If only he had realized that within the year she would be his stepsister. His problem.
Prior to his father destroying his mother the way that he had, he had ignored Heather when he passed her in the halls at Fairfield. But after the affair, after his mother and father had divorced, and Lisa and his father had married, it was different.
He resented her presence.
His father was enamored of her. It was clear.
His father had always wanted a daughter, and had never had one, and this was even better, because she was pathetic. She had needed saving, and his father wanted to do the saving. What better way to have someone look up at him with uncritical eyes, than to become their hero.
And it didn’t matter, the ways in which he had failed Romeo and Carla. It didn’t matter that he had been neglectful at best when Romeo had been a small child, wedded primarily to his business, and only later had he had any time for a wife and child. And at that point, the wife had been Lisa, and the child Heather.
In many ways, he had taken the concept of sibling rivalry with her a bit far. But he was not a man given to half measures. He never had been. His life had been his own, and then she had appeared.
He had resented her presence from the beginning, but worse was when she had become beautiful.
When her sulky mouth had become a temptation, when her body had begun to take the shape of a woman’s.
She was all of the worst parts of having a sister, he assumed. And yet she wasn’t his sister, and that made the entire situation abominable. It always had been.
He was surrounded by socialites who starved themselves for a living. He had always liked women in every shape, but there was a particular sort of lean, hungry look that was more popular within the circles he ran in, and Heather was an anomaly.
She wasn’t polished. Even though they wore uniforms to Fairfield, she had managed to look…different. She had buttons on her backpack, and her plaid socks pulled up to her knees often had a safety pin clipped to them with things dangling from it. It was maddening and strange. Her brown hair was a curly tangle, never tamed, and she was…
Lush.
She had only grown more so.
Her hips were round, and he had thought more than once about what it would be like to grip hold of them as he drove into her. Her waist was nipped in, but there was a softness to her stomach that held his fascination. And then of course her breasts… A man could spend a lifetime on fantasies centering on her breasts.
He felt that at this point he very nearly had.
And what a thing to be thinking about as he stood in front of the door of his dying father’s bedroom. His stepsister’s breasts.
He couldn’t wait to excise her from his life like the tumor that was currently killing his father.
He pushed the door open, and went to sit beside the bed.
“Romeo,” his father said.
“Yes, Dad,” he said softly in Italian. “I’m here.”
He was angry at his father. He always would be. There had been a strange sort of pain that had come with Lisa’s death two years ago that stilled his tongue now. She had died suddenly. She had been there, and then she had been gone.
It had been astonishingly painful, and to this day he couldn’t quite articulate why. He had spent the better part of the last decade and a half hating her. For what she had done to hurt his mother, for what she had done to change his life. But she had been a lovely and loving person. She had, in some ways, been better for his father. His mother and father had a tumultuous relationship, and he could admit that there in the relative silence of his father’s room. In his own mind.
Lisa and his father had never been tumultuous. There had been deep care between the two of them. He resented that too. That in many ways it was undeniable that life had been smoother for his father once he had made the decision to rid himself of his first wife.
But Romeo was the one who had to be there for his mother. Then and now. He was the one who’d had to pick up the pieces, and there were so many pieces.
“You have to take care of her,” Giuseppe said, his voice thin.
“Who?”
He had been thinking of his mother, but he knew very well his father didn’t care about her. He knew the answer before his father gave it.
“Heather. I need to know that she will be okay.”
Of course he had no similar concerns for Romeo. Romeo had never had the option to be anything but okay. His father expected him to get on with things. To be hard. To be a man. And so he was. Self-sufficient and successful.
