Chapter 13
“It was Professor Plum in the conservatory with the pipe!” Annie declared.
“Nope.” Jo flashed Annie the Professor Plum card.
Clue had been one of the only board games still available to check out in the Hotel Bellwether library, but Jo had to admit it was much more fun when she was playing with her friends and their partners over bottles of wine than it was stone cold sober with a seven-year-old.
Annie deflated, tossing her cards down on the coffee table. “I don’t want to guess anymore. What’s a conservatory anyway?”
“It’s a kind of glass room. Some people keep plants in them, or sometimes they sit in there because it’s sunny.”
“Oh. Miles has one of those,” Annie leaned back on the couch.
“Who’s Miles?”
“Mama’s friend. I think he might be her boyfriend.” She twisted her lips up like she’d smelled something sour.
“You don’t want Miles to be your mom’s boyfriend?” Jo asked.
Annie’s eyes widened comically. “Why wouldn’t I want him to be Mama’s boyfriend?” she whispered.
Jo laughed and tossed a throw pillow at Annie, who fell over on the couch, giggling. “You’re the one who made a weird face.”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to know he’s her boyfriend. But he was with her when I called her last night to say goodnight. He kept asking her if things could go in the dishwasher and she kept shushing him.”
“Loading a dishwasher can be complicated,” Jo said, sweeping game pieces back into the box. “My old roommates, Molly and Kyla, were pros at fitting the most things in the dishwasher.”
Annie cupped the side of her mouth and leaned closer to Jo.
Where did kids learn to do shit like that?
No one did that in real life. “Sometimes, Miles and Mama have sleep overs, but Miles comes over late after they think I’m asleep and he leaves really early in the morning before they think I’m awake. ”
Kind of like the sleepover your dad and I had last night?
She’d thought she’d get a repeat performance tonight with Annie headed back out with Kat, but after Derek’s reaction to the guys’ teasing on the beach, she wasn’t so sure.
Focus on the kid you’re supposed to be watching, not the dad you’re not supposed to be banging.
“And why aren’t you sleeping when you’re supposed to be?”
Annie rolled her eyes as though the answer should be obvious. “I like to read under the covers with my flashlight. That’s the best way to read ghost stories, especially the really spooky ones in the books Nico got me for Christmas.”
On the coffee table, Jo’s phone buzzed to life with an incoming video call. “Go make sure your backpack is packed for your sleepover with Kat,” she said, shooing Annie off to her room before flopping down on the couch and swiping open the call.
Immediately, her screen filled with a wobbly image of her friends gathered around a high top at The Rookery. Molly grinned at the screen. "She lives!"
A cheer rose up from their friends and a strange sort of homesickness tugged at her ribs. She wasn’t used to going more than a day without seeing at least one of her friends.
“What is on your face?” Baz asked. Sabrina, his wife, backhanded his stomach, but he only shot her an amused look, as though her halfhearted swat could actually affect the carefully-honed muscles beneath his omnipresent suit.
“Do you like It?" Jo asked, holding her hand under her chin. “Annie wanted to do my makeup.” Her smiling image in the lower corner of the screen stared back at her, bright blue eyeshadow and a wobbly purple smiley face on her cheek. She’d need to wash it off and start over before Derek got back if she didn’t want her face to resemble the pages of a child’s coloring book.
“We saw your reels on Midnight Storm’s social media,” Tessa shouted over the noise of the bar.
“How did you know they were mine?”
“You were tagged in all the captions. They’re really good! So much better than the stuff they were posting before.” Tessa blew a raspberry and flashed a tipsy thumbs down. Her friend was such a lightweight since becoming a mother.
But Jo hadn’t tagged herself in the captions, and she couldn’t imagine who was taking the time to edit the posts to add them—or why.
Still, Tessa’s approval meant a lot. Before the powerhouse pastry chef moved to Aster Bay and married her father’s best friend, Tessa had run a wildly successful Instagram account showing off her culinary creations.
“You didn’t tell us you were at the Hotel Bellwether,” Molly said. “That’s where they filmed Hotter Than Broadway. You have to find the fountain. Send us pictures!”
“I already promised Annie we’d find it tomorrow so she could make a wish,” Jo said.
“So it’s going well? You’re having fun?” Kyla prompted from her perch on her husband’s lap.
“Mmhmm. And I see Gavin’s home,” Jo said. Her friend’s husband raised his drink, some kind of fruity cocktail with a giant orange slice as a garnish.
“Don’t change the subject. We want to know about what’s going on with you,” Tessa said.
“What she means is, have you banged the hot single dad yet?” Hannah asked.
“Shhh.” Jo leaned back, glancing down the hall to be sure Annie was still safely out of earshot. “Annie is right in the other room.”
“That’s a yes,” Ethan muttered and Hannah affectionately stroked her thumb over his jaw. Catching her wrist, he planted a kiss on her palm.
Jo’s chest ached at the display of casual intimacy.
All of her friends had found their person and were barreling headfirst towards their happily ever after and she was—what?
Playing house with the guy she picked up while bartending?
Scraping together side jobs to pay her rent for another few months with no real plan for what came next?
Flitting from thing to thing like she was still nineteen and had all the time in the world?
If her modeling jobs drying up over the last year had taught her anything it was that time was not an infinite resource. No matter how much she liked to dance on bars and act like she didn’t care, her friends were moving on, growing up… and leaving her behind.
“When do we get to meet him?” Sabrina asked.
