Seducing Her Rival

by Seleste deLaney

  One box left.

  And another weekend with another picture of Lucas and the gorgeous blonde had her pulling it from the depths of her closet. She had the ribbon torn free and was on her way to Kelsey’s room when the lid slid off and the contents spilled to the floor in a bright blue puddle.

  She bit her lip hard enough she tasted blood.

  Then she picked up the T-shirt from the floor, holding it in front of her. Even a month later, she recognized it instantly: the stupid fifty-dollar shirt he bought when they met. Without thinking, she brought it to her face and sucked in the faded hints of cologne.

  It even smelled like him.

  She collapsed onto the floor and sobbed.

  The box made it into the trash, and Kelsey didn’t say a word about the contents. The shirt somehow found its way under Mercedes’s pillow.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Thanks again, Alycia. You’ve been a lifesaver these past few weeks.” Lucas sipped his drink while she talked on the other end of the line. “Yeah. You’re free and clear this weekend. And please, tell your boyfriend I really appreciate it. Talk to you later.”

  He thumbed off the phone and laid it on the bar. No more calls tonight. He wouldn’t have made this one if not for the fact that he needed to let Alycia know he’d bowed out of the party this weekend and didn’t need her to be his “date.” Funny how no one bothered to question a woman who popped up on his arm and then disappeared until the next event.

  Actually it was a good thing or they’d find out she was in Colorado running her family’s sporting goods store.

  After the cruise, the prospect of dating made Lucas sick to his stomach, so he’d called her up and begged a favor. He’d known her since college and stayed connected in that way where they rarely talked but fell right back into old patterns when they did. She hadn’t hesitated to say yes after he told her what he needed. Considering he’d once punched out a guy who’d tried to drag Alycia upstairs at a frat party, she said she owed him a lot more than a few public appearances.

  She made it so he was no longer quite so eligible, even if he was still a bachelor.

  And that meant it was safe for him to be pathetic and moon over Mercedes Vega.

  He flopped onto his couch and pulled the cruise pictures up on his laptop. He’d bought every one the ship photographer had snapped of the two of them. Those added to the ones from his phone…weren’t nearly enough. God, he missed her.

  With the thought, he threw back what was left in his glass.

  After the first week of pathetic longing when he’d been home alone at night, he decided he had to stop it. So he’d made it a drinking game. Every time he thought about missing her, he had to do a shot of cheap-ass, nasty tequila. He hated the crap enough it actually worked as a deterrent, but sometimes he still slipped.

  When that happened, he found himself absently searching the web for news from Better Todays. Like he was doing right now. Certain his search would come up with the same results as always, he pushed the computer away. Then his eyes caught on a link to an auction site. He clicked on it and read.

  Apparently, Mercedes had finally opened all his gifts—and was auctioning them off for the charity, which still wanted to build better, safer playgrounds for the less-affluent boroughs in honor of someone named Marco Belluci.

  Lucas frowned at the screen. Mercedes had mentioned a Marco—the kid who had asked her to do the rock wall and zip-line. Not really sure why he did it, Lucas typed the kid’s name into the search bar. A couple things popped up for high school activities—robotics and science club. Then…

  “Local Boy Shot in Drug Deal Gone Wrong”

  The headline stunned him sober. It was from seven years ago. Dreading what he’d find, Lucas read on.

  In the hours just before mothers in Queens call their kids in for the night, eight-year-old Marco Belluci was doing what a lot of kids his age do—playing at the local park. Unfortunately, while chasing after his baseball, he ran into a group of people who did not want him in their business. In what police are calling a drug deal gone bad, Marco was shot. He is currently listed in critical condition though the exact location is being withheld for his privacy and protection.

  The only witness to the crime was college student, Mercedes Vega. The witness had a small amount of marijuana in her possession and was held overnight for questioning…

  Suddenly all the times Mercedes mentioned how important the playground was and how kids in Queens needed a safe place to play made sense. This hadn’t been just a job she was passionate about. This was about healing from a past that had to torture her on a daily basis. The playground was more painfully personal to her than Rosie’s school had ever been for him.

