Chapter 8
Damian
"What are you doing here?" I asked my brother when I came home. "And where's Emilia?"
"She went to her place," my brother explained as he drank what looked like some of my good scotch while he sat on an armchair, facing a glass wall with a sprawling view of San Francisco.
"Damn it. I hope she took her pain medication with her."
"How did she get hurt?"
I sat down across from him and poured myself some scotch from the bottle resting on the coffee table next to whiskey glasses.
"Bianca pushed her and she fell. Hurt her head on the coffee table. It was an accident."
"She's not a gold digger, Damian."
"I know."
"You didn't fall in love with her, did you?" Duncan asked.
We didn't do love in our family, not the type Byron wrote about anyway. I sighed. I was happy to lie to my parents but not my brothers. "No."
"Then why the fuck did you marry her? And I'm not buying the you got drunk, and she took advantage of you nonsense. You proposed to her outside a fucking chapel."
I drank some scotch and laughed self-deprecatingly. "Bianca cheated on me."
That got Duncan riled up. "What the fuck?"
I nodded. I opened the email with the PI's report on my phone and gave it to Duncan. He looked through the documents, the images, and even checked out a couple of videos. By the time he set my phone down, he looked as fatigued as I felt.
"Stanton?"
"I know."
"That guy's a wimp. A fucking dilletante. I doubt his dick is big."
"I know," I repeated.
“What's this got to do with…no, Damian, don't tell me you did this to hurt Bianca?"
I raised my glass to him. "I did. I was pissed as hell. Gideon told me Emilia was in Vegas. I took the jet and found her."
"Jesus!"
"Yeah, and the irony of it is that she thinks she manipulated me."
"If I hadn't just met her, I wouldn't have believed anyone can be that na?ve. But she is."
I ran a hand over my face. Hating myself for what I'd put innocent Emilia through, what I was still putting her through. The thing was that I never saw her as innocent. The way Bianca, Maeve and Gideon talked about her—not that they mentioned her much—she was a leech, living off a nepo job. She was lazy and not interested in making anything of herself. I didn't know she went to one of the top art schools in the country.
"I had sex with her," I confessed and hated myself some more. "She was a virgin."
"Hell, Damian."
I struggled with getting words out because I had really fucked up. "I…didn't expect it and damn it, Duncan, it gets worse."
"How can it get worse?"
"It was the best sex of my life. The very fucking best."
"The best with a virgin?" Duncan couldn't believe it. Imagine how I feel, brother.
I shook my head. "It gets even worse."
"I'm afraid to ask."
"She thinks I didn't enjoy the sex."
"Why does she think that when you're crowing it was the best you ever had?"
"Cause she's inexperienced and couldn't see that I was completely blissed out…and maybe as soon as we were done, I pulled out of her and ran like the hounds of hell were after me."
Duncan frowned. "Why?"
"She scared me. I…this has never happened before, this kind of sex where my head all but blows off."
Duncan whistled.
I was no monk. I'd had my share of women. By the time Bianca and I got together, I was ready to be a single-pussy man. Bianca and I had sex, not a whole lot of it in the past year, but two-three times a week if we could make our schedules work. Bianca was a good time in bed, enthusiastic and not at all embarrassed of her sexuality. She gave great head, knew how to take what she wanted and understood my need for having my prostate massaged during sex.
But sex with Emilia was…next level. And I had no idea why. She didn't do any of the things that Bianca did and yet…when I now thought about sex, I thought about Em.
"Why does her family dislike her so much?" Duncan wondered. "Cause the picture they painted is nothing like the girl I met today."
"She's different from them," I said as the epiphany struck me, "she's a bit of a dreamer. Doesn't care about makeup and fashion. Is in her own world. Has a quirky sense of humor. She's not ambitious about business like Bianca, Maeve and Gideon."
"Dean's nothing like us but we don't think he's a douche?"
Our youngest brother, Dean was into antiques for the love of history. When Duncan and I went to business school, Dean got a PhD in history. He didn't have a business bone in his body and was therefore in charge of acquisitions. Though we had to put him on a budget at times, cause he could go overboard on something he loved with no business value whatsoever for Archer Galleries.
"The Winters are not us," I told him. "The way they treated Emilia…hell, if I wasn't already feeling like an asshole, I definitely would have. Maeve slapped her when I told her we got married. Like hard. Doc was worried she was a victim of domestic abuse."
"She was," Duncan muttered.
"They were all angry with her…not me."
My brother wasn't impressed. "That's nuts. But then…I was angry with her until I met her."
"You like her."
Duncan smiled…well, he moved his lips in what usually looked like a parody of a smile. "How do we handle the parents?"
"I'm not going to tell them about Bianca cheating on me. It'll hurt Mom and…it's not my place to fuck things up for Bianca. Her life, her business. I obviously have moved the fuck on."
"Mom will hate Bianca if she finds out," Duncan agreed. "Probably try to ruin her."
Our mother was all about integrity and loyalty. The fact that Bianca cheated on one of her golden sons would backfire hard on my ex.
"It's complicated as fuck."
Duncan shook his head. "I hate this relationship shit. This is why I fuck escorts."
I wrinkled my nose. "You're too transactional, brother."
"Damian, I'm not the one who married a girl to piss her sister off."