Lord E-Book

Kendra Little

• Herausgeber: Kendra Little
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

He's the landlord of a vast property empire. He's vain, dissolute, and on a fast track to self-destruction. Then he meets her.

Emma has always been the good girl, liked by everyone. She's successful, kind-hearted, and has a great family. Her life is perfect.
Until Adam Lyon comes along and shatters her perfect life.

Despite being all kinds of wrong, Emma can't help falling for sexy, hot Adam. He brings out the wicked side of her during their one-night stand - a side that gets captured by an anonymous photographer. With a promotion on the line and the photos circulating, Emma's perfect life begins to unravel.

And she blames Adam.
 

Leseprobe

Lord

Brotherhood Bachelors, Book #2

Kendra Little

Copyright 2015 Kendra Little

[email protected]

Contents

About LORD

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Books By Kendra

About Kendra

About LORD

He's the landlord of a vast property empire. He's vain, dissolute, and on a fast track to self-destruction. Then he meets her.

Emma has always been the good girl, liked by everyone. She's successful, kind-hearted, and has a great family. Her life is perfect.

Until Adam Lyon comes along and shatters her perfect life.

Despite being all kinds of wrong, Emma can't help falling for sexy, hot Adam. He brings out the wicked side of her during their one-night stand - a side that gets captured by an anonymous photographer. With a promotion on the line and the photos circulating, Emma's perfect life begins to unravel.

And she blames Adam.

This short novel is a complete story. It does not contain cliffhangers.

1

Legacy.

Adam Lyon was eighteen years old when he learned that a legacy was as painful and restrictive as a leash. Or a noose.

The Lyon males had been students of the prestigious Serendipity Academy for generations. Sitting atop a hill in Roxburg's wealthiest suburb, its alumni included senators, judges, and CEOs. Adam's great-grandfather had been a founding student. His grandfather made a clean sweep of every academic award in his senior year, and his father had done the same, all while captaining the baseball team. Every Lyon for generations had their name featured prominently on the polished wooden leadership boards nailed to the hallowed corridor walls.

Except Adam.

He failed at everything, from maths to English, art history to biology, and French. He failed spectacularly, earning bottom of the class marks on every single test. His teachers had long ago given up on him and merely shook their heads as they handed out his results with a big red F scrawled across the top. The kid who showed the most promise in class, who answered questions correctly, completed his homework on time, and got along well with other students, handed in poor assignments and got nearly every single answer on his tests wrong.

Talking to him about his poor results didn't work. Yelling at him didn't work. Detention didn't work. Threatening to expel him didn't work, because his father was on the school board and paid wads of cash to get Adam pushed through every year. By the time he reached his senior year, the teachers at Serendipity Academy decided that the brightest student with the most potential wasn't of the same caliber as his ancestors. He didn't have their drive, their fortitude, their focus. He was a failure, lazy, a waste of space and a black stain on the otherwise impressive Lyon legacy. It was such a shame, really, that he'd turned out the way he did.

They told him so, often.

What his teachers didn't know was that Adam had given up trying to impress them, and his father, when he was twelve. It had been a sudden decision in the end, either, but the signs were there early, if anyone cared to look. No one did. His downward spiral began at age six, a few months after his mother died. That's when he'd gone from the son of a loving couple, to "son of a whore and God knows who else." Those were his father's exact words. The viciousness of them, shouted at the top of his lungs after discovering a letter written by his wife to her lover, had seared themselves into six year-old Adam's brain and heart.

Over the course of the next year, after his father discovered his late wife had several lovers, he'd gone from caring to cruel to distant. The drunken abuse hurled at Adam at all hours of the day and night only ceased when his father slipped into an alcoholic slumber. None of the servants dared protect Adam, for fear of losing their jobs. Not even the housekeeper who sent him off to school and welcomed him home again, or the chauffeur who drove Adam whenever he could.

Adam never had friends over in case his father would abuse them too. He wasn't allowed pets. The mouse he'd kept in secret had been smashed into the brick wall while Adam was forced to look on. Christmas and birthday presents were sporadic, paid from the housekeeping money, bought by the staff and given to Adam in secret in the kitchen when they remembered.

Despite having a parent who despised him, Adam never gave up hoping that one day his father would notice how brilliant he was, how funny, kind, handsome and athletic. Or, failing those things, just notice him for being, well, his son. Then a week after his twelfth birthday, when his team made it to the baseball finals, Adam finally gave up hoping altogether.

