Puck Daddies (Reverse Harem Daddies #12)

1. Meg

MEG

The text from Luke pings while I’m still wiping espresso dust off the prep counter. Dress sexy. Surprise date. No emoji, no hint beyond that.

Typical. With Luke, surprises are either champagne and city views from a rooftop no one else can get to or…disasters. Confetti or shrapnel.

It’s a rainy night—the kind where the sky sits low on the city like a wet wool blanket—and the neon “Bea’s” sign turns the puddles honey-colored. I click the lights off, pocket the keys, and try to pretend my pulse isn’t doing its nervous hummingbird thing.

I love my coffeehouse most when it’s empty.

The chairs turned upside down make the room look like a forest of legs, and the faint sugar smell from today’s drinks clings to the air.

Aunt Bea used to say the after-hours quiet was the sound of a day’s work settling, the way a hive buzzes softer when the foragers come home.

I press my palm to the edge of the counter and feel the steady grain of the wood she sanded herself. I tell her photo on the back wall I’ll be back early to meet the dairy delivery and that yes, I’ll finally fix the sticking hinge on the back door.

Then I go to Luke’s palatial glass box of a home and try to become “sexy.”

The guest bathroom—the one I use because the master bath makes me feel like an intruder in my own life—has lighting that’s kind to my peachy pale skin.

I pick the black silk slip dress that makes my collarbones look like I know how to be languid and unbothered.

As if. Heels too, even though I’ll regret them by midnight.

I twist my brown hair up, let a few curls loose, and spritz the honey-vanilla perfume I keep for special nights.

By the time I come downstairs, the storm has settled into a steady drumbeat on the floor-to-ceiling windows. Luke stands in front of one, whiskey in hand, in a suit the color of midnight. He looks like money and drive and a magazine spread about “Baltimore’s Thirty Under Thirty.”

When he turns, he smiles at me the way he smiles at the camera at dealership ribbon cuttings—practiced and bright. “There she is,” he says, and kisses my cheek like I’m a client he can’t wait to upsell.

“Where are we going?” I ask, because we always do this dance—he says surprise, I pretend I like surprises. Romance, I suppose.

“You’ll see.” He finishes the whiskey, sets the glass down without looking, and holds out my coat.

It’s one of his favorite things, wrapping me in expensive warmth, steering me toward the door like I’m a car he’s putting in gear.

He likes steering. He likes knowing exactly how a night will go.

He doesn’t like when I improvise. I’ve learned not to.

Lately, we’ve both learned not to. That’s the problem.

We ride the elevator down together in a silence that feels almost polite.

It’s been like that since I moved in three months ago.

Easy mornings, separate screens at night, the weight of our choices sitting primly between us like a chaperone.

I tell myself we’re comfortable. This is a mature relationship.

Is everyone in a mature relationship this bored?

After choosing tonight’s ride—the Porsche—he pulls into the rain-slick street with the confidence of a person who never hydroplanes. The city blurs past in wet, electric streaks. When we hit the highway, he asks, “Have I mentioned how good you look?”

“You have now.”

He reaches over and squeezes my knee. It’s warm, familiar. It’s the touch I imagine women in commercials for luxury sedans practice in acting class. Luke is handsome. He’s smart. He’s the kind of man who gives to charity in the afternoon and knows the speakeasy password at eleven p.m.

I know how lucky I am.

A mansion rises out of the dark up ahead.

Valets in black hold big umbrellas and move like choreography.

A woman in a velvet cloak checks names on a tablet just inside the heavy front doors.

A chandelier the size of a compact car drips crystal over a marble foyer that makes my heels sound like promises.

It’s like something out of an expensive dream.

The word bubbles out of me. “Wow.”

“Right?” Luke is pleased. Pleased with the choice. Pleased to bring me here. Pleased with the way other people’s heads turn when he shrugs out of his coat. We hand our phones to a discreet man who slips them into velvet pouches and locks them with a small device.

I don’t like it, but when you’re surrounded by the cream of the crop, no one wants a faux pas posted online.

We walk through double doors into a room I could write poems about—dark wood, carved moldings, a fireplace the size of Bea’s back door, clusters of low seating—and the poems evaporate, replaced by a cartoon “Halt!” sign in my brain.

It’s a party. It’s very glamorous. And it’s absolutely, unmistakably, a sex party.

