Most Eligible Bastard: an enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy Read online

  Most Eligible Bastard

  Annika Martin

  Contents

  Untitled

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  35. before you go

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Annika Martin

  About Annika Martin

  Copyright © 2017 by Annika Martin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or business establishments, organizations or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover art: RBA Designs

  ISBN: 978-1-944736-04-0

  Created with Vellum

  He’s a powerful billionaire CEO who built the family business into an empire. The money doesn’t matter to him, but the company is his life. And then his eccentric mother wills it all to her tiny dog.

  I’m Vicky, the dog whisperer. (Not really, but that’s what my elderly neighbor always says.) When she dies, she surprises everybody by leaving a corporation worth billions to her dog, Smuckers. With me as his spokesperson.

  Suddenly I go from running my Etsy store to sitting in an elegant Wall Street boardroom with Smuckers in my lap. And my neighbor’s son, Henry Locke, aka New York’s most eligible bachelor, glaring across the table at me.

  Rumor has it Henry’s a business genius who’s as talented in the bedroom as he is in the boardroom. Sure, he’s gorgeous. Sex-in-a-seven-thousand dollar suit. But…

  He’s arrogant and infuriating.

  He refuses to listen to me when I insist I didn’t con his mother.

  He thinks he can bully me, buy me off, control me, even seduce me.

  Henry may have the women of Manhattan eating out of the palm of his hand, but I'm so over entitled rich guys who think they own the world.

  No way will his wicked smile be charming ME out of my panties.

  His wicked...devastating...impossible-to-resist smile.

  Oh well, who needs panties anyway?

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  One

  Vicky

  I’m smuggling a tiny white dog named Smuckers into a Manhattan hospital to see his owner, Bernadette Locke. Thanks to a standing appointment at a chandelier-draped dog salon on Fifth Avenue owned by a woman who ostensibly loves dogs but might secretly hate them, Smuckers’s facial fur is blow-dried into such an intense puff of white that his eager black eyes and wee raisin of a nose seem to float in a cloud.

  There are three things to know about Bernadette: She’s the meanest woman I ever met. She believes I’m some kind of dog whisperer who can read Smuckers’s mind. (I can’t.) And she’s dying. Alone.

  The people in her condo building will probably be glad to hear of her passing. I don’t know what she did to earn their hatred. That’s probably for the best.

  Bernadette has a son out there somewhere, but even he seems to have washed his hands of her. There is a photo of the son on Bernadette’s cracked fireplace mantel, a toddler with a scowly little dent between fierce blue eyes. Surrounded by people, the little boy manages somehow to look utterly alone.

  Back when Bernadette got her terminal diagnosis, I asked her if she’d told her son and whether he might finally come to visit. She brushed off the question with a contemptuous wave of her hand—Bernadette’s favorite way of responding to pretty much anything you say is a contemptuous hand wave. He won’t be coming, I assure you.

  I can’t believe he wouldn’t visit her, even now. It’s the ultimate dick move. Your mother is dying alone, jackass!

  Anyway, put all of that in a pot and stir it and you have the strange soup of me clicking past a guard, smiling brightly—and hopefully dazzlingly—enough that he doesn’t notice the squirmy bulge in my oversized purse.

  Smuckers is a Maltese, which is a toy dog that’s outrageously cute. And Smuckers is the cutest of the cute.

  Smuckers and Bernadette Locke made a notorious pair out on the sidewalk in the Upper West Side neighborhood where my little sister and I have our very sweet apartment-sitting gig.

  I remember them well. Smuckers would attract people with his insane fluff-ball cuteness, but as the hapless victim drew near Bernadette would say something insulting. Kind of like the human equivalent of a Venus flytrap, where the fly is attracted to the beauty of the flower only to be mercilessly crushed.

  Locals learned to stay away from the two of them. I tried—I really did.

  Yet here I am, slipping down another chillingly bright hospital hallway, smuggling the little dog in for the third time in two weeks. It’s not on my top ten list of things I want to do with my day. Not even on my top hundred, but Smuckers is Bernadette’s only true friend. And I know what it’s like to be hated and alone.

  I know that when you’re hated, you sometimes act like you don’t care as a survival method.

  And that makes people hate you more, because they feel like you should look at least a little beaten down.

  Bernadette’s hatred was real-life neighborhood hatred; mine was real life plus a fun national online component, but it works the same way, and heaven forbid you should have a cute dog. Or that a picture of you smiling should ever appear on Facebook or Huffpo or People.com.

  I know, too, how being hated can build on itself, how sometimes you do things to make people hate you more because it’s better in a certain perverse way. I think only people who have been hated in their life can truly understand that.

