by Bromberg, K.
“You mean this is all for me?” The way Lucy looks at Ryker has chills chasing over my skin, and it has nothing to do with the air chilling with the setting sun.
Ryker nods as tears well in both Lucy’s and my eyes but for completely different reasons. “You’re a princess, aren’t you?”
She nods fiercely.
“Then go get ready!”
She jumps up and down and all but runs toward the two women standing there waiting to pamper her.
I don’t have words—none—as I look around the space. Fairy lights have been hung between flags and crests. There is a sunbed behind us draped in elaborate fabric with tables on either side. A bottle of wine and a charcuterie board sit on one of them.
“Ryker.” My voice sounds as awed as I feel. “What did you—? We can’t accept this.”
He runs a hand down the small of my back. “Who said I did this for you?”
When I turn to look at him, he just lifts an eyebrow and gives me a shy smile that all but warms all of me in every way possible.
And of course, I feel like an ass. Not only for doubting that he’d know what Lucy would like but for thinking he hijacked my time with her to do something for himself . . . or whatever my excuse was going to be.
Because this . . . this is insane.
“You rented out a castle for her.”
“Technically, just the terrace. They don’t allow people to rent inside the actual castle.” His laugh rumbles against my lips as he presses them to mine.
“You’re crazy.”
“Perhaps.”
“This is too much.”
“She deserves this.”
“But . . .”
“Don’t try to figure it out. Just let her enjoy it.”
And she’s doing just that—enjoying it. Lucy is talking animatedly, her hands flying to her slack jaw every few seconds as she takes it all in—the rack of princess dresses I can now see, the vanity loaded with makeup and hair supplies, the snacks stacked on platters.
“But . . . why?”
When I turn to look at him, he angles his head to the side, and I try to rationalize the man before me. The one who says he’s heartless and unfeeling but loves me with a violent desire I can’t explain. And love he does.
I may have told him he can’t say it to me. I may have not allowed myself to say it to him either. But we both feel it. There’s no denying that.
And in turn, he loves Lucy.
Ryker frames both of my cheeks with his hands and leans down so that his lips are a whisper away from mine. “Because I can.”
My mind reaches back to our first conversations. To his question asking me what would impress me. To my answer: the unexpected.
How is it he keeps giving me the unexpected time and again?
“She’s on cloud nine. I’m never going to be able to bring her down to earth.” I rest my head on Ryker’s shoulder where we’re sitting together on the sunbed. Wine has been drunk. The charcuterie board has been devoured. The fabric draped on the canopy above us gives us a small bit of privacy.
I know how Lucy feels, because I feel the same way. The fact that he did this for her—for me—shouldn’t surprise me when it’s at the hand of a man who continually does just that—surprise me.
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
“Hmm.” It’s all I say, but I fear bringing her back to the clinical facility after she’s been made to feel like one in a million here. “Thank you for this.” I motion to everything around us.
“You can stop saying that,” he murmurs and takes a sip of wine. “I have to say it’s been quite the experience.”
My own laughter rings out, and Lucy looks our way and waves ecstatically. “If Lucy would have had her way, you would be wearing sparkly lipstick right now.” My smile widens as I picture Ryker sitting at the small vanity as Lucy demands to give her own princess makeover to the two of us.
“There’s only one place I allow lipstick on me, and your shade of red would look lovely in a ring around it right now,” he murmurs against my ear, causing me to snuggle in against him. My head on his shoulder, my hand on his chest, my body wanting him . . . but then again, when does it not want him?
“Watch me!” Lucy says to us as she follows the ladies to the middle of the terrace. She has a new princess dress on, her hair is done and adorned with a tiara, and the ladies are demonstrating some kind of “royal dance” they are going to teach her the steps to.
“She’s nervous,” I murmur.
“How do you know? She looks happy to me.”
“She keeps reaching for her necklace.” We both watch her as she reaches up several times over a short period to grab the key on the chain around her neck. “That’s her tell.”
“What’s with the necklace?” he asks after she does it again.
“It was Sam’s. She used to wear it all the time when we were teenagers. I forgot about it, but after she died, I found it in some of her stuff. Lucy thinks it’s the key to her mom’s heart. It’s her way of coping, of thinking she has her mom near.”
“What does the key belong to?”
“My sister used to tell everyone it was the key to her secrets.” I laugh and hear her voice saying it to friends. “It was really the key to our old house. The last one we lived in with our mom before she died. That’s all.”
“I like her story better,” Ryker murmurs, pulling me back into memories of another place and time.
Of laughter before the darkness. Of the bed we shared together and the late-night giggles we’d try to hide. Of innocence shattered and a past I don’t want to think about.
“Come back to me, Vaughn.”
“Sorry,” I say and lift our joined hands to my lips and kiss his, more than grateful I’m with a man who can read me so well.
“Don’t be.”
Lucy’s giggle carries over the distance, and I study Ryker out of the corner of my eye as he watches her. His smile is soft, his eyes kind, his body relaxed.
