Chapter 1 #2
I'm tired of spending my birthday alone.
I'm tired of pretending I don't want to be touched and taken so hard I forget my name.
I'm tired of being good when being good hasn't gotten me anything except an empty apartment and a cold bed.
I want one unforgettable night where someone makes me feel like I'm worth worshipping.
I want to feel like Cinderella at the ball. That's it. That's my birthday wish.
I read it twice. The honesty of it burns behind my ribs and I feel raw and exposed. It’s a vulnerability I never show anyone in person and sure as hell should not be putting in a text to a man who once asked me if carbs were "a European thing."
I hit send.
The whoosh of the message leaving my phone sounds like a bridge burning.
I grab my glass and pour more wine. A response tonight would require a miracle. Maximus treats communication the way he treats leg day, sporadically and with questionable commitment, so I can probably expect an answer in three to five business days.
I do a double take at my phone when the thing buzzes in under a minute.
My pulse kicks up and I set my glass down. Maximus has never responded to anything in under a minute. The man once took four hours to reply to a question about dinner reservations. I reach for the screen, curiosity and wine making my fingers clumsy against the case.
The message fills the screen and every molecule of air evacuates my lungs.
Tesoro, come to my penthouse. No names. No panties. My rules. Penthouse 106, Redthorne Holdings. Let me make your darkest birthday wishes come true.
My eyeballs stick on one word. Tesoro. Treasure.
Fuck. I am such a sucker for a cute nickname.
And then all the other details hit me simultaneously.
My hand trembles hard enough to rattle the phone against my ring. All the delicious wine I loved a second ago turns to vinegar on my tongue.
I read the message again.
Yeah. No. Those words are not Maximus. Maximus does not use words like darkest. Maximus does not issue commands. Maximus would have responded with a flexing bicep emoji and maybe, if the stars aligned, a complete sentence about how he's "been hitting chest today, hbu."
Come to think of it, I don't know why I even bothered texting him for a hookup.
That thought makes me pause. My gaze drags to the contact name at the top of the screen.
"Oh...fuck me."
I fill my lungs in a rush and blow it out. "Not Maximus." I did not text my muscle head ex.
I texted Massimo.
A fresh wave of air locks in my throat. Heat floods my face so fast my cheeks burn and my ears ring with the sudden rush of blood. My stomach drops through the hardwood and keeps falling into the apartment below.
One letter. One single letter separating the man I meant to text from the man I have been pretending not to want since I was old enough to understand what wanting meant.
I tap open my contacts and... "Fuck me again." I groan and throw myself against the couch cushions. Maximus and Massimo are stacked in my contacts, separated by a single character that three glasses of pinot noir apparently have the ability to erase.
I have had Massimo's number saved in this phone for two years. My father gave it to me 'in case of emergency,' like his best friend's phone number was a fire extinguisher to be mounted on the wall and never touched.
And definitely not for a dick call.
I can picture my father's face if he ever found out.
That slow blink he does when reality offends him, followed by the vein in his temple that only surfaces for catastrophic disappointments.
Harrison, your daughter used the emergency contact to sext your best friend.
He'd need a defibrillator and a new daughter, in that order.
I have opened that contact so many times the screen should be worn thin from my thumb. I sit up and re-read his message. I start to answer but quickly erase, suddenly unable to think of a single word to say that is not hell yes.
I've typed messages to him countless times before, only to end up erasing them.
Typed a different half. Erased that too.
Put the phone face down on my nightstand and pressed my burning cheek into the pillow and told myself to stop being stupid, stop being reckless, stop wanting a man who is twice my age, my father's best friend, and so far out of my league he exists in a different stratosphere of human experience.
And now I have to answer the man who has my nerve endings on fire.
No names. No panties. My rules.
Holy fuck, how do I do this and not get caught?
“That’s the million dollar question, baby.”
Wait. My brain catches on a detail the wine-fog nearly missed. He doesn't have my number. My father gave me his contact two years ago, but Massimo doesn’t have mine. He never needed it. Which means my desperate birthday confession landed on his screen from a number he doesn't recognize.
