Page 6 of Kingpin's Secret Baby

Piers pretends to struggle with my bag before swinging it up to sit on his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and taking his own duffle in his other hand. I ignore the way that makes all the muscles in his arms flex. “I’m helping you unpack, remember?” he says, like I’m dim for asking.

“You’re not coming inside. You’ve seen the house, now call yourself a cab and go.”

“And let you dislocate your shoulder trying to get this thing upstairs?” Piers asks. “I don’t think so, love.”

Love. I resist the urge to clamp my hands over his mouth to keep from saying that word again. “Go.Away. Piers.”

He leans in, mouth quirking. “No.” Then he steps past me toward the front of the house. My bodyguards hesitate, before grabbing their own bags and following after him.

For a moment, I stand outside alone, staring at the tall trees that surround me, too close, and the side of the house, looking down at me with large dark eyes. My throat is too tight, my breaths too short. If I go inside, I’m accepting my new life, the script I’ve been given by my brother-

No, it’s too late for that now. I accepted his terms when I stepped onto the plane without a fight. Maybe I'd accepted them even earlier- when I hesitated at my window during the chaos at Wesley Hall, failing to make the jump that might have ended it all. At that moment, my life stopped being my own.

Now, I’m forced to live it.

Inside, I’m a little relieved to find the house already furnished, and very tastefully decorated in sage greens, grayish white, and cream. Now that my bodyguards have turned on the lights, I can admire the airiness of the place. It lacks Wesley Hall’s grandeur, of course, but it’s… not unpleasant.

I peek into each of the downstairs rooms, finding a large common space, a kitchen with a massive island and bar- no proper dining room- a den that could be used as a private study, and doors that lead to the backyard and the garage. I don’t see Piers, but I hear him and my bodyguards moving around upstairs.

Unable to stall any longer, I return to the foyer and trudge up to the second floor.

There are three bedrooms in this house, not including the den, and all of them are spacious and filled with large windows. I find mine, the most sprawling of the bunch, to the right of the stairs. Piers is already inside, with my bag set on the bed. To my horror, he’s unzipping it like he’s going to unpack mytoiletriesfor me.

“Will you leave me alone?!” I demand, yanking my bag closed.

“You’ve been hunting me like a dog for the past year, and now that I’m here you want nothing to do with me,” Piers quips. “Will you ever make up your mind?”

I bite the insides of my lips hard, wanting to shout a thousand things but giving up before any of them have left my mouth. Instead, I turn away, aiming for the door. If I stop acknowledging him, maybe he’ll get bored enough to finally leave. Before I make it to the hall, though, Piers stops me with another question.

“What did I do to make you want me dead so badly?”

My heart ducks painfully in my chest, and I whip around to face him. Piers’s dark green eyes see too much, and I quickly turn away again, unable to meet them.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I tell him flatly, and I’m not lying. I’m no longer head of the Warwicks or the lady of Wesley Hall. Everything I was trying to hold onto has been stripped from me. Whatever I wanted then is pointless to me now.

I see Piers move in my periphery, but I refuse to look his way. He walks right past me, so close I can smell his skin. The door to my bedroom closes. For a moment, I think he’s finally left me alone, put off by my refusal to answer a question he’s well within his rights to ask.

I raise my head- and Piers’s face is mere inches from mine.

“I say it does,” he says, taking a step forward. I stumble back, and he comes after me. When my back hits the wall, his body traps me like iron bars, closing in, leaving no room to escape. “We were friends once.”

Once.

I was a child when Piers came to Wesley Hall, impressionable but painfully shy. He was barely a man, a boorish orphan plucked from obscurity by distant members of my Warwick family. Despite the difference in our ages, and the fact that my brother was even older than both of us, the three of us became friends almost immediately. Piers had a boyish charm to him that, I’m ashamed to say now, instantly enchanted me. He’d play pranks on older members of the Warwick family, steal sweets from the kitchen for me, and even lure wild animals into the house to play with. For the first time in my life, I knew what it was like toplay.

“Were we?” I whisper, my voice quivering.

That changed when we got older. Once I hit puberty, Piers stopped being just a friend to me. He became… well, he became everything. What had once been innocent between us became magical. Charged. Sitting on his bed and talking late into the night felt like more than just a conversation. Every smile was the promise of a kiss, even though he never touched me. For a long time, I was sure he didn’t think of me in the same way, that these were just girlish fantasies about a boy I’d grown up knowing.

Then, three months before everything went wrong, I ran into him in the library. I was 21 at the time, lost in my books for hours, missing lunch and almost teatime completely. I’d finally torn myself away from my book and stood to leave when Piers came around a bookshelf and crashed right into me.

His arms came around me, keeping me from falling, and I clung to him in response. Our bodies were brought flush. My face tilted up to meet his, and I felt his breath on my lips. He pulled back, but he lingered first.

He lingered for several seconds, for an eternity that helped me memorize the moment in every detail and replay it in every one of my dreams.

And then, mere months later, my father named Piers his heir instead of me. Marcus Warwick would rather a man who wasn’t even a blood member of the Warwick family be its next ruler than hand it down to his own daughter. That left me with a choice to make.

Lose everything I’d ever known, everything I’d been raised to possess, or kill the man I loved.

---