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“Valentine?” I laughed. “C’mon. You’re being paranoid.”
“Maybe,” Aric allowed. “But could you give him a shout to put my mind at ease? Or would you rather we be caught with our pants down?”
Robert Valentine was our oldest client. Our biggest client. He was the CEO and lead designer over at Legendary Gaming — the company I’d “made” with my viral zombie ad campaign.
We’d done every single piece of work for LG since its inception. All concept art, all promotion. Every last ounce of their marketing, from real-world campaigns to running every branch of their social media.
“What did he say exactly?”
“It’s not what he said,” Aric replied. “It’s what hedidn’tsay. He seemed nervous as hell, and he didn’t ask about anything. There were no deadline adjustments, no changes to concept. No progress reports he wanted to talk about. It was the shortest weekly phone call we ever had with him. By the time he hung up, the entire conference room was left looking at each other, baffled.”
Aric still looked worried. That concerned me.
“Alright. I’ll feel him out.”
“Thanks boss.”
I watched him go, exiting my office stiffly and without his usual, casual gait. He was definitely rattled. Eventually I would have to tell him I was pregnant, and that time would have to be sooner rather than later. Aric was the one person I trusted, and it wouldn’t do to keep it from him for too long. Plus, I was sort of looking forward to it. So far, keeping my pregnancy to myself had made it seem almost surreal. Like it wasn’t really happening.
Picking up my phone, I dialed Robert Valentine’s direct number. Maybe I couldn’t spill the beans about the child I was carrying just yet, but at the very least I could put my assistant at ease.
Thirty
GAGE
The dune buggy’s engine sputtered as I killed the power, coughing out one last misfire that echoed through the garage. It definitely needed service. Especially considering how hard we all rode it.
But sometimes, you just have to get way out in the desert to think things through.
It had been one of those epic sunset rides. The kind where you drive to the most remote place you can find and just sit there, absorbing the silence. I’d watched the sky turn yellow, then orange, then a crazy, beautiful red. I stayed there for the blues and purples, too, just thinking about everything.
And that’s when I’d made the decision to call her.
It was going against the others, and I hated that part. But in the end, I couldn’t get Juliana out of my mind. Not just because she might be carrying my child, although that was definitely a part of it. But mostly because in the short time we’d spent together, I’d felt closer to her than any other woman in my entire life.
I killed the lights and made my way through the courtyard, passing beneath the double arch that guided me back into the main part of the house. Music blared from the direction of the gym: AC/DC by the sound of it, which meant it was Devyn. Maverick would’ve gone with something ridiculous like Mozart or Beethoven, which I could never understand. How you could bench-press anything to the sounds of someone hammering away on a piano would always be a mystery to me.
I crept upstairs, feeling almost like I was doing something wrong. At this point though, I didn’t care. It felt even more wrongnotreconnecting with this woman who’d been dropped into our life like an atomic bomb. I for one was tired of living in the radioactive ruins of our bitter silence.
“Look, we’re obeying her wishes,” Devyn had assured us, several times already. “Trust me, she wants it this way.”
I wasn’t a hundred-percent sure of that, but I’d respected it anyway. Still, the ‘I’m sorry’ message she sent a few days prior was a good indication that she was at leastthinkingabout us. That we weren’t entirely in her rear-view mirror, at least in her heart, if not her mind.
Devyn’s door was closed, and the television was on. I chuckled, remembering how pissed he’d been upon learning we’d first bedded Juliana in his own bed. Maverick and I hadn’t planned it that way, his just happened to be the first room at the top of the stairs. The earliest place we could finally get at her.
Pushing into my own room, thoughts of that night ran wild through my head. I could remember the raw intensity of our threeway connection. How wet and eager Juliana had been to have us between those warm, beautiful thighs. Maverick and I had done so many wonderful things to her over the course of that week, both together and alone. Sharing her over and over again, until her whole body trembled.
I could still recall her sneaking into my room in the dead of night, after having screwed Maverick to sleep. I could remember the softness of her lips. The feel of her warm, naked body — still flush with sex — gliding deliciously alongside mine.
It was during such lovemaking in the dead of night, staring deep into each other’s eyes, that the two of us truly bonded. That our most personal attachments were formed.
Even while buried inside her I loved making her laugh. Her smile became the world. Her laughter was the medicine that healed my soul. It all seemed stupidly sentimental, looking back on it in the morning. And yet now, sitting alone in this empty bedroom, I realized there was nothing stupid about it at all.
Letting her go back to New York was bittersweet, but as far as I was concerned there was always the chance of something more. There was no way the three of us could’ve hadthatmuch fun and not want to repeat it again, especially since we parted on such amazing terms.
But now, thanks to one of us at least, she’d gotten exactly what she wanted. And now that she had it…
Fuck this.