“You’re good at this, you know.”
“At what?” He looks over to me and then back to Lucy.
“The dad thing. Have you ever thought about having kids?” I say the words and then realize what they sound like. And of course he responds at the same time I realize my gaffe.
“Are you offering?” His laugh rings out.
“No. That’s not what I meant. I just meant . . . you’re good with kids. Surprisingly good—”
“Kids I can handle. They’re a lot like men. You give them the shiny things that make the most noise and they’re satisfied. Now women, on the other hand . . . I fail at understanding.”
“So you want kids, then?”
He purses his lips and angles his head to the side in the way he does when he really ponders something. “I’ve never really thought about it. That sounds stupid, but I haven’t. My stance on relationships was that they were temporary at best.”
“That’s promising,” I tease with a nudge.
“Yeah, but . . . when you don’t have something, don’t grow up with a set ideal, the thought of living it is scary.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” I murmur.
“You can talk about it with me, you know.”
“What do you mean?” I ask the question, although I already know the answer.
“Connecticut. Samantha. Your uncle. I promise you I have a good record keeping secrets.” He squeezes my hand. “At least my clients think so.”
“Thank you,” I say softly. “There’s nothing more to tell.”
“I know, but . . . I’m here.” He pulls me in tighter against him.
I look up at him and press my lips against his. It’s a soft kiss but one packed with so much emotion that it’s hard to open my eyes when the moment ends.
So I don’t. I just rest my forehead against his and breathe him in, surrounded by a silence sprinkled with Lucy’s laughter and the distant sounds of the city.
“You’re wrong, by the way,” I whisper
against his lips.
“About?”
“You understand women better than you think.”
Another brush of lips.
“No. I understand you.” A rub of his nose against mine. “You changed things, Vaughn. You changed them in ways I never saw coming.”
Those words are like the soft sigh my soul has needed after so many years of holding my breath.
My mind wanders to places I rarely let it go. To futures and possibilities. One that has Ryker in it. I’ve been living in the next moment—one bill after another. I’ve been living for Lucy, with her as the endgame in mind.
But what if I wish for more?
What if I wish for one that has happily ever afters fit for the princess dancing in front of us?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Vaughn
“At some point we need to talk about Carter,” Ryker says when he puts the car in park in my driveway.
“Please don’t ruin tonight,” I say.
“But that’s what you’ve said the last three times I’ve brought him up.”
“I know. It’s just . . .” I lean my head back on the seat rest and close my eyes. Lucy’s sound asleep in the back seat, and maybe I don’t want to ruin a perfect evening talking about him. And maybe if I pretend he never happened, then he’ll never follow through.
“You’re naive if you think he’s just going to go away,” he warns as if he’s read my mind.
“Ryker—”
“Just hear me out—”
“Please.”
“I’m not going to ruin tonight, but . . . he needs to be dealt with.” His hand twitches on the gearshift as he reins in his temper.
“It’s not that easy.”
“Yes, it is. You have dirt on him. He knows it. You two are playing a game of chicken that neither of you are going to swerve on. Vaughn, men like him . . . you don’t want to mess with men like him. They’re cowards who ruin you out of spite. They’ll ruin you simply because they like to watch you cower in fear. They get off on it.”
“Then there’s nothing I can do if it’s out of spite. I don’t give in, he’ll ruin me. I do give in, he’ll still ruin me to prove he can. When a person’s endgame is to fuck me over in every way possible, it seems so much easier to stick my head in the sand and pretend he doesn’t exist. When I do, he leaves me alone.” I unbuckle my seat belt and move to get out of the car.
“What does he have on you, Vaughn?”
I try not to be pissed off the minute I meet his eyes and see the doubt woven into them. “Nothing that I don’t know of.”
“What about your uncle? You said he mentioned your uncle.”
“Hell if I know. I left with Sam and never looked back. Ever. I’ve had my private investigator that I use for Wicked Ways check to see if he’s alive or dead. It’s a shame he’s still alive, but I’m not going to apologize or be sorry about whatever karma-induced accident left him paralyzed. That’s about all I care to know. That family doesn’t deserve an extra second of my time. Not one. So what does the senator know about my uncle? Beats the hell out of me. But if Carter’s a man who gets off on fear like you say he does, then just bringing up my uncle has me scared when most days I can rationalize that he can no longer touch me.”
“What do you mean, ‘most days’?” he asks.
“Most days I know I’m out of his reach, but sometimes when you’re rich and want something bad enough, you have everything at your disposal to get it. Let’s just hope Sam and I were blips on his radar who he thinks fell off the face of the earth.” I push the handle to open the door and climb out.
“Vaughn.” He exits the car and looks at me over its roof. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Then why even bring it up?”
“You can stick your head in the sand all you want, but it’ll just make you more vulnerable because you won’t be able to see it coming. Carter’s not going to go away. Not until he gets everything he wants from you—your body, what you have on him, everything.”
