My Billionaire Stepbrother (Lexi's Sexy Billionaire Romance #1) (3 page)

“So what’s that, like two-three meals if we all go? That’s just enough to give her ideas. Suddenly, your cooking won’t be good enough. She’ll want to go out all the time. You know how she is.”

It’s the second time Bill has informed me that I know how my mother is in the past three minutes. Good thing he’s around to keep me aware of such things.
 

Instead of answering, I walk into the living room. Mom’s in her chair. For someone who doesn’t move all day, you’d think she’d be larger. But she’s practically a leather-covered stick. A lifetime of smoking and drinking. She stopped her vices before marrying Bill, thankfully, or we’d be drowning in a sea of barley and rye. Only Bill drinks now. Only Bill breaks things we need when he’s angry, so we have to buy more. Only Bill refuses to entertain the idea of Mom getting a job, seeing as how doing so might ruin her stipend.
 

But the worst thing is that Mom’s bought into it. When I was younger, before Bill and Parker entered our lives, Mom used to be quite the spitfire. But that cab didn’t just graze her, it knocked her spirit into the gutter along with her body and twisted knee. She used to play tennis. She used to dance around the house while cleaning. Now look at her.
 

“Hey, sweetheart,” she says, looking up.

“Hey, Mom.”
 

“How was your day?”
 

Shitty
.
 

I broke a tray full of glasses, and a guy kept looking aggressively down my shirt whenever I bent over, even after I called him out, holding it closed with my free hand. But I don’t want to say that my day was shitty because as sad as Mom is to look at, as much as I often resent her, and as twisted as her religious fervor’s become, I don’t hate her. She’s my mom. I love her: cursed to do so forever.
 

“Fine.”
 

“You make good tips?”
 

I give her a look.

“I’m just asking, Angela. You don’t have to take offense at everything I say about money.”
 

Yes I do. But I try not to. Mom’s life — and Bill’s too, really — is like a never-ending game of searching the couch cushions for change. They get excited by quarters on the ground. They clip coupons for things we don’t need then justify their purchases, not understanding that you aren’t saving when you spend over budget, no matter the discount.
 

“I did okay.” Truth is, lunch shift is shit on tips and always has been. But what can I do? I can’t be out all hours to work dinner every night. Not with two fifty-year-old children at home.

“Well, good. And did you work with Carol?”
 

This time, I eye her properly. “Let it go, Mom.”
 

“Abortion is a sin, you know.”
 

“Okay, Mom.”
 

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, Angela Ricci. If you’re really Carol’s friend, it’s your job to help her see the truth.”
 

I want to tell Mom that it’s Carol’s decision what to do with her unplanned pregnancy. But to Mom, that’s like saying it’s her choice whether or not to knife our boss in the throat. Which we both sometimes want to do.
 

“We’ll talk about it,” I lie.
 

“It’s also a sin to engage in relations outside marriage.”
 

What a laugh. I know she and Bill were doing plenty before saying
I do
. Bill and Parker moved in before they were married, and we lived together as some sort of broken commune before they finally tied the knot and made things official. I lived in the next room, between them and Parker. Before we were steps, the world had been different.

“I’ll tell her.”
 

Mom misses my sarcasm. Instead, she says, “That’s what she gets for shacking up with a Jew.”
 

My head spins. This is just a bit too bigoted, even for Mom.
 

“What does that mean?” I say.
 

“They don’t have the same moral fiber as we do, is all.”
 

We?
I don’t want to be included in this. I have Jewish friends, gay friends, friends of all colors. Each of them is Hellbound, according to Mom.
 

“Are you referring to the rampant ‘deadbeat Jew’ phenomenon? The huge social stereotype we have about Jews and the way they knock up women before running off, laughing through their bagels before heading to their jobs in the world’s law firms, banks and jewelry stores?”
 

“Don’t be absurd, Angela,” Mom says.
 

I stuff down a powerful urge to comment on her lack of understanding of the word “absurd.” Instead, I sigh, sit on the couch, and shuffle through the mail.
 

“That reminds me,” Mom says, looking at the stack of envelopes, “did I hear you say something to Bill about the birthday card?”

I swallow, not wanting to have this discussion again — this time with my mother.

“Yes, Mom.”
 

“Well, don’t be mad,” she says. “We didn’t mean anything by it.”

That catches my attention. I turn to look at her, but she’s again facing forward, our conversation apparently concluded in favor of talk shows.
We didn’t mean anything by it?
That didn’t make sense, regarding Parker’s inconsiderately polite, spooled off birthday greeting.

“What are you talking about?” I hold up the card just enough for her to know who it was from, but without seeing the incriminating Star of David on the front. “You’re talking about this, right?”
 

Mom looks caught, as if she’s been tricked into an admission.
 

Something is percolating in my mind, and there’s no way I’m letting her back down now.
 

“I meant the other birthday card,” she says. “The one we all sent
him.”

“The one
we
sent
him?”
I say, incredulous.
 

Mom doesn’t even
like
Parker. She thinks he’s Satan incarnate. He acted out the whole time he lived with us, and as far as Mom is concerned, his exodus from LA might as well have been a vacation to Sodom and Gomorrah — whichever had the greater number of high-ticket Asian fusion tapas bars per capita.
 

Why would she send him a birthday card?
 

“Well, I know you have your issues with him, Angela,” she stammers, caught, dodging the fact that
she
, traditionally, has always had far more “issues” with Parker than I have. “But he’s thirty this year, and it just seemed time to renew acquaintances.”

