Chapter 16 Sarah
SARAH
Like most times up to this point, Cassius told me on relatively short notice to get ready.
It was the day before Thanksgiving, and while we’d spoken some by text since the photoshoot, he’d been strangely distant.
Not in a bad way, not like I felt like he was retreating, but in a way that suggested to me he was grappling with something.
What was obviously anyone’s guess—probably something with his family or me—but I could not glean any specifics from his words or his actions.
That was, up until Tuesday night, when he told me to be ready to spend the next few days at his private home in Wyoming.
When I told him that I had intended to return to Phoenix to be with my dad for Thanksgiving, he said that he’d make sure I was home in time for Thanksgiving dinner.
That meant that we would be taking a flight Wednesday morning, and I’d be back in Phoenix by two p.m. the following day. A quick visit, but…
A curious one.
Unlike Las Vegas, unlike New York City, unlike even the photoshoot, I couldn’t see any professional reason why we’d head to Wyoming.
If we were doing photos of us, sure, it was hard to imagine a more scenic backdrop than what the Grand Tetons and other parts of Wyoming could provide.
But my artwork had never revolved around nature like that, and Cassius made no mention of photoshoots for us out there anyways.
All of this was to say that when I arrived at the private terminal at Reid Airport Wednesday morning, I wanted to see if Cassius gave any hint.
The vehicle I rode in the back of drove right up to his plane, and I emerged to find Cassius standing at the stairs of his plane, arms folded, sunglasses on, wearing a button-down shirt with no tie and a blue jacket.
He looked fucking incredible, but the looks captured my attention only momentarily before something hit me.
I couldn’t even recall Cassius folding his arms. I was no body language expert, but that usually suggested being closed off or cold to someone or something. Cassius had never felt the need to be guarded—until now, apparently.
“Hello,” I said.
“Plane’s taking off in five,” he said. There was something clipped, maybe even nervous, about his voice. “Get in and get comfortable.”
“What are we going to do today?” I said.
Cassius shrugged, not a hint of a smile forming.
“Relax. Take some photos. See where the day takes us.”
This was so unlike Cassius. Now I wasn’t nervous, I was suspicious. Cassius let nothing, life included, take him along for its whims; he took other things along for his whims. Where the fuck was this going?
I got on the plane, got buckled up, and sat across from Cassius. He sat down, crossed his leg, and smiled at me. But the smile wasn’t the controlling, cocky smile. It was… maybe not nervous, but curious, eager to see something.
Were we about to fuck in the air? Was this what he had his hopes up for? I couldn’t help but glance down, trying to see if his arousal had pushed through his pants. There was nothing overt; either he hid it well or I was getting way ahead of myself.
Way, way ahead of myself. I reminded myself that just because the thought of Cassius had brought me to pleasure myself did not mean I owed a fuck to him.
I might not have been an angel who waited until marriage, but I also wasn’t going to just get back in bed with him just because we’d been together long before and had seemingly had some of the tensest moments of our lives together.
“You seem edgy,” he said. “Relax. I’ll have some cocktails brought out to us when we get to a safe altitude.”
“Sure,” I said, though that only reinforced the possibility that we would fuck.
Anything, it seemed, was possible with Cassius Vale.
But despite the cocktails that did indeed show up, we did not fuck. We did not even get out of our seats until we had landed safely on the private runway in Wyoming.
And that was the least of my surprises.
When we got to the car, the valet driver got out, said, “Here you are, sir,” and stepped to the side. Cassius then got in the driver’s seat. Cassius. The billionaire. The man who could pay to have a driver in all fifty states and never sweat a dime of it.
What the actual hell?
“What is this?” I said.
“A vehicle,” Cassius deadpanned.
“You know what I mean.”
“Privacy,” Cassius said.
Now my thoughts went in a very different direction. Was he going to bang me in the car?
But then I laughed. How would that work?
One, it would make for terribly unsafe driving.
Two, if that was his fantasy, I didn’t think the presence of a valet driver who could easily put up his window would deter him.
And three, even if it did, he could just tell the valet driver to walk away while he took me in the much more spacious back.
“I see,” I said, hoping to wave off my laughter as a byproduct of the unusual moment.
