Quid Pro Quo: A dark stepbrother romance Read online

  QUID PRO QUO

  by NENIA CAMPBELL

  Nenia Campbell

  Copyright © 2021 Nenia Campbell

  All rights reserved.

  DEDICATION

  To those who love a bad boy redeemed

  (especially if he stays a little bad)

  Prologue

  2017

  ▪▫▪▫▪▫▪

  Nicholas Beaucroft leaned back in his chair, stretching his long legs beneath the streamlined metal desk. With the shades drawn, the office was dark. Gray paint and a mulberry tree growing unchecked beyond the window were the culprits for the room's bleakness. He could have, and probably should have, had the gardeners crop the branches, but—no.

  He wanted it wild. He wanted to remember.

  Seventeen years ago, when he had been a boy, there had been a young cat in the tree. He and his friends, Jake Van Hoff and Aaron Kranz, had been out in the yard, unsupervised and listless. They had been wondering what to do next when they heard the small mew overhead and looked up, glimpsing what appeared to be a white ball of fluff. He couldn't remember which of them had thrown the first clod of dirt, or why they had thought that would coax the kitten down, but suddenly, there had been a blur of blue and brown and a shouted cry:

  What the fuck are you doing?

  It had surprised him—the lowness of the voice, the easy vulgarity. How the owner of the voice had sounded so young and yet so confident. Jake had nearly shit himself, he remembered with a slight sneer, and Aaron had been too stunned to move, the clod of dirt crumbling in his hand as his fingers clenched in involuntary response to the note of authority.

  The girl—because the owner of the voice had been a girl—had climbed the tree, her patched and dirty sneakers hooking on the bark as she shimmied up the branches to where the kitten was huddled in terror. Her shorts had been too small, riding up on her thighs in a way that looked like it pinched, and when she had swung back to the ground, he'd caught a glimpse of taut, brown midriff. The sight of that had done something to him, and even though he'd been ten and utterly disdainful of girls by his own admission, he couldn't bring himself to look away from the tall, leggy creature who, with her sweatshirt knotted around her long, slim waist like a kilt, looked like some defiant young goddess.

  “W-we were just trying to get it down,” Aaron had stammered. “Nick started it.”

  “It's just a baby.” She'd had the cat cradled against her chest, pitching her voice low. “Are you such psychotic little freaks that you would throw rocks at a helpless creature?”

  Slowly, Nicholas had allowed his eyes to drift to her angry face, to drink in the flashing hazel eyes, the pointed chin, the nose with its unfashionable bump. Girls around here didn't have bumps like that; as soon as they were teenagers, they all went out and got noses that looked like ski slopes. She didn't look like the other girls at his school. She didn't look like anyone he'd ever met; but she was still the most beautiful girl that he had ever seen.

  “Who is that?” Jake had whispered, with equal parts fascination and annoyance, and for some reason, he had found himself wanting to slug the other boy in the face.

  He had watched the girl march away, still clutching the cat, muttering to herself as her sweatshirt swished angrily around her hips with each determined stomp.

  “I think that's my new stepsister, Justine.”

  The phone rang shrilly, gnawing into his memories so that they crumbled into nothing. He picked up the phone, toying with a small, stuffed bird he'd picked up at an estate sale. It was a little blue jay, made of felt. The jet beads it had for eyes seemed to glitter with the facsimile of life in the dim light. She never liked her name, he thought, fingering the stitching on the ruff. She always wanted everyone to call her Jay.

  As the woman on the other end of the phone went on, his eyes closed in impatience, strong fingers clenching minutely so that the fabric began to buckle in protest over the delicate cardboard base. “Blue jay” was what he, and only he, had called her.

  His little bird.

  No longer a girl now, Jay had become a woman: a beautiful woman, with only a few silvery strands threading through her dark corkscrew curls like pieces of tinsel, and a keen intelligence in her luminous eyes. He had stared at the photo that had been provided to him, greedily comparing it to the one that existed in his mind from when he had last seen her eight years ago.

