Ever since, she had decided to give as good as she had gotten. She didn’t have his power, she didn’t have his influence, but in their private war she fired off as many shots as he did.
“I assume you’ll be staying for the will reading after?”
She studied his face. He was beautiful. But he was empty. How could he say this, with that tone, concerning the death of his own father?
“Yes. Because it’s what he wants.” There was no point antagonizing him. She enjoyed it, yes, but this wasn’t a game. She was about to be an orphan. And yes, she was twenty-seven, so it wasn’t as if she was an orphaned child, but for the first twelve years of her life it had been her and her mother against the world. And then there had been Giuseppe. Without him, without her mom, she wouldn’t be the person that she was. And whatever Romeo thought about who she was, she knew that she was a good person.
A strong one, an ambitious one. A good friend, good at her job.
Someday maybe she would actually finish writing a book, instead of just editing other people’s stories. And when she did it would be because of not only the education that Giuseppe had helped her get, but also because of the confidence his love and support had instilled in her.
“What does surprise me, Heather, is that you have not found a rich man to pay your way the way that your mother did. Finding a fool like my father should be easy enough for you—you still have him convinced you’re a fragile girl who needs protecting. I bet a great many men would line up for the privilege of…protecting you.”
She was fed up with him. She snapped her computer shut, and stood, holding it underneath her arm. “I’ve been busy. Living my life. But you know, my mom didn’t marry your dad until she was thirty-five. So I have time.”
“Your mother pulled off a rare feat by gaining trophy-wife status in her thirties. I wouldn’t count on your charms to such a great degree.”
“And what about you? Why are you here, Romeo? You have your own billions with your investment firm, and I assume you want nothing to do with your father’s company. It’s going to fall out of the family’s hands. Publicly traded and with someone else as CEO, I assume you and I will end up with stock options. You don’t need to be here for that. Are you waiting to see if you inherit this house that you hate? Are you waiting to see the last breath of a man you despise…”
“I love my father,” he said. “If I despised him then all of this would be easier. Why do you think I come to holidays? Why do you think I stayed engaged in this family in any regard? You think it’s because I hate him?”
That was much more complex a thought than she wanted to give Romeo credit for. She wanted him to remain the one-dimensional villain. Selfish and cruel simply because he was. She didn’t want him to be someone with feelings as complicated as her own.
“I always thought it was to perform your abject disgust to all of us,” she said, ignoring the revelation.
“No. I am his son. His only child. I deserved to be there. I deserved to have a place at the head of the table, just as I deserve to have my inheritance, just as I deserve to sit by my father as he takes his last breath because I am the one with the birthright to do so. You are nothing, Heather, and you never have been anything at all. He wanted your mother, and he got her. He destroyed our family in the name of satiating his lust, and then in order to save face he married his affair partner and tried to make it legitimate. If I hated him, I could’ve simply walked away. I could have turned my back on him and never looked at him again. I don’t hate my father.”
“But you hate me,” she said.
“I don’t see why I owe affection to a cuckoo in the nest who has spent the last fourteen years trying to supplant me.”
“Maybe I just wanted a dad.”
“Yours didn’t want you. It didn’t give you the right to mine.”
Then he was the one to turn away. To leave her standing there, fuming.
She truly hated her stepbrother with all of her being.
She couldn’t wait to be rid of him.
And yet she could.
Because the day she walked away from Romeo, never to see him again, was the day her family dissolved.
Then Heather would be alone in the world.
With nothing but the burning hatred she felt for Romeo remaining.
CHAPTER TWO
Hating Heather Grayhad become a habit.
He woke up in the morning, brushed his teeth, shaved, and he hated Heather Gray. It had been like that from the beginning.
For so long that he no longer questioned it.
He could remember the first time he’d seen her. She was sulky, insolent, the corners of her full mouth turned down. She had been a child that first time. And he had dismissed her as being unimportant, because she was.