Yet again his father didn't show up for the game. The chauffeur had driven Adam, but when he got called away by his boss during the second inning, Adam had been utterly alone. The parents of his teammates cheered from the stands, the coach gave him a fist pump from the sidelines. Adam saw all this through dry eyes as he walked up to face the best pitcher in the league, because he no longer cried when his father failed to show.

He hit a home run, his team won, and he received a medal. The coach drove him home after the game and gave him a sad smile as he waved at Adam before driving off. To Adam's surprise, his father was home. Instead of going straight to his room or the kitchen, Adam decided to show him the medal. If anything would make his father proud, it would be that. His father loved baseball.

Adam found his father in his vast study behind the heavy wooden desk inlaid with green leather. The arched windows behind him looked out at the garden and the graying sky. An empty glass and a whiskey bottle sat before him. He lifted his cloudy gaze to look at his son's face.

"What do you want?" he drawled.

Adam held out his medal. "We won. I got a home run with bases loaded."

His father pushed himself out of his chair. He walked around the desk, his fingers trailing along the wood, and stood before Adam. His father was tall, and Adam was already on his way to being a similar height, although his build was different. Where his father's shirt could barely contain his fat and the belt stretched to its limit, Adam was slender with wide shoulders, still boney from youth.

"Show me."

Adam handed the medal to his father. His heart in his throat, Adam watched him inspect it. He flipped it over in his hand and ran his thumb over the engraving. Adam smiled. His father was impressed. Finally, Adam had done something worthwhile, something right.

"You're a good player." His father's words slurred. If Adam had been older, he would have known it was a warning sign to get the hell out. But he rarely saw his father any more, and didn't know how black his moods got when he drank alone.

Adam stood a little taller. "The best on my team."

"That right?"

"Best in the league."

His father's fist closed around the medal. His hand was so big it swallowed the gold disc completely. He watched the boy the world thought was his son from beneath eyelids too fat and heavy to open fully. His top lip lifted, sneering.

"Coach says the regional scouts might come next season, just to watch me play." Adam dared a small smile. "He says I can go far if I keep up training. Pretty cool, huh?"

The knuckles around the medal turned white.

"You think that's funny?" his father snarled.

Adam's smile slipped. He shrugged. "No."

"Don't answer me back! You're laughing at me."

"No, I'm not!" Adam backed away, but his father advanced, snorting and puffing like a steam train.

"You think you're better than me, with your goddamn medal." Foam bubbled in the corners of his mouth, and his eyes flashed with fury. "You think you're a better Lyon than me, but I tell you what, Kid, you're not a Lyon. I don't know whose kid you are, but you're not mine. There's nothing of me in you. Nothing! You're a little bastard, laughing at me just like your mother laughed at me. You think it's funny that she pulled the wool over my eyes, made me give her everything, including the Lyon name, then fucked every man in the city and laughed about it behind my back?"

"I'm not laughing! Dad—"

"Don't call me that." He bared his teeth, stained from years of smoking, and advanced with closed fists.

Adam backed away, but hit the wall. His father loomed over him like a bear, stinking of stale smoke and whiskey and bitterness.

"I'm a goddamn Lyon and I won't be made a fool of!"

His father raised his hand and Adam instinctively ducked. The blow skimmed the top of his head. It stung, but he was fine. His heart hammering in his throat, he managed to scamper to the doorway. His father was too slow to catch him, but his booming voice bruised him as much as any blow could. It followed Adam down the long hallway as he ran to his room. "I'm going to cut you out my will! Just because I have to pretend you're my son doesn't mean you have to get my money! You won't get a goddamn cent of the Lyon fortune, you little bastard. I'll give it all to the school. That'll teach you, and your bitch of a mother."

After that, Adam stopped trying, stopped caring, even about baseball. He got angry. He got bigger, stronger, so that when his father went to hit him again, Adam fought back and gave his father a black eye. His father never tried to hit him again, but that didn't stop Adam's anger and, when he let it in, his despair.

If it hadn't been for his close friends, now known as the Brotherhood, he'd probably have walked off the end of a pier years ago. But he was past those dark thoughts now. His father's death when Adam was twenty-one put an end to them. There was no one to be angry at anymore. A weight was lifted from his shoulders, even more so when he learned that his father never got around to changing his will. Adam inherited the entire Lyon fortune with a portfolio of over three hundred properties in both Roxburg and interstate.

