by Aiden Bates
But had I really expected that it would be this hard?
Not by a long shot. Not even close.
13
Alton
“Shit,” I swore under my breath as I watched him go.
“That’s a bad word, Daddy.” Lizzie toddled out from the hall, startling slightly at the sound of the door closing behind Eliot.
“You’re right.” If I hadn’t been so head-under-water, I would have been embarrassed—I always did my best to watch my words around Lizzie. “I’m sorry, Lizzie. I shouldn’t have used it.”
“It’s okay.” She hopped up onto one of the stools at the kitchen island, swinging her little beslippered feet and rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Mr. Rivers says it a lot. He says it’s a word that adults use when kids are misbehaving and they have to prove that they mean business.”
“Mr. Rivers isn’t a very good role model,” I pointed out, reaching into the fridge to pour Lizzie a glass of orange juice—though I didn’t miss the way her tongue flicked out across her lips as she eyed my coffee.
“Then how come you said it?”
I sighed. “It’s a word that adults use when they’re…frustrated. It’s not a nice word to use.”
“I think I frustrate Mr. Rivers a lot, then.”
“Mr. Rivers isn’t a very nice man.” I placed the glass of juice down in front of her and tried to give her a reassuring smile. It felt more forced than I would have liked.
“Yeah, I wish Eliot was my teacher. He’s much nicer.” Lizzie glanced around, obviously searching for Eliot’s blond head. “Where’d he go?”
“He had to leave, honey.” I bit my lip, heart pounding like a kettle drum. “He was really disappointed that he couldn’t say goodbye, though.”
I’d been so careful about who I’d let into our lives since Patrick’s death—so naturally, the first Omega I’d brought home had charmed Lizzie completely in just one night. If it hadn’t been for the uncomfortableness between Eliot and I that morning—which had been entirely my fault, to my chagrin—I might have even been happy about that. I liked Eliot. I’d liked him from the first moment I saw him—the first moment I’d heard him swear, pounding his fist with such annoyance against that door.
“Is that why you’re frustrated?” Lizzie asked, slurping at her juice.
“A little,” I admitted. “But I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“I’m frustrated too.” A glint of naughtiness flashed in Lizzie’s eyes as she drew in a breath.
“Don’t say it,” I warned before she could repeat the swear.
Her smile grew as she shrugged, clamping her mouth shut again. “Fine. Can I have pancakes for breakfast, then? Eliot promised…”
I opened up the cupboard, finding the flour and sugar. I hadn’t ever been the pancake chef in our home—that had always been Patrick’s job. But for Lizzie, I’d give it a whirl.
“They might not be very good.” I shuffled to the fridge, pulling out a few eggs and some milk. “But sure. I’ll try.”
The pancakes were my second failure of the day, even though Lizzie scarfed them down with an enthusiasm that couldn’t be faked. Her notorious sweet tooth meant that she’d eat just about anything if you soaked it in enough maple syrup. I was sure I’d hear about it from her dentist at the next check-up, but I was grateful that she didn’t mind how misshapen and ugly the pancakes had turned out. I’d already ruined Eliot’s day, though there was no way he could have known why. It would only make me feel worse to have ruined breakfast for my daughter as well.
I didn’t have a chance to really work through my feelings about the mug incident until after I’d dropped Lizzie off at Riley’s studio for her dance class. Which might have been for the best—I couldn’t exactly contemplate my own stupid emotions while I was trying to work Lizzie’s unruly mess of red curls into a French braid. But as I walked the street up to Hayward Financial, I finally got a grasp on what had really happened that morning.
After all—there was nothing more awkward than seeing the first Omega you’d been with since your husband’s death standing in your kitchen the next morning, sipping coffee out of your dead husband’s favorite mug.
