On my way to his penthouse, in the elevator, I cleared my throat several times because I didn’t want my voice to break when I spoke to him. Somehow, I still didn’t want him to see how affected I was by him. I knocked on his door three times and rang the doorbell twice, but nothing happened. I turned around, about to walk away, when one of the building’s receptionists walked out of the elevator with a wrapped gift and flowers. She headed straight to his apartment door. A set of keys jingled between her fingers.
She greeted me with a polite smile. “Happy Holidays.”
“Thank the Lord you’re here.” I almost threw myself at her. “I think something’s wrong with him. Can you open the door? We need to see if he’s okay.”
“Who, Mr. Cole?” Her brow furrowed.
What?
“No.” My voice chilled significantly. “Vic…Mr. Spencer.”
“Oh. Him.” Her lips pinched as she pushed the key into the hole. “I saw Mr. Spencer leave very early this morning with a suitcase. He’s probably flying back to LA. He’s already stayed in Dean’s apartment for much longer than usual.”
“Dean?”
She blushed. “I mean Mr. Cole. I deliver his packages for him when he’s not around. He gave me a key.”
My mouth dried and I blinked. “This is Dean Cole’s apartment?” I confirmed, feeling dumb. Not only about the question. About everything.
The girl nodded, her smile still wide. “Sure is.” She sauntered past me and just before the door closed in my face, she said, “Again, Happy Holidays, Miss LeBlanc. Hope you have a good one.”
But it was too late. It was already a horrible Christmas. The worst I’d ever had.
I was about to take the stairs back down to the apartment. There was no way I was waiting around for the elevator, and I didn’t want to get in with the receptionist because I feared I’d cry in front of her. I felt pathetic enough without adding the cry-in-front-of-a-stranger humiliation into this mess.
My steps toward the door leading to the stairway stopped when I heard my phone singing in my back pocket. I fished it out, my heart slamming against my chest, wanting out, out, out.
I begged for it to be him. Begged for him to have an explanation. Begged for all of this to be a mistake. He couldn’t have been so vicious. There was no way.
Staring at the screen for a second, disappointment gripped every ounce of me when I saw Rosie’s name, before the feeling was replaced with shame.
Vicious was a no one. Rosie was my family.
“Merry Christmas!” Rosie, Mama, and Daddy greeted in unison when I pressed the phone to my ear. I smiled despite the pressure in my nose. I was crying, but I didn’t want them to hear.
“Hey y’all! I miss you so much! Merry Christmas!”
“Millie!” Mama shouted in the background. “Please tell me your sister is not dating a biker named Rat!”
I did my best to sound like I was laughing, even though the emptiness spreading in my gut was numbing every emotion in me, even the pain.
“Rosie,” I scolded. “Stop messing with Mama’s feelings.”
We talked for about ten minutes, me still standing on the edge of the stairway, before Rosie took the phone to her room and dropped her voice to a whisper.
“Millie,” she said, “I thought you should know something about Vicious.”
It seemed like my heart stopped beating when she said his name. Hope and dread filled me in equal measure.
“Yeah?”
“Baron Senior died.”
I dropped my phone to the floor, my mouth falling open.
Jo.
The will.
His father.
Everything clicked like a gun hammer, and the invisible weapon was pointed at my temple. It was show time for Vicious.
But was I about to become his prop?
“FUCKING FINALLY,” I SAID, FLINGING the door to Trent’s red Range Rover open before climbing in. It was a nice rental, considering he was only here for the holidays from Chicago. I tossed my Ray Ban Wayfarers aside and shot him a look.
“Fucking finally? I got here twenty minutes before you landed.” Trent threw his vehicle into drive.
He looked like crap. Well, by Trent standards anyway. The fucker was easy on the eyes. With mocha skin, a rugby-player build, and other shitty qualities that made women cream their panties, he was probably the best-looking guy among the four partners of FHH. Only now he had red-rimmed eyes, a three-day stubble, and he needed a haircut. Yesterday.
