1

AS HE WATCHED the woman get dressed, Dawson held back a sigh of frustration. He’d enjoyed the previous night; he’d have to be dead not to have enjoyed having sex with a beautiful woman, even if he couldn’t remember what her damn name was.

But as he watched her getting ready to leave the warmth of his bed, he felt cold inside. She turned to face him as she started to put on her bra and flashed a smile that was all perfectly straight, white teeth and false eyelashes, and he knew what she was going to say even before she uttered a word.

“So, gorgeous, when will I see you again?” Her voice was as fake as her tits were, and the coldness he felt inside quickly turned to a feeling of disgust. “And could you possibly give me some money to pay for a cab home? I seem to have misplaced my purse.”

And there we have it, he thought. Another fucking gold digger out for what she could get off him. He was so sick and tired of being treated as a meal ticket by almost everyone he knew, especially women, that he was at the point where he could quite easily throw in the towel and move to a secluded island.

There were just two flaws to his getaway plan: he loved money and the power it gave him over people, and he loved sex with beautiful women, even if it meant he had to use his money in order to get it. Miss fake-sexy, whatever-her-name-was seemed oblivious to the fact that his expression had grown cold as he swung his legs off the bed and reached for his wallet on the nightstand. He withdrew a hundred-dollar bill and walked over to where she stood, ogling his muscular nakedness, before thrusting the money into her hand.

“You won’t see me again, but thanks for a good night,” he said.

The woman’s expression turned petulant, and he was reminded of a sulky child who had been told she couldn’t have any more candy, which, considering the things they’d done the night before, made him cringe.

Thankfully, she took the not-so-subtle hint though, and a short time later he was alone in his penthouse apartment mulling over his life and where the hell it was taking him. He supposed that he had no one to blame for the way people treated him but himself, but knowing that didn’t make it any easier to swallow. He knew that he’d been dealt a rough hand from the minute he’d been born, but he’d managed to make something of himself despite that – or maybe it was because of that – so why couldn’t he find someone decent to share his life with?

Because you can be an asshole. Your mother was an asshole. Your father was probably an asshole, and you can definitely treat people like assholes, which is probably why you get treated like an asshole in return. What else can you expect? He knew that he wasn’t really an asshole – not in the grand scheme of things. Too many people had told him otherwise for it to be true. But sometimes it was hard to ignore the demons of his youth that reared their ugly head during times of self-doubt, and during his formative years, he’d been told so many times that he was a good-for-nothing waste of space.

He shoved at the mental voice that had decided to answer his rhetorical question, pushing it resolutely back down into the recesses of his mind where it belonged. He refused to think about his parents or their effect on his life any more than he wanted to think about the ‘system’ he’d been raised in as a result of their non-parenting skills. That was a dark road that he really didn’t want to travel down – not if he could help it. At least he had one thing to thank them for; they’d made him determined not to turn out like them.

Unfortunately, once he started to think about it, the thoughts were hard to shut off, no matter how hard he tried. As he took his shower and got ready for work, he couldn’t help but dwell on his past.

He hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, despite what a lot of people thought when they found out that he was filthy rich. Hell, he hadn’t even been born with a plastic one either. If truth be told, he had no idea if his birth mother had known anything about spoons, other than to use them to do whatever drug users did with them to get the filth into their wasted bodies. He’d been born premature – tiny and suffering from the effects of his mother’s heroin addiction, and despite not being given much hope of surviving, he had recovered and thrived, thanks to the care he received from the neo-natal nurses.

Of course, he couldn’t remember any of that. His earliest memory was probably when he was about three years old, and it was the memory of children crying in their cribs or playpens at the children’s home he’d been taken to when he’d been well enough to leave the hospital. Most of his memories since then were carefully tucked away in some dark recess of his mind where they couldn’t escape to haunt him.

Occasionally, especially during adolescence, he hadn’t quite managed to keep them held back, and they would resurface when he least expected it, resulting in him being expelled from numerous schools and being labelled as a rebellious thug who would never amount to anything. Rather than adhere to everyone’s low expectations of him, he doggedly worked his way up the food chain until, eventually, he owned his own business. It felt good to actually employ those same people who’d said he’d never get anywhere in life except jail. As he thought about that, he smiled for the first time that day.