17. Vaughn
SEVENTEEN
VAUGHN
Charlotte’s playdate was entering the ear-piercing shrieks portion of the afternoon.
I sat at my desk in my home office, going through emails that I’d neglected during the week.
Saturdays should’ve been reserved for my daughter—especially during the weeks that I had custody of her—but the extra time I’d dedicated to my training with Alba meant that some of my work spilled into the weekends.
“Daddy!” I looked up from the computer screen in time to see Charlotte skidding to a stop in the doorway. Blue paint smeared her cheek, and one of her pigtails had lost its tie. She brandished a paper covered with not-quite-dry paint. “I made this for you!”
I pushed my chair back and turned to face my daughter as she circled my desk. Taking the painting in one hand, I curled the other around Charlotte’s shoulder. “I love it,” I said. “Reminds me of Van Gogh.”
“I used blue because it’s your favorite color.”
“Is it?” I asked, smiling faintly.
“Duh. Your new suit is blue.”
“You chose my new suit.”
“Because blue is your favorite,” Charlotte replied, looking at me like I was dense.
I laughed. “Fair enough. Where should we hang this one?”
“Daddy, it has to dry first,” she said, plucking the paper from my hands. “You’re so silly.”
I huffed and turned back to my computer. Time passed, and I heard my daughter running down the hallway toward me. “Daddy!”
“I’m working, turkey.” The lawyers had sent through the latest communication with the troublesome subcontractor, and?—
Charlotte’s shoulders dropped. Her face was pure disappointment. “Okay,” she said, and disappeared around the corner to rejoin her friends.
Pain shot through my chest, and I stared at the half-read letter on my screen, cursing myself. All this work—for what?
My wife had divorced me for this. She kept vying for more custody time because she insisted I wasn’t spending enough time with Charlotte when I had her. But if I didn’t work, then we wouldn’t have all these nice things.
It was a justification I’d recited to myself a thousand times, but it felt hollow now.
I thought of Alba, thrown out on her own, the bitter twist of her lips when she compared my words to her father’s.
My throat was tight. My hand snapped out like a striking snake to shut the top of my laptop.
Charlotte would be going back to her mother tomorrow, and I could answer emails then.
I followed the sounds of high-pitched squealing toward the second living area, which had been transformed into a play space for Charlotte. The table was covered in a plastic tablecloth, smeared with various colors of paint. The children were feral.
Billie herded them toward the bathroom one at a time, calling out a cheerful, “Time to wash our hands!”
“Daddy!” Charlotte called out as she walked out of the bathroom, her fingers leaving a trail of drips of water from the bathroom back to the playroom, her face splitting into a huge smile.
“Sit down. I want to paint your nails.” Imperious, she pointed to one of the child-sized chairs in the playroom.
I complied. What else was I supposed to do? Five-year-old children swarmed me, brandishing kid-safe nail polish bottles at me.
“Matilda,” Charlotte said, “he likes blue .” She held up a bottle of sparkly blue polish.
“Because he’s a boy,” Matilda said, nodding in understanding.
“I’m a boy, but I like purple,” another child said.
“Purple is nice,” Charlotte agreed, wrenching my hand toward her. I sat back on the too-small chair, smiling, and let my daughter smear polish all over my fingertips. When she concentrated, her brow furrowed and her tongue stuck out at the corner of her mouth.
It took her ten minutes to cover my nails (and surrounding skin) with glittery blue polish, while her friends put clips in my hair and wrapped swags of fabric around my body.
When she capped the polish and proclaimed the job done, she gave me the biggest, most beaming smile I’d ever seen.
“You’re pretty,” she told me, and I laughed.
Later, when the other kids were gone, Billie had gone home, and I had finished reading Charlotte her favorite bedtime story, she threw her arm over my chest and planted a kiss on my cheek. “I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you too, turkey.”
She nestled next to me and let out a sigh. “Today was the best day ever.”
I stayed with her until she was asleep, then crept out of the room and went back downstairs.
I sat on the couch, a huge piece of wildly expensive artwork behind me, a custom-built coffee table in front, my toes wiggling in the imported, handwoven rug that framed all the furniture…
and I realized that Alba had been right.
None of this stuff mattered to Charlotte. She wouldn’t care about private tutors and luxurious vacations. She just wanted me to be there to let her paint my nails.
Later, maybe, when she was older, she’d appreciate everything I did. She’d have a home of her own, a good career, anything money could buy. She’d know how hard I worked for her.
Or…maybe she’d remember days like today, that had hardly cost a dime.
The next time I saw Alba was on Tuesday evening at the dance studio. She sat cross-legged at the far end of the room, black leggings cladding her bottom half, a loose white tee giving me a glimpse of a black sports bra beneath. She looked up, blond hair glinting, and nodded.
“Good,” she said. “You’re here.”
My eyes dropped to her lips, then away. “I’m here.”
She stood up and faced me. “Next time, bring your date.”
“My date?”
“To the gala. So you can practice dancing together.”
I nodded. “Right. Um…about that.”
She arched a brow. “Don’t tell me you don’t have a date.”
“Noble bullied me into buying a table. I just figured I’d fill it with people from the office.”
“ Vaughn .”
“What?”
“You are unbelievable.”
I loved it when she got exasperated with me.
I’d only gotten glimpses of it these past couple of weeks.
She’d put her walls up, and I told myself it was for the best. At least she’d allowed me to take care of her living situation.
