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They’re already at the concert hall, preparing for tonight.
Chapter Three
Laney
THIS HOTEL IS LIKEnothing I’ve ever been inside before, and I’m doing my best not to feel intimidated as hell, or like I simply don’t belong here. I want to not care. My mother just died, and now I’m having to rely on someone who once walked out on me and Mom and who never looked back. I have a heavy stone lodged in my chest where my heart used to be. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel, so I prefer to feel nothing. It’s safer that way.
I follow Reed obediently, and we stop outside one of the doors.
“This is your room,” he says.
Reed presses a keycard to the device on the lock. It flashes green and clicks open, and he leans past me to push the door open. The scent of him, sandalwood and something citrusy, hits me, and it brings my senses back to life, if only for a second, and then the moment passes again.
He gestures for me to go inside, which I do, and he follows.
The room is huge—twice the size of the floorplan of my entire trailer. The floor to ceiling windows offer a view across the city, and the bed is so wide and deep, it looks like I could vanish into it.
“I don’t know when you last ate,” he says, “but feel free to order room service. Just put it on the room.”
He looks me up and down, and an awkward smile tweaks the corners of his lips.
“You’ll...umm...need some new clothes. I assume you’re not exactly in the mood to go shopping, so I can have a personal shopper pick some stuff out for you. I guess you’ll need...” He hesitates again and his cheeks flush. “Everything.”
Finally, I lift my head and meet his eyes.
“If by everything, you mean underwear, yeah, I’ll need that too. Unless you want me washing my panties in the bathroom sink, but then I’ll have to go without until they dry.”
The heat rises in his face, touching the tips of his ears, and I discover that I’ve enjoyed flustering him. Is he thinking about me not wearing any panties now? I bet that’s fucking with his head.
“I’ll send the personal shopper out to get you whatever you need,” he says, pulling himself back together. “There’s one other thing. You’re going to need something a little more dressy than the sort of things you might be used to wearing.”
I glanced down at my long sleeve t-shirt with the holes in the sleeves that I stick my thumbs through when my hands are cold and my threadbare denim-shorts and sneakers.
“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”
“You can’t exactly wear denim to a concert hall,” he says. “Dax—Darius—has a show tonight, and we have to be there.”
“I don’t normally wear ballgowns,” I say, doing my best not to sound sarcastic and failing.
He doesn’t pick up on my tone, and instead, smiles brightly, revealing straight white teeth. “Not to worry. I’ll get the personal shopper to pick you out something elegant. Money is no object.”
Is this how he works? Throwing money at me to ease his guilt?
That’s fine by me. It’s exactly what I came here for. I never expected him to lavish me with affection or hold me and wipe away my tears. This man might legally be my stepfather, but he means nothing to me.
“Fine,” I say firmly.
He holds the room keycard out to me. “I’ll call on you before we’re due to leave for the concert hall. My room is right down the corridor.”
I take the card from his hand, and our fingers brush momentarily. A flush of heat runs up my arm and into my chest. I catch my breath.I refuse to let this man intimidate me. I try not to think about the fact that it isn’t only him I’m going to have to deal with. I’ll have his sons, too. Will they see straight through me? They don’t have the guilt of walking out on me and my mother to use as motivation.
I struggle to picture what they’re going to be like. Of course, I’ve seen pictures of Darius Riviera on billboards across the city. And I know from social media articles that he’s blind. I’ve never really interacted with someone who’s visually impaired before. Will it be strange? Though I know there is nothing wrong with his hearing, I still feel like it will be harder to communicate with him. So much of our communication involves our eyes and body language, like the way I’m staring at his father right now with cold indifference, deliberately positioning my body defensively, with my arms crossed as a barrier and one leg in front of the other, as though I’m going to bolt at any minute. These are the kinds of things Darius won’t be able to read about me. I can’t decide if that will put me at a disadvantage, or him. As for his brother, Cade, I know nothing about him. He’s an enigma in my mind. I don’t even know what he looks like.
Reed backs out of the room and closes the door behind him. I’m alone for the first time in what feels like forever. I feel like if I stop and try to process what’s happened today, I might fall apart, and that’s the last thing I can afford to do. I’ve held myself together for so long, sometimes with no more than spit and mud, that I worry if I crumble, I won’t know how to put my pieces together again.
So, instead of collapsing on the bed in tears, I turn my thoughts to more practical tasks.
I use my cellphone to make a call to one of my jobs and tell my boss I won’t be in for a few weeks. I figure once I turn eighteen, I’ll be able to return to the trailer and my old life, and I’ll still need to work. He’s about to give me some shit for missing my shift when I interrupt and tell him my mother just died. After that, he’s a little more understanding, and I let him know I’ll be in touch once things settle down. My second job isn’t quite so understanding. Even with the news that I just lost my only parent, I’m told that they won’t keep the job open for me for that length of time. There’s nothing I can do about it, and the strange sense of emptiness inside me prevents me from even being upset.
