TEASE ( A Stepbrother Romance ) By Caitlin Daire

22

Chapter 22

Jace

Three years later

I never ended up going through with any of my auditing threats against my father. After I'd left for California three years ago, he'd stayed quiet and stayed out of our lives; a far cry from the hellfire he'd promised when he left the restaurant that day, threatening revenge on all of us. I still could've told Revenue to audit him and his company, just to be a dick, but I hadn't. It seemed too harsh, even for him. Besides, from what I'd heard from my friends back in the UK, his life had gone to shit since we all left anyway.

Apparently Milly hadn't been the only woman he'd been having an affair with during his brief marriage to Elena-surprise, surprise-and not long after Elena left him, this other woman published a tell-all piece in the newspaper gossip columns detailing her sordid affair with him, right down to the fact that Dad had apparently sneaked out of his hotel suite on the night of his and Elena's wedding night to have anal sex with her in the room right next door.

So classy.

According to my friend Tom, whose parents were part of the so-called social elite in London, Dad's reputation was shot now, and he was very rarely welcome at any of the usual high-class events. Everyone in that posh world had always known about his womanizing ways in the past, but the way the upper class worked was this: it's okay to have affairs and generally act like a man-whore, but only in private. If it goes public, then you're finished.

In a way, Dad had dug his own social grave without me having to lift a finger. Maybe one day he'd finally come crawling back to me with his tail between his legs, telling me he'd messed up and been a shitty father, a shitty husband to all his wives over the years, and a shitty person in general. If that ever happened, then I'd welcome him with open arms and try to make amends-I didn't hate him, I just hated who he'd become over the years, and until he accepted that, I wouldn't accept him in my life any longer.

Another person who wouldn't accept him in her life any longer was Elena, and I was happy to say that she'd finally met a decent man about six months after her return to California. He was a doctor named Brian Kenneth, and he'd just moved into the house Rayna and I had been sharing with Elena in San Diego. As much as we liked him, and as much as we liked living with Elena, Rayna and I knew it was finally time to move on and get our own place, so we were currently packing all our things. We'd found an apartment closer to the city center, and we were hoping to have all our stuff moved in within the next week.

Rayna was still in college and making me proud with her awesome grades after having transferred her course back to the States, and just like I'd suggested to her a long time ago, she was minoring in archaeology and heritage studies in the hopes of getting into the area of heritage law one day. She'd been a little miffed that she never ended up having the chance to see what it was like to study at an English university and work on ancient English heritage sites, but in the end she'd been more than happy to study all the interesting Native American heritage sites and get back to her old campus where she could see all of her old friends-and not just them, some new ones from the UK too. Liana had decided to take a year off from her English job and work in L.A. recently, so we often made the drive up there to visit her and her boyfriend, Rick, whom she'd apparently hooked up with at the fateful masquerade party Rayna and I had first met at.

As for myself, I was doing well. It'd been a rough transition settling into San Diego at first, seeing as I hadn't exactly had much money to live on, but Rayna had helped me find a job and also a position in a decent writer's group, and I'd started working on a few projects. I hadn't screwed around like a lot of the wannabe writers in the group did; I'd put my nose to the grindstone and worked my ass off, writing, editing, picking up new skills and storytelling methods. After a year, the leader of the group had noticed my efforts and come up with a proposition for me. He wanted to start an online e-book publishing agency, but he simply didn't have the time to run it, so while he was happy to invest the capital that it would need to get off the ground, he needed someone doing most of the day-to-day work that came with it.