It’s too horrible.
I grab her hand and drag her from the room, pushing through people I don’t even recognize in my quest to reach the wide marble hallway. How are we even going to find a taxi in this mess? We’ll be flagged down, caught on camera. This is what rich people have bodyguards for, but we’re not rich regardless of what just happened in that lawyer’s office. We have nothing, maybe not even a way to pay the hotel bill. I spin in the hallway, useless. There’s nowhere to run.
Christopher appears out of nowhere. “Come on, there’s a car waiting.”
I’m too frantic to even ask a question, like where we’re going. He could say we’re driving into the depths of hell, and I’d probably still follow him, taking Mom by the hand, pulling us both into the cocoon of a darkened limo. The press see us as Christopher moves to step inside, running toward us with their microphones outstretched and video cameras hot on their heels as the door shuts. Then the limo eases forward, taking us far away.
“Thank you,” I say, feeling both numb and exhilarated.
Christopher glances out the back window, his expression grim. “Damn him,” he mutters. “He should have given you some warning at least.”
Damn him. I cling to those two words like they’re a life preserver. Like when Christopher helped me break into the artist studio. We’re together, aren’t we? “You won’t help him, will you?”
My mother runs a shaky hand through her hair. “I’m ruined. No one will have me after this. Half the town knows what happened by now. There’s probably a YouTube video.”
I hate that she’s right. Daddy did more than make sure she couldn’t get his money. In that one public moment he made sure she would never marry well again. Everyone will say there must be something wrong with her, for Daddy to omit her this way. She’ll be the laughingstock of high society. Those rich husbands of hers, they didn’t only marry her body. They married her position in society. Her connections. The way she could host a dinner party with senators and billionaires. It doesn’t matter if I become a world-renowned artist, my mother will never get another society invitation again.
The limo turns onto the highway and speeds up. I’m sitting next to my mother, and I reach across the supple leather to take her hand in mine. Across from us Christopher looks haggard. He stares out the tinted window where the city speeds by.
I squeeze my mother’s hand. “It will be okay.”
“How?” Her mouth forms the word, but no sound comes out.
“Christopher will help us,” I say, the words like a tether. The red and white life preserver for me to hold on to when it’s too hard to swim. He’s always been there when I need him. Why would this time be any different? “He’s the executor, so he’s the one who decides what counts as being for me or for you. He’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”
God knows there’s enough money in that trust fund to take care of my mother twenty times over, in the most extravagant ways she can think up. I didn’t expect Daddy to leave me empty-handed, necessarily, but I also didn’t expect to get every terrible cent.
The entire St. Claire fortune, minus the yacht.
I look at Christopher, but he hasn’t moved. I might as well have turned him to granite, the same way I did to my father at the exhibit. I don’t feel like I’m cursed and full of rage. My dirty-blonde hair doesn’t slither and hiss, but the men around me are as cold and hard as stone.
“You’ll help us, won’t you? It’s too cruel, what Daddy did. It’s wrong. If the money is mine, I can spend it however I want. Why shouldn’t Mom get some of it?”
It won’t matter if none of the rich assholes who think they own the world will marry my mother, not if she’s already taken care of. It will hurt her to be shunned by her so-called friends, but at least she’ll be able to live comfortably.
The strong profile and ebony hair does not move a single centimeter even as the limo exits the freeway and turns toward our hotel. Through the windshield I can see a small crowd gathered at the front door. The press. Not the hard-hitting journalism that exposed the corruption at my old school after my Medusa painting. These are the tabloid freelancers and gossip bloggers. We aren’t celebrities in the way that a musician or a model is, but everyone likes to see the rich brought low. They’ve come to gloat at my mother’s pain.
“Christopher!”
He speaks in a low voice to the driver, who turns before we reach the crowd. There’s already a uniformed cop waiting to direct us into the parking garage. An entrance for celebrities and politicians, I realize. Someone set this up ahead of time. A way into the building without having to run the gauntlet of paparazzi.
Someone who knew we would need this.
“You,” I whisper, my chest crushed by a thousand-pound weight.
Christopher finally looks at me, and I can’t contain my gasp as I see the resignation in his eyes. “It’s his last request, Harper. The only thing he ever asked of me. How can I say no?”
It takes me forty-five minutes and a Valium to get my mother to relax in her bedroom, her lashes still damp from tears of anxiety and grief. Light batters my eyes as I step out of her bedroom and close the door gently behind me.
“Have you always taken care of her like that?” Christopher asks from the large windows that frame the city, his hands behind his back, looking out.
How dare he judge? He doesn’t know her, or he wouldn’t even be considering doing what Daddy asked him to do. And he doesn’t know me, if he thinks I would speak to him ever again. “I’m sorry that not everyone in the world can live up to your exacting standards. I suppose we should all be so heartless as to put money before family.”
He glances back, his eyes flashing. “Is that what I’m doing?”
If I were smart, I’d heed the warning in his voice, but he’s the one with the GPA and the plans to take over the world. I’m the troublemaker. “Aren’t you?”
A hollow laugh. “Is that why you think I stopped kissing you that night at the studio? Because you’re my stepsister? Because I think of you like family?”
The way he says family it might as well mean nuclear waste. “I mean, yeah. But now I think maybe it was something else.”
Those black eyes that hold so many secrets, they look over my body from the top to the bottom with such slow, obvious hunger that it seems impossible I would not have seen it before. “You aren’t my sister, Harper St. Claire. And I have never, not once, thought of you that way.”
My skin lights up under his stark perusal. “Then how do you think of me?”
He stalks forward until my back hits the wall of the suite. “Like you’re the daughter of the only man who ever gave a damn about me.” His mouth is only two inches away from mine…an inch…and then I can feel the gentle caress of his breath against my lips. “You were completely off-limits, when he was alive—” A rough sound. “And even more so now that he’s gone and asked me to do this thing that will make you hate me.”
“Then don’t do it,” I beg softly, and it’s almost a kiss, my lips moving near his.
“You have no idea, Harper. No idea what you’re asking me.”