  He searched for information on the boy, finding little other than that he’d survived. The years since the article meant he’d be a teenager now. A teenager that, from the sounds of it, Mercedes had been seeing at the charity for years.

  God. No wonder she’d hated him for moving on the property.

  This was the world she lived in. It wasn’t one of nannies and private schools and summers in the Hamptons. He scrubbed at his face, feeling both numbing guilt and a fire building in his gut.

  The school was already gathering applications from interested students, and the building process was too far along to halt. But there had to be a way for him to fix this. Maybe a couple ways.

  Jumping off the couch, he grabbed his phone and dialed. “Hey, Donovan, I need you to get a meeting scheduled for tomorrow with the legal team that’s handling the new school as well as the head administrative staff we hired.” He paused long enough to chuck the bottle of tequila in the trash. He didn’t need it anymore. “That’s right. I want everyone who can be there in the room. Some stuff needs to get ironed out ASAP so I can get word out to the press. Thanks.”

  His mind rolled through the possibilities. Ditching booze for the night, he grabbed a bottle of water from his fridge and brought his laptop in from the other room. Setting it on the black granite bar, he pulled up a stool and got to work, searching for the perfect place.

  The bottle of water gave way to an order of take-out Chinese and an iced coffee as he typed details into a spreadsheet and cross-referenced locations and prices. It was after ten at night when he had the beginnings of a plan, but he needed someone else’s approval before he would move forward.

  Lucas snatched the business card from the depths of his wallet and tapped the number into his phone, praying she’d still be awake.

  “Hello, unknown number, whatever you’re selling, I’m broke and can’t afford it. If you’re a charity, be prepared to give me the proper name and spelling of your organization so I can look you up. On the off chance you’re neither of those…hi.”

  “I’m neither. My name is Lucas Bellamy, and I have a proposition for you. Can you meet me for lunch tomorrow?” After a stunned silence, details were hammered out and he went to bed, getting the best night’s sleep he’d had in weeks.

  The next morning passed in a flurry of meetings and phone calls and headaches. He watched the clock through the last hour in the boardroom as people blathered about some company he already said he wanted to buy.

  The meeting ended with ten minutes to spare, leaving him just enough time to nod his way out of the room, grab his sports coat, and take the elevator downstairs. Five different secretaries tried to stop him on his way out of the building.

  Considering what was on the line right now, nothing less than death or imminent economic collapse was more important. He strode past couriers and business people and power-walkers on his way to the pub. By the time he got there, he was overheated and nervous as hell.

  The dim lighting inside left him almost blind for a minute as he searched the tables and booths, looking for some sort of sign. A tall woman unfolded herself from a spot near the back and waved him toward her.

  Light brown hair cut in a long, angled bob framed her face. She tilted her head to the side and arched an eyebrow a
t him as she reached out her hand. “I’ll let you know if it was a pleasure to meet you after you tell me why the hell I’m here, Mr. Bellamy. Because if it’s not for a damn good reason, you’ll have more to contend with than a drink down your shirt.”

  He took her hand and shook it, wondering how a woman three inches shorter than him could be so damned intimidating. “Put your claws away, momma bear. If we don’t want the same thing, I give you permission to kick my ass to the curb, and I’ll still pay for your lunch.”

  A faint smile curled up the corners of Kelsey Martindale’s full lips as she sat back down. “You know Mercedes would kill me if she knew I was here with you.”

  …

  Mercedes didn’t bother taking off her jacket when she stepped through the door. She did, however, kick off her heels and trade them for sneakers. Her hours filing paperwork on oil changes and brake jobs might be over, but work at Better Todays was just getting started for the night. “Hey, chica, I’m home. You said there were flyers to put up?”

