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But I did not miss Whitehall Court Castle.
I took the rest of the day off. Contrary to general belief, I was not married to my work. In fact, I wasn’t even engaged to it. I had a casual relationship with the firm I’d incorporated and used every chance I could to spend time out of the office.
Losing a father, even if I’d forgotten what he looked like, was a brilliant excuse to take time off.
Clouds glided lazily overhead, curiously watching to see what my next move would be. Not one to keep nature waiting, I wandered into Temple Bar, an Irish pub down the street from my office. I was sitting at the bar when Emmabelle Penrose burst through the sticky wooden doors, tears streaming down her face, looking like a train wreck seconds after a colossal explosion.
Emmabelle was the most beautiful woman on planet Earth. It was not an exaggeration, but a plain fact. Her hair, long and luscious, looked like it drank in every sunray it had been exposed to, falling in strings of different shades of blond. Her feline eyes, the color of a blueberry slushie, were perpetually hooded. Her lips were bee-stung, puffy like she’d just been kissed savagely.
And that was without even talking about her body, which I was inclined to suspect might cause a Third World War one day.
She was young. Eleven years younger than me. The first time I’d seen her, three years ago, when I’d gone to serve her younger sister, Persy, with Cillian’s prenup papers, I caught a glimpse of her asleep and spent the next month fantasizing about conquering the fair-haired nymph’s bed.
What made Belle even more enticing was the fact that she, like me, rejected marriage as an institution and treated her romantic affairs with the same practicality she would her finances. I found her fire, intellect, and nonconformist ways refreshing. What I did not find refreshing was the way she’d kicked me out of her apartment in the middle of the night shortly after we started sleeping together.
Miss Penrose could be Aphrodite herself, rising from seafoam on the Cypress shore, but I was still a man of self-respect and social standing.
I forgave, but I did not forget.
Though now that I took a good long look at her, she looked a bit … frayed?
Like she was on the verge of bawling into her glass of chardonnay.
A man came on to her not even a second after she walked into the bar, and I sat in the corner, watching her nearly snap his arm in two, chuckling to myself.
But with the amusement came a rather exasperating sense of responsibility gnawing at my gut. No matter how unappealing I found the idea of helping out this bratty vixen, I knew Cillian’s wife and Belle’s sister, Persy, would put me through all of Dante’s nine circles of hell if she found out I’d simply ignored her.
Plus, Emmabelle was not the type to self-indulge in a full-fledged mental breakdown over a broken fingernail. As a lawyer, I’d always been anthropologically curious. What could make this tough-as-nails woman crumble?
I approached her, showered her with compliments and reassurance, and tried coaxing the information out of her. Belle refused to cooperate, like I knew she would. The girl was thornier than a rose garden—and just as beautiful.
I decided to loosen Belle’s tongue through the international, unofficial truth serum. Alcohol.
It was after the third cognac that she turned to look at me, her big turquoise eyes aglow, and said, “I have to get pregnant immediately if I want to have a biological child.”
“You’re thirty,” I said, still sipping the same Stinger I started the evening with. “You have plenty of time.”
“No.” Belle shook her head furiously, hiccupping. I suppose today was the day of hysterical females. I couldn’t seem to escape them. “I have a … medical condition. It needs to happen sooner rather than later. But I don’t have anyone to have it with. Or the financial stability.”
A practical, albeit sick idea began forming in my mind. A two-birds-one-stone situation.
“The father part is not a big deal.” Belle snuffled, about to take another sip of her drink. I pried it out of her hand and placed a tall glass of water there instead. If she had fertility issues, becoming an alcoholic was not a step in the right direction. “I could always get a sperm donor. But Madame Mayhem is just now starting to turn in a substantial profit after months of breaking even. I shouldn’t have bought out the other partners.”
Belle was the sole owner of a burlesque club downtown. From what her brother-in-law had explained to me, she was a shrewd businesswoman with killer instincts on the fast track to turn a seven-figure profit. Buying out the two other partners of the club put a dent in her bank account.
