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I can fix this.
I jog down the stairs and, to my surprise, I find Ava sitting on my couch. She’s wearing jeans with a hole in one knee, and an oversize cardigan. Her dark hair tumbles over her shoulders and she sits, engrossed, reading a book from my shelf,Broken Angelsby Richard Morgan. There’s a bowl of cereal half-eaten on the coffee table.
“That’s the second book in the series,” I say, and she jumps. “You should readAltered Carbonfirst.”
“Are you a stickler for reading order?” Ava slides a bookmark between the pages. It’s not mine—the little strip of leather has a fringe at one end and the initialsAMembossed.
“I would assume you are, too, if you’re the type of person who carries a bookmark wherever you go.”
“Touché.” She stands and pushes the sleeves of her cardigan up, but they almost immediately slide back down over her hands, and there’s something strangely endearing about it. “I’ve already readAltered Carbon. I’d been meaning to continue the series, and I got excited when I saw the second book on your shelf.”
“I’m surprised you’re still here, to be honest.”
A delightful flush tints her cheeks but she squares her shoulders as if fighting the visceral reaction. “Why?”
I head over to my kitchen and press the button for a short black on my espresso machine. This conversation needs coffee, a strong one. The machine whirrs to life and I grab a small porcelain cup from the cupboard above it. It’s white trimmed with a fine line of gold—a gift from my mother when I first moved into this place.
“Last night was...unexpected,” I say as I watch the dark liquid slowly fill the cup. I sense movement behind me and hear the soft fall of Ava’s footsteps approaching the kitchen bench.
“Yes, it was.”
When the machine finishes pouring the shot, the apartment is eerily quiet. And yet, I can sense the cogs turning in both our minds so strongly it may as well be death metal blasting from my sound system. I don’t normally have these conversations.
Especially not here, in my home.
Whenever I’m with a woman, it’s a nighttime affair only. Fancy dinner or maybe a show, drinks, a luxury hotel room. Easy to get away if I need to—and easier for her, too. I’m not the kind of guy who assumes all women are looking to shackle me with a gold band. Plenty of the women I know aren’t looking for marriage or even long term, and are quite happy to approach sex the way I do: as something fun and temporary.
But something tells me Ava is different. The questions she asked about my family, the story about her mother... It all points to one thing: she is not the kind of woman who wants to settle for less than she deserves.
“I should have handled it different,” I say eventually. I grab my coffee and turn around, breathing in the aroma and hoping it’ll help my brain work better.
“You wouldn’t have needed to handle it at all if I hadn’t come up the stairs.”
“I don’t want this to change our arrangement,” I reply, pausing to take a sip of my drink. “I know the dinner last night was a bust, but even if I can’t get Marc to come around, I still have my public image to consider. I can’t have speculation about my personal affairs affecting public confidence in Moretti Enterprises. Not with everything I have planned.”
“Big goals, huh?” She smiles.
“Always.”
Ava traces a vein in the marble countertop with her fingertip, her gaze intently focused on the winding, natural line. It gives me a moment to observe her—I really thought she’d be running scared this morning. And the fact that she’s not intrigues me.
“I had big goals once,” she says with a sad sigh. “Get a teaching job at my old school, buy a beautiful house in a leafy suburb, make a life.”
“What stopped you?”
“Do you ever feel like you have a picture in your head and then...everything goes wrong?” She looks at me, then laughs. “No, you probably have no idea at all what that’s like.”
“I would say that describes my current situation quite well, actually,” I quip.
“That feels like my whole life. I took some time off to travel after high school, and I spent a year backpacking around Europe. When I came back, I got a teaching degree and then... There were no jobs. No one willing to take on a fresh teacher, anyway. I got a maternity leave contract for one year, but that finished and then there was no position for me.” She shakes her head. “I’ve been getting by on relief-teaching shifts and working as a catering waitress.Thenmy landlord decided to sell my apartment and...”
I realise she’s right. My current situationmightbe crappy and unfair, but I’ve never had to worry about these things. I’ve never worried about getting a job, because my whole life I was groomed to be CEO. I’ve never worried about where I would live, because my family owns this building. I’ve never worried about what my future might hold, because I could stop working right now and have plenty to live on until I was a hundred.
I want to help her, more than just upholding our side of the arrangement.
“If I live with my mother, I have a very real fear that I will never need to worry about where I live ever again,” she adds. “Because I will be in jail for murder.”
A laugh shoots out of me that’s so real and natural I almost startle myself. “I know that feeling right down to my bones, trust me.”