Meaning they want to get to know him again. To reenter his life like a tapeworm.

There’s a prickle at the back of my neck. Something more to this story.

“You said
‘we,’
Mom.”
 

“Oh, yes,” she tells me. “You were working at the time — ”
 

Shit.
I don’t like this. Not today. Not now.

“ — so I signed your name.”

PARKER

S
AMANTHA
’
S
STILL
WITH
ME
WHEN
we enter the lobby. I couldn’t break up with her at the party because it would have caused a scene, and I couldn’t break up with her in the car because I see my driver every day and didn’t want him to hear the things she’ll inevitably say when I break it off.
 

Our relationship is more of a business arrangement than anything. Samantha looks like a doll and does all the things that the best, most expensive adult dolls do. She likes it for sure — is kind of insatiable in her moral depravity, really, which I’ll admit gets me hard every time — but we keep only the flimsiest of pretenses between us. It’s her
job
to get me off. It’s also her job to accompany me to the right kind of events and look stunning beside me. She’s also a key in certain locks, seeing as her family is connected in all the ways my family never was.
 

That last one is both a blessing and curse. Because while I have much, much
more
money and power today than Samantha, she knows exactly where I came from. Early in our relationship, when she was still pretending to like me above the waist, I made the mistake of driving her through my old neighborhood. She’ll forever hold that against me, wielding my lowbrow past like a highbrow weapon. When I end this, she’ll bring it up. She’ll call me a gutter rat, a poseur, a pretender to the WinFinity throne and a rider of Duncan’s coattails rather than his partner.
 

But as long as I don’t rock the boat, Sam will do her job. She’ll dress well, act cultured and civilized, make me look far more respectable than I’ve ever felt. She’ll elevate me to the realm where I truly belong, like Duncan keeps berating me about. And whenever I want — and plenty when I don’t, but am willing once prompted — she’ll give herself to me. Any orifice I want, whenever and wherever. She once gave me a hand job under the table of a five-star restaurant. I came all over her hand as the sommelier was describing the house white. It was so ironic.

My job is easier. I make the money. I make the deals. But as it turns out, that job is far harder and less replaceable than Samantha’s. The fact that I don’t like her company much will make this easy, because I can slot her out for another disposable bit of arm candy if I so desire — something Duncan will demand in the name of networking and image. But dodging Samantha’s insults, anger, and jilted remonstrations? That will be harder.

I look over at Sam as she crosses the lobby’s expensive imported tile. I like the doorman, Telly, quite a lot, but for some reason the way she’s always such an entitled cunt to him turns me on. I’m told women like bad boys. I like bad
girls
, at least for the kind of relationship Sam and I have. Maybe we all desire self-destruction. It’s such a head trip that I’m horny again watching her ignore Telly’s hello, handing him a gum wrapper as if he were a trash can.
 

“You
owned
that party, Parker,” she’s saying, now crossing to the elevator so she can ignore the attendant like she ignored Telly. “Duncan wants you to be more visible, but that brooding thing you do is sexy as hell. Not just to women, but men, too.”
 

I don’t comment on her implication that I turn straight men on by mere presence. I also don’t comment on the way she just said I turn
women
on rather than saying I turn
her
on.
 

“You’re just thirty. You’ll make the hit lists thanks to my birthday toast.”
 

I’ve already diverted away from the elevator toward the alcove to its right. I don’t bother to call her over. Sam comes of her own accord, her fine ass moving smoothly under her tight dress.
 

“Hit lists,” I repeat.
 

“You know, when they do the top thirty under thirty, that kind of thing?”
 

“But I’m not under thirty anymore.”
 

She gives me her catlike smile. “
Honey
, you’re the talk of the industry. Any excuse to write you up, they’ll gobble it right up. You don’t give them much. Almost a recluse. That’s what Duncan keeps telling me: to get you out more. You’re this generation’s Howard Hughes.”
 

I don’t think that comparison is remotely apt, but I say nothing.
 

“But it’s a double-edged sword, Parker. If you hide too much, you won’t come off as
brooding
; you’ll become
invisible
.” She stresses the words as if I might not have heard them before. “It’s good that you came out. And now that the press is reminded that you’ve hit a landmark birthday, they can do one of those semi-retrospective pieces where they talk about how far you’ve come, what you’ve built, how you changed the whole fucking game! Why do you think I made that toast? It was just a WinFinity party without it, but now it’s your birthday party, too.”
 

“So you didn’t make the toast to cheer my health.”
 

“No, of course not!” Samantha laughed. “Strategic moves, Parker. This is why you need me. As a partner. You’re smart, but you don’t consider your image. Your profile. You’re a hot, single billionaire, baby. You parlay that, they won’t be able to get enough of you.”
 

“You’re really on the ball, Sam.”

She grabs my dick, right there in the lobby, puts her palm flat on my crotch and starts kneading. The elevator attendant (Carl) and the doorman (Telly) are right in her line of sight. Her thinking this is appropriate means one of two things, maybe both. Either she feels I pay enough for my penthouse that I should be able to act as lewd as I want, or she feels Carl and Telly aren’t human enough to demure for. Doing it front of them, to Samantha, is probably like doing it in front of dogs.

“Damn right I’m on the ball,” she purrs, still kneading my junk. “What do you think you fuck me so much for?” As if this is how I pay her. She has it backward, though she does tend to orgasm loudly and frequently, so she’s getting something for sure.