RICHARD (A BAD BOY ROMANCE) (55 page)

Chapter 5

I sat in silence behind my desk
after my brother left, walking so casually back into the night as though he
hadn’t just completely flipped my life upside down. He had a habit of that,
though, turning everything on its head just for the sake of a good laugh. But is
that
was
this was? Did he just want to play with me?

It was certainly easy to think so
after he’d practically named me as his perfect match to spend the rest of his
life with. My heart was thumping like a war drum as I stared into the empty
space that he’d occupied only moments before, looking so absolutely fabulous
without even trying. All those memories of the two of us growing up together
flooded back like a dam had burst in my head. It was almost too much to handle.

Tristan had been an absolute terror
when we were in our teens. He’d discovered girls long before the two of us had
met, and was more than popular with the younger members of the serving staff.
His father, of course, never approved of the way he conducted himself, but I
admired his freedom more than I admitted. My mother had always had me under a
tight leash, constantly dictating my behavior and my choices in friends—even
controlling which pieces of my wardrobe would be worn on different days. It was
like I had two mother rolled up into one—both of them overbearing and
controlling.

But my stepbrother could do as he
liked, disapproval be damned. The fact that he was so bound and determined to
gain back his father’s title after the announcement of my soon-to-be brother’s
birth came almost as a shock, given Tristan’s utter aversion to authority,
which was just what I had thought when he’d joined Her Majesty’s Royal Army. It
was as though just as you thought Tristan would go one way, he decided to veer
in a completely different direction simply for the thrill of throwing everyone
else in the world off their kilter.

And how he was trying to get
married—married to a woman who was, for all intents and purposes, the exact
same as myself in personality and temperament. Just the thought of that had my
mouth running dry. I felt my chest tighten as I bit down on my lip nervously.
How could he do such a thing? How, after all of this time could I be the
perfect match for him and he had never once said a word? If anything I had
always felt as though Tristan
hated
me when we were younger, his constant chiding that I was a stuffy, stuck-up
mother’s-girl still ringing in my ears like church bells.

“No matter,” I said to myself in the
darkness of my office as I pressed the pulsating power button on my computer to
bring it to life. “This is for the best, after all.”

Even I had a hard time believing
that.

With trembling
hands
I brought up the database of my female clients, all of their personality traits
indexed and coded so that I could simply type in my stepbrother’s preferences
into the required fields and before I could even blink there was a list of
gorgeous women almost a hundred strong. Surely, one of them would be an
appropriate match for Tristan. One of them might just be my future
sister-in-law if this crazy plan of his actually worked.

Despite my forced professionalism, I
couldn’t shake the feeling of my stomach having dropped somewhere close to my
feet. The thought of Tristan with someone else, some woman that he barely knew
brought a sickening taste to my mouth. Deep down a part of me wanted to close
down the database and simply tell him that there had been no matches, that no
woman I had in my considerable list was what he wanted. I think I wanted more
than anything for him to realize that it was me that had always wanted him—me
that was his perfect idea of a woman. Did he even know that the kind of woman
that he wanted had been sitting in front of him all this time?

He’s
your stepbrother
, I
thought, chiding myself on my incestuous desires. To even think of the things
that I wanted to do to Tristan would have been enough to cause a scandal the
likes of which the aristocracy hadn’t seen in a decade. Sure the two of us were
not technically related, but the bonds of marriage mean a lot to the rest of
the world, and scandal is something that I know that my mother would not at all
appreciate.

That
doesn’t make me want him any less
,
I answered my own chiding. I knew that if I set Tristan up—got him married to
some member of the aristocracy—then he’d be lost to me forever, and I’d lose
any chance that I had at making him mine like I’d always wanted. But he
was
my stepbrother, fruit of the
forbidden tree, and I knew that just one taste would be enough to have me smote
low and ejected from the garden of my family’s favor.

I knew that my feelings for Tristan
would never come to fruition, never give me the satisfaction of having him in
my arms, inside of me the way I’d dreamed about since I’d become an adult. But
maybe that was for the best.

If I could get Tristan tied off to
someone that spent most of their time away from London, and away from me, then
I could protect myself against the thoughts that I knew would betray me sooner
or later. In a way having Tristan matched was my only hope of protecting myself
from the effect that he
head
on me.

I began to work my way through the
list, clicking through the collected entries Tina and I had spent our
professional lives cultivating. Blondes, brunettes, and even a few exotic
redheads crossed over my screen, though I felt utterly unsatisfied with all of
them. None of them felt right for Tristan. I’d met countless times with each of
them, and no matter how well they seemed to match on paper I felt as though
Tristan would never have them for his wife. Something didn’t seem right.

