Page 13 of Bonking the Billionaire

“I haven’t,” Jasper said.

“Of course there’s more to see than water and naked Greek women. So I’ll be returning on Monday to tour Italy’s coast.”

“Sounds…lovely,” Jasper said. He turned to me. “How about you, Oscar?”

“I don’t like water.”

Sebastian burst into laughter. “What? How can you not like water? Between our trips to St. Barthelemy, Bora Bora, and Turtle Island, we practically grew up in the water.”

“Notwe,” I said.“You.”

He looked up and away as if trying to remember. “I guess I don’t recall you ever coming along, but surely Father took you somewhere wet at some point.”

“He didn’t,” I said.

My mother raised me entirely on her own. I hardly knew my father at all, aside from the obligatory yearly visits here to his manor for photographic evidence that we all belonged to the same happy cohort.

Jasper shot me a commiserating look.

“Well, no time like the present then, I suppose. I’ll have one of my assistants contact yours with the deets.” Sebastian turned to Jasper. “Certainly you’ve been.”

“I have. It’s lovely,” Jasper said, without elaboration.

Jasper’s childhood was a mix of mine and Sebastian’s. If anything, it was worse for him, having been Father’s favorite for six years before being abandoned. I didn’t lose that spotlight of favor, as I’d never had it to begin with; I’d only ever been in the dark.

“Have you decided what to do with your share of the company?” Jasper asked Sebastian.

Carrington Incorporated was more than a company. It was an empire, more than enough for each of the three of us to lead our third, for better or for worse, into a new era.

“Are you talking innovation versus tradition?” I asked Jasper.

Both of my brothers gave me a strange look I couldn’t decipher.

“I know exactly what I’m going to do. In fact I’m already doing it,” Sebastian said. “Yachts and supermodels. What else is there?”

“You sold your share of the company?”I couldn’t believe it. Carrington Incorporated wasn’t just our father’s company. It was our father. It was everything he stood for, everything he’d built, everything he was, the good and the bad.

I turned to Jasper in search of solidarity. He looked away, not meeting my gaze.

“You didn’t,” I snapped at him.

“Father didn’t stipulate what we had to do with our shares,” Jasper said.

I couldn’t believe this. Both of them had discarded our father’s company like it was nothing. “It’s Carrington Incorporated.Weare the Carringtons.”

“If he wanted to try and force us to become just like him, he’d have stipulated it,” Jasper said.

“If he cared about everything staying the same, he’d have given the entire company toyou,”Sebastian said to me.

I stared at him. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

“The cheese course will now be served.” Josephine strolled into the room, her shoulders a little stiffer than they’d been before. She swatted Sebastian’s legs, and he dropped his feet to the floor.

“Finally,” Sebastian said. “I’m famished.”

“Camembert, Fontina….” Josephine kept talking, but I stopped listening to the list of foods I didn’t intend to touch.

“By the way,” Sebastian said, his mouth stuffed with gorgonzola, “Oscar, what the hell happened to your face, bro? Maybe those scrapes will scar, and add to the whole feral mutt thing you have going on. You know, because of your freak-of-nature mismatched eyes. Pretty sure that’s only supposed to happen in dogs.”

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