The similarities between Eliot and Patrick weren’t exactly abundant, I realized as I took the elevator up to the accounting floor. Eliot had been born rich, for one thing—whereas Patrick had been waiting tables when I first met him, completely indoctrinated to the Michelin Star restaurants and summers in the Hamptons that I’d always been accustomed to. It was impossible to mistake Eliot’s thick, sleek blond hair for Patrick’s impossible shade of red. Even their builds were different. Patrick had been so slender, lithe—a little nerdy looking, even. It was what I’d called him when we first started dating. My little Poindexter. We’d laughed about it together almost daily those first few months, the way every other Alpha in town was chasing after musclebound Omegas without two brain cells to rub together and there I was, courting the only Omega in New York City who preferred going to the library instead of the gym.
But then there was Eliot. Eliot with muscle to spare—he must have spent half his life in the gym to achieve that incredible six-pack of his. Eliot, with the body of a Greek sculpture—no, the body of a Greek god. He was gorgeous, sharp and brilliant. Not exactly the kind of idiot that Patrick and I used to make fun of, but exactly the kind of Omega that had always made Patrick feel insecure.
It felt like a kind of betrayal, all the things I felt for Eliot. The same things I’d felt for Patrick once, back when we thought that we’d have fifty years together instead of just the scant two. The wave of emotions I felt for both of them now left me reeling, all tangled up together like fish caught in the holes of the same deep-trawling net.
Could I be with Eliot, after everything that Patrick and I had been through together? Could I find some way to reconcile it all, the guilt I felt over Patrick’s death and the remorse I felt for not being able to give Eliot more?
Maybe, I decided as I sat myself down with Hayward Financial’s books for the last quarter. I certainly wanted to. It had been the last thing Patrick had said to me, his hand clenched in mine as the doctors and nurses rushed around the room in an ordered panic.
Take care of our daughter. Be happy, he’d said. I love you. Be happy. It left my throat tight, sinuses burning as I remembered the eagerness that he’d said those words with. In his last breath, as the doctors failed to save him and a nurse carried our crying infant daughter out of the room, Patrick’s only wish for me had been happiness. Even as he’d realized that he wouldn’t be there to be a part of that happiness. Not anymore. Even though I’d known that if I lost him, I’d never be happy again.
It settled into my stomach, a grim realization of the world of pain I’d trapped myself in after I’d kissed Patrick’s lips for the last time. I’d taken care of our daughter. I’d given her the best of everything that I could provide for her. But happy? Happiness had seemed so far away from me for so long that it was hard to admit that I’d finally started feeling it again. Feeling it with Eliot. The Patrick-sized hole in my heart was finally starting to patch up. Fill in. It was starting to heal, all thanks to the gorgeous, charming Omega I’d met, then lost, then met all over again.
I’d been clinging to my grief for too long, I knew. Not for Patrick’s sake, but for my own. If he’d been there that morning in spirit, he would have knocked me on my ass for the way I’d treated Eliot. For being so fucking awkward over a stupid, ceramic mug. For taking it away from Eliot, and driving Eliot away from my life right along with it.
Be happy, Patrick had told me, and I’d spent the last five years insistently doing anything but. Self-sabotage wasn’t usually my style—generally, that was more of Hayward’s thing. But I knew that if I wanted to honor Patrick’s memory—not the silly, tragic, idealized one I’d been holding onto all these years, but his real memory, the one that had wanted nothing but my happiness…
“Shit,” I swore, my eyes falling over a bad set of numbers jus
t as the full brunt of my mistake came crashing down on me all at once. I’d told Lizzie just that morning that I shouldn’t have sworn, but in that moment, I couldn’t think of a more appropriate thing to do in the least.
Calling the mug incident and my failed pancake recipe my biggest fuck-ups of the day didn’t even come close to the fuck-ups I’d been making repeatedly. Over and over again. For years, and years, and years.
The first fuck-up, obviously, had been ever trusting Hayward to begin with. As I scrolled through our expense reports, the numbers I’d so diligently processed and recorded, checked and double-checked, I could see exactly where Hayward had sent his goons in accounting to doctor things up. My eyes should have been the last to survey every fucking decimal in our systems—but the numbers had been fudged before they’d even come to me, and they’d been shifted again, even more egregiously, once I’d signed off on them and sent them away from my desk.