It’s
because you want him for yourself
,
I thought, my stomach tying itself into knots. I hated myself for thinking it,
for telling me the harsh and unwanted truth and I could only have wished for a
comforting lie. I wished I was only protective of him, wished that I was simply
playing the role of the dutiful sister in charge of her brother’s romantic
interest—that I merely wanted him to have a more suitable chance at love. All
of this was true, but with the condition that
I
was the one that he fell for.

I rested my head in my hands in
frustration. I couldn’t just disregard all the women who matched my
stepbrother’s parameters for his ideal match. He was counting on me to find him
a woman that would make him a suitable wife and these women were all also
hoping that I would find them a romantic match, as well. I had two people whose
wishes I needed to make come true, regardless of what I wanted—needed—to have.

Romance, for me, had been touch and
go all of these years. Holding down a boyfriend was difficult, harder still
when marriage is expected to happen fairly quickly, especially where my mother
is involved. She’d been trying to get me married off since before I was even
old enough to walk, scheduling playdates with the boys she’d see as the
up-and-coming members of high society that she hoped I’d fall all over as I
grew into a young woman. It never worked out well. High society can make men
into monsters, their heads filled with entitlement and expectations of what a
woman is meant to do for them. I had little time for useless men like those.

Tristan had always been different,
though. While he was an arrogant pig at times, he still maintained a kind of
charm that always made my heart start to hammer like I’d just run a mile. He
could be kind and cunning, that grin of his always belying the inner workings
of that gloriously brilliant brain of his. That quick wit was never in short
supply, never failing to bring a smile to my face whenever we’d been stuck at
one of our family’s dinners while the two of us were in our teens. Just the
fact that he was back in town had brought me back to the feeling of being a
teen once again, awkward and shy, just hoping that my dashing stepbrother would
notice me and take me into his arms like I’d dreamed of since the day we met.

None
of these women are right for him
,
I thought, shaking my head as I poured over the list again and again. But I
knew that I had to pick one for him no matter what I felt. I needed to end this
fascination with him, this sinful desire that I knew would never be brought to
fruition. I needed to be free from my own wants, from the very thing that could
ruin my life and my reputation.

“You have to do this, Gwendolyn,” I
said aloud in an attempt to steel my resolve, to bring myself to let go of the
man that I had desired for almost a decade. It was like torture, but it had to
be done. Stiff upper lip, and all that. Duty. That was what it meant to be
British, wasn’t it?

After another few minutes of
agonizing over who I would give Tristan to I settled at last on a pretty little
blonde woman that had enlisted my services almost a week previously. She had
exactly the kind of traits that my stepbrother was looking for, exactly the
right personality that he was looking for in his ideal match. She was even
prettier that I was.

But
she’s
not
you
, I thought, grimacing as I began to
draft the email to inquire whether the young woman would be interested in my
stepbrother’s company. She had notes detailing her eagerness for a match, for
someone who could excite her and make her laugh—and fulfill her sexually.

I felt my heart grow cold as I wrote
to the young lady, Patricia
Attmore
. It felt like I
was signing my own death warrant, and once I sent that email Tristan might as
well have been gone forever. I swallowed nervously, trying to calm my nerves,
strengthen my resolve as I moved my cursor over the “send” button in the upper
right corner of the screen. Tristan would be mad not to take a woman like
Patricia and beg for engagement, and the logical part of me hoped that he would
to save both of us from a scandal, but it wasn’t the logical part of my brain
that was screaming the loudest in my mind.

I closed my eyes, tensing for some
kind of harsh immediate repercussion as I let the email out into the world of
the internet to find its destination in the blink of an eye. I was almost
disappointed that the world hadn’t crumbled down around me, perhaps then I
would have felt that the utter devastation in my stomach would have been
justified. I almost felt like a fool; a foolish schoolgirl with a foolish
little crush that would have never gone anywhere much less amounted to
anything.

Buck
up, Gwendolyn
, I
thought, taking a slow, calming breath through my nose before letting it out
through my quivering lips.
It’s better
this way. And even if you can’t have him, then at least you can give him the
life that he deserves with a woman that he loves. That’s your job, after all.

“But
I
want him,” I whispered to the chilly silence of my office,
reclining back in my chair as I wiped a spot of errant moisture from my eyes.

But
you can’t have him
, I
told myself.
You can’t let your feelings
get in the way of your job. This is what you do
.

I was already tipsy, and it was bad
enough that I was practically talking to myself. I felt enough like a loon
already, and pining over my stepbrother was hardly going to help matters. No
matter what I desired, Tristan deserved my best work, and I was determined to
give it to him.

Chapter 6

The very next afternoon Gwendolyn
had called me to tell me that she’d found me a match among all of her hundreds
of female clients. Needless to say, I was impressed to have been matched up so
quickly, but when your firm has a reputation like hers, I would have expected
nothing less than exceptional.

