* * *
***
* * *
I was startled from the gentle twilight between waking and sleep by a harsh knock on my door—no, my office door… I was still in my office! I’d almost forgotten where I was, my brain still addled by the copious amounts of wine I’d imbibed before.
How long have I been asleep? I wondered. I glanced over at my desktop only to find that it was somewhere close to two in the morning.
Another knock on my door brought me closer to the surface of reality, and I began to wonder who in the world would be at my business at this late hour. And for that matter, how had they gotten past the door by the front desk? If it was some kind of burglar then I doubted they’d have the courtesy of knocking.
“We’re not open,” I called out to whoever was intruding upon my quiet and somewhat sad round of lonesome drinking. “You’ll have to come back another time, I’m afraid.”
I strained to listen for whoever might be out there, expecting a reply but only silence followed. I’d almost begun to think that they’d simply left, surprised that one of England’s upper class had been satisfied to have been turned away so easily. However I was soon proven that none of my wishes were going to be honored.
I heard the sounds of the lock scraping and clicking, and within a moment I saw my door start to swing slowly inward, the scant light pouring in from the waiting room outside. To say that I was furious would have been an understatement. Someone had just walked into my own office without my permission, much less a word of greeting. But something in the back of my head told me that I should be more than annoyed, I should be panicking. Who had just done all this? Was I going to be murdered? The alcohol pumping through my blood made those important questions seem so very trivial as I looked at the masculine silhouette highlighted against the open doorway.
“I told you that we are closed!” I said, standing shakily from my chair. “Please leave! Come back during normal business hours.”
The man laughed, a cocky chuckle that brought thoughts to my head that I’d seldom had since I was only a teenager. A shiver ran down my spine. I recognized that laugh, having heard it so many times when I was younger, but it was the face I was having trouble placing. Where did I know that laugh from?
And then it hit me all at once like a ton of bricks, practically smacking me right in my forehead as I saw that gorgeous face as clear as the last day I’d laid eyes upon it. It couldn’t be him, not after all of this time, not after the fight that he’d had with his father—my father… Well, stepfather, anyway.
“Tristan?” I asked, squinting my eyes against the light beyond the door.
“You do remember,” he said, stepping farther into the dark room and closing the door behind him. I was thankful for the darkness, the beginnings of my hangover already starting to rear their head. “And here I thought that you’d forgotten me, after all of this time.”
Forgotten? Forgotten?
I was lucky that after several years of my stepbrother’s absence, my thoughts of him had become limited to only once or twice a day.
Good Lord—forgotten him. As if I could ever forget my first real crush. As if I could forget how badly I’d wanted him, even when I told myself that I didn’t. How he’d made me tremble in the kitchen of our old house, my breath thick in my throat, his voice husky in my ear.
Come on, love. Don’t you want to piss your mother off?
“How am I supposed to forget my stepbrother after the exit that you made?” I asked, trying to keep my mouth from hanging agape. Tristan’s sudden rush to join the military was something that none of us had expected—me most of all. And the night that the two of us had nearly... I fumbled for something to discuss other than that time we’d nearly fucked. “That fight you had with your father was legendary. I think there are old women still scandalized by it to this very day.”
Lord Wolfe was in a rage like I had never seen before in my entire life, bellowing at the top of his lungs, spittle flying from his mouth as Tristan and he stared one another down face to face. Not that fighting between the two of them was uncommon. In fact I almost thought that they both too a certain pleasure in angering the other, seeing how far they could go to push one another into another argument…. I wasn’t sure how Tristan could have stood for that all of his life.
“What can I say? I like to make a spectacle of myself,” he chuckled again. It was a sound that had angered me so when we were teens together. The way that he could turn anything into a joke.
Tristan always seemed to have that arrogant smirk on his face, as though he was always one step ahead no matter what. It drove me insane when we were younger, always acting like he knew everything, and yet all the while utterly oblivious to the fact that I had harbored the deepest crush for him than anyone else I’d ever known.
It was an illicit thing, of course. For all the inbreeding that had plagued the royal lines in the past, the aristocracy was doing its best to rid itself of that image now. The fact that Tristan and I weren’t blood-related hardly mattered when reputation came into play. So I’d weathered the storm of my hormones and tried not to think too hard about my stepbrother’s lilting accent, the mischief in his eyes, or the way his lean muscles rolled when he took off his shirt to go swimming in the lake near his father’s estate.
But then, there was that one time—that fleeting moment we’d had before he left for the military. The night I’d been certain Tristan was going to undo me, a silly little eighteen-year-old virgin, right there in the pantry well after we were supposed to be in bed…
I physically waved the memory away. No. Now was not the time to think of that. We were adults now, and we knew better. Or I hoped I did, anyway.
“You certainly do,” I said, trying to compose myself with all haste. “And still, after all this time, you think that you can just come and go? Leave for years at a time, and not expect me or anyone else to bat an eye?”
I hadn’t realized that my temper had gotten the better of me, my face still tingling from all the blood rushing to it. Even I was shocked by the suddenness of my ire, so many old memories brought up at once had apparently been more than my self-control could handle. I had been holding these feelings in for all this time, bottled away with the hope that I’d never need to confront them ever again. I never realized that my stepbrother would ever return, not so suddenly, at least.
I cleared my throat and straightened my blouse before addressing him again. “Is there a reason you’ve broken into my office at the godforsaken hours of the morning?”
“Well, when I broke into your apartment you weren’t there,” he said, his admittance of his own wrongdoing had me boiling again already, and yet that errant bad boy, blasé attitude that he always seemed to flout also had a more… arousing effect, as well. “I thought that if you weren’t at home then you’d be at this posh new office of yours, working until the break of dawn. That was always the way you did things, after all. Valedictorian. Top of your class, and all that.”
I hated how after all of this time he still could affect me in the most intimate ways, simply by being in my presence. I wanted to slap him with all my strength.
“What do you want, Tristan?” I asked, folding my arms over my chest, staring daggers at him from across the room. He was so gorgeous I couldn’t deny how I’d want to drag him back to my flat and tear every bit of those clothes off. It was too bad I also wanted to put him through a blender and burn him in an incinerator. Why did we always crave the people who had always been the worst for us?
“I need your help, otherwise I wouldn’t be breaking in like some common criminal,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“If you’d have answered me, then I would have opened the bloody door!”
“But that wouldn’t have been any fun,” he sighed, shaking his head. The urge to punch him only rose higher inside of me. He was such a damned asshole that I could hardly stand it.
“What could I possibly do to help you, Tristan? You’ve never needed my help in the past.
Why start now?” I set my jaw, my eyebrows furrowed in an attempt to look stern, though every time I looked into those gorgeous eyes I wanted to melt into the floor.
“Because I need something that only you can help me with, Gwennie.”
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped, my cheeks filling with color. “I told you never to call me that!”
“Which is why I do it,” he said in a sing-song voice. I wanted to scream.
“You’re not making a good case to get my help, Tristan. Whether we’re family or not, I don’t like being toyed with,” I said. “If you want to do business, then we’ll talk business. No games.”
I watched as his perfectly groomed eyebrows rose, and a shocking expression of... admiration spread across his face before his shoulders slumped ever so slightly. If I wasn’t so determined to be the kind of hard-ass who could stand up to him, I would have been surprised… and practically drooling at the way he looked in that suit.
“Sorry, Gwendolyn,” he began, clearing his throat. “I really do need your help.”
“With what, exactly?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. “You’ve never needed my help before—for anything. What’s so different?”
“I need to get married.”