Survival of the Richest (The Trust Fund Duet 1)

“Christopher!”

He speaks in a low voice to the driver, who turns before we reach the crowd. There’s already a uniformed cop waiting to direct us into the parking garage. An entrance for celebrities and politicians, I realize. Someone set this up ahead of time. A way into the building without having to run the gauntlet of paparazzi.

Someone who knew we would need this.

“You,” I whisper, my chest crushed by a thousand-pound weight.

Christopher finally looks at me, and I can’t contain my gasp as I see the resignation in his eyes. “It’s his last request, Harper. The only thing he ever asked of me. How can I say no?”

It takes me forty-five minutes and a Valium to get my mother to relax in her bedroom, her lashes still damp from tears of anxiety and grief. Light batters my eyes as I step out of her bedroom and close the door gently behind me.

“Have you always taken care of her like that?” Christopher asks from the large windows that frame the city, his hands behind his back, looking out.

How dare he judge? He doesn’t know her, or he wouldn’t even be considering doing what Daddy asked him to do. And he doesn’t know me, if he thinks I would speak to him ever again. “I’m sorry that not everyone in the world can live up to your exacting standards. I suppose we should all be so heartless as to put money before family.”

He glances back, his eyes flashing. “Is that what I’m doing?”

If I were smart, I’d heed the warning in his voice, but he’s the one with the GPA and the plans to take over the world. I’m the troublemaker. “Aren’t you?”

A hollow laugh. “Is that why you think I stopped kissing you that night at the studio? Because you’re my stepsister? Because I think of you like family?”

The way he says family it might as well mean nuclear waste. “I mean, yeah. But now I think maybe it was something else.”

Those black eyes that hold so many secrets, they look over my body from the top to the bottom with such slow, obvious hunger that it seems impossible I would not have seen it before. “You aren’t my sister, Harper St. Claire. And I have never, not once, thought of you that way.”

My skin lights up under his stark perusal. “Then how do you think of me?”

He stalks forward until my back hits the wall of the suite. “Like you’re the daughter of the only man who ever gave a damn about me.” His mouth is only two inches away from mine…an inch…and then I can feel the gentle caress of his breath against my lips. “You were completely off-limits, when he was alive—” A rough sound. “And even more so now that he’s gone and asked me to do this thing that will make you hate me.”

“Then don’t do it,” I beg softly, and it’s almost a kiss, my lips moving near his.

“You have no idea, Harper. No idea what you’re asking me.”

“He was wrong to make that rule!”

“Maybe so, but I don’t know what the hell happened between your mom and him. It’s not my place to judge whether he should have done it or not. It’s his money, and this is how he wants it spent.”

/> “It’s my money,” I say, my voice made imperious with impotent rage.

He huffs his amusement. “Spoken like a true St. Claire.”

“Christopher, I don’t know if you think we’re only in this for billions of dollars. I don’t care about that. We have nothing. She has nothing. All she needs is enough to live off of. You can have the rest.”

He steps back as if I slapped him. “You think I want your inheritance?”

Something wavers inside me. Did I go too far? Christopher is going to let my mother starve because he wants to honor a request that should never have been made. That’s wrong. Not me standing up for her. “Everyone else in that room wanted it. And you were there.”

It’s like watching ice form over a lake in a matter of seconds. The water had seemed deep and unnerving, but now he’s simply impenetrable. “The only reason I went to that damn reading is because the lawyer called me this morning and said I should come. And something in his voice told me it was going to be bad, so I had the car waiting for us and the hotel on standby.”

My throat feels scratchy, like I’m near tears. “I didn’t thank you for that.”

“I don’t want your thanks. I don’t want that fucking yacht, either. And I sure as hell don’t want a single cent from your inheritance.”

“We’ve been living in a motel.” The words burst out of me, ugly and hushed so my mother doesn’t wake up. “Every day Mom takes one of her jewelry pieces to the pawn shop, where they give her a few cents for every dollar that it’s really worth. That’s how we pay the bill so we have a place to sleep that night.”

My words crack the ice around him, at least enough so that I see the old Christopher looking back at me, the one who would have dived into the ocean to save me. “Hell.”

“Daddy paid for my tuition and my private dorm room directly, but that’s it. If I had asked for anything more, he would have had his investigators look into us again.”