Daddy's Coming Home For Christmas

Chapter Three: The Cruelest Cut

Raphael

I leaned against my bedroom window that looked out over palm trees and desert dunes, and swirled the drink in my hand. The other side of the penthouse overlooked the city, but I preferred the desert view to the urban chaos.

It was harsh, dry, lonely.

Like my life.

I never stayed in one place very long. I would spend a few months in each country, making sure the Segretto Star hotels were running according to my exacting standards. Italy, Spain, France, Japan, Australia and the UAE. But the penthouse in Dubai was the closest thing I had to a home base.

And very soon, I would add the United States to my list of hotel locations. I had just signed a deal to take over a 20 acre resort that was a mere forty-minute drive from the small town I had grown up in. Sentimentality might have overruled my business sense on that decision, but the elderly owners were keen to sell, and the deal was irresistible.

I took another gulp of my drink and let it burn its way down my throat and into my gut.

I hadn’t been home in six, almost seven years. I hadn’t planned to stay away that long, but things had gotten… complicated.

It was far easier to have my accountant and my personal assistant handle everything. I sent more than enough money each month to make sure that my mother would live out her retirement in comfort and ease. (I had no expectation that my brother, Gabe, would contribute anything to her care from his own share of the company earnings.) My PA, Jennifer, reported that my brother had hired a full-time live-in person to care for our mother, and that everything was in order.

Whiskey couldn’t drown the guilt I felt when I thought about my mother. She used to call and leave me voice messages. She used to write letters and send cards. But those had become fewer and fewer over the years until they stopped altogether last year.

Not that I could blame her.

How long did I expect her to reach out without anyone reaching back to her?

Finishing the liquor in the glass, I went to the bottle on my dresser and poured another. I couldn’t remember if it was my third or my fourth. The details were getting a little blurry.

I looked down at the bottom drawer.

The drawer I never open.

I sank down to my knees and set my glass on the carpet as I pulled the drawer open, revealing the sparse contents inside.

The first thing my eyes fell on was a black velvet box. It had gathered dust and lint over the years. I grabbed it and flipped open the top and gazed at the diamond and sapphire engagement ring that was still displayed on the little satin cushion. I had gone through six of the finest jewelers in Europe before I had found the perfect ring.

I traced my finger over the glittering gemstones.

Things had ended badly. I was grief-stricken and panicked. My dad had just died, and I was being called overseas to take over his position as CEO of Segretto Stars. I had barely graduated from college with my bachelor's degree in business; I was in no way prepared to take over a multi-million dollar hotel empire. I felt like I was being suffocated, not only by the business, but by my girlfriend.

She was clingy, needy, begging me not to leave her behind. Like I didn’t already have enough to deal with.

So, in a fit of temper, I broke up with her.

And somewhere over the Atlantic, on the flight to Italy, I regretted it. I vowed that I would put my father’s affairs in order, and then I would come back for her. I would apologize on my knees, I would give her the ring, and we face the future together, like we’d always planned.

But sorting my father’s business took longer than I expected.

And then I got the wedding invitation in the mail. The fancy envelope didn’t have a return address, but I knew it was my brother who had sent it. He would get off on rubbing my nose in it.

I put the ring back in the drawer and pulled out the envelope that was beginning to yellow and come apart at the edges. I pulled out the invitation card.

The Segretto Family cordially invites you to celebrate the union of their son, Mr. Gabriel Neil Segretto and Ms. Bethany Marguerite Hall ~ on April 11th at the Townline Country Club. Reception Dinner to follow the ceremony.

I had only been absent a few months, and she decided to marry my brother.

My father had once warned me that Beth was just a gold-digger, hanging on for the Segretto fortune. I guess he was right in the end. When she couldn’t get the money through me, she got it through Gabriel.

But the cruelest cut came later, when the birth announcement arrived in the same way. I picked up the pink envelope with a grimace and slid out the embossed card. “Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel Segretto are pleased to announce the arrival of their beautiful baby girl, Lucy Ann Segretto.” There was a black and white photo of a baby swaddled in a soft blanket, her eyes scrunched closed, a little tuft of dark hair standing up on the top of her head.

They had certainly wasted no time starting a family together. In fact, I could do the math.

She was pregnant before they got married.

That’s probably the only reason Gabe had married her. Her super-religious parents had probably demanded a shot-gun wedding.

All of my mother’s letters were scattered on the bottom of the drawer, most of them unopened. Along with a few random photographs that had arrived in anonymous envelopes. Wedding photos. Pictures of an adorable, dark-haired infant that morphed into a pig-tailed toddler. Pictures of Gabriel and Beth and the baby had clearly been taken by a professional photographer, looking like the perfect, happy little family.

I counted myself lucky that those anonymous letters with the family photos had also dwindled away to nothing in the last couple of years. It seemed my brother had grown tired of torturing me with glimpses of his perfect white-picket life.

I could almost forget.

I slammed the drawer shut so hard that the bottle of whiskey that was resting on top tipped over, rolled off, and fell to the floor. Luckily, the fall was broken by the thick pile of the carpet, and the bottle didn’t smash. I tossed back the last of my drink and let myself fall backward, so that I was staring up at the plastered ceiling.

Nah, I could never forget.

Those grey-blue eyes and that flaming red hair haunted my dreams every single night.

And in a few days' time I would be on a private jet headed back to Townline. Back to my childhood home, my mother, my brother…

And the woman who had betrayed me.