My date was, apparently, a woman
named Patricia—her last name hardly mattered, since the success of my time with
her would result in a rather permanent change of it. She looked pretty enough,
especially from the pictures Gwen showed me from her Facebook, some of which
were very much to my liking—risqué and just barely within the bounds of
propriety. Despite how eager I was to take a stab at this marriage business,
the more I sat there, the less I actually wanted to go through with any of
this. It wasn’t like me to succumb to nerves but something about this made me
feel on edge.

I’d been there for almost half an
hour before I began to even wonder if this woman would show up, the entire time
Gwendolyn’s eyes hardly left me. She hovered like a hawk, making sure I had
something to occupy myself with. I watched as she waited, it seemed often more
nervously than even I was, for Patricia to walk through the door while Gwen’s
assistant tried to get her to calm down.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I
said, trying to convince myself just as much as I was trying to convince her.
“I’m a charming man. She’ll never be able to resist my charm.”

Honestly, it wasn’t bedding her that
I was concerned about—I knew better than anyone I could get a woman naked and
wet in the time it took most people to say “hello”—but that didn’t seem to be
the reason why I was so… off.

“Yes, I know very well how charming
you can be, Tristan,” she said, “but the question is whether that makes you
husband material or not.”

“I thought we were looking for women
that were wife material, not the other way around,” I said.

“It’s whether they actually do you
the favor of even considering you for marriage that should be your concern,”
Gwen said, frowning at me, her arms crossed over her chest. “You’re not exactly
what most women are looking for in a husband.”

Something was off about her, and I
definitely got the feeling that she wasn’t normally this neurotic when it came
to matching up her clients. Just before I could ask her what she meant by that,
the door to the office opened and the unmistakable bombshell that was Patricia
stepped inside, her heels clicking softly on the hardwood floors.

She was certainly a beautiful woman
who had no fear of flaunting the parts of her that she was proudest of—namely,
her chest. Her blonde hair stretched down all the way passed her backside where
it hung in a wavy sheet.

“Hello!” she called as she entered,
looking me right in the eyes as she took a seat across from me in the waiting
area. She crossed her legs, as she smiled at me, laying her purse on the seat
beside her own. “This must be my arm candy for the evening.”

The way Patricia looked at me, you
might assume that I was some kind of candy. In fact, the entire time we sat
there I was quite certain she was going to take a bite out of me. She was
certainly young enough, though I could tell that if she was left in the dating
game long enough, Patricia would have become a ravenous cougar with all the
shameless lust that came along with it.

“Tristan, this is Patricia Atmore.
Ms. Atmore is the daughter of a software magnate, and she shares your love of the
classics.”

“A pleasure,” I said, smiling at her
stiffly, even I wouldn’t have bought its genuineness. It was forced, and I had
little interest in hiding it. Maybe it was nerves, some irrational fear or
misgiving about my whole elaborate plot. Either way, something felt off the
moment that woman sat down, and I wasn’t entirely sure it was her.

“I’ve heard about you,” she said,
biting on her lip ever so slightly. Already I could tell there were less than
savory thoughts brewing behind those eyes of hers. Patricia was definitely the
usual type of woman I would have been with, though part of me wasn’t sure if
that was why I was so shaky on this date.

“Yes, I’ve heard that my reputation
proceeds me,” I said, trying my best to sound charming.

“And it’s definitely quite a
reputation,” Ms. Atmore giggled, her eyes dropping below my waist. I
instinctively crossed my legs, frowning ever so slightly as I cast a glance
over at Gwendolyn for some kind of help. Was this what it was like to go on a
date with myself?

“Your car should be waiting out
front,” Gwen said in a less than graceful save. Her voice was nearly breaking
from the tension. “Your reservations are already made and everything is ready
for you at the restaurant.”

I almost felt like my stepsister was
rushing us out the door, desperate to see me out of her office and perhaps even
out of her life. I wasn’t sure why, but that thought brought a lump to my
throat. Why did she want to see me go so badly?

We stood and before I could react,
Patricia had slipped her arm under mine as Tina and my sister escorted us to
the elevator. I tried to get a look at Gwen’s face, perhaps see if I could
divine some reason for her odd behavior, but no matter how much I tried I
couldn’t get her to look me in the eye. I wasn’t sure why, but her behavior had
me on edge.

We were both escorted down to the
lobby, Tina and Gwen both seeing us off from the front doors as the limo driver
stood at the ready, the door already open for Patricia and I to step inside. I
should have appreciated all of the things that Gwen was doing, how facilitating
she was being to my plan for revenge against my father, but now that it was all
underway I was almost a little annoyed with her effort. Why was she trying so
hard on this? I couldn’t imagine she put this much effort into her other
clients, or that she cared this much about me even receiving my inheritance. So
what was it that was making her go the extra mile, all while pretending she
didn’t even give a damn enough to look me in the eye.

