Chapter Two
Hating Heather Gray had become a habit.
He woke up in the morning, brushed his teeth, shaved, and he hated Heather Gray. It had been like that from the beginning.
For so long that he no longer questioned it.
He could remember the first time he’d seen her. She was sulky, insolent, the corners of her full mouth turned down. She had been a child that first time. And he had dismissed her as being unimportant, because she was.
If only he had realized that within the year she would be his stepsister. His problem.
Prior to his father destroying his mother the way that he had, he had ignored Heather when he passed her in the halls at Fairfield. But after the affair, after his mother and father had divorced, and Lisa and his father had married, it was different.
He resented her presence.
His father was enamored of her. It was clear.
His father had always wanted a daughter, and had never had one, and this was even better, because she was pathetic. She had needed saving, and his father wanted to do the saving. What better way to have someone look up at him with uncritical eyes, than to become their hero.
And it didn’t matter, the ways in which he had failed Romeo and Carla.
It didn’t matter that he had been neglectful at best when Romeo had been a small child, wedded primarily to his business, and only later had he had any time for a wife and child.
And at that point, the wife had been Lisa, and the child Heather.
In many ways, he had taken the concept of sibling rivalry with her a bit far. But he was not a man given to half measures. He never had been. His life had been his own, and then she had appeared.
He had resented her presence from the beginning, but worse was when she had become beautiful.
When her sulky mouth had become a temptation, when her body had begun to take the shape of a woman’s.
She was all of the worst parts of having a sister, he assumed. And yet she wasn’t his sister, and that made the entire situation abominable. It always had been.
He was surrounded by socialites who starved themselves for a living. He had always liked women in every shape, but there was a particular sort of lean, hungry look that was more popular within the circles he ran in, and Heather was an anomaly.
She wasn’t polished. Even though they wore uniforms to Fairfield, she had managed to look…
different. She had buttons on her backpack, and her plaid socks pulled up to her knees often had a safety pin clipped to them with things dangling from it.
It was maddening and strange. Her brown hair was a curly tangle, never tamed, and she was…
Lush.
She had only grown more so.
Her hips were round, and he had thought more than once about what it would be like to grip hold of them as he drove into her.
Her waist was nipped in, but there was a softness to her stomach that held his fascination.
And then of course her breasts… A man could spend a lifetime on fantasies centering on her breasts.
He felt that at this point he very nearly had.
And what a thing to be thinking about as he stood in front of the door of his dying father’s bedroom. His stepsister’s breasts.
He couldn’t wait to excise her from his life like the tumor that was currently killing his father.
He pushed the door open, and went to sit beside the bed.
“Romeo,” his father said.
“Yes, Dad,” he said softly in Italian. “I’m here.”
He was angry at his father. He always would be. There had been a strange sort of pain that had come with Lisa’s death two years ago that stilled his tongue now. She had died suddenly. She had been there, and then she had been gone.
It had been astonishingly painful, and to this day he couldn’t quite articulate why.
He had spent the better part of the last decade and a half hating her.
For what she had done to hurt his mother, for what she had done to change his life.
But she had been a lovely and loving person.
She had, in some ways, been better for his father.
His mother and father had a tumultuous relationship, and he could admit that there in the relative silence of his father’s room. In his own mind.
Lisa and his father had never been tumultuous. There had been deep care between the two of them. He resented that too. That in many ways it was undeniable that life had been smoother for his father once he had made the decision to rid himself of his first wife.
But Romeo was the one who had to be there for his mother. Then and now. He was the one who’d had to pick up the pieces, and there were so many pieces.
“You have to take care of her,” Giuseppe said, his voice thin.
“Who?”
He had been thinking of his mother, but he knew very well his father didn’t care about her. He knew the answer before his father gave it.
“Heather. I need to know that she will be okay.”
Of course he had no similar concerns for Romeo. Romeo had never had the option to be anything but okay. His father expected him to get on with things. To be hard. To be a man. And so he was. Self-sufficient and successful.
But what he loved about Heather was that she was soft. Bookish and in need of support.
At least that was how he saw her, but then, Giuseppe had a rescue complex, when he felt the person could be rescued. Which had left Romeo’s mother on her own, and Heather and her mother well cared for.
Heather was much more canny than his father wanted to believe.
“I assume you’re leaving her enough in the way of money to ensure that she’s just fine.”
“She needs protection. She is not from this world, and she never has been. She never fit in.”
He had alienated her from any potential friendships at school. The only friend she’d had had been another girl who socialized on the periphery. He had been the most popular student, and he had wielded that social power against her.
The idea that his father would think that he would stand by and take care of her in his absence was ridiculous.
He might not be a high school bully anymore, and on some nights he could muster up a little bit of shame for his behavior then, but he was never going to take care of her.
“Father…”
Giuseppe’s hand shot out, and he grabbed hold of Romeo’s forearm. “You must take care of her. She’s special. I love her as a daughter, and with her mother gone she will be alone in the world if she doesn’t have you.”
“No harm will come to her,” Romeo said.
In the early days, he had fantasized about revenge. In fact, he had made her life difficult because what he had wanted was the ruin of her and her mother. He had wanted them to be unhappy in this world, miserable; he wanted it to be the cost of destroying his family.
He no longer wanted that. But he wanted nothing to do with her either.
“Promise me,” his father said. “If she needs you, you will be there. Promise me that you will not abandon her. That you will maintain a connection.”
He gritted his teeth, his lip curling. “I promise.”
His father would be dead within the next couple of days, and he would never know what Romeo did or didn’t do. He felt it was a kindness to lie to the old man now. Why give him cause for concern? But Romeo would not do the bidding of a ghost.
“Send her to me.”
“Of course.”
He stood, walking out of the room, anger burning in his chest.
He walked down the hall, and her bedroom door opened, and there she appeared, wearing a yellow dress that complemented her golden skin tone, the low neckline showing her curves off in a way that proved too compelling for him to ignore.
“He wants you,” he said.
“Okay.”
He should’ve just let her go on without him, but he felt compelled to follow her. He pushed the door open, and stood there as she went to his bedside and took his hand. “What is it, Papa?”
The smile on his father’s face was a cold dagger pushed through his heart.
And this was always and ever the problem.
He could see how much more his father loved them.
But in a few days this would be over, and he would go back to his life.
He would go back to New York; he would take a lover for a night and blot out all of this.
He worked, he played—the end. He was, in fact, an island.
And the only real connection he had, the only real relationship he had to maintain, was the one with his mother.
Because she needed him. She had no one else, not really.
“I love you, Heather. You are my daughter. This…this estate, I want to leave half of it to you. Because you are both my children. You…”
His anger rose up inside of him, but he said nothing.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “This estate is part of your family line.”
“I will,” he said. “I’m leaving it to both of you. Because I love you in equal measure.”
That was like a sword straight through his chest. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. This girl who had come into his life a mere fourteen years earlier mattered just as much to him as his own son. He had been right to hate her.
Always.
“I love you,” Heather said.
She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. And then he sat up. “I feel cold.”
He lay back down, and then his breath left his body.
While holding Heather’s hand.
It was done. His father was gone.
And it wasn’t him who had been holding onto him, but his stepsister.
Who would inherit half of the estate that had been in their bloodline for hundreds of years. She had successfully supplanted him. In every way that mattered.
He had known it would be like this. From the beginning.