Chapter Eighteen

Ella

My phone rang, and I picked it up, already knowing whose name was going to be on the caller ID. I looked at it and let out an exasperated groan, tossing it aside so that it skittered across the surface of the kitchen table and away from the bowl of obscenely sweet fruit-flavored cereal that I had been trying to get through for half an hour.

How did he get my number? …Oh, wait. Money and power. The same way he gets everything that he wants.

I tried another bite, but I just couldn’t deal with the overpowering sweetness.

Molly isn’t allowed to do the grocery shopping anymore.

I was standing up to bring the bowl to the sink when I heard my phone start ringing again.

“For the love of all that is good and pure in this world, will you please answer the damn phone?” Molly asked as she came into the room.

“Aunt Molly said a bad word.”

Edmond came in after Molly, gripping his dinosaur and rubbing sleep from his eyes. When I was pregnant with him people always told me that I was going to have to get used to early mornings because children like to get up with the sun and go full force from the moment their eyes open. Not my son. Edmond was like a little old man who hadn’t gotten his morning coffee yet.

“Yes, she did,” I said, pulling my little boy up into my lap and nuzzling into his hair. He smelled sweet and fresh like the green apple shampoo he had chosen because of the cartoon character on the bottle. “She shouldn’t say things like that.”

I cringed thinking of all of the bad words he had heard Mama say a few weeks before when we were standing in Mason’s apartment. He had been crying too hard to admonish me for them, and part of me didn’t know if he had even heard them, but I knew I had said them. Mason had earned every single one of them, though, and I wasn’t going to feel bad for saying what I did, just the fact that my son was only a few feet away when I did it.

“I’m not answering,” I said. “If I had wanted to talk to him, I would have in the last 300 times he’s called me.”

“I don’t understand why you’re being like this.”

“You weren’t there. You didn’t hear the way he talked to Edmond.”

“He yelled at me,” Edmond chimed in.

“I know that,” Molly said, “but he was in Mason’s apartment touching things that were probably really expensive.”

“Thing. Not things. And where do you get off being on his side? You’re my sister.”

“I’m not on his side,” Molly told me. “I’m just saying that you really didn’t give him an opportunity to say he was sorry or to explain himself.”

“There’s nothing that he could say that could explain that,” I said. “I’m just glad that I got to see him for who he really is now, before…”

I stopped before I went any further.

“Before what?” Molly asked. I didn’t respond, and she grabbed a cup of coffee, settling into the chair across from me. “Before what?”

I kissed Edmond’s head and patted his hip.

“Why don’t you go get dressed? I put some clothes out for you on my bed.”

Edmond slipped down off of my lap and headed toward the room we shared. I looked at my sister.

“Before anything else happened,” I said.

“From what you told me, there really isn’t a whole lot else that could happen between the two of you.”

She laughed, but I just shook my head.

“That’s the thing. There is. The sex was amazing. I’m not going to lie about that. But that’s all I thought it was going to be. One night of blissful, blistering sex and then I could go back to my life. Then I woke up and he was right there beside me. He had his arm draped over me and I just completely freaked out.”

“Why?”

“Because I felt something,” I said. “We had barely spent any time together, yet I could tell that I was developing feelings for him. It wasn’t something that I expected at all, and something that wasn’t at all welcome.”

“Oh, obviously,” Molly said, nodding. “A gorgeous, exorbitantly wealthy man with muscles you could do laundry on falls for you and wants to spend more time with you. I can definitely see why you’d be so conflicted. Nobody would want something like that.”

She glared at me over her coffee cup as she took a sip and I sighed.

“You just don’t understand,” I said. “I haven’t been with anyone since Branden died. I didn’t think that I was even capable of having those feelings anymore, and now it’s like I’m betraying him.”

“You aren’t betraying him. He would want you to be happy.”

“That might be true,” I said, standing and picking up my cereal bowl. “But it won’t be with Mason Dupree. I never want to see him again.”

“Then let’s hope he’s not at home this evening.”

I put my bowl in the sink and sighed, knowing that that couldn’t be a good introduction.

“Why?”

“I got us another job at The Avalon. We’re supposed to be there at eight. I’ve already talked to Mrs. Moskowitz next door and she said that Edmond can come stay at her house. They’ll make more cookies.”

“My son is going to think that the food pyramid is made up of 11 different kinds of cookies.”

I dreaded the thought of going back to The Avalon, but after how uncharacteristically supportive Molly had been in the weeks since I had left Mason in his apartment, I knew that I couldn’t let her down.

That night Molly and I walked into the lobby of The Avalon at exactly eight. I had insisted that we leave early so that we didn’t have a replay of our race from the night of the party. She hadn’t forced me to wear the horrible uniform that she had chosen for us, instead encouraging me to wear a pair of black slacks, heels, and a soft mint colored sweater. It felt like a strange outfit to wear to an event gig and I was starting to worry that she really had added escort to our list of services when I saw Mason come out of the Avalon Café toward me.

I started to turn around, but Molly grabbed me by my shoulders and turned me back to him.

“Thank you, Molly,” he said. “I appreciate your help.”

I looked over my shoulder at my sister.

“You did this?” I asked. “You knew all along?”

“Yep,” Molly said. “I got tired of listening to your phone ring a couple days ago, so I answered it and it was Mason. We talked for a while and I really think that you need to hear what he has to say. So, we arranged for this little dinner for the two of you. Have a good night.”

I glared at my sister as she walked out of the apartment building and back toward her car before turning back to Mason.

“I don’t have anything to say to you,” I said.

“Please just hear me out, Ella,” Mason said. “Just give me a few minutes. You don’t even have to stay for the whole dinner if you don’t want to. I just want to apologize.”

I let out a sigh and nodded. As much as I didn’t want to look him in the face anymore, I also felt the same powerful draw to him that I had since meeting him and couldn’t resist being close to him, even if only for a few minutes. I didn’t want my last memory of him to be the look in his eyes when he screamed at my son.

Mason gestured toward the Café and I walked toward it, extremely aware of how his hand hovered just over my back, not quite touching me but somehow guiding me just with its presence. As soon as we walked inside I noticed that there was no one else in the restaurant.

“They were kind enough to let me rent out the place for the evening so that we could have privacy,” he said as though he had read my mind.

I nodded, and we made our way toward a table that was decorated with glowing candles and trailing sprays of roses. He pulled a chair out for me and I sat. As soon as he sat across from me, Mason looked into my eyes and let out a long sigh.

“I think I need to explain to you why that frame is so important to me.”