THE BASTARD
THE FIRST BOOK IN THE FILTHY TRILOGY
I'm the bastard child, son to the mistress, my father's backup heir to the Kingston empire. He sent me to Harvard. I left and became a Navy SEAL, but I'm back now, and I finished school on my own dime. I'm now the right hand man to Grayson Bennett, the billionaire who runs the Bennett Empire. I'm now a few months from being a billionaire myself. I don't need my father's company or his love. My "brother" can have it. I will never go back there. I will never be the mistake my father made, the way he was the mistake my mother made.
And then she walks in the door, the princess I'd once wanted more than I'd wanted my father's love. She wants me to come back. She says my father needs to be saved. I don't want to save my father but I do want her. Deeply. Passionately. More than I want anything else.
But she's The Princess and I'm The Bastard. We don't fit. We don't belong together and yet she says he needs me, that she needs me. We're like sugar and spice, we don't mix, but I really crave a taste. Just one. What harm can just one taste do?
CHAPTER ONE
Eric
When the Kingston family decides to throw a party, it means no less than two hundred people at their twenty-thousand-foot Aspen estate, valets at the door, an abundance of Kingston Motors luxury cars in the drive, and money. Lots of money, because Jeff Kingston has nothing to do with anyone who doesn’t have money, aside from me, his bastard son, otherwise known as the backup heir just in case my half-brother kicks the bucket.
I exit the guest house, where I’m staying until my meeting with my father tomorrow, which I shouldn’t have accepted. I don’t know why the fuck I’m even here, aside from the fact that these people are supposed to be my people, and leaving the SEALs was like leaving family. It’s hard to let go of that need for a family unit. Family. Right. What the hell was I thinking? Like I could ever really be a Kingston.
I walk down a stone path shrouded in flowers and low hanging trees, twisting left and then right until I enter the courtyard filled with bodies in fancy dresses and tuxedos like the one I’m in now. A waiter walks by and I snag a glass of champagne when I’d rather have whiskey, but I’ll settle for anything to get me through tonight’s launch of a new model of car. I barely give a shit about the old model, which is exactly why my father shouldn’t want me to work for him. I walk to one of the few dozen standing tables covered in white tablecloths, down my drink and accept another when my gaze catches on a woman, on her and just her.
She’s standing on the other side of the pool, a princess in a strappy black dress, with flawless skin and long brown hair, surrounded by her subjects. At least, that’s how she reads to me, no doubt like every other socialite I’ve ever met in this godforsaken world, and yet I’m watching her when I never watch them. There’s something about this woman, a white swan among the black swans on a pond made of money and death, my mother’s death most specifically, since that’s how I got here.
My princess must feel my attention because she tunes out the conversation she’s having with several other people, her chin lifting, her gaze sweeping wide and then catching mine. I don’t even think about looking away. I don’t care that she knows that I’m watching her. I don’t care if she knows that I’m thinking about fucking her. I’m the bastard in these parts. From the time I was thrust into this place right before my senior year of high school, I do what I do and everyone whispers about it. I’m not going to change that now. Let them whisper about what I want, and this woman, whoever the fuck she is, is worth the whispers.
The man next to her touches her elbow, his gaze shooting in my direction, his jaw setting hard with anger. Priceless and so typical of my father’s class of people. He’s pissed at me for getting his woman’s attention. He should have fucked her better. My cellphone buzzes with a text message and I cut my stare, downing my champagne and then reaching for my phone to find a message from Grayson Bennett, a close friend from my first go at Harvard right before I left and went into the Navy. He’s not a bastard, but rather the true heir to the Bennett empire.
Call me, his message says, which is typical Grayson. He wants something, he asks, and usually with actual words. And since we have unfinished business I don’t want overheard, I walk toward the house where I know I can find that whiskey. I’ll likely find the rightful heir to the throne, right along with our father as well, but at least I’ll make my showing and get the hell out of here.
“There he is. My brother.”
My jaw clenches at the sound of Issac’s voice even before he steps into my path, and as if for the first time ever he knows what I want, and cares, he offers me one of the two whiskey glasses in hand. “The good stuff. The kind we drink around these parts.”
He doesn’t mean we, as in me and him, he means we as in the Kingston family, which I've never been a part of. Our eyes lock and hold, the drama of the past, the hatred between us, and I have no doubt the crackle of energy around us is the attention of the room. We are after all the heir and would-be heir who hate each other. Him the prince, with thick, dark hair and green eyes, while I’m simply the bastard, with wavy brown hair, blue eyes, and a good four inches on Isaac at my height of six-foot-two. I don’t look like I’m his blood. I damn sure don’t feel like his blood, but my mother made sure I can’t be denied. She took the damn DNA test that changed my life and not for the better in my opinion.
