PROLOGUE
Caleb
My father always said I would know when the right woman came along. He was such a wise man. When it happened, I didn’t even question it because the process was so effortless. I just fell into her . . . because my heart knew her right away.
Knew she was the one for me.
I’d known her for years actually. She came to Blackstone Island to live with her grandmother after her parents were killed in a car crash. A devastated fifteen-year-old trying to adapt to a new life in a new place, trying to find where she fit in a world so different from where she’d come—a forty-square-mile resort island off the Massachusetts coast where her grandmother ran the household at Blackwater, the family ancestral home.
Should have known of her, that is.
Our paths didn’t cross that I am aware of, but it’s possible. I rarely visited the island in those days because I was a twenty-three-year-old junior executive fresh out of Harvard Business School, learning everything I could about the family business. I traveled the world, enjoying the excitement of international boardroom deals by day and socializing at off-hours business affairs by night. I worked hard at both. Affairs, liaisons, one-night stands had all come and gone without a backward glance. Nameless faces and unremarkable encounters filled my nights whenever I wanted them to. The hopping nightlife of the big cities with even bigger players vying for a piece of the pie became my normal. I embraced every aspect that came with the lifestyle. Wealth, sexual favors, a certain celebrity born out of my name, all collected with barely any effort. For the next eight years, I had the world in the palm of my hand as I went about amassing a personal fortune in addition to increasing the family coffers.
Or so I thought.
I didn’t yet know what was missing from my life. Until her. And then, when I realized exactly who she was, and how fate had gotten the last laugh on me, it was already far too late. She’d bewitched me utterly. And furthermore, I knew she had no idea who I was or what ties connected us.
Maybe that’s what made her so intoxicating?
I didn’t know and I didn’t care because it made absolutely no difference to me. I wanted her with a primal desire I could barely understand, yet I embraced that desire wholeheartedly because I was incapable of doing anything else with it. How could I not? She had enchanted me.
However, once my brain managed to catch up, it wasn’t quite so effortless to accept this new and unfamiliar reality of feeling something for a woman beyond the unquestioning curiosity of when and if we might fuck.
I struggled against the idea of her at first for a few reasons. She was too young. My mother would never approve of us together. Others in my world would probably chew her up and spit her out, destroying her sweetness. But I soon found out my heart didn’t give a flying fuck about any of those reasons. The heart wants what it wants, and I’d discovered that for my heart, want was all wrapped up in the package that was Brooke Ellen Casterley.
The death of my father from the evils of cancer was an eye-opener for my siblings and me. Money can buy a lot of things, but it can’t stop the Grim Reaper from calling on you if it’s your time to go. Death is called the great equalizer. And it truly was. Wealth is a trivial thing when it’s only extra fuckin’ zeros on a balance sheet that makes any difference between lives lived. Doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor when you die, because none of it counts at the end. You leave this life the same way you come into it. You go out alone and take nothing. “There has to be more to life than making money, son,” he told me at the end. He took hold of my hand and squeezed as hard as his frail strength could manage so as to make me understand the importance. He had regrets and wanted to share with me what he’d learned to prevent me from making the same mistakes. I understood him clearly.
The most essential value my father tried to teach me along with my brothers and sisters was the idea of family. Family took precedence over money. “Take care of the family first and the wealth will grow, Caleb,” he said.
A strong family moving forward was the only thing that truly meant anything at the end of the day.
The Blackstones had been here on the island since the days when the Mayflower made its treacherous journey to the untamed American shores. As the eldest son it was my duty to make sure the Blackstones would still be here a hundred years from now.
My plan to fulfill my duty included her. It wouldn’t work any other way for me. I knew it the first time I ever felt the heat of her eyes as they burned me from across the room.
I knew it down in my bones.
I was going to marry that lovely, beautiful girl from England, and she would be mine.
Caleb
September
Boston
I rolled off her and knew it was the last time we would ever fuck. No use in trying to fake it and pretend there would be a next time. Janice and I were done even if she didn’t know it yet. Sex happened when I needed some, and the rest of the time, it was work, work, and more work. I’d been busy anyway, traveling all over the world since I’d taken over the reins at Blackstone Global Enterprises eighteen months ago when my father became too ill to continue.
