Takeover: A Step-Brother Romance (The Legacy Series Book 1) (24 page)

If only he knew. “I understand.”

“Don’t disappoint me.”

I would, sooner rather than later. I eagerly awaited the day.

“Of course, Dad,” I said. “I’d do anything for this family.”

It was time to move.

Unfortunately, I tucked deep in the blankets and reveled in the cascading warmth left in Nicholas’s wake. I lost too much time in a dreamless, contented nap. I woke achy and dazed. A part of me hoped Nicholas would return.

I silenced that insanity and stuffed it deep, deep down. No doubt he’d still reach those secrets.

I wasn’t wasting any more time. I peeked from my doorway. Silence greeted me. The stillness hung heavy in the halls—a foreboding barrier that almost convinced me to camp in my room like Nicholas ordered.

Wasn’t gonna happen.

I showered and dressed in protective jeans. No more helpless pawing within their territory like an invalid in baby pink pajamas.

The game changed. Everything changed. I prepared for the wrong outcome. Nothing happened the way I imagined, and I didn’t know if I was better for it or not.

I slipped from my room, pulling the door tight. The Bennett estate was carved from the stoic coldness of the masonry itself. No laughter or joy echoed in the halls.

When they were boys, Josiah and Mike invented stair-sledding and tore up Mom’s hardwood just before Mike broke his collarbone. And every spring, Mom pumped classic rock from the living room loud enough to hear it outside as she planted flowers. Once, I hid a goat in my closet for a week—until he snuck into dad's office, ate half of his laptop's keyboard, and did terrible things to his office chair.

My house was a flurry of activity—a farm, a business, a lively home full of noise and excitement. The day it quieted was the worst day of my life.

The same depressing stillness drifted within the corridors of the Bennett Estate.

I thought rage would lead me as I tested the secrets of the mansion. Instead, I endured an insufferable curiosity. It wouldn’t help me as I faced the serpent and searched for the right place to slice in his slippery underbelly. Somewhere inside Darius Bennett’s sanctuary was proof that my father’s death came at his hands. Even worse, Darius still had my research journal. It was a crime far worse than offering me to his sons.

Twice he attempted to destroy my family. He failed with my father—the farm hadn’t fallen and the fortune hadn’t passed to him when he tricked my mother into marrying him. He also failed with my journal—the experiments were only part of the ideas I had, the plans I drew, and the projects I believed could aid Atwood Industries and every agricultural business struggling in an arid region.

His third and final attempt to end us would fail too.

No matter how I responded to Nicholas, I had the upper hand.

Except my mind still dizzied with the softness of his breath upon my slit, the weight of his body thrusting into mine, and the utter oblivion of peace that crushed me in pleasure under his touch.

He ordered me to obey him and remain in my room, quiet and out of the way. To protect me? To own me? Probably just to confuse me.

Damn Bennetts.

The hall window faced the front of the estate. A limo came and went. Nicholas hadn’t returned. I avoided Max. Reed hadn’t come to visit and I doubted he would, not after that terrible moment when he tightened the restraints around my wrist and let Darius slam me into bed.

The solitude was fine. I’d take this tour of their estate alone.

The first door was locked.

As was the second.

And third.

They disabled the elevator at the end of the hall.

Why bother building such a lavish mansion if everything was bolted shut?

No one rushed at me as I tip-toed across the stairs. I stole through the foyer to the hidden rooms tucked behind the parlors and dining halls, kitchens and libraries.

Darius’s office spanned the rear of the mansion, looming at the end of a windowless, escapeless hall. The heavy oak door arched tall, closed tight and foreboding. I swallowed.

It had to be in there. Answers. Evidence. What belonged to me and what would make every abuse worth the suffering.

I listened, but only the low hum of air forced through the register rumbled within the corridor.

Now or never.

I slunk along the wall, reaching for the knob as though testing for fire on the other side. I wouldn’t doubt if a blazing flame awaited me. Darius was a demon, and he’d sour the ground with brimstone wherever he lurked. He was evil. I saw it, experienced it, fought it.

And it scared me more than I dared to admit.

Locked
, like everything else in my prison. The thickness in my chest wasn’t good. I held my breath as I tempted fate, or maybe fate had taken my breath from me. I sighed. Darius wasn’t on the estate, but nothing would stop me from getting into his office.

I pulled two bobby pins from my hair and stripped their plastic buds with my teeth. When we were younger, my brothers broke most of my hairpins on the locked closet in our parent’s bedroom. They promised to tell me what they tried to steal from Dad when I got older, but I figured it out when I hit the right age.

The pin bent and fit into the lock. I tensed as it jiggled. The tumblers clinked like an avalanche of stone. No one shouted. No one came to stop me.

The door popped open. I shifted inside before anyone witnessed my trespass.

The office might have been Darius’s heart and soul if he possessed either human quality. Part library, part conference room, part throne. His desk loomed in the corner of the room, surveying the gardens, the pool, the patio outside his windows. He’d ripped up the forest and replaced beauty with garish granite and imported plants, bent and broken to his will, like everything else in the godforsaken house.

I dove over his chair. The desk spanned an elegant L shape with a dozen drawers. Cabinets stretched behind me, bordering the walls and hiding more compartments and cubbies. I nudged the keyboard. The computer was locked, of course. I didn’t dare mess with it. I respected myself too much to imagine what Darius’s sordid mind might have concocted for a password.

I ripped the first drawer open and accidentally scattered pens and paperclips. I swore, fumbling over the dropped rubber bands that snapped my fingers as I tried to gather them. My vision blurred, and I smacked my head under the desk.

“Damn it.”