  Different, but the same. He would know her anywhere. He would know her blind.

  Part of him had wondered whether her effect on him would remain. She had been twenty-three years old when she left, four years younger than he was now. In the photograph, she was wearing office attire, looking over her shoulder while purchasing coffee, her face possessing the watchful calm of a grazing deer. His eyes had scanned over her fitted skirt and blouse, unbuttoned enough to reveal a glimpse of something lacy, and he had instantly gone hard.

  On the phone, the woman continued to rail at him and he listened silently. Though he was careful to make no sound that could be heard over the phone, he couldn't quite suppress his smile. It warped his swarthy, patrician features, forming the perfect arrangement of studied cruelty. Jay would have recognized it instantly and gone running.

  “Yes,” he said softly, picking the bird up in his hand. “I understand that your financial straits are dire. Well, if you wish to discuss it further, you can arrange it through a lawyer.”

  He knew she didn't have a lawyer. She only had Jay to speak for her now. Sweet, loyal, ethical Jay. That selfsame goodness was precisely what had propelled her into flight from his arms the first time. Of the two of them, she had been the one with the tender heart.

  Not that she had ever been willing to give it to him.

  His fingers convulsed and there was a quiet crack as the bird's hollow body collapsed. Carefully, he replaced the phone in its cradle, hanging up on the shouting that was still emanating from the line. In the blue wash of his computer screen, his gray eyes held an uncanny, arctic gleam.

  Nicholas tossed the ruined bird into the trash and smiled grimly as he turned to the computer and bought himself a plane ticket. I'm going to possess you, my little blue jay. And I'm going to make you love it. He folded his hands in front of him and glanced out at the tree.

  He only wished he could see her face once she realized she was caged.

  Chapter One

  2017

  ▪▫▪▫▪▫▪

  There were three things every woman needed in the city: sensible shoes, an umbrella, and a cell phone. Currently, Jay Varens had none of these, because some asshole had just cut the straps on her cute leather backpack and was racing off with it down the street.

  “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! Stop! Thief!”

  A few of the passers-by looked at her curiously. Several of them deliberately looked away.

  Helplessly, Jay watched the man dart away with her backpack tucked under his arm like a football, eventually disappearing down one of the underground BART tunnels. Why her? Why today, when it was raining? She couldn't even call the police—the bastard had her cell phone.

  Rain continued to pour down from the sky as if from a broken spigot as Jay schlepped herself to work in her pinching heels. By the time she got to the office, her light gray sweater with the sewn-on pearls was now a much darker gray and her curly hair was hanging in tangled clumps around her shoulders, making her feel like something scraped from the gutters.

  “Good morning, Ms. Varens,” said Ian, the elevator man.

  She forced a brave smile, trying not to cry. “Hi, Ian. Pretty cruddy weather, huh?”

  “Forget your umbrella?”

  “Yeah. I guess I did.”
>
  She managed to keep it together until she got to her desk, which she shared with Lily Chang, who worked as an administrative assistant for the other executive in Parker-Hawthorne, LLC. Lily was eating a piece of toast, which she immediately set down, eyes widening. “Oh no! You're soaked, Jay. Are you all right? Do you want me to make you a coffee?”

  That tiny bit of kindness undid her and a few tears spilled out, along with a choked-up sob. Jay hated crying, hated it, because it always made her feel small and powerless.

  Her chest tightened as old memories threatened to rush in. Nobody had helped her then, either.

  “I'm sorry.” Jay grabbed a tissue from her desk. “I was just robbed on the street by a man with a knife and nobody did anything to help. He took my phone, my sneakers, my umbrella—”

  “Your keys?” Lily asked, returning with a steaming cup. “Your wallet?”

  “N-no.” Jay sniffed. “I have those. They were in my pocket. Thank God.”

  “Well, that's something. At least now you don't have to cancel your credit cards.”

