Score - A Stepbrother Romance (34 page)

M
y heart was a black hole
.

The last week had been a living nightmare. Mom was an inconsolable wreck, and I wasn’t much better. The look on Drew’s face when I caught him with all that stuff…God, was there any way he hadn’t known what his Dad was up to? He hadn’t exactly denied it, and I’d spent the last several days in a haze. I hadn’t even cried. Every part of me was numb. Just when we’d made a total honesty pact with each other, I’d discovered that it meant nothing – he and his father had been scamming us the whole time. He’d only pretended to love me to distract me from finding out what was really going on.

The first few days, I’d been in total denial. I’d sat here and waited, wishing and praying for Drew to show up on our doorstep begging me to believe that he hadn’t known what his father had been up to, and that it was all some massive misunderstanding. But he hadn’t shown up. He hadn’t even sent me so much as a text, which pretty much confirmed for me that he’d been in on it.

Those Buckley men were some twisted fucks.

My Mom sniffed and blew her nose again as we sat at the kitchen table with Lana’s father, Kevin. He was a divorce lawyer, and he’d agreed to help us out. My poor Mom had barely stopped crying since we’d left the Buckley house that night. We hadn’t even gone back for our things. Tony had packed it all up and had it delivered two days later, and he hadn’t even bothered contacting us in any other way since then.

“Firstly, I’m going to try to get your marriage annulled,” Kevin said, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose. “He essentially tricked you into marrying him. That’s fraud, and it’s grounds for an annulment.”

“Okay.”

“As for the matter of getting your land back, we’ll also go after him for fraud. The manner in which he deceived you into selling it is despicable, if I say so myself. He defrauded you, and that’s going to be our argument. The problem is proving it.”

My eyes had been on the table, but they shot up immediately at that. “What do you mean? We saw it! It was all there, in his office!”

“But did you take any of the evidence you found with you?” he asked.

Mom shook her head. “We just left. We weren’t exactly thinking straight.”

Kevin sighed. “He’s probably gone and destroyed it by now, or come up with some ridiculous explanation as to why it was there. I’ve been speaking with some of my associates at the firm, and they have a fairly solid idea of how Tony’s defense team are going to play this.”

“How?”

“They’ll claim it
was
your first ex-husband sending those letters. They’ll also claim you knew full well that you were selling your land to one of Tony’s companies, and seeing as you did sign the papers, it’ll be your word against his. They’ll also call the police and CSIs to the stand, and they’ll all testify that the DNA found on the letters matches that of your ex-husband.”

“They can’t do that.”

“Unfortunately, they can. The DNA does match. Tony made sure of that, as you know. They’ll also say you’ve suffered some sort of mental breakdown in recent weeks, and that’s why you’re accusing Tony of what they will probably refer to as utterly ludicrous charges.”

My Mom’s eyes widened. “But it wasn’t just me. Sophie saw the things in the office too.”

“They’ll say she’s lying for you.”

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Mom murmured, putting her head in her hands.

“Wait,” I said. “What about the money from the land sale? Can’t you trace where that went? If he just put it in his own account, that’ll prove it was him behind the whole shady shit-show.”

“I already did that. It was sent to an anonymous Austrian bank account and withdrawn a week later. So far, we haven’t been able to trace where it went after that. We have no way of proving that it was Tony and not your father who accessed that money, Sophie.”

I wanted to slap myself in the face for not grabbing everything I could from Tony’s home office before we left that night. Then again, Drew would have stopped us anyway. The thought of his name alone made a cold shiver run down my spine, and I felt sick to my stomach to the point where I thought I might actually vomit on the table.

“Do we have any hope of winning this at all?” Mom asked, her entire body already sagging in defeat.

“I won’t lie. It will be very difficult. He has a stellar defense team, and he’s set it all up very well. I’ll keep digging, but right now the only thing that will really help our case is if we either prove that your ex-husband is definitely dead and has been for years, or if we get someone to testify against Tony.”

“And that’s not going to happen. Even if someone knew what he was up to, he’d probably just pay them off.”

“Exactly.”

My heart sank. Kevin was a good lawyer, but we were still going to be up for a big, lengthy court battle against a whole team of legal sharks, and we’d probably end up losing.