  I push into the room. “We’re here,” I say brightly, relieved no medical personnel are around. While Smuckers enjoys being in a purse, he prefers to ride with his head out, like the fierce captain of a pleather airship. Needless to say, he’s achieved maximum squirminess. I take him out. “Look, Smuckers—your mom!”

  Bernadette is half propped up on pillows. Her skin is sallow and her hair sparse, but what hair she has is energetically white. Her eyes flutter open. “Finally.”

  She has a tube in her arm, but that’s all. They’ve taken Bernadette off everything except morphine. They’ve given up on her.

  “Smuckers is so excited to see you.” I go over to her bed and set Smuckers next to her. Smuckers licks Bernadette’s fingers, and the love that comes over Bernadette’s face makes her look soft
for a moment. Like a nice woman.

  “Smuckers,” she whispers. She moves her lips, talking to him. I can’t hear, but I know from past conversations that she’s saying she loves him. Sometimes she confesses she doesn’t want to leave him, doesn’t want to be alone. She’s frightened about being alone.

  Feebly she scratches Smuckers’s fur, but she’s focusing hard on me, whispering something fervently. I draw near. Eggplant, she seems to be saying.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Eggplant…” she says, voice weak.

  “Yes, Bernadette?”

  “Eggplant makes your complexion…” She winces hard “…wormlike.” She manages to infuse the word wormlike with incredulous contempt, as though I’ve performed such a feat of fashion monstrosity that she needs to muster all her strength to let me know.

  “Damn. I was going for slug-like,” I joke as I adjust Smuckers so that he’s not on her tube.

  She sniffs and turns back to Smuckers.

  Over the three years I’ve known her, Bernadette has always been judgmental about my fashion choices. Did you get that out of a 1969 catalog for librarians, Vicky? Did JCPenny have a sale on drab pencil skirts? At times I literally seem to hurt her eyes, what with my uninspired ponytails and glasses and whatnot.

  I have this suspicion that Bernadette came from money but that her fortune dwindled over the years. Clue one: her apartment is in an expensive neighborhood, but it’s really shabby inside, like it was once grand and went to ruin. Also, her clothes are worn versions of what was expensive maybe fifteen years back. Really, she seems to spend nothing on herself. But Smuckers? Nothing is too good for Smuckers. No expense spared.

  I take her hand and put it where Smuckers most likes it so Smuckers will settle down.

  “Smuckers,” she breathes.

  I have this impulse to set a comforting hand on her arm, but human contact is not something Bernadette would ever want from me.

  I’m really only around as an extension of Smuckers, a conduit for Smuckers’s important communications. Other than that, I’m chopped liver. If Bernadette could somehow automate me or keep me in a sardine tin with just the corner rolled up so my voice can escape, she would.

  She looks up at me expectantly. I know what she wants. What does Smuckers have to say?

  I’m at a loss for what to say, or rather, what Smuckers might say. I never signed up for this pet whisperer thing with her, and what with her being on her deathbed, it seems especially wrong.

  But she’s waiting. Glaring. It’s Smuckers or nothing.

  I suck in a breath and put on my whisperer expression, which I would describe as a curious listening face. “Smuckers says that you shouldn’t be afraid to die,” I say.

  She waits. She wants more.

  “He wants you to know it’s going to be okay, even though it might not feel like that right now.”

  She nods, mumbles to Smuckers.

  In terms of subject matter, this is getting into new territory. Smuckers has typically confined himself to lifestyle commentary—requests for certain styles of neck scritching or flavors of Fancy Whiskas dog treats.

  Now and then he’ll speculate on the antics of pigeons outside the window. He has certainly never betrayed any divine wisdom about death or special understanding of esoteric secrets of the cosmos.

  But I can tell from Bernadette’s face that she likes hearing that Smuckers said that.

  “Vicky,” she says to Smuckers. “Vicky will care for you.”

  “You know I will, Bernadette,” I say. “I’ll care for Smuckers as if he were my own flesh and blood.”

  Though not literally. I don’t plan on racing around Central Park eating goose poop with him.

  “He’ll live like a little king,” I amend.

  Bernadette mumbles something and I settle into the surprisingly luxurious, leather-upholstered chair in the roomy private room they’ve given her. This is the hospice wing of one of the larger Manhattan hospitals where the news often talks about overcrowded conditions.

  Maybe she has good insurance or something.

  Bernadette scritches Smuckers’s neck. “Love you, Pokey,” she whispers.

  I quietly scroll through Instagram, one ear attuned to the door, but all I hear is the sound of footsteps and muted conversations going up and down the hall, along with the occasional intercom announcement. I want to make this visit last as long as possible.

  Smuckers will live like a little king, but maybe not a king of a wealthy country. More like a king of an impoverished nation, but one that loves their king. That’s the best I can do for him.

