lyn must have gotten more than her share of tirades about my behavior after I provided scandal after scandal for the entertainment of the country. It was one of my favorite pastimes, to be quite honest; often, I would wonder how much I would have to do in order to put my father into an early grave.
My stepsister shifted in her seat before clearing her throat.
“Are you looking for a woman who is among the aristocracy?” she asked, trying to refocus herself back onto the task at hand. It was almost adorable the way she tried not to think about how much she still wanted me.
“Not necessarily, but I wouldn’t be opposed, no,” I said, my eyes trailing over the line of her blouse, imagining the way she looked naked. “So long as they didn’t have their head up their ass.”
“Any interests you’d like to share with your potential matches?”
“Well, I do love a good football match,” I said, smirking as I watched her eyes flicking toward me every now and then from her screen. “And I suppose a healthy enjoyment of literature is a bit of a must-have. After that, maybe an enjoyment of classical music.”
“When have you ever liked literature?” she asked, her eyebrows raised incredulously.
“Since always and forever, my dear stepsister,” I said, my grin widening as her substantial shock to such news. “It’s always been one of my secret loves.”
In fact I’d gotten top marks in every literature course since primary school, a fact that my father never once gave one lick of attention to. He’d have much rather focus on my failings than congratulate me for my accomplishments.
She blushed deeply and cleared her throat again, trying not to let her mind dwell too long on the fact that I was sitting here while she was almost drunk off of her ass. I wondered just how easily it would be to get her to take those clothes off. I knew I could if I tried, and I knew that I’d have enjoyed it… but there was another task at hand. As much as I wanted to claim Gwendolyn, I knew business had to come first, and sadly, a sense of propriety along with it.
“Any preferred physical type?” she asked, swallowing thickly as I considered.
“A redhead, preferably. A woman who’s about my height—maybe slightly shorter—curvy rather than skinny, I think,” I said, pondering just what I’d always fancied in the women I’d bedded countless times.
“I see,” she said, her cheeks still flushed a nice rosy pink with embarrassment. “I think that’s about all that I have right now… If I need to narrow things down a little more, then I’ll contact you.”
“Sounds like a plan, then,” I said, smirking as I stood slowly from my chair. “I hope I’ll hear from you soon then.”
“I’ll try to get you a match by tomorrow evening and arrange a date for the two of you,” Gwendolyn said, rising as I did and offering her hand awkwardly. “After that, we’ll see where everything goes.”
“I’ll be eagerly awaiting your call, my dearest Gwennie,” I said smirking as I watched her face redden with annoyance. “Yes, I know, ‘don’t call you Gwennie.’?”
“Goodnight, Tristan,” she said, summoning some resolve after my purposeful little jab.
“Goodnight, Gwendolyn” I said as I turned and walked out of her office and into the night. I couldn’t help but chuckle as I walked a few blocks out alone in the early hours of the morning, enjoying the crisp night air as I gathered my thoughts.
I thought about the days when Gwendolyn and I were younger, teens who would have liked nothing more than to have never known one another, yet secretly harbored an unforgivable lust for each other—though “secret” could have been a strong term. I used to catch her staring at me all the time, her pale cheeks made rosy by all the naughty thoughts I was sure were running through her brain.
I happily recalled the night before I’d left for Afghanistan, the way she felt underneath my touch as I slipped her cami up her body. The way she’d writhed for me, her lashes fluttering, her fingernails dug in to the palms of her quaking hands. Was my Gwennie still a virgin? Part of me—a very southward part of me—was desperate to know, and had been ever since I left her dripping wet the night before my deployment.
Oh, what a dolt I was back then. I’d made assumptions about her character, writing Gwendolyn off as a girl who was just the same as any other I’d seduced. But she was stronger than that, not at all the shade of her mother I’d imagined she’d turn out to be. As punishment for my pride, I’d spent years wondering what it would have been like to have had her, to have consummated our forbidden affair. I wondered if I’d ever get the chance to know.
I also wondered if she even realized that the perfect match I’d described to her back there in her office fit her to a “T.”
Chapter 69
I sat in silence behind my desk after my brother left, walking so casually back into the night as though he hadn’t just completely flipped my life upside down. He had a habit of that, though, turning everything on its head just for the sake of a good laugh. But is that was this was? Did he just want to play with me?
