“I’m your son,” I said.
His eyes panned up to mine and I could’ve sworn I saw his cheek twitch with a frown.
“So?” he asked.
My pathetic excuse for a father turned his back on me, but I stepped in front of him. That asshole wasn’t getting away from me this time. Not by a long shot.
“I haven’t seen you since high school, and you don’t have anything to say to me?” I asked. “Don’t you wonder what I’ve been doing? What I’ve been up to? Where my life took me?”
His glassy stare zoned out, and I wondered if he had even heard me.
“Don’t you want to know what I’m doing back here?”
His silence was infuriating.
“Do you even want to know anything?” I asked.
And then, my father gave me a reaction. He shook his head from side to side. He didn’t care, and likely never had. And he sure as hell never would now. I felt something inside of me crumble away. The last of my resolve as my father pushed past me with a strength that still shocked me. He slammed into my shoulder, knocking me off balance, then clamored into his rusted-out shit-box and drove away. Swerving down the damn road like he always had.
Leaving me there, alone and fending for myself.
Like he always fucking had.
I moved mindlessly to my convertible and got in, but I didn’t move. I didn’t crank it up, I didn’t pull out of the parking space, and I didn’t head back to Anton’s. I sat there, replaying the incident over and over again in my head. The look in his eyes. The anger at the fact that I had chased after him. The sharp downturn of his disapproving frown. My success meant nothing to him. My billions meant nothing to him. My professional athletic career and my vineyard didn’t mean shit to him. My money bought me all the things in the world. Women to sit on my dick. Houses in any part of the world I wanted. The best clothes, the best food, and the best hotels in the premium seasons.
But one thing it didn’t buy me was my father’s love.
The one thing it didn’t buy me was a family.
For most of my childhood, I had denied the reality of my father’s apathetic attitude towards me. But once Anton took me in that night—giving me a home, his attention and his care—I was able to change. I was able to slowly admit the truth to myself. Anton single-handedly showed me how family was supposed to treat one another. All of the most important lessons Anton ever handed down to me happened before I went off to play college ball.
Did any of that change now that I knew what Anton had done? It wasn’t like Anton could’ve bribed the damn NFL to draft me. Even an ex-Russian mobster didn’t have that kind of pull. I did that myself. Anton’s money might’ve gotten me out of this damn town and into college, but I got myself into the pros. My own intelligence made me millions, and my business-savvy mind made me billions after I’d’ gotten hurt.
No. Nothing changed by knowing Anton had greased the wheels. Because once he gave that cart a steady push with the grease he’d snuck on there, my legs had to keep the cart moving.
And I moved it all the way up the damn mountain myself.
My father was a shithead, and that contributed to my own path of destruction. But that didn’t mean I had to stay on that road. That didn’t mean I had to contribute to someone else’s path of destruction. And suddenly, she came flooding back to my mind.
Holy shit, the things I’d said to her.
Pressing the heels of my hands in my eyes, I thought about my argument with Michelle. Seeing now how much my father had affected me unleashed the error of my words and my ways. And if that woman really was pregnant with my child, I needed to know for sure so I could be there for my child. Be there for her.
Make some sort of a family out of what I had willingly created.
If Michelle was carrying my child, then I refused to be the kind of father mine was to me. If that really was my child she was growing, I refused to be the kind of companion my father had been. I wouldn’t hang her out to dry. I wouldn’t perpetuate that abuse any longer in my life. I wouldn’t feed the cycle. No, I was going to break it.
Starting with the supposed mother of my child.
I had enough money to take full custody. If she didn’t want the child—if money was what she was really after—I had more than enough to pay her off and take the child under my wing. I had an infinite amount of resources to give my child anything they could ever want without having to deal with the pain of a money-hungry mother.
Either way, there was one fact that remained.
I sure as hell wasn’t abandoning my child the way my father had abandoned me.
> Time to find Michelle.
Chapter 10