I snatched the paper from his fingers, unfolding it with unsteady hands. Bastard wasn’t bullshitting. It had the stamp from the law office he kept on retainer and everything. The wrinkled paper, although still unsigned, noted that I was not to inherit a penny of the Fitzpatrick fortune unless the six-month agreement was executed to my father’s full satisfaction.
I looked back up, feeling something hot and uncomfortable spreading in my chest.
“You can’t do that,” I hissed.
“What, save you from yourself? I am doing that,” he announced, spreading his arms. “Agree to my terms, and you can have half my kingdom, Hunter. Continue to let me, your mother, and yourself down, and you have no place in our family.”
I never have. Which was why the money meant so much to me. I wasn’t going to be robbed of that, too.
“Fine,” I spat. “Whatever. Put me in your dick-shaped building. I’ll stay out of trouble, and I won’t drink or fuck for six months.”
“Of course you won’t,” my father said, yanking the piece of paper back and folding it tidily before tucking it into his breast pocket. “Because you’ll have a roommate to make sure you’re on the straight and narrow. Always accounted for.”
I threw my head back, laughing bitterly. “I’m not sharing an apartment with Cillian. He probably performs satanic rituals involving puppy blood and baby tears on the daily.”
My older brother was the definition of a cunt. He had that holier-than-thou, wunderkind attitude that had made me give up on being anything other than the family jester. Catching up with his many conquests, both academically and career-wise, seemed futile. He was the golden child, the wild promise, the ruthless emperor everyone looked up to.
Da shook his head. “Please, like mo órga would reduce himself to living under the same roof with you.” Mo órga translated, quite literally, to golden child in Gaelic.
Real subtle, Pops.
“My bad. I forgot he needs to take off his human costume after a long day and relax by himself. Who, then?”
“Well, that person is yet to be approached. You will have to convince her to agree to this. If she says no, the entire plan crumbles. But your mother and I have found the most perfect candidate.”
She. He said she. That meant she was female. That also meant I could fuck her behind his back. No matter her age and looks, I was willing to do it if it meant dipping my dick into something that wasn’t my own hand.
“Who?” I gritted out, knowing he was enjoying the exchange, having me at his mercy.
“Sailor Brennan.”
Yeah, never mind. Ain’t touching that with a condomed ten-foot pole.
Why? Let’s count:
Sailor was a goody two-shoes. Straight-up, straight-A, boring-good kind of girl.
She was a tomboy, and possibly a lesbian (not that I had any issues with that), and an archer (something I did have an issue with, because it meant she could kill me with little effort).
She was Troy Brennan’s daughter, and Troy Brennan was a person you didn’t want to make an enemy out of. He was Boston’s underworld’s fixer, the guy the upper society of the city had on retainer to do the dirty work for them.
The few times I’d met Sailor, she’d seemed annoyingly resistant to my charms (as I said, lesbian).
“Kinda out there, don’t you think?” I feigned boredom, itching to haul ass to the Southern Hemisphere and escape my verdict.
“Better the plan being out there than your penis driven into holes it has no business being in,” my father deadpanned, taking a handkerchief from his front pocket and dabbing his sweaty hands with it, focusing on the clover-green fabric.
“Six months to live and play house with a complete stranger—that’s unorthodox, Da. Some would go as far as saying prosaically medieval.”
“You were just caught having sex with five young women on top of your friend’s antique Italian furniture—which, by the way, we still have to pay for and will be deducted from your salary. You’re too far from the realms of orthodox to be concerned about your reputation.”
“What about Sailor’s reputation?”
“She has none—a clean slate. And no one is insane enough to talk badly of her, considering who her dad is.”
He is sending me to live with a girl whose father is a cold-blooded murderer. Me. With my unfiltered, filthy mouth.
“What makes you think Sailor would agree to this?” I squinted at him.
I’d met Sailor Brennan maybe three or four times in my life. Her parents had restaurants all over Boston. Her mother was a chef and had cooked for a few events my mother hosted a while back. The entire time, Sailor messed with her phone or looked at my sister curiously (more proof of the lesbian theory).
I barely remembered the chick. What I did recall was carroty hair that looked about as soft as blistered feet, more freckles than a face, and the body of a malnourished, five-year-old boy.