Stepbrother: Impossible Love
Victoria Villeneuve
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Chapter One
I sighed as I looked down at the quickly vanishing landscape below me. It was my home, my city. Manhattan. The Big Apple. New York. The city so nice, they named it twice. For the first nineteen years of my life, it was my home. I loved walking the streets, I loved the hustle and bustle of it, and I loved the energy it generated. Somehow, I knew London just wasn’t going to be the same.
I could have stayed, of course. After all, I was an adult. Unfortunately for me, my mother wasn’t, despite being twenty years older than me. And seeing as she was the only family I had – apart from an aunt in Oregon that I hadn’t seen or spoken to since I was five – I agreed when she asked me to move to England with her.
At the same time, it wasn’t entirely family based. Sure, my mother was a needy hypochondriac who had depended on me her entire life, and I would have felt bad if I’d wiped my hands of her and left her as a problem for her new husband. But when said new husband was a billionaire businessman with titles that can be traced back to William the Conqueror in his name, and he promised to get me into Oxford, well, that tipped the scales towards the Old Country just a little bit.
That’s how I ended up on this plane, sipping champagne from my luxury seat in first class, my mother across the aisle from me fussing with her seatbelt, looking down at the city that raised me and wondering if I hadn’t just made a huge mistake.
Oh well. If it doesn’t work out and I hate England, a degree from Oxford will probably get me a pretty good job if I come back stateside I decided, and leaned back, listening to the low drone of the engines outside the window as the 747 whisked us over the Atlantic Ocean.
It had been such a whirlwind, but that really was my mother’s life in one sentence. I leaned back in my seat, trying not to think about how this ticket almost certainly cost more than the money I made by being a waitress part time at a diner downtown while finishing up high school.
According to her (and I never really could know if she was telling the truth), my mother was an up-and-coming Broadway actress, who had gotten a few minor roles here and there, and was slowly crawling her way up the pecking order, waiting for her big break. She was about to make the big time by sleeping with the producer of a new show that was going to make millions, until it turned out he got her pregnant.
Cast away by the producer – and by the entire industry – when she had me, my mother made ends meet working odd jobs and by blackmailing the producer in question. He paid her enough to live off, and she didn’t go public with the fact that he had a child out there that wasn’t birthed by his wife of 25 years. He stopped paying her when he found out she re-married, and as far as I know my mother has never contacted him again.
To this day my mother won’t tell me who my father is, and to be honest, I don’t really care. I was never really into showbiz anyway. I preferred the classics, which was why I figured English Literature was the perfect degree to go for at Oxford. Cliché, I know. Everyone gets an arts degree. Well, I don’t care. Deal with it, universe. I was only going to get the chance to learn from the best once, and I planned on studying something I enjoyed.
That said, I also decided to do a minor in journalism, as I figured that would help me get a job when I graduated and came back to New York City.
Anyway, my mother quickly decided that I needed a father figure, and that she needed a stabilizing figure in her life, and when I was two she married for the first time, a stock broker from Brooklyn. That marriage lasted an entire three years before they got divorced, and I don’t even remember the man’s name.
This new husband, number five, John Andrew Alcott the 4th, Baron of Winchester, was by far the richest. My mother met him at one of those charity dinners she still managed to somehow get herself invited to – no doubt by namedropping husband number three, who is now a New York City councillor – and instantly had him wrapped around her little finger.
For all the shit I gave my mom for not exactly being the best mother, or the most sane person, I had to admit she was drop dead gorgeous, and I absolutely wished every single day that I’d gotten her genes instead of my mystery father’s.