No wonder the goddamn Feds were ready to bring us to our knees. The stats we’d been reporting to our shareholders had been botched from the start, then botched all over again before we turned them over to the IRS with our quarterly taxes. I opened the tab where our accountants logged changes and spotted the culprit immediately—John Simmons, a slick-looking, scowling bastard of a man with a long track record of spousal abuse and shady business dealings I hadn’t wanted to hire to begin with. A man Hayward had gone behind my back and hired anyway. Insisted on.
Now, I knew exactly why. He’d walked a clever little tightrope as he’d processed our financial statements, sending one thing to the shareholders to imply profits and growth, then a completely different thing off to the government, helping Hayward dodge as many taxes as he could. Every financial statement I’d poured my energy into, Simmons had gone in and underwritten as soon as it had left my desk. They’d both painted me a complete fool in the process, to the point that I was hardly Hayward Financial’s CFO at all. Simmons was really running the show when it came to the company’s financial state—I was just Alton fucking Palmer, the honest-looking face they could put on the tin to cover up whatever rancid things were contained inside it.
They’d played me—both of them had. It was my reputation holding the company afloat in the public, and Simmons’ underhanded cleverness that was holding it together in practice. The actual state of Hayward Financial, once I’d crunched the numbers, was so fucking abysmal that it was a wonder we were even still in business.
And if our dinner with Mickey Montgomery that Saturday didn’t go as planned, we certainly wouldn’t be for long.
I groaned, pushing my chair away from the desk and pinching the bridge of my nose between my fingers with frustration. Shit didn’t even cut it. Shit was what you said when you accidentally knocked over your coffee onto the morning paper. Forgot your wallet on the way to dinner. Stubbed your toe.
The correct word for this situation was fuck. A big, nasty, blatant fuck. I’d been pouring myself into Malcolm Hayward’s disaster of a company ever since Patrick’s death, when what I really should have been doing was exactly what Patrick had asked me to.
Be happy, he’d told me. My second greatest fuck-up of the last five years. He’d told me to be happy, and I’d shut myself away from love. From feeling anything at all. For years, and years, and years of my life—and I’d dumped all of that energy into a company that would be bankrupt by the end of the year anyway.
I’m sorry about this morning. I fired off the text to Eliot so fast, I didn’t even stop to think of a more clever way to spell out my apology. Let me buy you lunch and explain?
I didn’t know what I was staring at harder after I sent it: the mess of the company’s financial reports on the computer screen in front of me, or the reflection of my face in my phone screen while I waited for Eliot’s response.
In a way, it didn’t matter what Eliot said. If I didn’t sort things out with Hayward Financial and the Feds, there wouldn’t be any room for dating at all—or fatherhood for that matter. Not with the company in shambles. Hell, if Hayward went down, I could even be facing jailtime—for the very thing I thought I’d been hired to prevent.
I couldn’t exactly prove to Eliot that things could work between us from behind bars. There’d be no more pastrami sandwiches. No more strolls in the park. No more bookstore coffees. No more tender moments together where I could show him how much he mattered to me and how sorry I was. And I certainly couldn’t be a father to Lizzie if I was locked away in some white-collar prison upstate.
But now that I’d seen the real state of finances at this company, I was faced with another problem entirely. If Mickey Montgomery really did come through for us and the Feds didn’t sink Hayward Financial, would we really be able to survive Wall Street without Simmons cooking the books? I’d have my work cut out for me there—and so would Hayward, for that matter.
And even then…what happened when Hayward realized exactly how much work doing business on the straight and narrow really was? What happened when he decided to dispatch Simmons to doctor up our accounts, just like he had last time? What was there to stop him from doing it again?
When Eliot’s reply finally buzzed in, my heart nearly stopped—then, once I read it, I felt my fucking stomach turn.
Busy at the Ballroom. I’ll see you Saturday, Alton. Have a good week.
