Leah Vale - The Bad Boy

Cooper spoke. “My grandfather is right, Sara.” His already deep voice dipped further, and intimately, at her name.

He was trying to mess with her. Judging by her current state, he was succeeding.

He lowered his chin. “You misunderstood me.”

She gaped at him, her earlier empathy disappearing as the anger and frustration rose like a tide of acid inside of her. “Misunderstood?” she choked out. “Why, you two-faced, lying—”

“Sara!”

The sharp edge to Joseph’s voice brought her up short, especially since she’d never heard that tone directed toward her before. Yet, she’d never lost her cool in front of Joseph, either.

Joseph’s slow rise to his feet wasn’t a sign of age—he’d turn seventy-five in a matter of weeks—but rather a reminder that he expected to receive the respect he’d rightfully earned. “Cooper is a McCoy now. I want you to treat him as such.”

She nodded curtly and kept her mouth tightly closed against all the reasons, heard straight from the source, that Cooper should not be given the same devotion she’d never questioned giving Joseph, Alexander or even Marcus on the rare occasions he’d been around before his unpleasant death. Joseph was grieving for Marcus, and she understood his need to embrace a grandchild he hadn’t known he had.

Even if that grandson had the heart of a snake.

She looked at Cooper. He’d cocked an eyebrow and watched her with a casual—no, make that innocent air—but the shadow of pain in his eyes made her feel for him despite what she was thinking.

Okay. So she did empathize with him. She would acknowledge that and then get over it. She refused to fall under his spell. He was a snake with the ability to trick unsuspecting women into aching for what he’d gone through as a child.

Or so he thought, she forcefully amended. While what he’d threatened was far more serious than a little game-playing, she had his number and would do everything in her power to stop him. And she knew of one person who wouldn’t be so blinded by grief to not hear what she had to say.

Remembering his shock over one of the details of Marcus’s will, she gave Cooper her sweetest smile. “If you’ll excuse me, I just remembered I have something important to discuss with Alexander McCoy. Your brother,” she added, launching a parting salvo of her own.

She left the study, her smile now one of grim satisfaction, certain his wide-eyed, slack-jawed look of surprise was more impressive than hers must have been after he’d dropped his bomb.

COOPER CLOSED HIS MOUTH with a snap.

Alexander McCoy was his brother?

He looked away from the door that Sara, the pretty piece of fluff who had to be old man McCoy’s personal secretary, had just sashayed through. He met Joseph McCoy’s gaze. “I myself must be having listening problems, because I could have sworn she just said that Alexander McCoy, your youngest son, is my brother.”

Joseph blew out a breath and slouched back in his chair, something that didn’t look quite right on the old man. “Marcus turned more than a few lives upside down in his time.”

Shock rocked Cooper back on his heels yet again that day. “Are you saying it’s true?”

Joseph ran a hand over his face, for the first time letting on that he wasn’t taking all the recent events in stride. “Yes. It’s true. Alexander is actually Marcus’s son. Your half brother.”

His knees unsteady, Cooper took a seat in one of the chairs facing the big desk. “Tell me everything.” He’d spent his entire life with so many questions, so many doubts, he wasn’t surprised his voice sounded strained.

Joseph rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and tented his fingers in front of him. “Marcus never really displayed the best judgment. Especially when it came to women.”

Cooper involuntarily thought of the wet one he’d wanted to plant on Joe’s secretary, and the fact that he still wanted to do it. Heaven help him if bad judgment around women was hereditary.

Joseph continued, “He was only nineteen when he seduced a young maid of ours. After the girl realized she was pregnant, everyone concerned felt it would be best if my wife, Elise, your grandmother, and I adopted the baby as our own rather than force Marcus and Helen—”

“Whoa, wait a second. Helen? The lady who showed me in here said her name was Helen. And that she’s the housekeeper.”

“Yes, Helen is still with us. By her choice, I might add.”

Cooper had to physically shake off his disbelief. He did not get these people.

“As I was saying, we decided not to force Marcus and Helen to wed. And we would have had to. Marcus did not want to marry. A sentiment he never outgrew. So Helen and Elise went to Europe for an extended holiday—”

“And returned with Marcus’s new baby brother, thus avoiding any messy scandal that would have trashed your image.”

Joseph met his gaze steadily, all trace of sentimentality gone. “We did what we thought was best.”

Cooper remembered what Sara had said, as well as the earnestness in her vivid green eyes, and echoed, “The right thing.”

Joseph inclined his head in agreement, apparently not picking up the sarcasm in Cooper’s tone. “We really believed that Marcus had learned from his first…indiscretion. But his irresponsibility apparently wasn’t hampered by the threat of being disowned.”

The burner simmering Cooper’s anger kicked up a notch, making him boil. “He simply learned how to keep it under wraps by buying the women off.”

“So it seems.”

Cooper sat back in his chair. He hadn’t expected Joseph to agree with him. “You knew about it, though, right?”

Joseph studied his hands. “I learned of my other grandchildren two days ago, during the reading of my son’s will.”

Cooper could barely contain his snort. That’s your story and you’re sticking to it.

The rest of what Joseph had said sank in and the muscles in Cooper’s chest clenched. “So how many half brothers and sisters do I have?”

“Three brothers confirmed. So far.”

Cooper scrubbed a hand over his face. “So far.” He blew out a breath. “Three, including Alexander, right?”

“Correct. You and he are the only ones in town, however. One has a ranch in Colorado and the other is in the process of being discharged from the service.”

Cooper struggled to process the information. He’d instantly gone from a man who’d grown up on the fringe of any sort of family to a man with three brothers. Half brothers, but brothers all the same. And one already lived in this very house. A strange tightness took hold of his heart.

He refused to let the existence of brothers matter, though. The memory of his mother’s unrelenting despair over being so coldly spurned by the man she’d given her heart to was still too visceral for him. His own shame was too rooted.

He looked around him at the expensively decorated study, which somehow managed to convey that this family deserved every one of their billions of dollars in a way the mansion built to resemble Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello on steroids couldn’t. His attention caught on an oil portrait of the McCoy family before Marcus had developed a raging case of hound-dog hormones.

Well, now Cooper knew where his black hair came from. All three people in the portrait had a variation of it. Marcus looked to be about ten in the painting, with a mop of wavy dark hair he’d later wear slicked back, and bright blue eyes that didn’t so much as hint at the lack of feeling they’d eventually radiate.

Cooper shifted his gaze back to Joseph, who at first glance had barely changed from the time the portrait had been painted except for his hair, which had turned steel-gray. But the death of Elise McCoy over a decade ago from cancer—according to the news, a more lingering sort than Cooper’s mother’s—and the recent death of his son had left their mark in the lines on Joseph McCoy’s face.