Chapter Five

Mason

I was expecting to see a large crew scurrying around the apartment handling the final preparations, but when I stepped out of the elevator I noticed that it was extraordinarily quiet. I was accustomed to the chaos of these events and Aidan standing in the middle of it, looking as though he were right on the brink. It was that very chaos, and the mayhem that I discovered in the aftermath, that had led me to firing the last event company that I had used and taking the advice of one of the other men who lived in The Avalon to hire the woman who had been acting as his personal assistant in recent weeks. I had been surprised to hear that this apparent renaissance woman was able to not only take on the list of errands and responsibilities that Devon gave her each day, but was also an event coordinator, but this party had been a last-minute decision and had to come together too quickly to justify me spending a lot of time looking for another company. So, Molly it was.

Now, though, I was wondering if maybe I should have taken a little bit more time to try to figure out who was going to handle the preparations. I hesitated to go inside the apartment. As long as I stayed out here in the hallway I didn’t have to face the very real possibility that the preparations for the party were a disaster and there was nothing that I was going to be able to do to rectify it in the few hours that I had before the guests started to arrive. On the other hand, maybe I should embrace whatever travesty had occurred in the apartment. Perhaps if the guests showed up to an apartment with crepe paper streamers and latex balloons they wouldn’t be so fast to try to convince me to have another party anytime soon.

Deciding that either way it was going to turn out was going to have to work, I opened the door and stepped into my apartment. I was immediately stunned by what I saw around me. The company might not have been as large as I was anticipating, but the results of their work was truly beautiful. Delicate lights, cut glass bowls of glittering amber-colored stones, and candles were scattered around the room. The effect was subtle, but even without the candles alight, I could envision the impact that the details would make when the sun went down and the full effect of the decorations would appear.

I was accustomed to the apartment being fairly quiet at this time of day. Though I didn’t often come home from the office early, when I did I usually found myself alone for an hour or two as the staff did their errands for the day. The quiet of the apartment today, however, seemed somewhat unnerving. The door had been unlocked, which meant, hopefully, that the event coordinators were still there, yet I didn’t hear anything. I wandered through the rooms of the apartment, taking on the subtle, gradual changes to the decorations that flowed from space to space to ensure that each was distinct in of itself but that the entirety of the apartment was uniting into one effect. It was masterful, and I was truly impressed, something that I didn’t encounter often.

As I made my way into the ballroom to the back of the apartment I heard a soft sound like someone humming. I followed it into the miniaturized version of the elaborate ballrooms I had admired in magnificent homes when I was younger and insisted upon including when I designed my apartment before moving into The Avalon. A woman was inside, her back to me as she arranged tall peacock feathers in a vase. She turned and looked at me when I walked in and I felt my stomach tighten. Dark, glossy hair tumbled down along the side of her face where it had escaped from the knot on the back of her head. Wide, almond eyes stared back at me and a lush mouth opened slightly in surprise.

“Oh,” she said, brushing her hair back. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting you to be back before I was finished.”

“It’s alright,” I said, trying to reassure her. “It’s fine. I came back early.” She nodded, but still looked mortified that I had caught her. “I guess you’re Molly?”

The beautiful woman looked at me quizzically for a moment as if she couldn’t quite process what I had just said, and then shook her head rapidly.

“No,” she said. “Molly is my sister. I’m Ella.”

“Hello,” I said, walking toward her with my hand out. “I’m…”

“I know,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Dupree.”

She reached her hand out toward me and then realized that there were pieces of feather sticking to it. She yanked it back, trying to brush away the feather as her face flushed.

“Please. Call me Mason.”

“Mason,” she said.

She looked embarrassed, but the effect only made her more appealing. I looked around at the ballroom and the decorations that enhanced the space.

“It looks incredible in here,” I said, hoping to reassure her with the compliment.

“Thank you,” she said, looking around at her progress. “Molly is determined to add something else, but I’m hoping if I can have it done before she gets back and that I’ll be able to convince her not to do anything else to it.”

“I hope you can,” I said. “It looks perfect.”

Our eyes met, and I felt a flicker of heat pass between us, but before I could say anything else, I heard a high-pitched whimpering sound coming from somewhere behind me. At first, I thought it was a puppy and could only imagine Bettie’s reaction if she saw dog hair on any of the furniture. When I saw Ella rush out of the room toward the sound, however, I realized that that wasn’t likely the origin of the sound.

“It’s alright,” I heard her murmuring as I followed her out of the ballroom and toward the drawing room. “I’m here. It’s alright.”

I stepped into the room and found Ella kneeling on the floor, gently brushing her hand over the forehead of a small boy lying on the couch. His whimpering had stopped, but he had reached out and was grasping Ella’s shirt tightly as if terrified that she was going to disappear.

“Hello there,” I said.

Ella looked up at me and her cheeks were brightly flushed again. She reached out and scooped the little boy into her arms, straightening to her feet in one smooth movement.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is my son, Edmond. I didn’t have a babysitter for him, so I had to bring him with me. He needed a nap, so I laid him down in here while I did the ballroom.”

Before I could say anything, I heard the door to the apartment open and a loud voice echoing through.

“Ella! I’m back. I couldn’t find the rhinestone curtains. Oh.”

I turned and saw another woman who looked like an older, less delicate version of Ella standing in the doorway to the drawing room.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m guessing you’re Molly.”

“Yes, I am,” Molly said, a smile coming to her lips as her eyes scanned over me with a hungry look that made me briefly wonder if this was one of the women I had brought home recently.

Hopefully not one of the ones behind the flowers this morning.

Ella took the distraction as an opportunity to gather up the blanket and soft dinosaur toy that the little boy had been holding on the sofa with him and rush out of the room.

“I’m going to take Edmond home, Molly,” she called back. “Everything is under control here.”

“Alright,” Molly called back.

It was obvious that she wasn’t bothered that her sister was leaving, but I found myself wishing that the situation could be reversed and Ella would have stayed behind to finish the decorations. I would have liked to spend a bit more time looking at her, even if the thought of the child on her hip did throw me off a bit. Mothers were something I tended to steer away from. No need to make things complicated. I looked at Molly.

“I’m going to go to the gym and then to the spa for a massage. Please make sure that you lock the door when you’re finished if the housekeeper hasn’t gotten back by then.”

Molly’s smile faded, but I wasn’t interested in appeasing her. I still needed to get my brain into a space where I could host guests that night and that was going to require a massage. Before that, though, I felt the need to hit the gym and work out the adrenaline looking at Ella had sent surging through me.