“I was actually referring to my father dropping dead,” I said, twisting to the backseat and retrieving my black leather Armani messenger bag.
I was also referring to the fact that I’d gone through travel hell. Everything went to shit the minute I got the phone call about my dad’s death. I was in such a hurry to catch a flight, I forgot my charger. My phone died and there were no available flights to San Diego or LA for hours upon hours. Finally, by the time I landed, I’d been able to buy another charger and called Trent to pick me up.
I pulled my phone out and checked for calls and messages from Eli Cole. There weren’t any. Just two missed calls from Emilia. She could wait. First, I needed to know when we were going to read the will. No point in contacting her until I knew how soon she needed to fly her ass to Todos Santos. It was crucial she be here on stand-by, ready to spring my trap on Jo. The raging erection I had every time I thought about Emilia had nothing to do with it.
“Can you focus for one fucking minute on anything other than your goddamn inheritance?” Trent said.
He was still pissy about knocking up that stripper chick. I rolled my eyes. “Right. How is Valenciana?” Valenciana was the stripper. And, sadly, that wasn’t her stage name.
“She’s okay, we’ve decided to…that’s not what I meant! What I meant is, you should be sad about your dad passing away.”
We were heading into a traffic jam out of San Diego and toward Todos Santos. I wondered if Jo was going to be home and if so, if it was too early to kick her out.
“Trust me when I say he earned my hatred fair and square.”
“This seems a little out of nowhere. You never spoke one bad word about him before.”
I fought another eye roll. “What am I, a fucking fifteen-year-old girl? Which reminds me, where is that fucker, Dean?”
“At his parents, of course. It’s Christmas Eve, and if I were you, I wouldn’t be surprised if he dropped by to say hello. And fuck you very much for hiring his ex-girlfriend. Now what the hell is that all about, Vic?”
“I needed a PA,” I gritted out. It had been ten years. They were together for a semester and a half. It drove me crazy that Dean made it out to be what it clearly wasn’t.
“She was his first and last serious girlfriend,” Trent accused.
“And she was mine,” I said flatly, shoving a blunt between my lips and lighting it in his car.
The windows were rolled up—it was winter, after all—and zero fucks were given on my part. It was Trent’s fault for butting into my business.
Trent tapped the steering wheel. “Goddamn you. Give me a hit.” I passed him the blunt.
He inhaled before returning it to me. “You keep saying she was yours”—smoke poured from his mouth—“but did you ever tell her that? All you did was talk shit about the girl and bully her every time she came near you.”
“Excuse me, but have you grown a vagina since you found out about becoming a father? What is this crazy talk about feelings?” I exhaled smoke from my nostrils. “When’s Jaime landing?”
My best friend was flying in from London for my father’s funeral.
“Christmas Day. He’ll leave Mel and Daria at home.”
I nodded. I knew he would.
“Think you can shut up about my PA and focus on trying not to fuck your way into another mess till then?” I scowled at him.
Trent shook his head and hit the accelerator, swerving onto the shoulder of the road. He breezed up the side of the congested highway, his
jaw tight. “Fuck you, Vicious.”
“Honey, I’m home!” I announced when I walked into my father’s cold mansion. Soon to be mine. Soon to be no one’s after I burned it down.
Okay, fine. Technically, I was probably going to use a wrecking ball. After that, I planned to use the land to build a nice library named after my mom, Marie Collins. Not Spencer. His last name was unworthy of her.
No one answered my greeting, so I climbed upstairs to my old room and pulled out my drawers, packing up before I said goodbye to this goddamn place. Most of the shit in my old room was football related.
I wasn’t a very sentimental person. I found letters I’d received from dewy-eyed teenage fangirls, an eight-year-old blunt I’d forgotten to smoke, and Emilia’s chewed pencils. They were at the bottom of my bottom drawer. I was about to throw them into the trashcan beside my old bed when I decided, why waste them?
They were fucking pencils, I reasoned with myself. They didn’t have an expiration date.