“You’re not—it’s not like that,” Jo stammered, pulling her thoughts back to their conversation, but the words felt wrong in her mouth. “This is a vacation fling.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t a vacation because you’re working,” Tessa said with a knowing smirk.
“Fine. It’s a work fling. Either way, it’s just for this trip. When it’s over…”
Caleb shook his head, hiding a snort by taking a sip of his drink. “Molly and I know all about work flings that are supposed to end when the trip is over.”
“Lay off, guys. She’s flustered,” Kyla said.
“I am not.” Jo shot to her feet, suddenly needing to move. “I have to get back to work on my work trip.”
They shouted their goodbyes and she disconnected the call, more than a little angry with herself for actually being flustered.
She was Joelle Fucking Baker, goddammit, and she did not get flustered talking about men.
Especially not rich, important, boss-type men who couldn’t have been clearer that there was a time limit on their arrangement—even if he did look at her like—
Do not finish that thought.
She paused her pacing and turned one way and then the other, not sure what to do next and hating the nervous energy suddenly bubbling up inside her.
“Jooooooooooo,” Annie wailed from her room down the hall. “What do you wear to a dance party?”
She sighed, shaking the last of her nerves out of her hands. “Don’t worry, kid. I’ve got you.”
Figuring out what exactly she was feeling about her whole fuck-buddies-with-her-sort-of-boss situation? Screw that. She didn’t have time to obsess over the way he looked at her. She had an outfit to put together.
It looked like someone had taken Annie’s suitcase and shaken it out, clothing flung all across her bedroom. “Annie? Jo?” Derek called.
“In here!” Jo and Annie chorused from the en suite off Annie’s hotel room.
Annie sat on the counter, completely still except for the nervous flutter of her fingers in her lap as Jo twisted sections of her hair and pinned them in place, a mouthful of bobby pins held between Jo’s lips.
She slid the last section of hair into the twisty, twirly hairstyle, loose ends sticking out at odd angles that gave his daughter a sort of wild look that somehow matched the chaotic energy of the seven year-old.
Jo removed the rest of the bobby pins from between her lips and set them on the counter.
“There.” She held up a hand mirror so Annie could see the reflection of the back of her hair in the mirror mounted on the wall. “What do you think?”
Annie flung her arms around Jo’s neck. “Thank you, thank you! It’s perfect!”
Jo smiled, gently folding Annie into a hug and pressing a kiss to the crown of her head, and suddenly Derek couldn’t breathe.
He leaned against the doorway and forced air into his lungs as a vision filled his mind of what it would be like to find them like this all the time.
For Jo to help Annie get ready for special occasions, to come home from work to the two of them hatching plans and creating chaos in the best way.
The kind of chaos that felt like happiness.
He watched them whisper to each other until Annie burst into giggles. The sound unlocked something in his chest, loosening the bands that had been constricting his airflow, her joy somehow making it okay for him to let in his own.
“That’s a pretty dress,” Derek said to his daughter. “I don’t recognize it.”
“It’s Jo’s. She said I could borrow it.”
Derek blinked back his surprise. The dress fell to below Annie’s knees, but on Jo it would have barely covered her ass.
It was a simple shape with short sleeves and a crew neck like a t-shirt but completely covered in iridescent sequins.
A length of silky black fabric that looked suspiciously like one of his neckties had been looped around her waist and tied in a bow at her lower back, cinching in the material.
Annie slid off the counter and gave him an absent-minded squeeze around his waist on her way into her hotel room. He arched a questioning eyebrow at Jo, who simply shrugged and set about cleaning the counter of the scattered bobby pins and tubes of lip gloss.
“She wanted to dress up for the dance party,” she said.
“She’ll be the sparkliest one in the room.”
“Nothing wrong with a little sparkle.” Jo leaned back against the counter, bringing them face to face. Electricity crackled between them. “Fair warning, though,” she added, wetting her lips. “She’ll be finding glitter in strange places for weeks.”
He should have laughed. He told himself to laugh. But now all he could think about was hunting for stray pieces of glitter all over Jo’s body, following the shiny specks like a treasure map.
Before he knew what he was doing, he’d moved farther into the bathroom, crowding her against the counter.
He brushed his fingers over the purple smiley face drawn on her cheek.
He recognized that wonky smiley face. Similar drawings of it adorned his refrigerator and the walls of his office.
He even had a tiny one on a scrap of paper in his wallet for when he was on tour with the band.
His daughter had painted her love for Jo all over her face, marking her the same way she drew the mark inside the front cover of her favorite books.
As soon as his fingers made contact with the mark, Jo pulled back with a self-deprecating laugh. “I got distracted helping her get ready. I wanted to fix my makeup before you got back.”
“You never have to fix your makeup for me.”
She shot him an incredulous look. “Says the man who’s never seen me without makeup.”
Before he could answer, a loud knock at the door and Annie’s excited screech interrupted him.
He heard Annie fling open the front door and greet Kat with a rapid-fire litany of things she had planned for them for the evening.
Reluctantly, Derek joined them. “Peanut, what have I told you about opening the front door?”
“It was just Kat,” Annie said.
“You’re sure this isn’t an inconvenience?” Derek asked Kat.
“Are you kidding me? We’re going to have so much fun.
” Kat scooped up Annie’s backpack. “Nico and Zach are meeting us at the side door to the Carousel Room. Are you ready to make a grand entrance?” Annie jumped up and down, shrieking in delight all over again. Kat laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Thank you,” Derek said.
“You can make it up to me later. I like fancy chocolates,” Kat said with a wink.