Janice purred up against my neck and rubbed her tits into the side of my chest. I fought the urge to push her away but stripped off the condom instead. In the beginning we both seemed to be on the same page with expectations that our connection didn’t really extend beyond the bedroom. She was a successful model in the fashion industry and traveled as much as or more than I did, so I hadn’t found her to be clingy before. If she had been, then there never would have been a “thing” at all between us, because I knew all about women who cling. The line of females looking for a rich man to make all their dreams come true was as long as it was easy to spot, and I’d fielded so many attempts over the years, I was an expert at avoidance.
But now I sensed Janice wanted so much more from me than I was able to give her, and I dreaded the confrontation that was coming. Some sort of commitment to the future was never going to happen, and it annoyed me that she still pushed. I thought I’d been clear when we start
ed out.
She’d come to my father’s funeral six months ago with her family, and in my grief I’d turned to her offer of comfort, even though I’d said I probably couldn’t give her more than an infrequent night at a time. After a few weeks of regular sex, I’d suggested we be exclusive, which was completely new territory for me. Not having to play the field in order to get laid was convenient, and we came from the same world, having grown up privileged in the Boston area, attending the same private schools, vacationing at our beachfront homes on the island. Being with someone who understood the ins and outs of New England society just made for an easier time of it, so I decided to give the girlfriend thing a shot with her. We both had to be in Boston at the same time in order to be together anyway, and that wasn’t always easy. As much as I’d made the effort to work toward my first real relationship in the hopes maybe I’d feel something for Janice, it was time to face up to the fact there was nothing deeper than an orgasm or two going on between us, and there never had been.
My mother would be devastated when she found out. Probably even more than Janice would be. Our families were close and I accepted that it would be awkward between her people and mine once our breakup was announced.
Note to self: don’t fuck friends of the family ever again.
And there was also the suspicion Janice was cheating on me. The fact that I wasn’t bothered too much was telling in itself, but she was the only woman I’d been with for the last six months. If we couldn’t even be honest with each other about who we were fucking, then it was hopeless for us anyway. Not contracting genital herpes would be an additional plus.
I wished I could lay that bomb on my mother when she started in with the guilt trip over our demise as a couple. But it wouldn’t do for Madelaine Blackstone to hear the word fuck or any variation of it in a conversation with her son. Ever. What a pity that was. I’d love to see the horrified look on her face—
“What are you smiling about?” Janice asked, her hand sliding down my stomach on a direct path to my cock.
“Was I?” I stopped her hand from gripping me at the last second and disentangled myself from her body. I rested my forehead in my hands as I sat up on the side of the bed.
“Yeah, Caleb, you were.” She sounded annoyed. “What’s the matter with you anyway? Why don’t you want to go again?” She draped herself over my back and shimmied the whole naked length of her body into mine while I tried not to shudder. “You know once is never enough for me,” she said with a very noticeable touch of desperation thrown in to hopefully change my mind.
You’re a motherfucking idiot for ever getting involved with her. Learn from this, moron. Learn!
I was pretty sure Janice was a nymphomaniac, and while it had been a bonus in the beginning for a guy who needed to have his brains fucked out to bear the loss of a beloved parent, now not so much. I reached for my pants and dragged them on, desperate to put a barrier between my cock and her as quickly as possible. I really needed a shower, but my conscience couldn’t go another five minutes without delivering the news we were finished—fucking—forever.
The three f’s that became an eventual reality for every woman I’d ever been with.
I knew it made me an asshole for having sex with her first. I shouldn’t have and I wasn’t proud of it, but to be fair, Janice initiated the sex tonight, starting with the elevator ride up to my apartment. She would have happily blown me on security camera if I hadn’t insisted we wait. Public fucking was her thing, not mine.
Tonight I’d needed her on my arm for a charity dinner because at five grand a plate it was downright cheap if you went solo. Ten thousand dollars to cancer research was a lot better than five for the charity. I wouldn’t have minded writing a check for ten times that amount and skipping the dinner altogether, but that would be a socially retarded thing to do. Benefitting cancer research in my father’s name was something I would support generously for as long as I lived. My check would always have the extra zero at the end of it anyway.
“So you’re really all done for the night.” I could hear the disdain in her voice. “Caleb, I’m leaving for Hong Kong in the morning. It’ll be at least a week before we can be together again.”