Mom’s eyes filled with tears again. “Where do I find these men?” she said. “Am I just a magnet for horrible people, or is it my fault?”

Kevin put his hand on hers and gently patted her. “It isn’t your fault, Marie. You were vulnerable, and Tony took advantage of that. He probably spent a lot of time planning this.”

“No, it is my fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gotten married again so fast. We were only dating for five months before we ran off to Vegas together like a pair of idiots. Except I was the only idiot in this scenario, apparently.”

“It’s not your fault you trust people, Marie. I’m surprised you found it in yourself to trust anyone again after what your first husband did to you,” Kevin said. “It’s not a bad quality to trust people, but the scum of the world will take advantage of it if they can.”

“Well, I don’t think I’ll be trusting anyone again after this,” she mumbled, putting her head back in her hands.

Kevin asked us a few more quick questions, and after he’d left, I quietly made my Mom a cup of tea. She stared at me over the top of her mug for a minute before speaking.

“I wasn’t the only one fooled by a Buckley man, was I?”

“What do you mean?”

“I know about you and Drew,” she said. “When we had coffee the other day and you said you had something to tell me, I thought you were finally going to come clean.”

I was aghast. “You knew?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Sophie. You two weren’t exactly good at hiding it. But don’t worry. I never told Tony. I kept it to myself until you were ready to talk about it.”

I cast my eyes down. “Oh.”

“I’m not angry at you, Sophie. I wasn’t surprised when I realized what was going on. Drew was your best friend when you were a kid, and he certainly grew up to be a very handsome young man. Unfortunately he’s just like his father.”

She reached over and squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry you had to find out the hard way, honey. Not all men can be trusted, and it seems like Drew is one of them. Like father, like son, I guess.”

Tears sprang to me eyes, and every bit of emotion I’d been trying so desperately to hide from her welled up all at once. “I really believed him when he said he loved me. He was so…he was so perfect.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “Oh, Sophie, it’s not your fault. I guess you inherited your ability to be too trusting from your old Mom here.”

“You aren’t old.”

“I feel old. I think this situation has aged me about a hundred years. I even found a grey hair the other day.”

For some reason, that sent her over the edge, and she dissolved into tears all over again. I held her for a while, crying as well, and when we were finally out of tears, she stood up.

“I think I need a nap,” she said. “I’m just so tired.”

“Good idea,” I said. “I might do the same soon.”

Ten minutes later, I was in the bathroom, sitting on the cool tiles of the floor. As a final cherry on top of the crap cake that was my life, I’d missed my period. It was probably just the stress from the last few weeks making me miss it, because according to all the magazines I’d read, that sort of thing happened to women all the time. It made total sense. That had to be it.

The two pink lines on the pregnancy test said otherwise.

M
y fucking prick
of a Dad was going down.

I’d been lying low for a week now, because he had no idea it was going to be his own son who took him down. I wanted it to be a surprise. I wanted to see his mouth drop open in a perfect ‘O’ when they called me to testify against him and tell the judge exactly what he’d been doing.

You shoulda heard the way the bastard tried to explain things to me when everything had blown up in his face. He’d just gotten out of the shower when Marie and Sophie went tearing out of the house, and his face was ashen when he’d seen me standing in the study with all the evidence of his deception.

“Son, this is all a misunderstanding,” he’d said, his face twisted in faux sadness. “When I found that toothbrush to give to the police a few weeks ago, I went back looking for more stuff in the attic the next day to see if there was anything else that might help prove it was Marie’s ex-husband who wrote those letters. I found the comb, an old letter and his old cologne. I thought that’d help prove it was definitely him, and I took it to the police but they said they already had enough. I kept it, just in case they ever did need it.”

I was willing to bet a million bucks he’d paid off a police officer to back that claim up if the need ever arose.

“Oh yeah? And what about this sheet of paper where it looks like you’ve been trying to learn to write just like him?” I’d said, unable to believe he was still telling such bald-faced lies.

He sighed. “Because we hadn’t heard from him again after we paid him off, I thought maybe I could pretend to write a letter from him to Marie, saying he’d received the money and was going to leave us alone. Just to give her peace of mind. I never ended up getting good enough at it to pull that off, though.”