The day he learned that, Adam laughed himself silly. Then he got rolling drunk. His father had forgotten to change his will, and Adam saw a way to get revenge on the man who'd made his life miserable when he'd needed him the most, and gone and died before he could have it out with him properly.

He would destroy everything his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had worked for. Their reputation for making intelligent decisions, possessing solid business acumen, and living a conservative life out of the public eye, would all end with Adam. The property empire they'd built up would crumble, pulled down by Adam's hands. By the time he was finished, the Lyon name would be associated with failure, laziness and scandal.

All he had to do was get rid of the fortune, the properties, and live a playboy lifestyle that would make his father's starched collar curl. If he were alive, he would have told Adam he was behaving just like his whore of a mother, but Adam didn't care.

He just didn't care.

By the time he was twenty-nine, he'd given away over half of the Lyon fortune to charities—anonymously, so as not to associate the name with philanthropy—and fucked half the single women in Roxburg, and dozens of married ones too. He was a manwhore, a lazy son-of-a-bitch (literally), with a don't-give-a-fuck-attitude.

And he'd just met the first woman to refuse his advances in years. A woman who wasn't impressed with the money he splashed around, the fast cars, or the wild parties. A woman who was everything he wasn't—focused, cheerful, careful and kind-hearted. A woman he never thought he'd date. A woman he shouldn't want to date, but couldn't get out of his head, no matter how hard he tried.

Yep, Emma Sampson was driving him crazy.

2

"He's a very interesting man." My mother's voice had gone past the point of gentle persuasion and moved on to cajoling. Next would be pleading and finally, emotional blackmail.

I thought about pretending the line had gone dead or static. But I couldn't lie to my mother, so I fortified myself by filling up my wine glass.

"He's rich," Mom reminded me, again.

I kicked off my black pumps and put my feet up on the coffee table. "I don't care about money."

"So you say." Mom sounded like she didn't believe me. In her eyes, everyone cared about money, and those who claimed they didn't were lying. "He's handsome too. You must have seen the pictures of him in last month's issue of The Gourmet."

I sighed and leaned my head back on the sofa. I closed my eyes against the pounding headache. "I don't read The Gourmet. I hate cooking."

"That's why you need to date a chef! A celebrity chef, no less. He can cook for you and introduce you to all the right—"

"Mom," I ground out. "I told you last time. I'm not interested in Avery Madden."

"How do you know? You've never even met him."

"That's kind of my point. I meet enough guys on my own. I don't need you setting me up on dates with strangers."

"Avery Madden is not a stranger. He was in The Gourmet only last month."

I laughed. Mom had a warped sense of perspective sometimes. Among other things.

"Anyway, I've met him," she went on. "I liked him. He was very charming. He's quite keen to meet you."

I sat up, setting my feet firmly on the floor. "Why? What did you tell him about me?"

"I didn't tell him anything."

I blew out a breath.

"I showed him your picture."

I groaned. "Not the one of me in the pink bikini."

"Why? What's wrong with that photo? It's a gorgeous one of you, and shows off your figure beautifully. You've got a lovely shape. Sexy." She giggled. My mother giggled.

"Mom!"

"You get your figure from me, and Grandma."

I squeezed the bridge of my nose. My mother was on a roll now. "Can we just drop this discussion and move on to something else? Avery Madden doesn't even live in this state, so I am not going to date him. And no, before you get started, I'm not moving back to New York. I like it here. I have a great job, great friends, and a nice apartment."

I glanced at the baby blue walls and the second hand furniture, and thanked every God I could think of that Mom hadn't figured out video calling. It wouldn't be long before I had to worry about her seeing my shabby apartment. Once I secured the promotion at work, I could get a painter in, and buy more furniture, but not until then. My boss told me I had the promotion in the bag. It was just a matter of observing due process and going through the requisite motions.

"Fine," Mom said in a way that made me think the topic of Avery Madden wasn't over yet. "Did you hear back about that photo shoot I set up?"

From one fire straight to another. Sometimes I felt like I was constantly dodging them, or trying to. "The magazine people contacted me yesterday."

"And?" Mom's voice squeaked with excitement. She must think I was finally becoming more like her. She'd been a model in her twenties, and photo shoots were definitely her thing.

"And…I'm thinking about it." I winced and braced myself.

"Emma, don't you dare pull out. I went to a lot of trouble to organize the shoot."

"I wish you hadn't."

"Oh, Emma. How could you do this to me? I thought you'd be pleased to be included in a national magazine in an article about amazing career women."