“Your sister told me that you were
in the military,” Patricia said as the limo merged into traffic, quickly on our
way to the restaurant that Gwen had picked out for our dinner reservations.
“That must have been terribly exciting.”

“Not as much as you’d imagine,” I
said, shrugging half-heartedly. “They don’t permit the aristocracy to engage in
much excitement when they’re serving in the Royal Army. You’re usually there to
look nice and stay out of harm’s way. They liked to handle men like me with kid
gloves.”

“It couldn’t have been all bad,” she
said, scooting herself a little closer to me on the seat. “Must have had your
pick of the local girls, did you? Cute boy like you?”

“No,” I said, frowning as I gave
myself a bit of room from Ms. Atmore. “The Afghani women don’t take kindly to
soldiers defiling their daughters and wives.”

My date frowned, obviously
displeased that I’d rebuffed her flirtations. Normally I’d have played along,
teased and flirted for the entire car ride and on in through dinner, but
something felt
wrong
about all of
this. It was almost like the setting was right, but the person that was on it
with me was entirely wrong. I didn’t want Patricia. I wanted someone else.

The driver pulled us up just in
front of the restaurant’s main doors, opening the door for the two of us as we
made our way inside. The car
ride
had gone on with an
uncomfortable amount of silence, one that perhaps would be fixed once the two of
us were happily filling ourselves with food.

While Patricia and I were both from
money, it seemed that neither of us were particularly fond of the stuck-up
attitude of London’s upper class, something that Gwen must have known when she
picked the place that we’d be sharing dinner. The dress code was rather lax,
sort of an “upscale casual” feel with a modern twist in the decor that I
actually rather enjoyed, especially over those
faux
-French-style
places that you’d find people of our “class” inhabiting.

The two of us were seated at a
secluded table toward the back of the restaurant, all the better for a romantic
evening. At least that must have been what my sister had thought. There was
wine already chilling for us as we sat down and a centerpiece of roses that I’d
not seen on any of the other tables. Gwen was pulling out all the stops for
this, and that only seemed to make me feel worse about it.

“Seems like someone wanted this to
be a special night,” Patricia purred as she took her seat, eyeing the wine chilling
beside the table. “I’m normally not the biggest fan of sit-down places like
this, but I’ve got to give it to your sister—this place is really nice. Not
like all those other old fashioned and boring places my dad kept dragging me to
when I was younger.”

The two of us ordered fairly quickly
sending the waiter off about his business, though I’d have personally have preferred
him to stay for the rest of the meal. I didn't want to truly be alone with
Patricia, not when I knew that she’d try to turn what could have been a
moderately pleasant experience into something I wasn’t intending on our first
date.

Even the thought crossing my mind
sounded wrong. Normally I’d have been the last person to take things slow on
the first date, but for some reason I had almost zero interest in Ms. Atmore,
especially not sexually. I knew who I wanted, I knew exactly which woman I had
been craving for days… and it was the only woman I couldn’t have.

I went through the dinner on a
strange sort of autopilot, my responses short and rather vague at times,
something that Patricia seemed to notice only slightly. Perhaps she knew that I
was playing hard to get, because the more detached I was the harder she pushed
to turn things more and more… adult.

Patricia, despite my feelings at the
time, seemed to be a lovely woman, and were I feeling like my old self I would
have skipped dinner and had her bent over a public bench before the clocks had
chimed for six-o’-clock. But I didn’t feel like my old self… I felt like
someone different… someone I’d never met before.

I knew that I should be more
interested. Patricia was honestly everything that I should have been looking
for in a partner—she was smart, charming, witty, and as a bonus she seemed to
have almost as dirty a mind as I did, every other word out of her mouth a
veiled flirtation that evoked the thought of stealing away to somewhere private
where I could have my way with her. Before the Army I might have taken a woman
like her in a heartbeat, using her for my own satisfaction before we parted
ways to find our next temporary lover.

Small talk had never been my strong
suit growing up, and it certainly wasn’t a favorite pastime now, either. Our
conversations were stilted and awkward, especially with my own disease seeming
to make matters worse. When the time came to leave, I happily paid for the
check and the two of us made our way out to the limo that had been waiting for
us yet again. We had the car for the whole night.

Normally when I had the pleasure of
a personal driver and an eager woman at my disposal, my first thought would
turn to the abundance of trouble we could get up to in the back seat. It had
been so long since I’d had the two in combination that I almost didn’t even
consider it at first.

Maybe
I’m just out of practice
,
I thought as I sat back into the back seat.
This
could be what I need to turn my thoughts back around
.

Apparently Patricia was having the
very same idea, her finger pressed down on the control for the privacy screen
that separated us from the driver. I looked at her, watching those full lips
turn up into a wolfish grin that I’d seen so many times.