Oh, this is good. There’s no name attached. No identity. Just a stranger's raw, aching honesty and a phone number he's never seen before.
I think I can use this.
He has no idea he just invited Harrison Whitmore's daughter to his penthouse.
Err… Doubt bubbles up and I can’t help but think I should text him back immediately and apologize. I could explain my mistake. Laugh it off with some self-deprecating joke about wine and similar contact names and the cosmic cruelty of autocomplete.
Yeah… no. Who am I to tell the Universe it made a mistake?
I push to my feet and head to my bedroom on legs that feel borrowed from someone braver.
The brass bed frame catches the light from the hallway and throws it across white linens and the red accent pillow I keep because it matches everything else in my life.
Red heels lined up in the closet. Red lips in the mirror every morning.
Red nails gripping whatever surface keeps me upright when the world tries to knock me sideways.
My vanity waits under the window. Hot rollers, hairspray, liner pencils, the tubes of cherry lipstick arranged by shade from barely-there to stop-traffic.
Every morning I sit at this mirror and I build Sloane Whitmore from scratch.
The victory rolls are modern architecture.
At least that is how Onyx describes them.
My eyeliner and lipstick are the last touch of my war paint. The whole thing is a performance so thorough that most people never look past it to wonder what's underneath. Which is the point. Hide in plain sight.
I consider my options for pulling off a reverse Cinderella.
Maybe tonight, the performance ends for once.
I pull the first bobby pin and the tension at my scalp releases with a sharp, sweet ache.
One by one, the pins come loose, each tug sending tiny prickles across my skin as the structured rolls unwind.
My blonde waves tumble around my shoulders, soft and messy.
I shake my head and the curls fall forward, sweeping across my cheekbones, catching on my eyelashes, half covering my face.
I look like a woman who is ready for a roll in someone's bed and I say good. That's the energy I need tonight.
I drag a makeup cloth across my eyelids and watch the black liner smear across white cotton. The lipstick comes off next, remover stinging the spot on my bottom lip I've been chewing all evening. Cherry stain dissolves until my mouth is just pink, plump yet bare.
The woman in the mirror has freckles and wide baby blue eyes and looks about nineteen without the liner to sharpen her edges. Younger. Softer. Terrified.
I know this face. Not from the mirror. From the floor of a hallway in my father's house when I was fifteen years old.
The memory doesn't crash in the way people think trauma works. It seeps in like a drip of acid you have no control over. It’s a slow bleed through the cracks in the armor I just stripped away, the way it always does when the lipstick is gone and the liner is gone and there's nothing left between me and the girl I used to be.
Back then I used to love sneaking into my father’s business gatherings. I always had a mind for business and my father was proud of that fact. But he warned me his lifestyle was not for me.
I didn’t listen. Not until that night.
It was a warm Wednesday night. The Harrison mansion was packed with men in suits too expensive for the whiskey they drank, laughing too loud about deals daughters like me were never supposed to hear. Society 69 was on many men’s lips. I didn’t know what that meant back then. I do now.
When the jokes got too crude and the hands thought they could touch property they had no right to, I slipped into a side room to escape the noise. One of my father's guards followed me in. A man trusted with access to our home. Trusted with access to me.
His hands were on me before I understood what was happening.
Heavy, rough, smelling like the bourbon he'd been drinking and the gun oil on his palms. I fought him.
I was fifteen and weighed nothing. He was a grown man with one hundred pounds on me and operated with the certainty that comes from knowing nobody is going to stop him.
I close my eyes and the image rushes in, that man pinning me down while I fought back, filling the dark space behind my lids. I can’t stop it now or at any other time. I stopped trying a long time ago.
One minute the brute had his pants open and my skirt around my waist despite my tears. And the next there was nothing over me but the raging face of Massimo Santoro.
The guard was gone, his body slumped against the back wall.
I inhale deeply and let the truth settle over me and calm my nerves. Massimo stopped him. I was safe because of him.