Page 17 of Filthy Hot Billionaire
No, it was safe to say, I certainly wouldn’t miss this place.
My good fortune of avoiding my mother for most of the afternoon ran out roughly two hours before my scheduled dinner with Emily. I hadn’t expected my luck to last forever, but part of me had hoped I could get through this visit without encountering her at all, yet still get credit for being present. It never seemed to work out that way.
She eventually found me in her hideous living room, where I had been working, reviewing the finalized documents that would seal the latest deal I was working on.
“I am glad you are home, darling boy,” Kitty greeted, her tone bordering on cool indifference, although it was obvious she was making an attempt at warm and friendly.
I looked up from my iPad then scanned the room, looking for whoever Kitty was putting on the act for. No one was in the room with us, so her feigned joy confused me. One thing I knew to be true about my mother, nothing really made her happy. Certainly not me.
“We both know that’s not true, Mother.” I purposely used the term because Kitty hated to be referred to as anyone’s mother. Growing up, she had preferred I called her Kitty, so I had.
Setting the iPad down, I picked up my bourbon, took a long swallow, enjoying the way she fidgeted in my presence. It was the little things that kept me going, like seeing my mother fumble because she didn’t quite have all the power she felt she was due.
“Sit,” I instructed, nodding toward the brown leather sofa opposite the one I was sitting on.
She ran a hand down her cream-colored blouse and took a few hesitant steps toward the other sofa.
My mother looked the same as she always had. Her hair—cut in a sharp-angled bob that framed her small, round face—had been dyed and highlighted, brightening what would’ve been considered average brown. Her brown eyes showed no signs of creases or lines, her mouth either, and I suspected Botox was her drug of choice. As usual, she was wearing silk slacks and a silk blouse, both of which hung loosely on her petite, thin frame. At fifty-one, Kitty still had a youthful glow about her, made possible from the full face of makeup she sported.
Then again, for having a thirty-two-year-old son, she was still young.
She’d gotten pregnant with me at eighteen, a hand Kitty had been dealt when she’d made a play for a wealthy businessman who’d been significantly older than she. Of course, Kitty being Kitty, she had pulled out all the stops, seducing Jeremiah Montgomery the moment she learned the billionaire was widowed and had never had children of his own. In her corrupt mind, that meant his fortune had no heir, and who better to get it than she?
Being that Jeremiah was seventy-one at the time of their introduction, no one, certainly not Kitty, had expected him to be fertile, much less for him to impregnate her within the first days of their taboo affair. But that was what happened, and to hear Kitty tell it, she’d gotten exactly what she wanted, although she and I both knew that was a lie. From the moment of my conception, I’d been a bargaining chip, nothing more.
Despite her frequent pestering, they had never married, and Kitty’s good luck ended when, upon Jeremiah’s death sixteen years after she’d trapped him with an unplanned pregnancy, she learned he’d left her nothing.
I still remembered the day we’d gone to the lawyer’s office to hear the reading of my father’s will. When we walked in, Kitty had been strutting like she was the anointed queen of the new world order. Not twenty minutes later, a foul-mouthed, hatred-spewing bitch had claimed my mother’s soul. The moment Kitty learned that Jeremiah’s entire fortune had been passed down to me, and she’d been given a measly fifty-thousand-dollar-a-month allowance to take care of me until I turned eighteen, I’d feared for the lawyer’s life. When he tacked on that she had to remain single until my eighteenth birthday or risked forfeiting everything for her future, she came damn close to cleaving his head off with a letter opener.
To this day, that lawyer refused to be in close proximity to Kitty. I knew this because I still kept him on retainer for certain things.
Once Kitty got over her volatile rage, she’d calmed down long enough to learn that, provided she remained single until I turned eighteen, she would be given a lifetime allowance of twenty thousand a month. As for me, I would receive the other thirty a month upon my birthday, paid to me until I turned twenty-one, at which point I would have access to more. The full extent of my fortune would become accessible when I turned twenty-six or on the date when I received my MBA. Needless to say, money was a damn fine motivator, so I had put my nose to the grindstone and graduatedmagna cum laudeat twenty-four, having met all my requirements and then some.
Kitty’s first attempt at manipulating me occurred as soon as we walked out of the lawyer’s office that day. I had to give her some credit. The woman went Method when she wanted something, her acting ability superior to many A-list actors. When I didn’t immediately react to her sudden grieving, Kitty sank into a deep depression from fear of having toworkfor a living. According to her, fifty thousand a month would not sustain the lifestyle she was accustomed to.
I still recalled how she’d hardly gotten out of bed for an entire summer.
But my mother wasn’t one who stayed down when she was hit. Oh, no. Rebellious and pissed that Jeremiah could treat her so callously, Kitty set her sights on someone else.
Unfortunately for Kitty, her warped intentions never were without consequence. It hadn’t been until she’d invested nearly a year of her life seducing Rhett that she realized he was on the brink of bankruptcy. In fact, he had whiled away what’d been left of his fortune courting her, taking elaborate vacations, remodeling this enormous mansion to her specific standards, and lavishing her with only the most luxurious clothing and jewelry.
All while leaving his young, motherless daughter at home to be cared for by the help.
Eleven short months after Jeremiah’s cold, dead body was lowered into the ground, Kitty found herself back in the lap of luxury, having met and seduced Rhett Campbell, the handsome and then recently widowed heir of Delta June’s. Rhett had lost his wife only a few months prior and had been lost in a bottle when Kitty came along. My mother, four years Rhett’s senior, had pulled her chameleon act, morphing into the woman who’d been tailor-made for him.
At that point, I realized my mother was nothing more than a gold-digging whore who would stop at nothing to be hitched to a man with a healthy wallet. It wouldn’t be too long after that when I would learn that was one of her finer qualities.
Needless to say, I hadn’t been particularly fond of Rhett from the beginning. He had nothing to offer a sullen teenage boy who hated the fact I’d been uprooted from our posh comforts in New York and dumped in the humid climate of Texas made worse by the Gulf of Mexico. Yet I had sacrificed. After all, Kitty was my mother, and as selfish as I’d been at the time, I’d still wanted her to be happy.
I was just a few months shy of my eighteenth birthday when my mother decided to stake what she saw as her rightful claim as Rhett’s wife and single-handedly save him from what would’ve been a public humiliation for them both if he went down beneath the onslaught of his ego and avarice.
At the time, I hadn’t been paying much attention or I would’ve realized I was the lynchpin in my mother’s devious plan. The fortune my father had left me was growing leaps and bounds thanks to sound investments and a booming economy, and she knew it since she had hired the crooked accountant who oversaw all of my money. In order to salvage her new life and secure her future, Kitty had managed to steal seventy million dollars from my trust fund. In all fairness, it was but a tiny dent in my overall inheritance, but for me, it was the principle of it. Kitty then used that money to buy her way into Rhett’s life, paying off his debt and investing in Delta June’s in an effort to revitalize one of the most famous auction houses in the US.
To her credit, it had worked. And she’d had the smarts to force Rhett to marry her before she brought him back from the brink.
Shortly after they saidI do, Rhett’s fortune had been returned to its former glory thanks to the stolen money, and he had risen to power once more with his new trophy wife on his arm.
I probably could’ve forgiven Kitty for the theft when I would later learn about it, but shortly after their nuptials, my mother overplayed her hand by taking it one step further, proving her greed knew no bounds.
