Page 4 of Prized Possession

My fathers lips twist up into a smirk, a hint of pride visible that I rarely see. As I leave his office, my mind is whirling a million miles an hour.

Not only do I have to save my best friend from himself, I also have to do something to stop that arsehole Scott from gaining any power or influence.

My first thought is to find a way to stop the wedding before it happens, but I can’t do that. If Chloe marries that wanker, she’ll become his problem. I won’t have to see her as much as I do now, which means she’ll have less opportunities to drive me fucking crazy.

The part of me that’s screaming to ruin her wedding needs to be silenced. I try to tell myself how much I’ll enjoy her misery, watching her pretend to like the man her father is forcing on her.

I know she’ll despise having her marriage arranged for her, and the sadistic side of me takes pleasure from her misery. So why is there a part of me that hates the idea of her marrying him?

I push the irrational thoughts to one side and focus on the assignment my father set for me. Talk about a fucking impossible task, and I have no idea where to start.

“Come on, Marcus. When did you start behaving like an old man?” Jacob whines to me down the phone.

I roll my eyes at his annoying tone, despite the fact he can’t see me. “I’m not old, I just have responsibilities.”

I resist the urge to remind him that he does also. But that’s not how I’m going to sort Jacob out. He’s already crippling under the pressure of said responsibilities, so highlighting that will only make things worse.

“Fuck responsibilities. We’re only twenty-eight-years-old, Marcus. We should be going out on a Friday night. We should drink too much, blow off steam, and fuck pretty girls, whose names we can’t remember the next day,” he states, his voice raising in pitch as he no doubt becomes more animated on the other end of the phone.

I may not be able to see him, but I know Jacob well enough to be able to picture the way he’s animatedly waving his hands around.

I want to remind him that we actually spent most of our late teens and early twenties doing exactly that. Though our fathers made the responsibilitieswe were born with clear, they also knew what the pressure of being an heir was like. They too had been pressured by their fathers before they were ready.

As a result, and a bit of pushing from our mothers when we were born, it was always agreed that we wouldn’t be forced to work for the family business until we’d completed all of our education. And since we didn’t really need the university degrees we were studying for, we made the most of being young, rich, single students while we could.

I threw myself into my role after I graduated, but Jacob has never really wanted to let go of the freedom we had as students. Hence, the night out he’s trying to drag me along to.

I’ve been working all day, in and out of boring meeting after fucking boring meeting. And I didn’t even get to hurt anyone, which meant the whole day dragged. I want nothing more than to go home, drink some good quality whiskey, and do fuck all. But that’s not going to help with my assignment to straighten out Jake.

Oh, and taking him to a bar and getting fucked up alongside him will really help with the plan, I think to myself rather unhelpfully.

“I have an important meeting tomorrow, so I can’t get shit-faced,” I tell him with a sigh.

A loud whoop echoes through the phone, causing me to wince.“Yes! It’s been far too long since we had a proper good night out.”

I want to point out that we went to a bar just last week, and we meet up every month for our poker nights, that always end with us both consuming way too much alcohol. But I know that’s not what he means, and I immediately set about fixing his expectations.

“Don’t get too excited, Jake. I’ve agreed to come out, but this won’t be a night out like when we were younger. I don’t plan on drinking so much that we need to get our stomachs pumped. And your father will lose his fucking mind if you come home with a stolen, bright-orange traffic cone on your head again,” I remind him.

The way my best friend chuckles tells me he doesn’t look back on those incidents with the same feelings I do.“He’d still prefer that than the time I was brought home in a cop car.”

I groan, remembering how furious both our fathers were about that. Jake was the one who got arrested for getting his dick out and pissing in an alleyway. I got into trouble for not stopping him.

“We were just lucky the cop who found you was on our fathers’ payroll, or the outcome may have been really different.”

Jacob snorts.“Every cop is on their fucking payroll.”

He’s not wrong. Sometimes, I think this is exactly the reason why Jake is asunruly as he is—there are no consequences for his actions. His father may yell and scream, or punish him in some way, but that’s of no consequence to him. He knows the one real punishment would be to take away his role as heir…and that would be a prize for him, not a punishment.

“Even so, I don’t want any trouble tonight. In fact, we’ll go to Caged, so we can’t cause any problems,” I reply.

Jake’s groan echoes loudly down the phone, sounding more like a petulant teenager than a guy who’s not far off turning thirty.“Do we have to go to your club? You’ll just end up working. Plus, Maximus banned me from fucking any more of the girls who work there.”

I can’t help but roll my eyes again. “That was me, not my father, and I did it because every time you fuck them and never call them, it causes issues for us. We’ve not had to replace as many girls since we put the rule in place.”

“It wasn’t that fucking bad,”he grunts.

It really fucking was. “Mindy and Giselle tore fucking chunks out of each other’s hair fighting over you, and neither of them realised you couldn’t remember either of their names.” I remind him, shuddering as I think of how truly brutal women can be towards each other when the green-eyed jealousy monster grabs hold of them.

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