Chapter 1
Chapter One
THEO
“Truth or dare?”
I sway on my wingback chair, my lager clutched firmly in my hand as the room slightly spins.
“Truth.” I tip back my bottle, gulping down the rest.
Rupert, my best friend, smirks from where he’s lying in front of the unlit fireplace, my father’s faux-fur bearskin draped across his bare chest while he sports the war pants of my great, great, great, great, great…
uh, how many greats was that? Who fucking knows and who fucking cares.
Just know, he’s wearing crusty-arse trousers from the 1700s that he snagged from the glass case in my father’s office.
Between you and me, I’m unsure they’re from the 1700s. I’ve spent my entire life with eyes glazed over as my father spoke of the battle triumphs of our late ancestors. Call me progressive but I haven’t really found the urge to care about all the blood my family has shed over the centuries.
And the bearskin, it’s faux because I replaced the real one my dad once had with it.
One night, when we were in high school, Rupert and I snuck in, grabbed the real bearskin, replaced it with this dupe, and then gave the real one a proper Viking burial out at sea.
We got so knackered that we both were woken up by the ocean tide slapping us in the face.
Despite almost drowning ourselves, we felt like real vigilantes that day.
Rupert rubs his hand over the faux bear fur, paying far too much attention to where it rests just over his nipple, and says, “Gertrude Storch.”
With a loud groan, I roll my eyes. “Come on, mate.”
Rupert grins. “Did she or did she not blow you exactly seven times in one night, as legend states?”
Trading my lager out for the bottle of whiskey we stole from my dad’s cabinet, I take a swig…and I’m met with instant regret.
Fuck, that’s terrible.
The liquid burns down my esophagus, reminding me how shitty his drink of choice is, just like all the other shitty choices he’s made in his life.
“Gertrude Storch…did not,” I answer, passing the whiskey to Rupert. Then, with a smile, I say, “It was six.”
Rupert lets out a roar of a laugh that normally makes me cringe—it draws attention to our two-man party—but my parents are currently on holiday in Spain, so I have nothing to worry about.
The only people who could possibly hear us are the house staff, but I slip them cash all the time so they’ll never tell my parents that Rupert and I are drinking in my dad’s office, wearing ancestral pants, while stroking the faux skin of a bear my father believes he once murdered.
“Truth or dare?” I ask as he passes me the bottle back.
“Dare,” he answers. He always goes for the dare option, hence the pants he’s wearing.
I glance around the pompous decor of my father’s office, where he admires the wealth that has been passed down to him from generation to generation rather than conducting any business.
The brown houndstooth curtains my mum has changed out at least eight times cover the floor-to-ceiling windows, the obnoxiously large mahogany desk where Gertrude Storch blew me twice that one infamous night, and the self-indulgent oil painting of my father above the mantel, his foot perched on top of a rock in his hunting gear, looking out toward a pretend field of domesticated grasses.
I hate everything about this office, and yet…some of my best memories have been made between these pretentious and abhorrently expensive walls—and I’m not just talking about with Gertrude. Rupert and I have defiled this office in more ways than one.
Ehh, that came off wrong. Rupert and I haven’t defiled it in the way that Gertrude and I have. But Rupert has rubbed his arse on almost every surface, because, you know, he always chooses dare. I don’t think there is a spot in this office that his bare arse hasn’t touched.
Which reminds me, steer clear of that brown tweed ottoman over in the corner. If memory serves me right, that thing had more than just Rupert’s arse on it—it had a full-on affair with his twig and berries too.
But that picture…that picture is the fucking worst. It’s everything my father wants to be seen as and everything he’s not.
Respected, accomplished, a man of superior stature.
But he didn’t earn his respect.
He didn’t earn his title.
He didn’t earn anything in this life. It’s all been handed to him.
Just like it will be handed to me.
And because of that, I nod toward the picture and say, “I dare you to take a permanent marker and add something to the painting.”
Rupert’s face blanches as he adjusts the bear on his shoulder. “Do you want your dad to shoot my head off with Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Charles’s musket?”
I chuckle. “It can be small.” When Rupert doesn’t move, I add, “We’ve never broken the truth-or-dare pact. And it’s the one thing in this office that we haven’t besmirched.”
Rupert looks up at the picture and then back at me. “How small? Because I just found out that my dick can pleasure women in a way I never knew.” Whispering, he adds, “I found that G-spot, mate, and I don’t want to lose such a sacred secret.”
I give him a get real look because if I know anything about my best friend, it’s that he does not know where the G-spot is. “You didn’t find it.”
“The fuck I didn’t. I found it.”
“Christa was faking.”
Rupert points at me with the whiskey bottle. “She was not fucking faking it. I felt it.”
“Oh yeah? Did it feel like a G?”
“Oh fuck off.”
I laugh as he stands and lets the bearskin fall to the ground.
He stretches his arms over his head, yawns, and then loses his balance and stumbles forward, right into my dad’s desk.
His right knee smashes into the front, his left hand knocks over a notebook, and his right hand only misses the Zen garden my mum bought for my dad by mere centimeters, causing Rupert to freeze in panic.