  I took Smuckers home two weeks ago, the day before Bernadette went into the hospital. It wasn’t long before I discovered that the raw frozen food he gets is more expensive than spun gold, and I can only imagine what it costs to re-up his puffball hairstyle at his monthly standing appointment at the aforementioned dog salon, which has an original Warhol painting of a poodle in the waiting area.

  I’ll just let you do the math on that one.

  So, no, I don’t envision keeping Smuckers in the exact life he’s accustomed to. I’ve supported my little sister, Carly ever since she was nine years old and I want her to have everything I never did. I want her to feel safe and dream big.

  And if there’s some left over for a fabulous blowout, it’ll be her in that chair and they won’t have to tie her up to do it like poor Smuckers.

  She’s sixteen now. It’s hard to raise a teen in Manhattan, but somehow we make it, thanks to my Etsy store of funky dog accessories. Someday I’ll break into women’s jewelry, but for now, it’s all sequined bow-tie dog collars all the time.

  Bernadette’s lips move. Nothing comes out except the word alone—I don’t want to be alone.

  I feel a pang in my heart.

  It’s strange how a long life can be reduced to a darkened hospice room, a stranger scrolling Instagram, and a little white dog.

  Though I suppose it’s no more strange than my playing the part of a pet whisperer, which I never in my life wanted to do, and a hundred percent blame my friend Kimmy for.

  Kimmy is the one who put on a festival to raise money for her animal shelter, the one who looked at me so beseechingly, holding a colorful scarf and hoop earrings, when the real pet whisperer didn’t show up for the pet whisperer booth.

  Just make shit up, she said. It’ll be fun, she said.

  I left Carly to handle the booth selling my dog accessories and put on the scarf.

  I’d said whatever came into my head that day. A lot of pets had complaints about their food. Most wanted the owners to play with them more. Sometimes, if the companion person seemed sad, the pet would express intense empathy and love. I think, no matter who you are, your pet cares about you.

  Sometimes I’d say how much the pet enjoys it when they talk to them or when they sing to them, because doesn’t everyone talk and sing to their pets?

  Then Bernadette came by, steely and outraged, smashing the pavement with her cane alongside a tiny, energetic toy dog.

  She threw down two five-dollar bills and demanded to know what Smuckers wanted to tell her. I honestly couldn’t tell whether she wanted to debunk me or if she really wanted to know.

  So I took the little dog in my lap and rubbed his fuzzy little ears and started talking. I’d found, over the course of my afternoon as a pet whisperer, that the more flattering you are, the more the people buy it.

  Smuckers loves you so much, I’d told her. He knows you think you’re too slow for him, but he doesn’t care. He loves you. And he mostly loves to hear you sing. Maybe you can’t run around with him, but he wants you to know that your singing is amazing to him. He thinks you’re beautiful when you sing.

  When I looked up, her eyes were shining. She really believed me. I hadn’t felt like a scammer until then. She asked for my card, but I told her it was just for fun.

  She didn’t believe I didn’t have a card. Like I was evilly keeping my card from her.

  I
told her that if she just watched Smuckers closely enough, she could do it, too.

  She bit back something about not all of us being pet whisperers and then proceeded to try and get my contact information from other people there, who refused to give it, and who she then insulted.

  She finally left, and I thought I was home free, but New York has a way of pulling random people into each other’s lives. And you can be sure that the exact person you don’t want to run into in the city of millions will show up as a regular where you work or shop, or in Bernadette’s case, as a frequent sitter on the bench Carly and I had to pass on the way to her school.

  I look up from Instagram to see Smuckers at the edge of the bed, like he wants to jump down. I go over and give him a vigorous ear rub and he circles and settles.

  The last time I was here visiting, a priest came in, offering to say a few words, and Bernadette called him a sewer rat in the process of banishing him from the room. Sewer rat is one of her favorite insults for neighbors, mail carriers, clerks, and the revolving roster of maids she has in.

  But never for Smuckers. I stay at the bedside, feeling so bad for her.

  “Smuckers wants you not to be scared,” I say. “Smuckers says you’re not alone, and you won’t be.”

  Her dry lips move. If I could give her anything it would be some way for her not be scared, but it’s pretty unavoidable in her situation. I don’t care what religion you are, the unknown is always scary, and death is the ultimate unknown quantity.

  A nurse comes in just then, entering stealthily. She spots Smuckers before I can flick the sheet over him like I usually manage to do. “You can’t have a dog in here!”

  I shamble on a surprised face. “The other nurses didn’t say anything about the dog…” Since they didn’t see the dog.

  “You need to remove the animal.”

  “Get out,” Bernadette says hoarsely.