Resisting the Bad Boy by Violet Duke

for anything. All of our father’s expectations for him slid right off him like a magnet on its back. Brian was going to be what he was going to be, period.”
    Abby smiled. “He’s still like that.”
    “I’m glad. Unlike my father, I never wanted Brian to lose that.”
    “Why do you two hate him so much?” Her eyes popped open. “Sorry, you don’t have to answer that.”
    “No, it’s okay. Our father is a relative stranger to us both. I don’t know if Brian hates him so much as disrespects him as a father. After he had Skylar, that feeling multiplied infinitely. I , on the other hand, do hate him. I have since the fourth grade, since the day I saw him sucking face with some woman who wasn’t my mother, and then making her feel small for no reason at all later that night. Before that day, I used to work really hard in school to try and gain his approval, get him to just stop and notice me. For once. He ever did. Brian, my mother, and I simply didn’t register on his radar. We were merely an obligation. If even that. The only thing he cared about was his work, and all those other women he was screwing around with.”
    Abby couldn’t imagine anyone being so callous to their own family.
    “After the fourth grade, I kept on getting good grades, but for myself, not for him anymore. By the time I was in high school, my motivation to do well shifted to one goal: going away to a school on the east coast without having to ask my father for a penny.”
    “Hence, Columbia.”
    “Yep. And since I wasn’t the athlete Brian was, I had to rely on academics to get me a scholarship. It’s funny because that was the one and only time I remember my father sounding even remotely proud of me. The day I’d gotten my full ride there.”
    “That must’ve felt good.”
    “You’d think. But then he immediately started mapping out my whole life for me—law school at Stanford and eventually a partnership in his firm so I could be the second Sullivan listed on the door. As always, it was still all about him. I know it sounds petty but I remember so vividly telling him there was no chance in hell I wasn’t majoring in pre-law or going to law school. I almost fell over in shock when I saw him actually display an emotion. A little one or annoyance. Of course, ten seconds later, he just dismissed me completely, shoved me back to the completely invisible status I shared with my mother and brother.”
    He practically spat the words out. Said them with such contempt that Abby was momentarily too shocked to ask how in the world his life ended up taking the road he’d swore it never would—Stanford Law and senior partner at Caldwell, Sullivan & Phillips. Then she did the math. He was three years older than Brian; he’d been a senior at Columbia when Brian found out Beth was pregnant. “You went to law school for Brian,” she said quietly.
    He stiffened.
    She pulled back and looked at his shuttered eyes. “Does he know?”
    “No, and you can’t tell him. He thinks I always wanted to go to law school.”
    She remained silent, giving him the chance to get it all out. Undoubtedly for the first time ever.
    “Brian was planning on quitting college. I couldn’t let him do that. Unlike me, he’d always known what he wanted to do. My major was basically ‘anything but law’ while his had always been business. He has a natural knack for business that in many ways surpasses mine. If he’d been the one to get a dual JD/MBA from Stanford, he’d probably be a major CEO by now.”
    “But that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to be a dad. So we sat and discussed his future, weighed his options. Since teaching was another thing he’d always been interested in, he applied for the teaching program at ASU and majored in business and economics.”
    So how did Connor’s going to law school fit in all this?
    “The biggest obstacle he faced was money,” he explained as if reading her mind. “When he told my parents about the pregnancy,