I accept the glass and his gaze goes to the ink peeking from beneath my white shirt, and lingers on the Rolex on my wrist, before lifting. “Looks like someone got all inked up.”
“The bastard brother might as well look the role, right?”
“You’re never going to let me live down calling you that, now are you?”
“You don’t need to live it down, Isaac, but you will have to face me every day if I decide to join the company, and we both know that didn’t go well for you at Harvard.”
His eyes spark with a familiar anger I don’t have to intentionally stir. He hates me for being the bastard child of his father’s mistress, the brother thrust on him only months after his mother died. An ironic turn of events considering my mother’s cancer. He steps closer, toe to toe, all up close and friendly. “If you think that because you’re some sort of SEAL Team Six hero or something, that I won’t buckle you right at the knees, you’re wrong. You will not take what is mine.”
“I see you two got right back into the brotherly love.”
At the sound of my father’s voice, Isaac grimaces and my lips quirk. “Seems we have,” I say, as Isaac rotates and we both face my father, who looks fit and younger than his fifty-four years in his tuxedo with his dark hair. “I have someone I want you to meet,” he says, and The Princess steps to his side, her crystal blue eyes meeting mine as my father says, “Eric. Meet your stepsister, Harper.”
CHAPTER TWO
Eric
Harper steps in front of me and Isaac and I offer her my hand. “Nice to meet you, Harper,” I say, and when our eyes meet at this close proximity, the spark between us is so damn combustible there’s no way it goes unnoticed.
She presses her palm to mine, her gaze dropping to a portion of my inked arm to the collection of colors and designs that make up my full sleeve and reflect everything and somehow nothing in my life. Her lips part, her expression intrigued by the design, not at all the disgust I expect from a perfect princess. She tightens her grip on mine ever-so-slightly and looks up at me. “Nice to finally meet you,” she says, and fuck, the raspy quality to her voice makes my cock twitch.
“Finally?” I ask, arching a brow and forcing myself to release her.
“Harper’s become quite the protégé the past year,” my father says. “You’d think she was blood like you two, but then, her father owned a competing business we’ve now absorbed.”
“I was with him night and day,” Harper says. “I learned a lot from him at a young age.”
She’s my father’s protégé and if she didn’t want to fuck me as badly as I want to fuck her, she’d probably want to fuck me right out of town. Yet another priceless moment. “I need to make a phone call,” I say, and I don’t wait for anyone’s permission.
I down the whiskey Isaac handed me, set down the glass, and step around Harper, my destination once again the castle-like house that is the centerpiece of the property. No one stops me. No one welcomes me because this isn’t home for me and they know it. If this trip has done one thing for me, it’s to remind me that I’m not in the midst of the Grayson Bennett clan, and a family that takes care of each other and wins together. These are the Kingstons, one step up from the devil’s own family.
I reach my destination and enter the back door, directly into the kitchen which is the size of the mobile home I grew up in with my mother, right up until the time she killed herself before the cancer took her. Of course, she didn’t leave me in that trailer. She spent her dying days proving that I was the bastard child of Jeff Kingston and forcing him to claim me. I walk through the archway and down a hallway to the right toward my father’s office, which is where I’ll find whiskey a few grades higher than the bullshit Isaac gave me like I wouldn’t know better.
Once I’m inside the man-cave of an office, with bookshelves lining the walls and a sunken seating area with couches and chairs, I walk to the bar in the corner, pour a thirty-year-old whiskey and sit down in a chair. After a damn good taste, I pull my phone from my pocket and dial Grayson.
“My man,” he says. “That stock you hooked me up with came through in a big way. You’re a beast. That IQ of yours is financial genius.”
That IQ I inherited from a mother who never put hers to use for anything but bad. “Glad it worked out, man. Are we even now?”
“You paid for the past two years at Harvard and then some. I took the extra money and invested it back into the stock, for you.”
“Consider it yours. Interest for loaning me the money.”
“I don’t need the money. I’ll reinvest it in you ten times over, but I know you have your own empire to run down there in Colorado.”
I down the whiskey and decide I’m done. I’m going to get drunk if I don’t slow the fuck down. “I’m the heir bastard, not the heir apparent. You know that.”
“I know what you are,” Grayson says, “and it’s nobody’s bastard. You have a place right here by my side, not in some office two buildings over, if you decide you want it. Otherwise, I want a piece of Kingston Motors, if you’re running it.”