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“Whiskey?” Hannah makes a face but takes it anyway.
“I can get you something else. A martini, maybe?”
A quiet scoff is her response to my reference to the night we met. She hands me the glass back and drops her head down on my chest. “Do you think it was my idea?”
I don’t have to ask what she’s referring to. “It might have been mine.”
It’s not hard to imagine looking at Hannah and thinking that same thing:Mine.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
“The thing with your stepmother. Was it just…physical? Was she hot?”
I rub the side of the tumbler with my thumb. Hannah has never asked about Candace, not since that night when I told her it happened. I don’t know why she’s asking now, and it wouldn’t be my first choice of topic.
“She was…there. Crew was focused on his marriage to Scarlett. My dad basically forgot about me once Crew graduated business school, it felt like. There was some bitterness there, for sure. But mostly, I knew it was nothing anyone would expect from me. Crew would be photographed stumbling out of clubs with models and everyone would pat him on the back at work the next day. If I showed up two minutes late to a meeting, everyone would ask if traffic was bad.”
“You wanted to be someone different.”
“Yeah.” I exhale. “Not that I wanted to be Crew. We’re different. Always have been. He’s happy being the center of attention; I hate it. He’s naturally charming; I research the interests of every investor or client I work with, so we have something to talk about. He was patient with Scarlett; I would have just ignored her.”
“And you felt different with Candace?”
“I felt like shit. The first time, I was so drunk I could barely get hard. And I never came after that, which pissed her off. She took it as some twisted challenge…” I shake my head. “It was toxic.”
“Then why did you keep having sex with her?”
“She blackmailed me.”
I feel Hannah’s eyes on me, but I don’t look over at her. I’ve never told anyone this before.
“The first time, I’d gone over to the house to give my father some documents. He wasn’t home. He’d told Candace he was visiting the Miami office. We don’thavea Miami office. It wasn’t hard for either of us to piece together why he lied.”
I take a sip of whiskey, staring out at the skyline.
“She begged me to stay with her. Said she was lonely and depressed and hated being alone in that big, empty house. It was the first time we’d ever been alone together. I’d always avoided her. It was strange—my father marrying a woman a few months younger than me. One he basically ignored and treated as a possession, just like he treated me and Crew like employees instead of family. At least we had each other, in some form. Candace had no one. Money and beauty, but no love or power.”
I swirl the glass, watching the amber liquid slosh up and drip down.
“Cheating on Arthur Kensington with his son? Controlling me by threatening to tell my father what happened between us? It was a thrill for her. An obsession. All she had in her life. And I didn’t see it until too late. I thought she just wanted a night to forget, which is what I was looking for. Crew was marrying Scarlett. I wouldn’t be CEO. It felt like nothing was really important—like my whole life was reorganized in a split second. And every time my dad credited Crew with an account I’d worked on, and I sat silent, I knew I was getting back at him another way. But that was just for me. I didn’t want him to know.”
“She told him anyway?” Hannah asks.
“She told him she was pregnant. To get his attention, I think. To scare me because I was getting more and more fed up? I don’t know. Regardless, my father had conveniently forgotten to tell his bride they wouldn’t be having any children. He had a vasectomy after my mom died. So as soon as Candace told him, he knew she was cheating.”
“What about you?”
I glance over. “What about me?”
“You can have kids, right?”
An unwilling smile tugs up one corner of my mouth. Because she’s not looking at me with disgust or judgment, and I didn’t realize how worried I was it might be there until I’m seeing it isn’t. “As far as I know.”
“What happened to the baby?”
“Never existed. As soon as my father told her the child couldn’t be his, she folded. Told him about our affair, admitted to lying about the pregnancy. Their divorce was finalized a few months later. I haven’t seen her since. Hopefully, I never will.”