I’m not na?ve. I don’t clutch pearls. I’ve been twenty-six for long enough to know adults do what they want with other consenting adults, and I’m truly happy for them. But the moment my eyes catch up with the scene, my stomach drops through the marble.

There are masks. There’s a woman on a fainting couch wearing a lace bodysuit that seems like a legal loophole.

There’s a man getting his tie loosened by someone whose nails look like tiny swords.

Voices hush in the way voices do when a conversation’s center of gravity is below the waist. In a corner, a curtain is pulled back just enough for the suggestion of movement, and a laugh like a bell rings out, then cuts off.

I stop. Luke doesn’t at first, then feels me still and turns, smile already loading. “Meg,” he says, like my name is a leash. “Remember the thing we talked about last month?”

“We talked about Italian restaurants and winter tires.”

“The other thing.” His eyes are bright. He loves when he thinks he’s about to expand my world. He loves being a tour guide.

“The other… Luke.” I keep my voice low because it seems to be the vibe, but also because my throat has gone tight. “This isn’t a—this isn’t a dinner.”

“No, babe.” He grins. “It’s an experience.”

“Luke. I am not into this.”

He tilts his head. “You haven’t even tried.

Come on.” He gestures to a side room with velvet curtains where people are laughing.

His hand slides to my back, the spot between my shoulder blades he touches when he’s moving me.

“You keep saying we’re stale. We’re not stale, Meg.

We’re…comfortable. Which is fine. But this—this could be good for us. ”

“I said things felt flat after I moved in. I said I missed us dating, not…this.” I sweep a hand, and immediately worry I’ve been rude. The woman with the sword nails glances at me, expression bored and kind.

“Lots of couples start here,” Luke says. “Same page and all that.”

“I don’t want this.”

“You used to be more adventurous.”

I swallow a laugh because it’s either that or bite him. “I spent Wednesday night blindfolded while you narrated a car auction.”

“And you didn’t like it.” He makes a face that says, see?

“I didn’t like the blindfold. The auction was fine.” I try to smile. “You have a very soothing voice when you explain depreciation curves.”

“This will be better,” he says, sure the way he’s sure about APRs. “You’re safe. There are rules. You always say you like rules.”

“I like the idea of rules. I like knowing we’re on the same page.” I’m stalling; I know I am. My heart is thudding that fast-slow that means my body wants out and my brain is still making a pro-con list.

He leans closer. He smells like whiskey and cedar and the cologne I once told him makes him smell like a library in a snowstorm.

He kisses the corner of my mouth, then my jaw, one hand warm at the nape of my neck.

My body—traitor—arcs toward the heat I know.

“We can just watch. We’ll have a drink. We’ll see if anything feels good.

If not, we leave. We can leave whenever you want. ” A salesman to his bones.

It’s a reasonable pitch. I know it is. Even if I want to peel my skin off and run. But I’ve been trying to make things work with him, and I’ve invested a lot of time into this relationship. I can step out of my comfort zone for him. “One drink.”

“Atta girl,” Luke murmurs, and the words hit something old inside me, something that likes gold stars, that used to bring Aunt Bea handwritten menu drafts like a report file.

He guides me to the bar and orders for both of us without asking, which normally makes me want to pinch him, but right now I need my hands for the glass.

The first sip loosens something. The room grows less sharp, the edges softened by more than just the light.

A woman in a mask shaped like a moth flutters near us, smiles, drifts away.

A couple at the end of the bar laughs, heads together like the dirty version of a rom-com still has a meet-cute. This is fine, I tell myself.

I’m halfway through the drink when I feel the temperature in the room change the way you feel a storm move over water. The fine hairs on my arms lift. The back of my neck knows before my eyes do. And then she’s there, like the universe decided I didn’t have enough plot.

“Meg,” she purrs, and I freeze so completely I feel my heartbeat pulse against my eyes.

Callie.

She’s in red satin because of course she is.

She smiles at me the way she used to across Bea’s pastry case when we were in high school and she insisted she had “dibs” on the lunch rush tips because she was saving for textbooks.

She used to borrow my sweaters and never return them.

She used to be the girl Bea called “the daughter I never had,” and I told myself it didn’t bother me because I was the actual daughter (adopted, but close enough).

“Callie,” I manage.

She places a hand on Luke’s lapel like she’s adjusting him, and he looks down at it like it’s an honor. “Come on, Meg,” she says, bright and intimate. “Let’s show our man a good time.”

The words clang in my skull. “ Our man?”