Yeah, sure.

“Right. And what about the petition to divorce papers and the land sale documents? She had no idea one of your companies was buying the land, judging by her reaction just now.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. She was well aware that she was selling the land to one of my subsidiary companies. She was also well aware of all the money I’d make from developing it, and as my wife, she was going to be entitled to half. If she says otherwise, she’s lying. I have no idea why she’s reacting like this. Perhaps the stress of everything has driven her a little nuts.”

Jesus. He was actually trying to claim that Marie was just crazy.

“As for the petition to divorce papers,” he continued. “Well, I’ve had them sitting there for a while on the off chance the marriage does disintegrate. It doesn’t mean I was planning on divorcing her.”

It was all bullshit with a capital B. He was trying to get me on his side, because he knew if his own son testified against him, he’d be sprung. I honestly couldn’t believe he thought I was that stupid that I’d believe any of his crap. It was just so fucking obvious that he was lying.

I hadn’t tried to contact Sophie since she left. I knew what she thought of me now, and I knew if I even tried, she’d probably murder me. I didn’t exactly have the best track record at keeping her trust. All I could do was wait until she and her Mom realized I was going to help them in their case against my Dad, and then she’d realize I‘d had absolutely no part in the deception. Then I’d finally have her back in my arms again…if she was willing to look past the fact that my father had royally screwed her mother.

Right now I was meeting with Kevin Beck, who was going to be representing Marie in the case she was bringing against my father.

His eyes narrowed at me behind his glasses. “So what are you doing here, Drew? Come to offer a deal from your father? Because I’ll tell you now, Marie will
not
be paid off to keep her mouth shut. She wants justice for what he did. She deserves justice.”

“I know. I’ve come to help.”

His eyebrows shot up. “
You
want to help Marie?”

“Yes. My Dad is full of shit. I know he’s lying, and if you guys are bringing a case against him, I want to testify against him.”

Kevin took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes before looking back at me. “Son, if you actually want to do this, you know your father will be in a lot of trouble. He’ll face jail time.”

“Good.”

He stared at me for a long moment, clearly not believing that I was actually serious.

“This isn’t a trick,” I said. “I don’t care if he’s my father. He destroyed an innocent woman’s life, just so he could develop that land and make a huge amount of money off it. He’s a fucking shark.”

“That’s exactly what he is,” Kevin said. “And we intend to make him pay. Drew…if you really want to do this, then this is a major coup for us. Right now we barely have a case. It’s basically Marie’s word against your father’s. But with your testimony, we’ll actually have a very decent shot at beating your father. I assume he’s destroyed the evidence you found in his study?”

“Well, he tried to tell me that it wasn’t even evidence.”

I filled him in on the excuse Dad had given me, and Kevin guffawed. “Christ. He must think we’re all a bunch of idiots.”

“I think he’s panicking. He’s used to people saying yes to him and believing everything he says.”

“So has he destroyed it or not?”

“I don’t know. He says he hasn’t, but who knows with him? Either way, he doesn’t know that I managed to liberate this from his office before he tried to clean up.”

I pulled out a sheet of paper from my bag. It was the scrap paper he’d been using to try and emulate the handwriting of Sophie’s father.

“I found this in his office along with the other stuff. He has an excuse for it, but any court will think that excuse is bullshit. He says he just wanted to write one fake letter to Marie to give her peace of mind. No one will believe that for a second, right?”

Kevin nodded and then stood up before extending a hand. “You’re doing a good thing, young man. It can’t be easy for you to abandon your own father and testify against him.”

I nodded, unsure of how to respond. It actually wasn’t that hard. The minute I’d figured out what he was up to, I’d started to hate him. I didn’t care if he lost his whole fortune. I didn’t care if he went to prison. I didn’t even care about the inheritance money I’d lose if I went ahead with this; hell, I made an okay amount at my modeling jobs, and I still had my trust fund. That had become legally mine as soon as I turned eighteen, and my Dad couldn’t touch it.

He could shove the rest up his ass.

All that mattered to me was Sophie. My Sophie. And now that I was working with her mother’s lawyer, I was going to get her back.