Page 5 of Vicious Arrangement
As sleep takes me, my mind swirls with a hot man with a killer dimple, the one night stand from the heavens that got away…
Chapter Two
NOAH
My grandfather,the coldest fuck I’ve ever known, is dead.
And my head pounds.
My stomach lurches like I want to hurl.
All that, and he’s still fucking dead.
With a groan, I throw an arm over my face and wait for my alarm to go off, six a.m. as usual, though today, I don’t have to be anywhere until ten.
I don’t sit up. I know what the king of kings hangover feels like. Something like hell, and I’ve only visited this place twice before.
Once at eighteen when Genevieve McMasters ripped my heart out through my throat and stomped on it. And then that night of… I don’t even know what that second one was in honor of, so it probably had to do with my friend, Asher, and yesterday, after Grandfather’s funeral.
Not Gramps, Pa, Pops, Grandpa, or even Oscar. Grandfather is the only name he tolerated from me, or at work, Mr. Templeton.
He was a mean old bastard, to me.
My stomach turns, and the ache hits hard behind my eyes.
I can’t believe Grandfather’s dead.
One day he was fine, getting a little frailer, ignoring me to see someone about the wheeze and shortness of breath he’d developed, and then… gone.
I sit up and drop my head in my hands, holding it until the sledgehammers stop.
Okay, maybe not so sudden, but it feels like it. The heart attack shouldn’t have taken him. He should?—
“Yeah, yeah, Noah, you’re a fucking weak kid. Sniveling and sobbing over spilled milk. He’s dead, get over it.”
Not even paraphrasing him helps.
I rise and head to my bathroom in my SoHo duplex, a wildly expensive place that looks out over Manhattan.
There’s aspirin in my cabinet, and I take some, grabbing a bottle of water I left there the night before.
A night that weaves in and out.
He was a bastard, and I both hated him at times, learned not to like him, and yet… I did respect him. Worse, I loved him.
That little kid in me still jumps and hides under the bed or in the back of the closet in my head.
“Fuck you, Noah.” I turn on the shower and step in, having shucked all my clothes in a drunken mess the night before.
I’ll admit it. His death, the funeral yesterday, hit me hard. So much harder than I ever thought.
A funeral brings it all slamming home, and all I’d wanted to do from the moment I acted as pallbearer to the wake afterwards, with sharks and rich fucks dressed as business people and society swarming all over the place, speculating about the fate of Templeton Properties, was to forget.
I wanted to forget all of them there, ignoring the fact that I stood there, the newest CEO, freshly appointed the day before in the wake of Grandfather’s death.
I just wanted to fucking forget.
Forget the pain.
