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Now, as I sat in the leather chair facing down the toxic woman in front of me, I brought my hand up to cradle my chin, tapping my finger against my lips.
“Spencer!”
The familiar, sharp tone of my mother’s voice brought me abruptly back to the present moment. I looked up at her, trying to make my expression as pleasantly indifferent and removed as possible.
“Yes,” I answered with no emotion.
“My God, can you try to be more alert? You’re starting to act as much of a vacant idiot as your father, dear.”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek, holding back the aggressive response I would’ve unleashed if I knew it would make a difference.
“Well, can you blame me? You’ve been talking for about,” I checked my watch with a falsely concerned look, “twenty minutes. I keep waiting for you to actually say something.”
A sigh from next to me drew my gaze from my mother’s infuriated face to my brother’s exasperated one. “You’re not helping matters much, Spencer.”
“I’ve honestly lost track of what she was trying to say,” I said to my brother, barely shifting my gaze from my mother’s face. “She uses five words when she could use one, and it’s woefully inefficient.”
“Spence,” he said, his voice coming out in the stern tone that I knew meant he was far more irritated than he was trying to let on. “Really. Calm down.”
No one ever, and I mean, mother fucking ever, told me to calm down. Not even my brother, who possessed far less of the strong personality I’d developed as a survival mechanism in this household. I had to bite back my natural reaction, which would have been to level my brother, and that would’ve been only the prelude to me jerking my ass out of this office, snatching up Natalia, and leaving this godforsaken place.
But I knew this fucked-up game all too well. My mother’s supreme skill of divide and conquer was in full effect, serving its purpose of having my brother and me at odds. So instead of treating Stephen like the sharks I dealt with at work, I needed to take his advice and calm down instead of wanting to crucify him for suggesting it, which was precisely what Heidi wanted.
God, I hated my mother. Shoving emotions down like this made my blood pressure skyrocket, and if I had a stroke and died because of her? I would come back and make sure this woman’s ass was so haunted that Ebenezer Scrooge wouldn’t even believe it.
“Seriously?” I said, finally, after taking more than a minute to ensure the venom of anger didn’t drip into my tone. “Our mother has been monologuing for the last fifteen or twenty minutes about how much she hates my choices. She’s the one who could use your advice.”
“How can I be calm,” she said, coming around to stand in front of me as she dug her long fingernails into the skin of her arms, “when my younger son has brought home this…this puttana—”
“First of all,” I said, my voice becoming even icier than before, “if you want me to sit in this room with you another second, you will never speak of my wife in such ways. Not in Italian, French, Dutch, or fucking Spanish. I don’t give a fuck. She’s not a whore, and I expect you will never refer to her as such again.”
“Well, what in the world am I supposed to think of her, Spencer? Don’t you dare sit in that chair and expect me to believe she is anything but a woman who is after you for your father’s money. And now that she’s got her claws in you, I can only pray that you had the foresight to sign a prenuptial agreement.”
“You mean like Dad did with you?” I looked at her humorously. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? You’re furious that I finally brought someone home and fulfilled that final condition of Dad’s trust. Shall we go over the details of that truth, Mum?”
Like clockwork, as I knew they would, her eyes began to water. “How could you say that to me?” Then came the lineup of her hysterics that I’d known would emerge next. I could practically teletype the emerging actions as if I were reading a script. The shocking part was that I knew this woman had the emotional depth of a serial killer, so her ability to turn on the waterworks or switch emotions was always unsettling. “How could you imply that I would want anything for my beloved son but the best? I’ve only ever—”
“Treated me like shit? Made me feel like I was last on your long list of priorities?” I stared her down. “No, you’re right, and I’m wrong. I’m the evil one, and you’ve always been my victim. That’s what this is leading up to, right? How horribly I’ve treated you, and what a hateful son I am?”
“I never said that,” she said, her eyes still tearful, “but you’re doing me a disservice by supposing I want anything other than—”
“My money,” I said, nodding. “Or rather, my father’s money. And just so you know, we never signed a prenup. We talked about it, but we sort of just…forgot. Time had just escaped us. It was quite the whirlwind.”
“Spence,” Stephen cut in, his wide blue eyes looking at me with the sincere, older brother concern that he’d learned from the time he was forced to parent me when there hadn’t been anyone else after our father died. “Did you seriously marry this woman with no protection of your assets? What could you possibly have been thinking? Haven’t you learned anything from—”
He clenched his lips together before turning away from me and looking out the window, but he didn’t need to speak for me to hear the words he’d been tempted to say.
Hadn’t I learned anything from my father’s mistakes?
I tapped my fingers against the desk where my father, Alessio, had sat day in and day out, working himself to an unhealthy exhaustion level while building up his family’s fortunes. “If any of you had bothered with a simple Google search, you would’ve seen that Natalia Hoover earns a small fortune on her own, and my money would not tempt her to marry for that reason alone. She’s brilliant at what she does and has built a reputation to match it, so when I say that I was the one who had to tie her down, I meant it. She’s far above me, and somehow, I’m lucky enough for her to be willing to spend her life with me. I’m not willing to sully that with an insurance policy because I don’t care about the financial side of it. And before you say a goddamn thing,” I said as my mother opened her mouth, “no. No, and no. I’m not about to disregard my father’s last wishes about how his fortune was handled, particularly when that money was left to me to give my family and me a better life.”
“As you said, though,” my mother responded with an edge of maliciousness I’d learned to pick up on over the years, “your wife earns quite a bit of her own money. So that begs another important question. Why would you need your father’s money to live a better life if your wife is so well-situated?”
“You’re correct in this begging a very important question, Mother. And that question goes to you. Why do you need the money?” I asked. “The money he left for you in trust should’ve kept you solvent until the day you died with leftover cash to burn. So, what the hell are you doing trying to manage what he left his children?” I shook my head. “At the very least, your share should’ve been enough to keep you going so that you could establish a career of your own.” I stood up from my chair, shaking my head in fury. “I don’t know why you keep insisting on having this argument with me every time I come home, but I’m done with this. Just stay out of my way until the wedding is done, and I’ll do you the same courtesy.” I took in the sight of my mother, twisting my mouth and shaking my head. “Ironic that you would call my wife the whore when you’re the one who’s always played that role so well.”
I turned to walk out of the office, trying to breathe as normally as possible.
“What was the second thing?” Stephen called from behind me.
