His jaw ticked, but he didn’t lift his gaze from the legal document he was working on.
“Go to sleep, Help.”
And so I did.
THERE WERE TWO THINGS I never told anyone about myself.
Number one: I had insomnia. Ever since I was about thirteen.
When I was twenty-two, I saw a shrink to try and fix it. He said past events were responsible for the fact I couldn’t sleep to save my fucking life and suggested we meet two times a week. That lasted one month.
Since then, lack of sleep had become a part of my everyday existence. I’d run on zero sleep for a few nights in a row, then pass out for a day or two to make up for it. I’d even learned to control the cycle of frustration. When I left the office late at night, instead of tossing and turning in bed like a junkie craving his fix, I went straight to a twenty-four-hour gym and worked out. Then I’d go back to my empty apartment and read the latest thriller—whatever bestseller crap everyone was talking about—or an autobiography of a public figure I didn’t completely hate.
Sometimes I’d invite a woman over. Sometimes we’d fuck. Hell, sometimes we’d even talk. I wasn’t against talking to the women I shared a bed with. But I never went out of my way to get them there in the first place.
I had rules, and I didn’t break them.
No dinners. No dates. No visiting them at their place. Absolutely no fucking pillow talk.
Things were my way or the highway.
If they wanted me, they knew where to find me. In the morning, I’d get dressed and show up to work, freshly shaved and looking rested. I knew that the pass-out stage would eventually arrive, but I’d become better at sensing when. It didn’t make my life easier, but it made the sleepless nights bearable.
Number two: contrary to popular assumptions, I was capable of love.
Sentimental, banal shit? Yeah. But deep down, I knew the truth. I wasn’t a monster or a psychopath, or a fucked-up sociopath like my stepmother. I loved. I loved all the fucking time. I loved my friends and I loved the Raiders. I loved practicing law and shaking hands on lucrative deals. I loved traveling and working out and fucking.
Fuck, I loved fucking.
I glanced over at Help. It wasn’t easy to ignore her sleeping beside me. So close. Her face stirred the kind of chaos in me I once had tried to tame by doing shit like Defy. Her lips begged me to take them in more ways than one. Her body too. But I couldn’t. Not unless it was on my fucking terms.
I tried to work on the pharmaceutical merger deal. I tried to work and saw her shivering in her seat while she slept, goose bumps dotting the delicate flesh of her neck and collarbone.
Tearing my gaze back to the screen, I tried to work again.
But I kept stealing glances.
And I kept trying to cool down the temperature my blood boiled to every time I was near her.
I ended up pulling a blanket over her body. I watched her sleep for forty minutes. Forty fucking minutes. This was bending the rules. What was worse—I wanted to break them all. With her.
I tried reasoning with my cock. There was no guarantee Help would get into bed with me. You could take the girl out of the church in Virginia, but you couldn’t take the church out of the girl. Despite her years in New York, I suspected she still wasn’t a heavy Tinder user who bed-hopped her way to her next broken heart.
Plus, she seemed to hate me just as much as I hated her.
And last but not least—I knew I was about to plunge headfirst into some dirty, nasty shit with my family.
I couldn’t afford a distraction. All I wanted was to get the help I needed from her, maybe screw her a few times, and cut her loose.
Make it stop.
We landed at sunset, slicing through sky the color of purple with a gold undertone, just like her hair. The bite of a promising new adventure filled my nostrils when I finally got out of the airport, armed with the girl I’d driven out of this place ten years ago.
Cliff, my family driver, was leaning against the black Limo, waiting for us at the curb of San Diego International’s baggage claim. He rushed to snatch her duffle—I’d overnighted my luggage straight to Todos Santos—and flung it into the trunk of the limo, firing off pleasantries I didn’t bother acknowledging. Emilia followed behind me, her eyes darting everywhere, drinking in the view she hadn’t seen in so long.
I knew she’d visited her parents a few years ago when I was already in LA, but that was the extent of it as far as I was aware.
The drive to my father’s mansion ticked by silently and gave me time to think and regulate my heartbeats. Cliff kept his mouth shut, probably remembering I was not my chatterbox stepmother. I didn’t bother to raise the privacy glass. Help squinted at the side window, pretending I wasn’t there next to her.