  Jay tried to remember if she had ever paid for anything with a credit card on her phone and whether she ought to cancel them anyway. She logged into her Apple account to track her phone and saw that the phone thief was speeding towards the East Bay. Probably on BART. Using her Clipper Card. Bastard, she thought angrily, logging out of her account.

  “Thank you for the tea.” Jay sighed and opened up ShiftWare, the platform they used to keep track of the CEOs' schedules and click through calls and appointments. “It helped a lot. I felt like I was about to start screaming my head off. You're seriously the best.”

  “Don't I know it,” Lily said, with a little hair flip. “Drinks after work? I'll buy. We'll invite Grace, if she's not working late again.”

  “Great. I like Grace.”

  An appointment popped up for Jay to schedule. She glanced at it and let out a small gasp.

  “Jay?” Lily didn't look away from her screen. “You all right over there?”

  “Burned my tongue on the coffee.”

  She stared at the name, burned into the screen. Nicholas Beaucroft. What the hell was her stepbrother doing in San Francisco? The last time she had looked him up, feeling drunkenly masochistic, he had still been living in L.A. Had he been looking for her, too?

  No, she thought, even as goosebumps broke out beneath her damp and clingy sleeves. Her LinkedIn was private, inaccessible to anyone who wasn't in her network, and her Facebook didn't say where she worked. He took over his father's investment firm when he died, she reminded herself, trying to quell the panic. It's strictly business—that's all.

  But what would Nicholas want with soap and bath oil? In San Francisco?

  No. He had come here to find her, she was sure of it. Given what had transpired when she had last seen him, Jay could only imagine what his motives were.

  Revenge, probably.

  You're going to refuse me again? She could still conjure up his voice so easily: deep and smooth and painfully cold—an icy river churning with hidden undercurrents of violence.

  Jay looked at the pending appointment and considered trashing it or pretending she'd never seen it. Tempting, but no. Those types of things could be traced and she didn't want to lose her job. She didn't want to cost her boss his. Nicholas could make or break this company with his money. With his father's money, she corrected herself. He didn't even earn it.

  Jay scheduled the appointment for late afternoon the next day and resolved to leave early.

  “So,” she said, turning to Lily with a bright smile, “where are we going tonight?”

  ▪▫▪▫▪▫▪

  After two Boothby cocktails, Jay's head felt like it was going to float away on a cloud of champagne. She thanked the Uber driver Lily had ordered for her before climbing up the stairs to her apartment door. It took her several tries to fit the key into the lock. She dropped them on the second attempt and something about the way they looked, all spread out from their ring on the ground, struck her as hilarious, and she began to giggle hysterically as she picked them up.

  Such a lightweight, Lily had teased her affectionately, while Grace, who was Lily's cousin, had laughed. I can't take you anywhere, Jay.

  Sitting in the trendy cocktail bar in the FiDi district, with the raspberry-colored lights and loud indie music, Jay could almost forget the reason for the darkness clouding her heart.

  Finally, she got the door open and clumsily tossed her keys in the little ceramic dish by the door as she did up the latch and bolt. Carbon, her cat, rubbed against her leg, meowing vocally. She bent to pet him, scratching behind his ears the way he liked. She'd always loved cats. Before Carbon, she'd had a white cat named Gypsum. She was long dead now, but she had continued her weird trend of naming her pets after rocks.

  She found herself thinking of the gypsum rose Nick had gotten her when his dad had taken him to Nevada. Back when her collection had been smaller, it had been the nicest rock she owned. She had been touched. An olive branch, she'd thought, from her weirdly intense younger brother. How wrong I was, she thought, staring unseeingly at her tattered old sofa.

  It was locked away in a drawer somewhere, now. She hadn't been able to bring herself to sell it, but she couldn't stand to look at the flattened cluster of crystals, either. Maybe she should sell it. The one he had given her was a nice piece and probably worth a lot.