“Then I guess you should have never offered me in the first place,” I whisper harshly, well aware that Lucy is sleeping a few feet from me. I push off from the car and take a few steps to get some distance from him and the ever-present reminder that is beginning to ruin this perfect night.
But I force myself to calm down and turn around and face him. I hang my head for a beat before I meet his eyes. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”
“I deserve it.”
“Yeah, you do—”
“I exacerbated the situation. The one you refuse to let me apologize for . . . so we keep going on, and this huge fucking elephant in the room rears its ugly head every time we get two steps forward only to pull us ten steps back.”
“I promised myself I was going to forgive and try to forget . . .” I look down at my hands twisting together and know he’s right about all this, but at the same time I would prefer to live in the fairytale land we just left at Belvedere Castle.
“We’re both works in progress.”
I smile softly. “Definitely works in progress.”
“Again, I’m sorry. He had his eyes set on you, Vaughn, and . . . and when he said he had dirt on you, I played his game. Fuck, did I play it.” He runs a hand through his hair in frustration and walks to the end of the driveway and then back.
“And now we know what he thought he had,” I say, thinking about my uncle and what it is that Carter was using his name for other than to try to scare me. To let me know he could hold the same kind of fear and power over me.
“If there’s anything else, Vaughn—anything at all about your uncle that you’re hiding—you need to tell me.”
I stare at him and just shake my head. “This is never going to go away, is it?”
“It will. I’ll make sure of it.”
“At what cost, though?” I ask, my voice breaking in ways I don’t want it to.
“I don’t know,” he murmurs as he pulls me against him and wraps his arms around me. And it feels so good, to be here, to feel safe, when I’m sure the sense of security is just as false as me pretending Carter is going to go away. “I just don’t know.”
“Maybe I should just hand over what I have on him. Losing all of this isn’t worth it,” I say with my cheek resting on his chest and his lips pressing a kiss to the crown of my head. Lucy. Him. My freedom if Carter calls the authorities. The three things that matter the most to me.
“What do you have on him, Vaughn?” he asks for a second time.
I tense at the question, at him asking to know the secrets I keep from everyone to protect myself. My safekeeping. At the last piece of myself that I haven’t given him yet—my confidentiality. “Pictures of Carter. . . let’s just say with his pants down.”
His pause in response tells me he knows just how big of a deal my answering him was.
“The underage girls.” My head whips up at his comment, and he simply nods. “His wife is my client. I’ve investigated him as well.”
“Oh.” But for some reason I feel a little more at ease divulging the information now, because I hadn’t thought about it that way.
“What else do you have? There has to be more.”
“Some kind of phone records.”
“And he knows you have these?” he asks, leaning back so he can see my eyes when I nod.
“Yes.”
“He knows specifically what they are?”
I shrug. “I just told him I had a call log. He acted like it wasn’t a big deal and said his calls were public record, but . . .”
“But what?”
“I don’t know. They mean something to him.”
“What are they of?” he asks. “What—”
“I don’t exactly know.” I shake my head and feel stupid that I don’t have an answer. “They were emailed to my investigator anonymously. The IP address and fake email address were traced back to a terminal at a public library. The email just said that this paper was extremely important if som
eone connected the right dots. It was signed, A Concerned Citizen.”
Ryker angles his head to the side and narrows his eyes in thought. I wait for him to ask for more—to see the call log—and I struggle between giving myself completely to him or drawing a line in the sand I can’t let him cross.
“And they’re in safekeeping?”
I nod, almost breathing a sigh of relief when he doesn’t ask.
“What a clusterfuck,” he mutters with a shake of his head. “I need to think about this. About all of it. We’ll figure it out. I’ll help you figure it out.”
“Ryker . . . you don’t need to get involved. The last thing you need—”
“It’s you. I’m already involved.” He leans forward and brushes a tender kiss to my lips that feels so resolute, almost as if he, too, is wishing away the situation.
There’s a subtlety to him right now—a softness—that I’ve never seen before. It’s in the way he stares at me across the distance, brandy-colored eyes looking at me from under thick lashes while Lucy sleeps soundly in the back seat of some ridiculously expensive sports car. A car that most men would freak out over because the glitter in her hair might get on its precious leather. And the whole of the moment—of him—is enough for me to realize that he knows he screwed up.
We all do.
If Lucy could comprehend things like I do, when she’s older would she judge me for the mistakes I’m making now? For running Wicked Ways, even though in the end the risks are all for her?
How can I not forgive him?
How can I not love him?
I don’t think that’s possible.
“Let’s get her royal highness inside,” he says, holding on to me a little longer before heading back to pick up a dead-to-the-world princess snoring in his glitter-laced back seat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Ryker
“She still asleep?” I ask as Vaughn shuts the door to Lucy’s room.
“Out like a light.”
She stares at me, arms crossed over her chest and exhaustion written all over her body, but the softest of smiles is on her lips. For a brief second her question from earlier comes back to me: Have you ever thought about having kids?