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Of course his dormant sex drive would choose the most inopportune moment possible to come roaring back to life.
Apparently oblivious to his closest friend’s completely improper thoughts about his daughter, Emmett grinned. “So, Braden. How are things at the club?”
Right. The club. The BDSM club he owned, packed wall-to-wall with willing subbies who would gladly offer themselves up for a night of kinky debauchery if he so much as looked in their direction.
Subbies who were much more appropriate targets for his desires than pretty little Charlotte Duvall.
“Things are good. You should come by tomorrow, let me buy you lunch.”
Just like the last hundred—or more, Braden had given up counting—times he’d made the offer, Emmett shook his head. “No. I’m not ready for that.”
Grief had its own timeline. Braden knew that, logically, but there was still a part of him that wanted to shake his friend, to tell him to snap out of it. To remind him that he had a daughter who needed him, and at forty-six, he still had so much life left to live.
But that wasn’t his place. So he didn’t force the issue the way he so badly wanted to. Instead, he settled in for an afternoon of listening to the same stories of Nat and Emmett’s life together he’d heard a million times.
And tried not to think of all the filthy, perverted things he wanted to do to their daughter.
* * *
LOTTIE
With her cheeks burning from Mr. Elliott’s scolding, Lottie hurried upstairs to her bedroom.
She needed money. Logically, that meant she needed to go to work. But she wasn’t under any delusions that she could find a job that would pay anything near what she needed to pay off her father’s debts.
And even if she could start putting a small dent in the credit card payments, it would all be for nothing if she couldn’t stop her father’s gambling problem and keep him from hemorrhaging money.
Mr. Elliott could fix it. Unless he was also hiding a mountain of debt, he could probably bail them out and never even feel the pinch. The part of her that still loved the fairy tales where the prince swooped in to save the princess from a lifetime of hardship wanted so badly to run back downstairs and throw herself on his mercy. If anyone could get through to her father and make sure he got the help he needed, it would be Mr. Elliott.
But she’d already promised herself she wouldn’t tell him. Losing their fortune was enough of a blow, and if she could help her father keep his pride, then she was willing to do whatever it took to do so.
Flopping down onto her pretty four-poster bed, she plucked at the ruffles on her perfectly white duvet cover as she stared at the ceiling and ran through her options.
Which took her all of about thirty seconds, since she didn’t really have any options. Groaning, she forced herself to pull her phone from her pocket and make the phone call she’d been dreading.
Frankie wasn’t just the smartest, or the richest member of their friend group. She was also the one with the biggest heart. So even though she wasn’t entirely convinced she was doing the right thing, Lottie hit the button to dial the one person in the world she thought might be able to help.
“Hey, Lottie baby. Figure out what’s going on with your accounts?”
Lottie opened her mouth to explain what she’d found. And promptly burst into tears.
“Oh, honey. I’m on my way. Do you want me to bring the girls?”
“No! J-just y-you,” Lottie managed to choke out between gulping sobs.
“All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Finally giving into the despair that had been brewing inside her since she’d opened the first credit card bill, Lottie rolled onto her stomach and wept. She sobbed until the tears ran dry and she felt like a sponge someone had wrung out and tossed to the side. If she’d cried that hard since her mom’s funeral, she couldn’t remember.
Oddly enough, though, she felt better for it. Sniffling back a few straggling tears, she rolled off her bed and made her way over to her en suite bathroom. Jesus, she looked a mess, with her mascara all smudged around her red, puffy eyes.
By the time Frankie burst into her bedroom a few minutes later, Lottie was looking and feeling much more presentable. She’d managed to wash her face and reapply a light coat of makeup without her eyes watering and ruining it all over again. There was nothing to be done about the redness or the puffiness, but she figured Frankie already knew she’d been crying so there was little point in trying to hide it completely.
“You poor thing.” True sympathy, not the fake kind so often employed by the women in their circles, echoed in Frankie’s voice as she rushed across the room to wrap Lottie up in a tight hug. “Tell Mama Frankie all about it.”
And so she did. She told Frankie everything, about the overdue bills, the bank account, the gambling. All of it.
“I just don’t know what to do. I mean, I could get a job, obviously. I don’t mind working. But I’d need to be making six figures at least to even begin paying down those cards, and even with that it would still take forever.”
