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He saluted me. “I will, Your Grace.”
“That’ll be all, servant.”
Smiling, he slipped on his jacket. “Don’t we have the best pet names for each other?”
“Only in our own heads.”
“You know, Chris said the same thing. But then, he also said that he’d never touch another man’s dick, so I don’t think we can trust his judgement.”
I snickered, opening the door. “Just how often do you tease him about how wrong he was?”
“Not as often as you’re probably thinking.”
Knowing Zhen as well as I did … “I highly doubt that.”
“I can’t really claim that you shouldn’t,” he admitted.
Just then, my phone began to ring. “Six am tomorrow,” I reminded him as I pulled my cell out of my pocket.
He nodded. “Six am.” Then he left, closing the door behind him.
Meanwhile, I frowned down at my phone. The caller was none other than my mother. She was no doubt calling to check that I was still attending the charity ball. Walking into the living room, I answered, “Hi, Mom.”
“I heard a rumor that I hope is incorrect,” she said, her tone clipped. No ‘hello’ or anything. Nice.
“And that would be?” I asked, sinking into the sofa.
“That you disappeared into a private room with Trace Lacroix.”
Ugh, I should have considered that she might hear about it. Alondra wasn’t a member of the Vault, but she had friends who were. “Yeah, so?”
“Soit should not have happened.”
“Why exactly?” I asked, though I already knew what her issue was. She didn’t like that a man who’d rebuffed her advances would show interest in me. In her mind, it shouldbe the other way around.Everywoman was competition to Alondra, including me.
“He’s not good enough for my daughter.”
She spoke the latter two words with the same depth of emotion one might use when saying ‘my shoes.’I wasn’t much more than an accessory to her. I didn’t lament it. I’d had plenty of time to get used to it, and I couldn’t help but feel pity for this person who had no capacity for love.
“The man never commits to women,” she went on. “He seduces them and then discards them when he’s done. He’s a user through and through.”
I bit back a snort.Hypocrite, thy name is Alondra.She used people all the time. She also rarely committed to people, so she was in no position to judge.
“It doesn’t make him a bad person that he isn’t big on relationships,” I pointed out. But, of course, she knew that already. She simply wanted to convince me to keep my distance from Trace. “Is that all? I have stuff to do.”
She spluttered. “No, it’s not all, because I’m sensing that you’re not taking my concerns seriously.”
“Trace and I had sex, Mom. Sex. That’s it. We’re not getting married or anything.”
Silence fell, and I’d bet my life that she was grinding her teeth over the whole ‘Trace and I had sex’ portion of the comment.
“He never should have touched you. He likely only did it to get back at me.”
I frowned. “Back at you for what?”
“Rejecting him, of course. He fairly fell all over himself trying to get my attention during the filming ofBelle.”
I rolled my eyes. Like I’d believe that, given how many accounts I’d heard that varied from hers. But there was a possibility that she believed her own lie in this case—it surewouldn’t be the first time. “The story goes that it was the other way around.”