  What was he doing in San Francisco? Seeking revenge?

  Fear surfaced anew, ready to consume her if she let it. Jay drew in a breath and walked towards the kitchenette with small, determined steps.

  Rocks cluttered many of the available surfaces in her apartment. Once people found out that she collected them, that was all they tended to give her as gifts. She had lots of geodes, a few pseudomorphs, a king's ransom of semiprecious stones. Her favorites were the fulgurites, the spiny bristled structures that formed out in the desert when lightning struck the earth. There was a big one on her coffee table, carefully mounted on a wooden base by a collector friend of hers.

  Lightning turned to stone. She stared at the dangerous spikes. That's what I feel like sometimes.

  She was at that point of being drunk where feeling good could easily turn into feeling bad and was just sober enough to recognize that, so even though she felt hungry, Jay decided not to eat. She turned on the hot water boiler instead, thinking it would be nice to have a hot cup of tea.

  As she puttered around her studio apartment, she noticed the light on the answering machine was blinking. Hopefully that wasn't her bank calling to tell her she'd been scammed. Just thinking about what had happened earlier, and how no one had helped, filled her with another tide of fresh anger. She couldn't believe no one had even asked if she was all right.

  Look for the helpers, Mr. Rogers had said. Clearly he'd never been to San Francisco.

  She pressed the button for “new messages” and winced when her mother's nasal voice filled the room. “Justine,” she said, “it's your mother. I need you to call me right away. It's urgent.”

  It's always urgent, thought Jay, folding her arms. Last time, her mother had called, she had been convinced that she was being “scammed” because she didn't understand the additional charges on her food delivery. By the time Jay had finally called her back, her mother had already disputed the charge and gotten into a shouting match with her bank.

  Jay thought about listening to the other two messages first, but decided against it, quickly dialing her mother's number. “Hi, I got your message,” she said, a little breathlessly. “What's wrong? Are you all right?” Please don't let it be about money.

  “Your stepbrother got us both disinherited.”

  Shit. “He did? Why would he do that?”

  “Because he's a bastard,” her mother hissed, “and he clearly has it in for us.”

  Jay wasn't surprised that her mother had forgotten that she was never even in the will. Damon Beaucroft had never legally adopted her, so she had never even be
en in the running.

  “What happened?” Jay asked slowly. What did you do?

  “Apparently,” she continued in seething tones, “Damon added a stipulation to his will stating that his wife needed to remain faithful until his death, or she would lose everything.”

  And you weren't, Jay finished for her silently—and Nicholas knew it. He'd told her as much. “How did that get out?” she asked, falling into her computer chair, hot water forgotten. She already knew why, already dreaded hearing it. “How would they even know?”

  “Your stepbrother has photographs. The fucking snake. He was always slinking around the house with that camera of his, and of course, his father never did a damn thing to stop him.”

  Jay felt her throat tighten with unvoiced suspicions. Photographs.

  She turned to the computer, typing in a quick search that her mother should have looked up from the start. Her fingers stumbled only a little; she told herself it was because she was drunk. “I'm sorry,” said Jay, “but I'm not sure what you can do. It looks like you could assert something called your right of election, as his spouse, but that seems to be for general disinheritance and not for, like, the kind that comes with stipulations. Can you hire a lawyer?”

  “I can't afford a lawyer,” she said. “I'm broke. He'll crush me in court.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “He won't speak to me. I tried calling his office. His secretary wouldn't let me through.”

  Administrative assistant, she corrected silently, far too used to the dismissive indignity herself. “I'm sorry,” Jay said again, leaning back in her chair. “I wouldn't fight him on this. It really sucks—but I'm just not sure what you can do. You know what he's like.”

  There was a pause. “He said he would be willing to speak to you.”

  Jay's heart froze. She felt the filaments of that chill extend to her veins before snapping off like sharp, stabbing needles to pierce her throughout her body with that terrible cold.

  “Absolutely not.”