He’d even try to make it look legitimate by throwing in a live birth clause entitling her to an additional million for each Cates offspring she bore. Those were some safe millions, he knew, considering he wasn’t about to take that risk. He didn’t want to be tied to her after the necessity of their union was over. Custody and visitation and child support and all those other complications were things he wanted to avoid.
If she had seemed disappointed when he’d insisted on a condom, if he’d said it more as a power play than out of any true protective instinct, that was beside the point. She may or may not have an IUD or a tubal ligation for all he knew. He was still using backup birth control when they slept together. He’d be a faithful husband, if only to spite his father’s gloating spirit. Still, the explosive coupling on the sofa—that had been unexpected. He’d intended on a cursory consummation on the king size bed in the hotel suite. He hadn’t intended on getting all hot and bothered watching her eat the damn cake. That cake bothered him...not because he couldn’t eat any of it himself, but because he was unreasonably jealous of it.
There was no time to be wistful about cake or women. He was about to snatch his father’s empire (the word, her use of it made him smile) away from Lena, who had done nothing but make everyone miserable since the day she married his dad. Lena had been young and obviously his dad had taken advantage of her. He hesitated to use the phrase ‘preyed upon her’ because, from his experience, Lena had exploited Dane Cates as much as he had exploited her. She noticed everything and, by extension, needed to put her stamp on everything. Suddenly, seemingly all of the household linens including the curtains boasted a swirly embroidered monogram of D-C-L.
He always assumed it was so anyone who entered the home knew at once that it was hers, that Dane Cates was hers (despite her infidelities). For the holidays, instead of a nice check from his dad, Brandon opened a tailor’s box with a navy blazer inside, monogrammed at the breast pocket like a prep school boy’s uniform. He had done his best to seem appreciative but it was appalling. For his birthday, monogrammed pajamas (again, no check, no tickets for a ski trip) and the following Christmas, cufflinks.
It wasn’t her impersonal gifts, her seeming obsession with monogramming anything that stood still long enough for unnecessary stitchery. It was her overpowering sense of tangible entitlement. Even if she hadn’t been practically peeing in the corners to mark her territory, it would have been obvious. Not one stick of furniture remained in his father’s mansion from the time when he was married to the first wife. It was all donated so things could be refurbished. Including the blue chintz armchair that his mother used to love. It had sat by the window in her bedroom, and she used to sit there to read to Brandon when he was a child before she got sick. When he found out the chair was gone, that she’d never thought to ask him if he wanted anything that had been his mother’s, he had broken things. Things newly purchased and displayed, and made by Lalique and Wedgwood.
He had hated Lena from that day on. Even though she wasn’t that much older than him, even though she should have been less secure about her position than he, Lena had slapped his face. When he broke the crystal swan, she cracked him right across the mouth with her palm. Brandon, who had never been hit outside of the occasional schoolyard scuffle, had stopped immediately, horrified that he’d been struck in the face.
She had to have known that he wasn’t the sort to hit her back, to tell his father what she had done and why he was angry. He knew his father would have been annoyed with them both for it, and he would have taken a petty enjoyment from making her partake in his father’s displeasure, but he hadn’t tattled. At sixteen, he hadn’t wanted to admit he’d lost his temper or that he’d been smacked. So he put up with the punishment of having to mow the lawn—and the lawn at the Cates Manor was substantial—and help the gardeners to earn back the cost of the china and crystal figures he broke ‘by accident’.
It had been the second shittiest summer of his life. First, was obviously the one when he was nine and his mom died. His sixteenth, though, was spent in that house, knocking his elbows on unfamiliar furniture that seemed to be rearranged constantly, trying to stay out of her way. Feeling like a stranger in his own home and missing his mother so much it ached.
If he had managed to hold onto family feeling after his mother’s passing, if he had held on to an attachment to his distant workaholic father, Lena had managed to sever that. He stayed at school and took extra classes during the summer after that. He went on school-sponsored trips to Switzerland and Spain and once to South Africa. Brandon managed to avoid going home—or what he used to consider his home—over holidays.