14
Eliot
There was nothing more sinister for a single Omega than becoming a dinner date.
I said my goodnights at the Ballroom early on the Saturday of the dinner. Foster had agreed to shift my set to the beginning of the night, only grumbling slightly about losing my talent for the closing number, and I headed home dutifully to shower, shave and put on enough deodorant to avoid sweating myself through my beautiful new tailored suit. But it didn’t seem to matter how well I cleaned myself up for the evening—by the time I shrugged the suit jacket on over my shoulders and fumbled my tie together, I couldn’t help but feel dirty in the clothes Alton had bought for me anyway. Who would have thought that in one perfect night, I’d actually believed for a moment that things would come together for Alton and me? That it would only take one awkward morning to pull them all apart?
I couldn’t back out of the dinner. Not knowing what I knew about Alton’s situation—the one that his idiot, asshole of a boss had put him and his company in. Alton wasn’t working to save his own skin. He wasn’t that kind of man. What he was doing was working to save the jobs of everyone in Hayward Financial—and he couldn’t do it without a partner. Couldn’t do it without me.
It just hurt, I supposed, knowing that if he’d had his pick, however much he might have liked me, he would have wanted Patrick there more.
There was no pretending that I wasn’t enamored with Alton’s cause. On some level, I felt like it was just as much my burden as it was his. If there was ever any chance for redemption after my parents ran their own company into the ground, it was helping Alton save his own.
On another level, it had never been about redemption in the first place. It had been about him—about the way he made my stomach flutter and the way I felt about myself when he was around. I’d been cast out of the high society world that Alton inhabited the moment my parents lost their fortune. After, I never thought I would feel comfortable in that world ever again.
But Alton wasn’t like my parents. Not really. Not at all. He didn’t flaunt his wealth just for the hell of it. There was no keeping up with the Joneses for Alton Palmer—hell, Alton probably owned the Joneses when it came to high-society New York. He hadn’t tried to woo me like my rich idiot ex had, though. Hadn’t offered me money or fame, a Broadway career or a house in the Hamptons.
No, what Alton had done was all the more tempting—and all the more terrifying for it. He’d brought me into his life in the most intimate of ways. Introduced me to his daughter. Made us dinner. Shown me a side of him that I was so sure so few people ever had the opportunity to see. Not Alton Palmer, old money CFO and Wall Street fat cat, but Alton Palmer,
single father of one. He’d broken down every misconception I might have had about him without even knowing it—and in the process, he’d made me fall in love. Not with him, maybe. Not yet. But with the adorable daughter that Patrick had given him. With the coziness and warmth of his penthouse apartment. The idea of being a part of something—of having some sense of family again.
But it wasn’t my family to have. Alton was so obviously still in love with his late husband. And me—I was just the bastard who came crashing into this life that they’d built together, wanting it for myself and knowing all the while that it never could be.
I couldn’t be in a relationship where I’d spend every moment haunted by Patrick’s ghost. It was bittersweet, given how much I cared about Alton and Lizzie both, but it was true. Alton’s late husband had left shoes in that home that I wasn’t sure I could ever fill.
But God, if I didn’t want to fill them anyway. If Alton had walked to my apartment that night dressed in his ugliest dad sweater, taken me out for burgers at a diner and a stroll in Central Park, I could have forgiven it all in an instant. Helped him grieve. Maybe someday found that, while I couldn’t fill Patrick’s shoes in the slightest, there was still room for mine nestled by his door.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the night for that. The moment I spotted Alton’s Tesla pulling up outside my building, I made my way to the elevator with an unrelenting tightness in my chest.
This wasn’t a night for making up, making nice, making love. Alton was going to battle for his company—it was apparent in everything from the cut of his suit to the way he’d slicked back his ruddy brown hair into a perfect, wolfish coif.
And me?
One way or another, I’d be going into battle with him. By his side. Whether I felt good about it or not.
“Eliot,” he breathed, running his fingers through his hair and blinking as he took me in. “You look…”