It was certainly easy to think so after he’d practically named me as his perfect match to spend the rest of his life with. My heart was thumping like a war drum as I stared into the empty space that he’d occupied only moments before, looking so absolutely fabulous without even trying. All those memories of the two of us growing up together flooded back like a dam had burst in my head. It was almost too much to handle.
Tristan had been an absolute terror when we were in our teens. He’d discovered girls long before the two of us had met, and was more than popular with the younger members of the serving staff. His father, of course, never approved of the way he conducted himself, but I admired his freedom more than I admitted. My mother had always had me under a tight leash, constantly dictating my behavior and my choices in friends—even controlling which pieces of my wardrobe would be worn on different days. It was like I had two mother rolled up into one—both of them overbearing and controlling.
But my stepbrother could do as he liked, disapproval be damned. The fact that he was so bound and determined to gain back his father’s title after the announcement of my soon-to-be brother’s birth came almost as a shock, given Tristan’s utter aversion to authority, which was just what I had thought when he’d joined Her Majesty’s Royal Army. It was as though just as you thought Tristan would go one way, he decided to veer in a completely different direction simply for the thrill of throwing everyone else in the world off their kilter.
And how he was trying to get married—married to a woman who was, for all intents and purposes, the exact same as myself in personality and temperament. Just the thought of that had my mouth running dry. I felt my chest tighten as I bit down on my lip nervously. How could he do such a thing? How, after all of this time could I be the perfect match for him and he had never once said a word? If anything I had always felt as though Tristan hated me when we were younger, his constant chiding that I was a stuffy, stuck-up mother’s-girl still ringing in my ears like church bells.
“No matter,” I said to myself in the darkness of my office as I pressed the pulsating power button on my computer to bring it to life. “This is for the best, after all.”
Even I had a hard time believing that.
With trembling hands I brought up the database of my female clients, all of their personality traits indexed and coded so that I could simply type in my stepbrother’s preferences into the required fields and before I could even blink there was a list of gorgeous women almost a hundred strong. Surely, one of them would be an appropriate match for Tristan. One of them might just be my future sister-in-law if this crazy plan of his actually worked.
Despite my forced professionalism, I couldn’t shake the feeling of my stomach having dropped somewhere close to my feet. The thought of Tristan with someone else, some woman that he barely knew brought a sickening taste to my mouth. Deep down a part of me wanted to close down the database and simply tell him that there had been no matches, that no woman I had in my considerable list
was what he wanted. I think I wanted more than anything for him to realize that it was me that had always wanted him—me that was his perfect idea of a woman. Did he even know that the kind of woman that he wanted had been sitting in front of him all this time?
He’s your stepbrother, I thought, chiding myself on my incestuous desires. To even think of the things that I wanted to do to Tristan would have been enough to cause a scandal the likes of which the aristocracy hadn’t seen in a decade. Sure the two of us were not technically related, but the bonds of marriage mean a lot to the rest of the world, and scandal is something that I know that my mother would not at all appreciate.
That doesn’t make me want him any less, I answered my own chiding. I knew that if I set Tristan up—got him married to some member of the aristocracy—then he’d be lost to me forever, and I’d lose any chance that I had at making him mine like I’d always wanted. But he was my stepbrother, fruit of the forbidden tree, and I knew that just one taste would be enough to have me smote low and ejected from the garden of my family’s favor.
I knew that my feelings for Tristan would never come to fruition, never give me the satisfaction of having him in my arms, inside of me the way I’d dreamed about since I’d become an adult. But maybe that was for the best.
If I could get Tristan tied off to someone that spent most of their time away from London, and away from me, then I could protect myself against the thoughts that I knew would betray me sooner or later. In a way having Tristan matched was my only hope of protecting myself from the effect that he head on me.
I began to work my way through the list, clicking through the collected entries Tina and I had spent our professional lives cultivating. Blondes, brunettes, and even a few exotic redheads crossed over my screen, though I felt utterly unsatisfied with all of them. None of them felt right for Tristan. I’d met countless times with each of them, and no matter how well they seemed to match on paper I felt as though Tristan would never have them for his wife. Something didn’t seem right.