As I packed, I got a phone call from my father’s attorney. I’d been chasing his ass along with trying to reach Eli since I’d gotten the call about Dad dying. Goddamn holidays and people who had real families. Dad took his last breath alone. Only Slade was there to tend to him. The other nurse was celebrating Christmas Eve with his family. Jo was spending the holiday with a so-called friend in Hawaii.
She wasn’t there for him, like he wasn’t there for my mom.
I wondered if Jo had ever loved him. Really loved him. I knew nothing about relationships, but something told me the answer was no. Something told me that my mother was murdered not because of a great love but because of pure greed.
“Hello?” I pressed my phone to my ear.
Mr. Viteri, my dad’s attorney, was a man of few words. “The day after the funeral,” he said.
It didn’t seem too long a wait.
“Who else are you sending a copy to?” I asked. Not that it mattered. Wills were public records.
“You, Josephine, and your dad’s brother, Alistair.”
Alistair was irrelevant. He was sixty and lived an ordinary life on a ranch in a small town in Texas. If anything, I was planning to split the funds with him, though I knew he didn’t care about money. Lucky bastard. But now I knew for certain Jo was in the will.
“Can you send my copy to Eli Cole? His house, not his office?” I asked.
I heard his Sharpie as he scribbled down the address. “I’m sorry for your loss, Baron,” he finally said, because that was what was expected to say.
“Thank you, that means a lot,” I said, for the exact same reason.
I finished packing, took my stuff and my sorry ass to The Vineyard, the nearest five-star hotel, ordered room service, and got drunk on whatever was in the mini bar.
I was eager to see Jo’s face when I confronted her about knowing everything she and Daryl did. When I forced her to give up every single penny my father left her.
I was eager to have Emilia by my side again. Catering to me. Assisting me. Fucking with me.
Rubbing my hands together at the very idea of what was to come, it dawned on me that the idea of flying my PA to Todos Santos was just a little more exciting than seeing Jo’s face crumbling with agony as I laid the new laws of life in her fucking face and stripped her of the money she wrongfully claimed to be hers.
I picked up the phone and called my PA.
To say I got no response would be an understatement.
She didn’t take my calls and didn’t answer my text messages either. Not on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day or the day after. I dialed, I hit send, and each time my phone sat there silent, I wanted to smash something. Although, to be completely fair, my messages were less than welcoming.
What the fuck happened to your phone? Answer me.
He dropped dead. I need you to come here. Call me back.
I wonder how blasé you’ll be when I bend you over and fuck the rudeness out of you for not answering your boss for three days in a row.
It felt ridiculous. The sitting. The waiting. The craving.
That needed to change. I needed a distraction from this woman.
And I knew just how to change it.
“Just leave it outside,” I yelled to room service from inside my suite.
It couldn’t be anyone else, because the only person I’d invited to my hotel—Georgia, my high school casual fuck—was already inside the room. She was also pissing me the fuck off with her annoying, whiny voice. The years hadn’t been good to her. Sure, she worked out and was always wrapped in the latest designer number, but everything about her was self-involved, plastic, and overdone.
I needed to throw her out before she made a move on me. Ridiculous, considering I’d asked her here so I could fuck her and the aching memory of Emilia from my system.
So, I’d called one of my old flings to distract myself until I had the will in my hands? So what.
Georgia was sitting on the sofa across from my chair, still babbling about something that happened at Todos Santos’s country club five years ago. I wasn’t listening—I lit up a blunt.
“…and I was shocked, Vic, so shocked. I mean, it was one thing that she didn’t want to donate to my charity, but to shamelessly accuse me of founding a whole organization just so Dad would look better during his senate campaign—”
“Why did you break into Emilia LeBlanc’s locker that day?” I cut her off suddenly, smoke fanning out of my flared nostrils.
I was physically unable to hear any more of the boring shit she was feeding me. Downstairs, in the hotel bar, where we’d had a drink, I’d convinced myself that I didn’t mind her annoying voice and annoying facial expressions and annoying self. Alas, I was wrong. I minded all of these things. A lot.
