Page 18 of The Bastard (Filthy Trilogy 1)

k. I wanted to call but it felt like you were pretty finished when you left. I wasn’t, but that just seems to be how things work with us.

I stop myself. What am I doing? This isn’t a personal email. I should delete that. I start again.

Eric—

I grabbed your card from your desk. I wanted to call, but I thought you might welcome an email more freely. I know that your history in Denver runs deep and dark. I shouldn’t have asked you to come back here in the first place, but I need someone to help me figure this out. I need to hire someone and Isaac has money and resources that I don’t. I need someone I can trust who can’t be bought off. So, this is me asking for help one last time. Who would you hire to investigate Kingston Motors? Just a referral would be appreciated and I don’t even have to mention your name.

Harper

I read the message and there’s more I want to say, so much more, but I don’t. I hit send and hope for a reply. In the meantime, I start researching and looking for someone I can hire to help me solve these problems at Kingston. I make a list of operations outside of Denver who will be less influenced by Isaac and my stepfather, who may or may not be a part of what’s going on. Until I know, I can’t talk to my mother. She will tell him everything.

Hours later, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. I grab my phone from the nightstand, pull up my email and with the discovery that there’s nothing from Eric, disappointment fills me. Obviously, I was just his bastard and princess conquest he needed to get out of his system, which would make me feel foolish if I hadn’t gone into that night with him knowing that he felt that way. He did. I knew, and for reasons I can’t explain, it felt like something more happened between us, like there was a real connection, something lasting, but clearly, I was wrong. It’s time to move on. And yet, as I fall asleep, I’m back in the past, living that moment by the pool when his eyes had found me, the tingling sensation running down my spine. The lift of my gaze and the force of that man’s attention. I’ve clearly never recovered.

My memory floats forward to me standing on that stage, scanning the crowd for Eric and catching a glimpse of him disappearing back down the path to the cottage. I’d wanted to pull him back.

“Good riddance,” Isaac had murmured next to me. “I hope he’s leaving.”

And he had. He’d left. I’d felt that certainty like a sharp knife in my chest even before I knew. And yet still, the minute I was free of that stage, the minute the world of people focused on my stepfather, not me, I’d hurried to confirm. I’d walked that path toward the cottage, my heart racing in my chest, and found the door unlocked. I’d found the cottage empty. And I’d gone to bed, like I am tonight, with the feel on his hands on my body, the scent of him in my nostrils. Those piercing eyes haunting me, and the two nicknames that define our separation in my mind: the princess and the bastard.

***

Eric

I’m sitting on the slate gray couch of my living room with a whiskey in my hand and my MacBook on the coffee table in front of me, that damn email from Harper open and staring back at me as it has for a good two hours. I down the amber liquid in my cup, a smooth thirty-year I need to stomach anything Kingston before I grab the Rubik’s cube sitting on the table and start turning it, the numbers in my head telling stories that no one else would understand, and doing so every damn moment of my life. Right now, they’re telling the story of the bastard and the princess and the numbers want the woman as much as I do.

I set the damn cube down and stand up, walking to the floor-to-ceiling window to the left of the main living area. I stop in front of the glass and nothing but inky black touches my eyes, a storm on the horizon, but out there beyond that darkness is a spectacular Manhattan skyline to kill for that I worked my ass off to earn. That no one named Kingston gave me. They don’t get to give or take from me ever again. And they did take.

I press my hands to the glass, cold seeping through my palms and sliding up my arms, but there is fire in my blood, memories of the only person that could ever get me to give two fucks about anything Kingston in my mind: Harper.

My lashes lower, numbers exploding in my mind that become her again. That become me replaying exactly ten different moments with Harper in my arms, with me inside her, the scent of her on my skin, the taste of her on my lips. What the hell is it about that woman that makes me need another taste? That makes me remember how she tastes? What is it about that woman that drives me fucking insane? I finally had her. I fucked her, so what if I want to do it about another twenty times? It’s over. That’s how it has to be.

I need help, she’d said.

My lashes lift and I shove off the window. I do not help the Kingston family.

The end.

The princess is part of their clan now, and six years deep. Helping her is helping them, and she wasn’t even honest with me. There was something she wasn’t telling me. She didn’t even deny that truth. I sit back down on the couch and refill my glass. I don’t like unknowns and where the Kingstons are concerned, that gets personal. Especially after they sought me out through Harper.

What don’t I know and what consequences are there to not knowing?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Harper

I waste no time dressing and getting to work, and by eight in the morning, I’m in my office at the Kingston corporate offices. Today my dark hair is tied neatly at my nape, rather than loose the way I like it, a style I see as no-nonsense and all business. I’ve dressed in a black suit, with a pale pink shell beneath it, because I like to remind the world that I’m not one of the guys any more than I’m one of the Kingstons. I need that distinction today, and I hate that part of it is to spite Eric.

I’m not one of them. I need to believe this today. I’m my father’s daughter, and that means I fight for what I believe in and for others. Right now, I just have to protect our customers, my mother, and even Gigi, who hasn’t always deserved being saved. Maybe she doesn’t now. She was horrible to me and to Eric, but seeing someone almost die and then beg for forgiveness has a way of getting to you.

I sit down at my desk and pull out my MacBook as well as the pad of paper where I wrote the different companies I want to call for aid, but I can’t help myself. I power up my computer and check for a reply from Eric one last time. I actually hold my breath waiting for my email to load, only to find nothing from him in my inbox. I said I was letting go and moving on, but the enemy of your enemy is your friend. And Isaac and my stepfather have always been enemies, even when I was too naive to heed the warning Eric had given me about being used with no endgame for me but defeat.

I stand up with the intent of shutting my door, only to have Isaac appear in the doorway, and in his ridiculously expensive suit, there’s no way I can avoid a comparison between him and Eric. “I see you’re back to work,” he says, his voice a rich, arrogant accusation as perfectly honed as his body. He’s a good-looking man, his hair perfect, his jawline sharp, clean. He’s refined in all the ways that the rasp of whiskers on my belly reminds me that Eric is ruggedly, perfectly male. A thought that has my cheeks heating with the memory and I cut my stare from Isaac with the ridiculous fear that he can read my mind.

“How was your trip?” he asks, hitching a broad shoulder on the doorframe, obviously planning to stay longer than I’d like unless he’s going to give me the answers he’s been avoiding about the recalls.

“It was a much needed long weekend,” I say, hoping to avoid a topic laced with lies. My lies about why I took off of work.

“Who were you with again?”

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