“Bollocks, that was a close one.” He lets out a shaky breath. “I think my dick just shriveled up.”
“I heard it squeeze into your scrotum from here.”
“Impeccable hearing.”
I tug on my ears. “Thank you. I grew my ears myself.”
“And you say you don’t accomplish things.” Rupert tsks at me. “Dare I say, you can write ‘grows own ears’ on your list of unblemished achievements.”
“Grew my own dick and arse too.”
Rupert straightens up, puffs his chest, and slowly claps.
“And the list continues to grow.” I take a curt bow and then gulp another mouthful of fermented barley water while Rupert snags a Sharpie from the cup on my dad’s desk.
When he turns around, he dramatically holds the pen in the air and says, “Let the besmirching begin.”
Smiling, I sit back, utterly pleased with my choice in dare. Sure, making him wear bloody battle britches is all fun and games, but watching him become a graffiti artist on my father’s beloved portrait—now that’s pure entertainment.
With a herculean effort—because he’s knackered—Rupert moves a chair in front of the mantel, stands on top of it, and then gently caresses the pen tip along the bushes at the base of the rock my dad’s perched on.
“What are you doing?”
“One second.” His tongue sticks out as he concentrates, his other hand hanging on to the mantel to steady himself.
He swirls his hand with flair.
He leans in a little closer, examining his markings.
And when he’s done, he pulls away, caps the Sharpie, and then tosses it at me, hitting me dead in the chest.
I glance up at the portrait, looking for any sort of defilement, but I don’t see one goddamn piece of evidence that he made his mark. Did he even do anything?
“What the fuck is that?” I gesture to the painting.
“It’s called code,” Rupert says and then beckons me with his finger.
With a hoist, I lift my body off the chair and stumble across the floor, ramming right into the fireplace.
“Aw fuck.”
Rupert lets out a roar of a laugh while I rub my shoulder, thinking twice about the addition of whiskey in my drinking tonight.
“The fact that you’re not wearing any pants just made that so much better. Your thigh jiggled.”
The fuck it did.
I glance down at my bare legs, my half-unbuttoned dress shirt barely covering my junk and my pink toenails that Rupert made me paint as a dare looking more like a Jackson Pollock splattered across my feet.
“Why don’t I have pants on again?”
“Because the swish swash of corduroy was driving you bonkers.”
“Right.” I chuckle. “Swish swash.”
Rupert sways. “Your words, not mine.” He clears his throat. “Now, please, bring your attention to these bushes.”
“You didn’t actually draw?”
“I did.” He stiffens his finger into a pointer. “Right here. I wrote out ‘wanker’ in script to mesh with the branches. It’s only visible to the drunk eye.” He slaps the oil painting. “So go ahead, put your eye on it, you’ll see.”
Don’t mind if I do.
“Give me a hoist.”
Rupert bends down, hands clasped together so I can step on his joined palms, and then lifts me up so my eye presses against the painted bushes.
“Oh, yup, ‘wanker,’ right there. Plain as day.”
My eyeball is kissing the canvas, and I can’t see shit, but who really fucking cares.
“Lower me down, dear sir,” I say just as he releases his hands and I fall right to the ground, flat on my arse, with a thud. “Fucking Christ.” I roll to the side and rub my hand over my backside. “You broke my hip.”
Rupert plops down in my dad’s office chair and lifts the lid of his cigar box. He pulls one out and then replaces it with one that he brought with him, a cheap knockoff. He’s done it so often that now my dad is convinced that in every box he buys, there’s always a dud in the batch.
“You’re fine, but if you don’t put pants on soon, I’m going to kick you in the cock. Can’t stand seeing your giblets, mate. Your dick is way too big to be walking around without pants.”
I glance down at my lap, noticing nothing wrong with my lack of pants. If anything, it’s a dignified dick and he should be honored to be in its presence. “Grow up,” I reply as I spread my legs apart and start stretching side to side for the hell of it.
“Ahh, fuck off,” Rupert says, shooting his hand up to cover his view of me. “Christ…truth or dare? And you can’t say truth.”
“Then why did you ask?” I lie back on the floor, staring at the plaid wallpapered ceiling, a touch my mum found to be classy but I saw as a waste of money. But that’s wealthy arseholes for you, wasting money on meaningless things like wallpaper on a ceiling.
“Out of courtesy to my lord.”
I lift my middle finger to my best friend and say, “Don’t fucking call me that.”
“It’s your God-given title. You’re going to have to get used to it.”
“Not yet.”
“‘Yet’ being the key word.”
“Just get on with it.”
“Fine. You chose dare, or I chose it for you. Either way, are you ready for this?”
“Yes,” I say, exasperated.
When he doesn’t say anything for a solid ten seconds, I look up to find my best friend grinning like he has the best, most maniacal idea he’s ever come up with.
“What?” I ask, sitting up on my elbows.
“How do you feel about finding a fiancée?”
A fiancée? Has he lost his mind?
“Uh, not great.”
Rupert laughs. “Too bad, because I created a profile for you on a find-a-fiancée website. So, I dare you to press the activate button.”
Oh fuck.
I think truth or dare just became a whole lot more serious.