She had pointed out Nick, who, even at fourteen, was beginning to inch up in height. He had been slim then, only 5'11”, but with the lean musculature all boys at that age seemed to have as they worked against their bodies' natural urges to devour everything in sight as they shot up like weeds. And more importantly, he had the broad shoulders and strong arms of a swimmer.

  The guys had left then, after tossing off another comment about her breasts, and she had taken Nick's discarded shirt and put it on, feeling like she wanted to cry. Wishing she was anywhere but that stupid beach. Wishing she didn't have a body that made people feel as if they had the right to say things to her like that. Wishing that she didn't feel like it was her fault.

  Then Nick had come back and he had been mean. Really mean. Almost cruel. It made her wonder if maybe her stepbrother saw her the way those guys had—dirty, slutty—and was judging her for it. And then, on the walk back to their family's suite, he'd tried to kiss her.

  It was as if she had been wearing a pair of tinted glasses that had shattered. Suddenly, the world looked different and she knew that it would never be the same again.

  Jay stared at her suitcase, shuddered violently, and took everything else out. She repacked the suitcase, trying to add a blend of work clothes and casual wear, before bagging up all her toiletries and tossing them in at the top in a Ziploc bag. By the time Jay was done, a thin sheen of sweat was misting her body and the alcohol had worn off enough that the nerves were creeping in.

  She wasn't sure what to do about her apartment or how long she'd be gone, so she didn't say anything to her landlord. Rent was paid off for the month anyway, and it was possible she might need to return sooner if things didn't work out. She wanted to leave herself a path of escape.

  Her phone vibrated and she glanced at it, unamused to see a whole flock of bird emojis. She'd sent him the stupid flight number and he'd sent her the phone number for the driver along with a pick-up time. Apparently she was supposed to have responded and he didn't like being ignored. She stared at the screen for a long time before sending a middle finger emoji.

  It buzzed again. Sweat droplet. What was that supposed to mean? That she was making him hot? Was he flirting with her? The phone slipped from her nerveless fingers.

  She wasn't sure how to flirt with Nicholas. She wasn't sure he wanted to.

  Setting her phone on the nightstand and resolving not to touch it again, Jay got up and began to empty her fridge. Having a task calmed her, and she let her mind empty out as she poured out the old stuff and packed everything that was still good and sealed in a cardboard box.

  Holding the box under one arm, she went to the apartment next door, where she had seen a kid running around before. “Hello,” she said, smiling brightly at the woman who answered. “I'm your neighbor. I got called away to visit family and I don't know how long I'll be gone. I have all this new food in my fridge—I don't suppose you'd like it? I'd hate for it to go to waste.”

  ▪▫▪▫▪▫▪

  The next morning, Jay gathered together all of her personal documents, her chargers, her wallet, her keys, her laptop, and everything else, and loaded them into her suitcase and purse.

  She lured Carbon into a cat carrier with his “just for special occasions” cat food, and he started yowling almost as soon as she closed the door, which made her feel awful. The yowling eventually died down to anguished meows, punctuated by long, judgmental silences. I'm sorry, she thought, wishing she could explain her intentions to the small, sullen animal. It's just so you won't get hurt. If only there were someone looking out for her like that.

  “Where to?” her taxi driver asked, eyeing the cat carrier nervously.

  “San Francisco Airport, please.”

  Jay had only been on a plane a handful of times, and always in coach. She never liked it. Takeoff made her feel like she was being packed into a rocket that would be hurdled to space. It was incredibly claustrophobic and made the air in her lungs fizzle like a carbonated drink.

  When she got to her gate, she was surprised to learn that her ticket had been upgraded to first class. For a two hour flight? It seemed so wasteful. Her irritation rose. Did Nicholas think he could buy her now, throwing money away for her on frivolous things? How dare he.


  She walked onto the plane with the shaking cat carrier and her giant Longchamp bag and something in her seemed to sigh when she saw the curtained, padded chairs. Don't be weak, she told herself, as she took her seat. This is wasteful and he's a bastard for doing this.

  Carbon had hissed ominously at her feet when she set him down, as if in agreement.

  The flight had been mercifully short and the comfort of the trip did make it seem to go by faster. She had met with the driver without issue—not Vlad, much to her disappointment, but some other man dressed in all black with a pair of sunglasses—and as the car cruised through Hollybook, seeing the patchwork of familiar and unfamiliar filled her with something too bitter to be nostalgia and too aching to be dread. I remember that, she kept thinking. Or, Oh, that's new.

  Her old house looked . . . exactly the same. Just as imposing as it had when she had been fourteen and starstruck by what had seemed like a stroke of good fortune tantamount to Cinderella walking up to the fairytale castle that first time.

  My God, I forgot about those colonnades, she thought. It's so ostentatious.

  Her stomach seized up as she rang the bell, bracing herself for Nicholas to answer the door. Instead, a woman answered it—not Yelena, but a younger, sterner-looking woman she had never seen before. “H-hello,” she said. “Uh, where's Nicholas?”

  “Mr. Beaucroft isn't here,” the woman said, in English that felt like a slap. “He's been detained.”

  Okay, thought Jay, feeling heat suffuse her face as the woman looked her up and down like she was covered in mud. She wondered what had happened to the old housekeeper. By his own admission, Nicholas had never cared for Yelena, so she supposed it wasn't much of a surprise that he had gotten rid of her when he'd taken over the deed for the house. The way this woman was looking at her now made Jay wonder what Nicholas had said about her to his staff. It didn't seem like it had been complimentary.