  Grinning like hanging flyers was her absolute favorite way to spend a Friday night, Kelsey grabbed her coat and a stack of papers. “Let’s go. How was your day, anyhow?”

  Forcing a smile, Mercedes followed Kelsey through the door and back out into the dwindling sunlight. Spring was in the air—rebirth, renewal, and all that ridiculous stuff—but she felt exactly the same as she had since the cruise…miserable. “Fine. You?”

  “Fantastic. Excited about Eva moving in this summer.”

  Good. Conversation was good. It meant she wouldn’t wallow in her thoughts too much. “She could still get her dream job, you know.”

  Kelsey whacked her arm with the papers. “Stop it. My sister is graduating and beyond excited to be the new face of Better Todays.”

  Excited. Sure. Every new college grad would be over the moon for a job that paid minimum wage for less than half the hours you actually put into it. Sadly, if they wanted to make things happen, that was as much as they could afford to pay themselves.

  Letting out a quiet sigh, Mercedes grabbed half the flyers from Kelsey and started mindlessly tacking them to street signs and fences. A real charity wouldn’t need to do things this way. They’d have something a lot more efficient in place than two women and a bunch of kids running around the city putting up pieces of paper and hoping someone saw them. Those places the rich people gave their money to didn’t work like this.

  It was getting harder and harder to find joy in their operation when she knew there was a better way. One they couldn’t afford by a long shot. The two of them ducked inside a convenience store with community boards on both sides of the entrance and, as she pinned up the pale blue paper, Mercedes caught sight of the words: School of the Arts.

  No. Hell no.

  “Kels,” she said between clenched teeth, “why are we advertising for Lucas Bellamy’s new school?”

  Giving an exasperated roll of her blue eyes, Kelsey walked over and lifted Mercedes’s finger to point at a single word on the flyer: scholarships. “Abby’s mom found out they’re offering a bunch of need-based scholarships to kids with talent and suggested we put the flyers up. I know we had other plans for the land and you aren’t Bellamy’s biggest fan, but we started this charity to help out the kids. These scholarships could mean the difference between someone going to an art school and spending their talent tagging buildings or abandoned cars.”

  The kids. She needed to think about them and how this could give them a way to build a better life. She did not need to think about Lucas or how she still slept with his shirt next to her so she could smell the hints of his cologne…still smell him. Or how he seemed to be trying to help, even with his stupid, rich-kid school.

  Focus. On little Abby and her dancing. On Matthias and his painting. On Jesse’s poetry and music. On all the others who might not have to give up their dreams in order to serve meat at the neighborhood deli.

  Better. With a less-forced smile, she nodded and headed out the door. At the corner, Kelsey turned left instead of right toward the middle school. “We aren’t hanging them at the school?”

  “Marco and the boys already hit that side, so I thought we could go this way.” Kelsey had walked ahead and didn’t look back when she said it.

  Mercedes tried not to think about how much Marco had to hurt when they’d finished papering the neighborhood. One time, he’d taken off his forearm crutches in front of her, and he’d practically fallen onto their couch. No matter how many times she told him not to push himself like that, all he ever did was laugh at her and remind her he was fifteen and “didn’t really need another mom, thanks.”

  No lectures this time. She just wanted it done. Once they got the papers up, she could go back to forgetting about Lucas and be happy. Or at least she’d be happy once she managed to let go of that stupid T-shirt.

  “Hey, how did the auction do anyway?” After giving the gifts from Lucas to Kelsey, she’d stayed hands-off for the prep-work and weeks of bidding in order to work on healing.

  “Great. It was kind of interesting, one bidder ended up taking everything.”

  “That’s…odd.” Mercedes glanced down the street, verifying their location. The tall temporary fencing to her left hadn’t been there the last time she was in the area. “What’s going on? Didn’t there used to be a bunch of houses here?”

