36. Lucas
36
LUCAS
My father’s sitting in my office, his cane resting on his chair, frowning down at the heavily revised contract that McRawlins is now begging to sign. Turns out they have such a bad reputation that nobody wants to work with them. We’re debating whether to work with them or not.
Doesn’t really matter either way. I’m having a very hard time motivating myself to care about business these days.
I glance down at my half-eaten lunch and consider finishing it. Not really feeling up to it. I pick up my tray and dump everything in the trash. Goodbye, filet mignon that tasted like nothing.
My father looks up at me.
“I think I made a mistake,” my father says.
“Only the one?”
“You’re hilarious. You should see if they’ve got room for you at open mike night, in case this whole property development thing doesn’t work out for you.”
“Well, that’s a step up from you pimping me out on OnlyFans. ”
He leans back in his chair. “You’d make more money on OnlyFans.”
“Thanks, I think. So, what mistake did you make?”
“You’re straight up miserable. And it’s because of a woman. I know that look. I know it deep in my soul. Yes, I have one.”
I squint at him skeptically.
“I think I gave you bad advice,” he says. “About women. You and I are different people. Our fates aren’t intertwined. I drove off your mother by being an asshole. That was my choice. I could have dealt with my issues, but instead I made everyone else deal with them.”
“That is true to an extent, but she also is the kind of woman who’d abandon her own child because she was pissed at the child’s father, so maybe she wasn’t such a saint.” The memory of it burns inside me, dark and bitter.
His brows draw together and his forehead wrinkles. “You’re right there. She hurt you, and that is unforgiveable. I think I built her up in my mind and clung to her memory because I didn’t ever want to risk opening myself up again. I always thought I was unlovable, and she proved my point. My story doesn’t need to be yours, though. I don’t want to see you going through life lonely, unhappy and moping. It’s not a good look for you. You can have a relationship. You may have to do some work on yourself, but it’s a damn sight better than going through life alone.”
“Easy for you to say,” I scowl. “Since you’ve already made that decision, so you’re not running the risk of destroying someone else’s happiness.”
He returns my scowl with a challenging stare. “Maybe you’d destroy their happiness more by not being willing to take a chance on them. Where is that stunning young assistant of yours, by the way? The one who never quit, the only one who was able to tolerate your crap?”
“Who knows. Who cares. Probably off dating somebody who makes her happier than than any man ever has before, and eating expensive mac and cheese.”
Not that I’ve been lurking around that deli watching her eat or anything, because that would be weird.
She hasn’t brought a date there with her yet, though, so there’s that.
“Aha.” My father nods in satisfaction. “I knew it.”
“Don’t aha me.”
“Go fix whatever you broke, idiot.”
“Seriously?” I shout. “You think it’s that easy?”
“Of course it’s not easy, you buffoon. If it was easy, nobody would need to write love songs. Go apologize and beg for forgiveness.”
“Sure,” I scoff. “I’ll do that, as soon as you make yourself a dating profile on SeniorMatch.”
“All right, I will,” he huffs.
Yeah, my ass he will.
“Fine,” I glare. “Let’s set up that profile right now.”
“I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself.”
“Yeah, of course you are.” I stand up and cluck like a chicken and flap my arms like wings to emphasize my point. “I’m going out to lunch.”
“You just got back from lunch and threw most of it away.”
“Well, I’m going again.” I stalk over to the door and glance back at him with a fierce glower. “I love you, you insufferable, nagging moron.”
“I don’t even like you. And you’ve got spinach in your teeth. You’d better fix that before you go kiss up to your girlfriend; you’ve already got enough strikes against you.”
Exasperated, I pull out my phone and check using my camera. I do not have spinach in my teeth.
“Made you look,” my father says as he taps away on his laptop, no doubt sending a very snarky response to McRawlins’s latest attempt at groveling his way back into our favor.
_ _ __ _ _
“Serena Lovelace.” It cost me a pretty penny to track her down, but it didn’t take long. I can afford very good private investigators.
She stands there frozen in the doorway of her brownstone, giving me the deer-in-the-headlights look.
She’s back to her Manhattan self, wearing a black Caroline Herrera dress that flares out dramatically at the waist, glossy black pumps, and a black beaded mini-purse shaped like a camera.
“Oh, hell,” she says, her shoulders sagging.
“Hell, indeed. We need to talk.”
“Do we, though?” She sighs as she shuts the door behind her. “If I was going to talk to anyone, it would have been Brooke. I’m going to have to talk to her one of these days anyway. She’s emailed me enough times.”
“And you ignored her?” I say indignantly.
“I haven’t seen anything in the gossip columns linking you two together, so I’m assuming you also ignored her.”
“I did not ignore her!” I splutter.
“Not directly. You gave her some dramatic parting gift that she couldn’t refuse and then vanished.” She looks me in the eye. “You were never just going through the motions with her, were you?”
“Maybe not.”
Serena shakes her head in disgust. “That’s the best you’ve got? You don’t deserve her.”
Frustration swells up inside me. I throw my hands up in exasperation. “I know I don’t deserve her, but I want her anyway.”
“Better,” she says grudgingly. “Fine, come in.”
She opens the door to her brownstone, and I follow her in. She leads me through a foyer into her sitting room, which is tastefully decorated with framed art prints and lots of hanging plants.
“I expected pink velvet sofas and posters of handsome shirtless hunks,” I muse, as I settle down on a gray leather armchair.
“Typical man. And I don’t have shirtless hunks on my covers; I have illustrations.” She sits across from me. “I’m not going to offer you anything to drink, because I don’t want you here that long.”
“I don’t want to be here either, trust me.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“Well, since you’re the queen of romance, I want advice.” I grimace. “And for you to remove the smirk from your face.”
“I can only help you with one of those. All right, tell me every stupid thing you did to mess this up, and I’ll see what I can do to help. For her sake, not yours.”
She sits there with a judgy look on her face, tapping her glossy pink fingernails on the arm of her chair.
My father owes me big time. And this probably isn’t even going to work, because what does Serena know? I’ll humiliate myself for nothing, Brooke will rightfully reject me, and I’ll have nothing to show for it.
But if there’s even the tiniest chance that I can win Brooke back, I will grab for it. I will grovel. I will tolerate Serena Lovelace’s snark a million times over, and I will make a complete idiot of myself, if I have even a microscopic shot of undoing the damage I did with my cowardice.
I explain everything that’s happened since we got back from Green Acres, and she listens intently, nodding.
“Why do you want her back?” she asks.
I open my mouth to snap out something sarcastic, but then I see the look on her face. She’ll kick me out on my ass and never talk to me again. Serena, like Brooke, does not take any crap and will settle for nothing less than the painful, unvarnished truth.
“I want her back because I am in love with her. I love Brooke. I fell for her the first minute I tried to tell her off, and she held up a stapler and told me to do something anatomically impossible with it, and even offered to help me.”
Serena’s mouth curls up in a smile.
“I made her work a crazy schedule so she’d always be around. I thought I was protecting her by not ever asking her out, but I know now I was only protecting myself. Since I broke up with her, I feel like my whole world has turned gray. Food has lost its flavor. I used to look forward to the dumbest things, like doing the dishes, because I could do it with her. I can’t get excited about much of anything anymore.”
I wait for her mocking rejoinder, but she just nods, and some of the hostility in her expression melts away. “I believe you.”
“So do I have a chance?”
“Maybe. I’m going to tell you exactly what to do, and you have to follow my instructions to the letter.”
I lean forward eagerly. “I will do literally anything.”