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Chapter One
Jonas Raiden’sstep-monster Judith Rowley was the reason he was never getting married. Ever. She was rude and opinionated and could argue until she was blue in the face—it didn’t matter if she was right or wrong. She was going to argue the point into the ground. Most of the time, she was wrong.
Twenty years ago, his dad had married her in a lavish, over-the-top ceremony that Jonas had been forced to take part in. Since that day, she had not grown on Jonas; she was more like a fungus that you tried to get rid of, but it just kept showing up a few weeks later, no matter what you tried. It got more annoying each time it happened until you just lived with it in disgust.
Jonas wasn’t the only one who thought that. His dad had left her three years ago—and not for the first time. This time, however, he had moved to a completely new town to get away from her, leaving behind almost everything as he did. His only mistake in the move had been to not divorce the woman, a simple step that would have prevented her from being there tonight. Yet here she was, sitting across from him, prattling on about some staff member who had walked out that morning. This was the third staff member to leave since she had walked into the house just a few months before.
His dad, George Raiden, was staring at his plate as if it had the answers to the universe on it instead of salmon. The only answer that Jonas wanted was why his stepmother was here, and why wasn’t he told before he showed up for supper. Except Jonas knew the answer to that question, and she was sitting next to her mother in rapt attention. Louisa was the spitting image of her mother in looks and, sadly, personality.
Louisa was his younger half-sister, and at nineteen, he barely knew her. Since he had avoided her mother for years, he had avoided her as well, which he saw now as a mistake. He had missed a lot of her life; she was an adult now. When had that happened?
Dr. Judith Rowley, because she was too important to take her husband’s name, turned to him and drew him back into the conversation. “It’s nice that you can make time to eat with us, Jonas. I haven’t seen you once since Louisa and I came home. Isn’t that right, George?” She shot her husband a look that said she didn’t want her stepson there now either.
His father looked up from his plate and over at his wife. He hadn’t been listening and was now caught not knowing that was happening. Two slow blinks later, he dismissed the entire group and went back to looking at his plate.
Saving his father from answering, he told her, “I have been busy at work. Being the VP at Raiden & Son’s Financial takes a lot of my time.”
It was vague enough that she would be satisfied, but not enough that she would ask anymore. There was no way he was ever telling her the truth about his job … or anything else about his life. He had learned long ago that if he kept his answers light, she would stop talking about it. After all, she wasn’t interested if she wasn’t talking about herself.
For years, he had worked with his uncle at the family company, a company his dad had opted out of to stay in academia. Jonas thought that he would one day work his way to the top of the company, taking over from his uncle and mentor. That was now in the balance.
“You’re still there, then? I had thought you would find something better.” Judith’s brown eyes were full of judgment.
“We can’t all be academics.”
His stepmother didn’t think you had achieved anything until you had a master’s degree, and a doctorate almost made her swoon. But Jonas had never been so happy to graduate with a degree and walk away from academia. He had never looked back.
When Jonas had first met his stepmom, he was fourteen and hated her the moment they had met. For months, he had called her Dr. Judith, even as she had moved into George’s house. The name had never bothered her, and he just grew tired of it, so he spent the rest of his teen years ignoring her.
Since the beginning, his dad had let her have her way with everything. By the time she had moved her boxes in, she was pressuring his dad to marry her. The pressure had worked, and within months, they were married. By then, she was obviously pregnant, and George was ecstatic about having another child.
The marriage had been far from happy from Jonas’s point of view. In nineteen years, they had separated no less than seven times, and typically, it would last for nearly a year. But then something would happen, and they would be back together again. There was just something about the woman that kept his dad going back … or letting her come back.
“You just didn’t have the ambition,” Judith told him with a dismissive wave.
Jonas bit his tongue to stop himself from telling her that he didn’t think she had ambition. After all these years, he still didn’t know much about her life before she moved in with his dad. Just that she had been a professor when they had met at a conference for children’s literature, which was what they both taught. She had promptly quit to raise Louisa.
At the time, George was already a department head in Chicago, and Judith was from some other college somewhere. Exactly where was still unknown to Jonas. In order for her to move in with George, she had to quit her job. So far, she hadn’t looked for another one that he was aware of.
“Well, you must come home more often since we are all in the same town now. We missed you for the holidays; you must have been out of town.” Judith wasn’t all that convincing, which was fine. He almost laughed at her words about him missing the holidays, which was just the week before. He hadn’t been invited, and he didn’t want to be.
He hadn’t celebrated a holiday with his family since he’d graduated high school and had chosen a college in a city that was far away from his parents. Not being close to his stepmom had been enough reason to not see his father and his sister for years. After college, he had gone to work for the company his grandfather had built, which was still not in the same town as his parents, who had lived in Chicago almost all his life. Until now.
Yet now here he was once again, eating with her, trapped in a conversation that he didn’t want to be in. His dad and sister were silent as church mice.
“Yeah, it’s too bad I was busy,” he told her, then turned to his sister. “How are classes, Louisa?”
His sister had just completed her first semester in college and was going to start a new one the next week. Jonas remembered that time as exciting and fun. But he had been away from Judith, not under the same roof like his sister.
“It’s going wonderfully, and she’s excelling in her classes,” her mother answered for her. To her credit, Louisa had opened her mouth, but she hadn’t been fast enough to actually answer.
At nineteen, he was surprised the girl let her mother speak for her. Most teenagers resented their parents, but not Louisa. All she did was slowly blink her blue eyes a few times like George always did.
“Are you excited for any particular one this semester?” he asked with interest, hoping she would get to answer. He hadn’t spent much time with her as an adult. Being attached to her mother’s hip made that impossible.
“The one on Dickens.” Judith patted her on the back, but Louisa turned away and took a bite of the fish, completely giving up and letting her mother do the talking for her.
“Dickens is good but may be depressing for an entire semester. If it were me, I would be watching all the movies I could find on the subject. Less reading that way,” he told his stepmother as he watched his sister suppress a smile. Judith couldn’t quite figure out if he was kidding or not—which he wasn’t. But Louisa’s smile caused him to see her as more than just Judith’s puppet. She just didn’t feel a conversation with him was worth the fight with her mom, which hurt.