I got in the front, buckled up, and took in the scenery of Jackson Hole as we drove toward some sort of distant private resort.
It was chilly outside, and snow capped the mountains, dressing them as if in white gowns for the gala of nature.
Quite the contrast to Vegas, where even the coldest days brought nothing more than above-freezing temperatures and the need for a windbreaker.
It was almost as if Cassius needed the complete opposite type of scenery.
For what end, though? As much as I told myself it was for sex, what if it wasn’t? What if it were for something else?
A loud rumble of thunder disrupted my thoughts.
“Hmm,” Cassius muttered. “I suppose skiing is off the table if the weather is going to be like this. We’ll have to stay inside for the day.”
“Did you plan it like this?”
He looked at me as if I had said I was an alien. He snorted and turned his gaze back to the road.
“I’m powerful and rich, but I don’t control the weather,” he said. “Although perhaps I appreciate that you think I can.”
“Perhaps?”
“I can’t decide if it makes you delusional or just delighted.”
I laughed. And making me laugh even harder—he smirked.
He fucking smirked. And it wasn’t the kind of cocky, “I control you” smirk that he’d worn before.
It almost seemed genuine, like he knew he was making a joke, he knew I would laugh at it, and that brought him delight.
Maybe being out here really was for the best.
A short while later, with thunder still rumbling and lightning now visible in the far distance, though not close enough to be a safety concern, Cassius pulled up to a beautiful mansion, replete with floor-to-ceiling glass windows and mountain and ranch artwork on the inside.
I didn’t even want to fathom how much such a house cost; I could only guess that it was an eight-figure home, and any thought beyond that made my head spin.
Never mind how much value is in the artwork and such inside.
“You might want to grab your bags and hurry inside,” he said. “The storm doesn’t look that far off.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Out here, things happen way more quickly than you’d ever guess,” he said, the corners of his lips curling up ever so slightly—not a smirk, but a flash of one.
I took his advice to heart, grabbed my bags, and headed inside. Indeed, by the time we’d sat down on the couch in his living room—which was probably triple the size of my hotel room—rain had started to pound on the rooftop of the mansion.
“This is the first family home that we bought when we became rich,” Cassius said. “My parents always said Wyoming, Jackson Hole specifically, was their dream house. We didn’t get it until a few years ago, but we had vacationed here when we didn’t have the money that we do now.”
He put his hand on his chin, nodded silently, and sighed.
“I’ve had a lot of good times in this house. Great times with family.”
“With Virgil, too?”
I hadn’t meant to blurt out the sensitive subject. Fuck, that was stupid. Brought all the way out here, away from any prying eyes, and I’d said the one thing I shouldn’t have. Maybe my gut had thought it would be sweet to reminisce.
“Actually, yes,” Cassius said in a surprisingly gentle voice. Well. Maybe my gut wasn’t so stupid. “Well, not this house specifically. But this type of house, when we had good money but not the money we have now. We’d talk about what we’d do when we had the money we do now.”
He whistled, as if in admiration of how much money he had.
“Virgil loved Wyoming, more than any of us ever did, and it’s not like we hated this place,” Cassius said. “He wasn’t quite like the rest of us. He was softer. Gentler. Preferred the slower pace of life to the hustle and the grind the other four of us went for.”
“Yeah?” I said, gradually realizing how I had turned my body to him, had put my head in my hand, was playing with my hair, and was looking only at him.
“Sometimes, I think he was ahead of us,” Cassius said.
He paused for a moment, stood up, grabbed what looked like a bottle of wine from the fridge, poured us each a glass, handed it to me, and sat back down.
Not once did I look away from him. “The end goal we’ve all had was riches and power, perhaps as a way to prevent what happened to Virgil from happening to us.
But it’s going to happen eventually. Hopefully, in like sixty, seventy years, but it will happen.
Maybe there’s something to be said for slowing down. For relaxing. For enjoying.”
This was a side of Cassius I hadn’t even seen when we dated while Virgil was alive. I looked at him expectantly, not sure what to say—if I needed to say anything at all. The topic of Virgil was sweet, nostalgic even right now, but it could go cold so very quickly.