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I laugh and text her back.
Hey sis, wow them with your genius and HAVE FUN. I’m sorry I haven’t called, been busy with work but I will call you later in the weekend or on Monday. You deserve this. Remember: you’re wildly talented and beautiful and amazing!!! I love you Sky Rose. Good luck!!!!! xxx
My phone’s battery is on 3% so I go back into the bedroom, fish my charger out of my bag and plug it in.
Ace’s eyes are open. The sheet barely covers the low, muscle-quilted, hair-dusted plane of his abs and he looks warm and sleepy and delicious. “Hey,” he purrs. “Everything okay?”
“I think it’s safe to say that you’ve made my mom and my sister very, very happy. I still feel like we need to talk about that.”
He pats the bed next to him. “Come here.”
So I do, crawling back in with him.
“The question is,” he drawls, “is Dusty Rose happy?”
“Of course I’m happy, Ace. But I’m still mad that you did that without asking me. It feels so uneven. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to pay you back for all that.”
“I told you, I owed you one. To me, it feels uneven the other way. There’s still more I want to give you to repay you for converting me into a romantic and making me believe I’m actually capable of falling in love.”
Despite the fact that his big, rock-hard body wrapped around mine feels more comforting than anything ever has, the die-hard cynic in me has to challenge him. “Stop throwing around the L word. It’s too soon for that. And we still have to address the whole you’re-my-boss dilemma.”
“I’ve already addressed it.”
“How?”
“By coming in your mouth. Once you drink the magic elixir, you own me. You’ve already transcended my power. You’re the queen of my kingdom.”
I laugh, rolling back on the pillow. “I’m trying to be serious here.”
He presses his tongue to his plump bottom lip, watching my face as though enchanted in a hot, manly way. But his tone is more measured when he continues. “You want serious? Okay, here’s some serious. I want to hear about that day when you were four years old and you realized your father had left.”
I blink at him and my smile fades. I wasn’t expecting that. “Oh. You mean really serious.” It’s the most serious of all my damages. In fact, it’s the cause of them too.
Ace seems to get this. “Tell me about it.”
And so I somehow end up confessing things to Ace I’ve never really talked about with anyone else. “Well, he went out for the proverbial pack of cigarettes on a sunny Saturday morning and he never came back. I was on our porch playing with the little horses Sky and I used to love. We had this stable we’d made for them out of shoeboxes. And my mother came out and sat on the porch and watched us play. It’s one of my earliest memories. She sat there until after the sun went down, crying silent tears. She already knew.”
Ace’s arms and legs are languidly wrapped around me and he holds me close. “That’s hard.”
“Yeah. It’s so cliché. But that’s exactly what happened. He disappeared off the face of the earth, as far as we could tell. Later my mom heard from her hairdresser that someone had seen him and that he was working in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So she went over there to confront him and he’d changed his name and was living with his new wife, even though they’d never divorced, not legally.”
“What a coward.”
“Yeah. He hid from us so he didn’t have to take responsibility for us or pay for us. He wanted to wash his hands of us so much, he created an entirely new identity for himself just so he could avoid us. I mean, who does that?”
“Someone who has no integrity, or self-respect.” His fingers play with mine absent-mindedly. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. And that your family did.”
I sigh, more heavily than I mean to. “You know, I honestly don’t care anymore. Once he left, there was nothing left to salvage anyway. I always felt like we were better off without him.”
“I’d say you were. And look how far you’ve come, without his help or anyone else’s. It’s all you.”
“I guess so.” And I guess I’m accepting that he’s not going to take back his way-too-generous offers. “And now you.”
“That’s still you,” he insists. “Because of the way you smiled at me that night in Waikiki. I was like the Grinch. My heart grew three sizes and busted out of its mean little cage. I felt, for the first time in a long time, like I was capable of real happiness.”
This makes me smile. “Well, I’m glad.” And I ask the question carefully. “What about your father? He must have been very successful.”
Ace is quiet for a long moment. “We had a complicated relationship.” I get the feeling he’s putting that diplomatically. “We never really saw eye to eye on much. I’d just told him I was leaving the family company to go out on my own. And to top it all off, I was poaching two of my brothers. Needless to say, he wasn’t happy about any of it. He was determined that I would fail. We had a big blow-out over it and we both said some things we—or at least I—regretted. Three hours later he died of a massive heart attack.”