“Emilia LeBlanc?” Georgia twirled a strand of her hair with her finger, blinking at me. Her mascara was too thick and obvious. It didn’t really help my disinterested cock.
“Yeah. Don’t pretend like you don’t remember her.” I blew smoke to the ceiling and twisted my wrist to check my Rolex.
“I do remember her. I’m just surprised you do.” She arched an eyebrow.
I stared at her, expressionless, rubbing my thumb on my temple with the same hand that held the blunt. “She found her calculus book in my bag, remember?”
Georgia huffed. “Because you took it from me and threatened you’d ruin my life if I ever did it again!”
“You had it coming, sweetheart. You acted like a little brat,” I countered without even blinking.
There was another knock at the door. Who the fuck hired this kind of idiot? Why couldn’t they just leave the food outside?
“Get the fuck out of here and take my dinner with you!” I shouted. I wasn’t hungry anymore. And I definitely didn’t want her to stay and dine with me. But what I really didn’t want was to touch her. It wasn’t unusual for me to throw out a perfectly good one-night stand if I wasn’t in the mood. But it was definitely the first time I got annoyed to the point that I wanted the woman out of my life for good.
“Vic, what is this?” Georgia smiled uneasily, shooting up from the sofa and striding over to me.
I took another hit from my joint and watched her. She placed her ass in my lap, and I shook my head slowly, my eyes dead. “Move your ass, pronto, Georgia. Off.”
Another knock on the door, and this time it was a brutal blow to the wood. I got up to answer, and she scrambled to her feet just in time. I didn’t care if she landed on the floor.
She grabbed my free hand and squeezed it. “I was a little wild. So what? We all were. That was adolescence. We grew out of that phase.”
“I don’t want to see you again,” I told her, setting the joint in the soap dish I’d appropriated from the bathroom. “You were a nasty bitch to her, and I suspect you’re still a nasty bitch to whoever was unlucky enough to stay in this goddamn town. This was a mistake. I want you to leave.”
I marched to the door with balled fists at my sides. If this was ano
ther hotel staff member whining in my ear that this was a no-smoking room, I was going to make them bleed. I swung the door open, ready to bark at the person in front of me. Then I froze.
“Welcome to California, motherfucker.” Dean pushed me back into the room and walked in like he owned the place.
Dean was slightly taller, slightly bigger, slightly handsomer than me. His light brown hair was cut short and preppy these days, and his style was a little more elegant than mine. He loved full suits in eccentric colors, just like the Joker. He also loved pissing me off, just like everyone else in my life.
“Hey, Georgie. What’s up?” He winked at her.
“I was just leaving.” Georgia collected her purse from the round table where I’d sat just moments ago and shouldered past us, making a beeline for the door.
I watched her bony, annoying ass disappear into the hallway and closed the door behind her.
Dean was inside, making himself comfortable, pouring himself a glass of something alcoholic from the mini bar and whistling with a smile on his face. “I’d ask you if you want something, but I’m afraid you’ll think I care.”
I pressed my shoulder to the wall and watched him, my hands tucked in my pockets, waiting for him to get to the point. “That’s it? Not even ‘sorry that your dad passed away’?” I mocked.
Dean turned to face me, tossed back a full glass of whiskey, then pointed it at me. “You’re forgetting you had endless meetings with my dad at his office. You think I didn’t do the math? I know the drill, Vic. You hate your father. You hate Josephine. You hate the whole world. Came here for the money and the estate, didn’t you?”
Wrong, asshole. I came here for revenge.
Dean refilled his empty glass. “Where’s our little friend, Millie LeBlanc?”
“Where she belongs. In New York at the penthouse. In my bed,” I lied. “Well, technically your bed.” I tucked the half-smoked blunt between my lips and lit it casually. “Don’t worry, though. I’ll reimburse you for the mattress and frame, which we broke, by the way.”