  “Yeah. They were scheduled for demo because they were falling down, and then it got delayed when the cops found a meth lab in one of them…”

  Mercedes remembered the case. Everything was done, but the buildings had stood for almost a year after. “Glad to see the city finally took care of it.”

  “Wasn’t the city. An investor bought up the property and must have greased a lot of palms in the process to get things moving so fast. Demolition happened a few weeks ago and then they jumped on cleanup.”

  An investor?

  “What do you—” Mercedes froze, unable to move or even speak anymore when Kelsey turned and walked through a break in the fence. On the other side of the opening stood Lucas Bellamy.

  Her heart clenched. He’d lost weight, and the Van Dyke beard had grown to a face full of scruff, but his eyes sparkled at her like they had the very first time she’d seen him. As she stood there panicking, he gave a wan smile that tore her up.

  Run to him.

  Run away.

  “No more running, chica,” she whispered to herself. Squaring her shoulders and standing as tall as she could manage, she raised her voice. “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, you see, there was this woman I knew. She had a fantastic plan to make life better for a bunch of kids. Turned out she was trying to fix something beyond the obvious, but her plan cost a shit ton of money she didn’t have. More, actually, than she thought she needed.”

  “So, you’re here to rub it in my face that you won and I lost?” Why had Kelsey gone through the opening? Listening to Lucas taunt her for her failure wasn’t going to solve anything. Hell, she’d go home and burn the damn T-shirt. Mercedes took a step backward, ready to leave without her best friend.

  “Never.”

  The single word made her pause, balanced between the world without Lucas and the one where he stood right in front of her. “What did you say?”

  “I would never do that. I’m here to show you something.” He waved her toward the opening. “I promise, I won’t bite.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “You’ve said it before too.”

  And she’d bitten. Damn it, was she going to be forced to relive every mistake she made with him? Sucking in a deep breath, she stepped through the opening. Ten feet beyond the rickety wooden fence stood a metal arched trellis with its top covered by a sheet. Pots full of daisies and forget-me-nots were planted in front of it to either side of the opening. Behind the display stood Kelsey, Marco, and a slew of the kids who had worked with them throughout the past year. And beyond them was about three acres of land cleared of everything that had screame
d “city.” Trees were planted and tied upright, and grass had started to take hold.

  Mercedes swallowed hard, her gaze shifting from one face to the next, taking in their grins but comprehending none of it. “What is this, Lucas?”

  “Well the daisies mean love and loyalty and the forget-me-nots are for good memories. And the hyacinths that are just poking up—sorry, I couldn’t get them to agree to tonight—are purple for forgiveness. And I feel those things and more—I’ve been feeling all of them since you walked out on me that morning. So what do you say? Can you forgive me for not knowing and putting my own mission ahead of yours?” He waved toward the arch.

  The motion drew her gaze, as did the rustling of the cloth as Kelsey and Marco yanked it back. Worked into the design of the metal were the words MERCEDES VEGA SAFE HAVEN PLAYGROUND surrounded by brambles and roses with vicious-looking thorns. She stood, dumbfounded, unable to move even when Lucas stepped up behind her and rested his hands on her arms.

  “We can change the wording if you’d prefer it said something else, and I know it isn’t where you’d planned…”

  “It’s perfect.” It was even better than where she’d planned—more centrally located and surrounded by homes instead of businesses and warehouses. She wanted to spin around and hug him. Kiss him. Something that would be completely inadequate to express her thanks.

  “In that case, maybe you could do something for me.” He tugged gently on her arm until she turned. Bending, he picked up a shopping bag that rested against the temporary fencing. “You see, my friend Alycia is getting sick and tired of flying out here to pose as my girlfriend. I mean, her guy is being great about it but she’d rather spend her weekends with him. Any interest in taking her place?”

  He wasn’t with the blonde? He still wanted her after how she’d behaved? After everything?

  Holding up the bag, he winked at her. “I even have this fabulous outfit that’s perfect for the opening of Evita tomorrow night. Pretty sure it’ll fit you.”