That had calmed the part of me that needed to control, protect, and watch over.
But I loved her like this, open and annoyed and real.
I shrugged. “Look, it’s a business dinner. I’m bringing business associates. What’s the big deal?”
“What am I even doing here?” she demanded. “Have you learned nothing ?”
“I’ve learned I should use the side plate to butter my bread and keep my grubby fingers off the wine glass bowl.”
She grumbled to herself, then turned back to me. “You find yourself a date. The gala is in three weeks!”
“You don’t think I can get a date in three weeks?”
“Someone who won’t see it as an excuse to get drunk on champagne and embarrass you.”
“I agree. I’m perfectly capable of doing that myself.”
Her jaw hardened, and her eyes flashed. She clenched her fists, then took a deep breath. “It’s your funeral. Or should I say—your business’s funeral.”
“Arlo Noble doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would stand on ceremony.”
“That’s not the point.”
We’d moved closer at some point, as we always seemed to do. I could smell her shampoo, see the glint of the lights against the gold necklace she always wore. I canted my head and arched my brows, just because I knew it would annoy her. “And what is the point?”
“You,” she said, poking my chest, “are a debutante. This is your ball. Your entry into society. The appearance that will shape people’s opinions of you.”
“How exciting.”
“You’re not taking any of this seriously, are you?”
“Five hundred dollars an hour is pretty serious to me.”
She shrugged. “Not to these people.”
The way she said “these people” made me pause. Her gaze slid away from me, and I studied the stubborn tilt of her chin, the muscle feathering in her cheek.
I wanted to kiss that frown away. I wanted to drop to my knees and worship her until she was boneless in my arms.
“There’s only one person who could be my date and not embarrass me,” I finally said.
Her eyes, blue, slitted, unimpressed, blinked back to meet mine. “Don’t even think about it.”
I took a step forward, and she took a step back. “Alba,” I started.
“Absolutely not.”
“The only other person I could bring is my mother.”
“Wonderful. A family man.”
“She’ll definitely get drunk on champagne and embarrass me.”
Her stubborn chin lifted. “Maybe that’s exactly what you deserve.” I’d backed her up against the wall of mirrors, and now she pressed herself against it.
My palm landed next to her head. “Come with me,” I said.
“No.”
“Show all those people who turned their backs on you that you aren’t broken.”
Her eyes sparked. God, she looked good when she was furious. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know that you hate the way you felt when you ran into those assholes at Rebellieux.”
Her jaw clenched.
“You hate to be made to feel small and weak and scared.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” she repeated through clenched teeth.
“I know that’s how you felt, because that’s how I feel every time I have to walk into one of these business meetings and pretend I respect the person on the other side of the table. Rich, pretentious assholes who don’t know anything about hard work.”
She turned her head to look at the darkened windows. “So what? I go to one event on some oaf’s arm?—”
“Ouch.”
“—and then suddenly I’m back in? I don’t even want to be back in. I just want—” She stopped.
“What? What do you want?”
Her chest rose and fell with a breath, and she turned to meet my gaze. Tension pulled tight between us, my fingers curling against the mirror by her head. The flash in her eyes was what did me in. I could keep my distance when she put her walls up, but this? When she was real?
Irresistible.
Alba’s gaze flicked between my eyes, her brow wrinkling. We’d circled each other for weeks, and I was so sick of holding back. But I wouldn’t push her. Not when I knew it might push her away.
Instead, I waited. The silence hummed between us, and I thought about how badly I’d wanted her to stay at my apartment. How much it had soothed me to know she was there, safe, taken care of.
Maybe she read that thought in my face, because she finally whispered, “I just want to feel like the rug isn’t going to get pulled out from under me.” Her throat clenched as she swallowed. “I just want to feel safe.”
I could give her that. I would live to give her that. If she let me.
But Alba had thick walls, and I knew it would take a long time to get through them. But I could try.
My free hand slid to her hip, thumb tracing the bone that protruded there. Her breath caught.
“Tell me to stop, and I will.”
She opened her mouth—but nothing came out. A mouth I’d dreamed about every night since I’d tasted it. A mouth of razor-sharp words and wry smiles and desperate kisses.
Slowly, studying the fluttering of her eyelashes and the pulse thrumming in her neck, I moved my palm from her hip to her inner thigh, sliding it up so I could feel the heat of her beneath the stretchy, smooth fabric of her leggings.
She shivered, stepping her feet a little wider, and I curled my hand to hold her there, where she was hot and damp. My heart rattled.
“Are you wet, Alba?”
She glared at me.
“Have you been waiting for me to touch you all this time?”
“I haven’t been waiting ?—”
She gasped as I ground the heel of my hand against her clit, hands scrabbling at the mirror.
“You want me to stop?”
She bit her lip, closing her eyes. I took my hand away from the mirror and gripped her chin, tilting her head until she opened them back up again and met my gaze. Her eyes were liquid, desperate.
“Do you want me to stop, Alba?” I rubbed at the gusset of her leggings, heart pounding so hard I wondered if she could hear it.
She sipped in little breaths, and she shook her head.
“You want me to make you come?”
Alba nodded.
“I need your words, princess.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Yes, what?”
She huffed, frustration flashing across her features. “Yes, I want you to make me come.”
The words sent a jolt through me. She was burning hot against my palm, wet enough that I could feel it through her clothing. She was mad as hell—and she wanted me.