Just being in his office terrified me. Touching what he touched. Sitting where he sat as he decided who would molest me first. I sucked in a breath and coughed as it stuck awkwardly in my chest.

Not a good sign. I forced myself to move slower.

I replaced the drawer with a soft click. The papers on his desk revealed nothing. A contract. A color quarterly report stuffed under a gold and marble clock.

No pictures of his family? No trinkets or memorabilia?

I doubted his computer desktop was filled with a collage of my step-brothers as little boys, running on a beach or climbing around the Santa Cruz Mountains. Hell, I couldn’t imagine it, but I hardly understood Nicholas Bennett now. I couldn’t picture him as a child.

Just as I couldn’t imagine what our son might look like.

The trembling returned.

The search was supposed to distract me, not force my thoughts into the mire that was the bedroom’s tossed blankets and discarded clothing.

He slept beside me all night. Why the hell would he do that?

I still felt his warmth, imagined his touch, and wetted for whatever else he wished to give. I hadn’t protested when he woke me by entering me again. He simply answered a prayer I offered in my dream. Had he not taken me, I might have asked for it anyway.

Of all the foolish, incomprehensible,
dangerous
things I ever did, offering myself to Nicholas would only end in my ruin.

And yet I knew I’d do it again.

“Idiot,” I whispered. “Probably have brain damage from the attack or something.”

The drawer next to Darius’s computer housed only tax information for the house. The second drawer contained copies of important documents—insurance, birth certificates. I pulled a paper from an older folder.

A death certificate.

Helena Bennett. 1998.

Nicholas’s mother?

I tucked it into the folders. Not the memento I would have kept.

The chair tripped me as I clattered to the bottom drawer. I bit my profanity and yanked the door. A manila folder rested over a collection of other papers and leather binders. I recognized my handwriting on the paper that slipped from the pile.

My research.

“Son of a bitch.”

I lifted the folder. It contained every scrap of my research journal.

Ripped from the book.

Photocopied.

Vandalized.

The journal had been stripped. Undoubtedly scanned and cataloged and critiqued by
his
research team at whatever division of Bennett Agricultural Supply he deemed fit.

This violation prickled my skin more than any touch, lick, or bite. Nicholas’s desire coated me from the inside, but I hated the bile thickening in my stomach more.

I flipped through the pages. It was all there though mostly out of order. They even copied my doodles and bubble letters scrawled in the margins of the notebook when I got too tired to read the figures on my labs.

My life was in this research—everything that had been me before my family died. I had a plan. A future in a field that I liked and something I was good at. Something that would have made Dad proud. Cutting edge, ridiculously bad-ass fields that would have helped us.

I reorganized the pages, but the newer the date, the less data I had. Numbers and graphs trickled away. A message from Mike scribbled in the corner—a note about Dad’s chemo. Another page passed. I wrote a phone number for the funeral home. I flipped again. The numbers were unreadable. I had to redo the experiment after drinking too much when Mom announced her engagement. Another page. A scribble of dress sizes and shoe dyes Mom requested for the wedding.

Then a blank page.

Mike and Josiah’s plane crash.

The research stopped. The numbers now scrawled between phone messages and dates and endless acronyms of the divisions I was supposed to oversee and the directors I was supposed to help and the endless wills and bonds and assets and liabilities I was supposed to deal with.

A yellow highlighter scrawled through one of the columns I listed. Darius marked something.

I squinted.

Josmik Holdings.

Son of a bitch.

How the
hell
did he keep finding information about the holding? Everything my brothers did was so tied up in wills and trusts I hardly had the authority to run the company, and that was before I opened my mouth and proclaimed Atwood Industries untouchable except for my male heir.

Great
idea.

Darius Bennett knew something about Josmik Holdings. My stomach tensed. That was my key. It wasn’t like I’d find a bloody knife stashed around his office to proclaim his guilt in my father’s death. But money was a weapon that couldn’t be washed in bleach or buried in the backyard, deep and secret.

If I could get information about my brothers’ financial secrets—if I learned what they did with all the money they spent—I’d find the evidence of Dad’s murder. Maybe Josiah and Mike had already figured it out, and the proof waited for me to find it.

I took my research. The originals were probably in a safety deposit box somewhere, but at least I had something. One mystery solved. How the hell was I supposed to solve the other?

What if I couldn’t prove anything that would implicate Darius in Dad’s death?

The door’s handle clicked.

The bile rushed into my mouth. It wouldn’t matter now, not if Darius killed me for breaking into his office.

I tucked the folder under my arm. The door opened.

I bolted.

Darius roared as I ducked through the doorway, skirting under his arm. He swung, but his fist only clipped my shoulder. I didn’t stop.

Except I had nowhere to run.

“Little fucking
cunt!”

His bellow rumbled over the mansion. I sprinted, but my chest tightened almost immediately. I wasn’t recovered enough to marathon around the estate. I avoided the steps and rushed into the kitchen. Darius’s boots slammed behind me.

How was a man his age so fast?

I scooted around the marble island and dove over the counter, clasping the handle of the chef’s knife imbedded in the butcher’s block. The steel rang as I unsheathed it. Darius stilled under the kitchen’s archway. He shed his suit jacket and quietly rolled up his sleeves.

I regretted not grabbing the cleaver.

The grey in his hair hadn’t slowed him, and the cracking of his knuckles heralded a charge. He was older, but his sons were built like him. Strong. Fit. Etched from stone and just as unbreakable. I brandished the knife before me, crossing my arms over the folder.

“I should have tied you down like a little whore.” Darius stepped closer. “Gagged your mouth and plugged your ass. Left your cunt exposed for the only goddamned reason you’re of any use to anyone.”