The Bastard (Filthy Trilogy 1)

“My briefcase is still in the car,” she says. “I need to grab it.” She glances at the door and I don’t miss her unease. I’m driving home the theme of danger. It’s messing with her head.

“I’ll grab it. You get comfortable.” I head that direction and as I walk down the stairs, my phone buzzes with a text from Blake that reads: I hacked the HR files and looked at employee numbers and even union membership numbers for Kingston. No go. No matches. Still working. More when I know something.

I shove my phone back into my pocket and go grab Harper’s briefcase. Once I’m back upstairs in the bedroom, I find Harper barefo

ot on the bed, and it doesn’t matter that she’s in sweats and a tee. My cock throbs. I want to strip her naked. I want to fuck her. I want to make love to her. But I need her out of this Godforsaken city.

I cross to the bed and set her briefcase down. “Thank you,” she says, giving me this sweet, sexy look that almost changes my priorities to dirty play instead of my dirty brother.

I sit down next to Harper and we both unpack our computers. For me, that means my MacBook and a full-sized Rubik’s cube. Harper picks it up. “A Rubik’s cube?”

I study it in her hand, the woman that is now holding a piece of me, the way I control my mind, an explanation of which exposes weakness. I could say what I say to everyone and I do just that. “It helps me focus,” but unlike the rest of the world, she doesn’t stop there.

“You’re a savant,” she says. “I read up on it. Most savants have time when the data in their heads takes over, when it overwhelms them and comes too fast. I even read about a man who has seizures when that happens.”

She tried to pull back downstairs, to place a wall between us. I fight the urge to do the same now. I don’t want to pull back with Harper and so I tell her what only Grayson and a few doctors know. “I collapsed in a swell of numbers when my mother died. My father paid for expensive doctors and one of them actually helped me, but when I got pulled up to law school three years early, and with Isaac, he was angry. He tried to trigger my episodes, as someone started calling them, but it’s like the harder he tried, the stronger I got and the more desperate he became.”

“And when you could have ruined him, you didn’t,” she says, repeating what I’d told her earlier.

“That’s right. And joining the SEALs was good for me. They helped me hone my skills and turn them into assets, not detriments.”

Her cellphone buzzes with a message on my side of the bed and she climbs over the top of me and ends up straddling my lap. “I need my phone. You were in the way.”

I lean against the headboard, easing her body to mine. “Do you see me complaining?”

Her hand goes to my face, returning to our conversation. “Do you tell people you’re a savant?”

“No. Never.”

“Does it bother you that I know?”

“No, it doesn’t. I don’t announce what I am, but I own it.”

“When was the last time you had an episode?”

I cover her hand with mine, tension sliding down my spine. “Why, Harper?”

“You don’t have to tell me. Sorry.” She tries to get off of me and I hold onto her.

“Why, Harper?” I ask again, intent on getting an answer from her.

“I just—if something happened, if you had one, if being here triggers one, I want to know how to help. I want to know what to do and what not to do.”

I’m aware on every level that this is information she could use to hurt me. But I can’t seem to home in on that part of the equation. No one has ever asked me what to do or not do besides my mother. “This,” I say, dragging her mouth a breath from mine. “Kiss me, and kiss me with all you are.”

She presses her lips to mine and her cellphone starts to ring this time. She groans and settles her forehead to mine, her hand on my jaw. “Twenty dollars of your billion says that will be my mother.”

I’m struck by her ability to talk about my money and have it not feel like a play for my money. That’s the thing about having money, I’ve learned. It comes with agendas, other people’s agendas.

“Talk to her,” I say, stroking her hair. “I’ll be here when you’re done.”

“Let me just make sure it’s her.” She leans to the nightstand and grabs her phone and almost falls. She yelps and I catch her, helping her settle back on top of me. “Yep,” she says. “It’s her. I think I need that wine we didn’t finish to survive her tonight.”

I roll her to her back. “I’ll get it.” I kiss her and stand up, walking toward the door as her phone stops ringing without her answering it.

I turn to find her staring at me. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. Talk to your mom.”