SAYING I DIDN’T WANT VAL there was the understatement of the fucking decade.
Problem was I had zero choice.
I got home at six, fully intending to change into some workout clothes and go downstairs to the gym to let out some steam after Edie had walked into her father’s office with the flash drive holding all of my ammo, but I had a surprise waiting for me at the door.
Fucking Valenciana Vasquez, leaning against a wall, looking twenty shades of sex-on-red heels, and of course, it did nothing for me.
“Trent.” She batted her eyelashes, a venom-glazed siren. “Long time no see.”
I walked right past her, jamming my keys to the hole. “Hey, you heard no complaints from me.” My jaw ticked once. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
She braced herself against the wall, probably overwhelmed by my underwhelming reaction. If she was expecting tears, shouts, and ‘we’ve been waiting for you’ Hallmark card sentiments, she was deeply mistaken. Luna was mine. Mine to love, mine to raise, mine to fix. Val just presented a complication to me, and I was going to eliminate it, nip it in the bud before she could say Jack-fucking-Robinson.
“I’m here for my daughter, of course.” She scoffed, slithering in my direction and sneaking through the door I’d opened.
“What in the good fuck do you think you’re doing?” I asked when her shoulder brushed the doorframe. I blocked her way with my body, turning around and making sure she had no room to slide between my arms.
She blinked away her shock at my steel voice. When Valenciana found out she was pregnant with Luna, she’d asked for five hundred grand to make the pregnancy go away. It had been borderline cute, how she’d thought she could blackmail me. My answer to her had been—go ahead, sweetheart. Have my kid. Money wasn’t the issue—I could pay her off with little to no effect on my lifestyle. But having an abortion on my dime was out of the question. It was different if it came from her. But since she’d given the choice to me, I chose not to choose. Simple.
So she’d had Luna. Then she’d walked away from us.
And now she’d come back.
If she thought she could do so without an explanation and declaration of intention, she had another thing coming.
“I’m trying to get in so we can talk.” She stomped her heel.
“Luna is going to be here any second now from dance class. She can’t see you.” Each of my words dripped ice, so I wasn’t surprised to see her shiver.
“Who took her?”
Is she a dancer? What is she like? Does she have any other hobbies? So many questions she could have asked. Of course, that would require her to give minimum of two shits about her Luna.
“None of your business. You wanna talk about my daughter, we do it somewhere else. My office. A coffee shop. In another fucking state. No matter where it’ll be, you won’t get access to her until I figure out your angle. Now go.”
“Trent…” Val glided her way to me, hell on heels, her palm on my chest. I threw it off, giving her a piercing look. She swallowed, batting her lashes. “I flew all the way from Georgia,” she whispered.
I started laughing, about to give her a piece of my mind, when the elevator slid open and Luna and Camila walked out. Camila was holding Luna’s backpack, while my daughter bounced on her steps—something she’d started doing ever since Edie had come into our lives—and awarded me with a smile that melted quickly when she realized I wasn’t alone.
“Oh my Gosh, Luna! Look at you! You’re so pretty! Do you know who I am?”
No. Fuck no. I stepped forward to scoop Luna up, but Val’s big mouth was ahead of me. “I’m your mommy!” she exclaimed, flinging her arms theatrically. “I finally came to see you! I’m so excited to get to know you, sweetie!”
Luna’s eyes bugged in disbelief, her face twisting to search my gaze. I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t exactly sure what was going to come out of it if I allowed myself to respond. Punching a woman was not something I’d ever contemplated doing. But hell if Val didn’t make it difficult to not want to end her.
“All right, let’s get inside and have a nice cup of tea.” Camila was the first to move from her spot, her words tense, her eyes skating between Val and me. There was an edge to her tone which warned me that I couldn’t tell Val to fuck off like I normally would. That I couldn’t let a bomb drop on my kid and then go, “so, that was awkward, huh? Anyway, now that I’ve kicked your mom out, shall we see what’s on television…?”
We all went into my apartment, Val taking everything in, no doubt making inventory and calculating how much money she could milk out of the situation.
Suddenly, she turned around and produced a stuffed seahorse from her designer bag, handing it to Luna. “I heard you like seahorses, so I thought I’d give this to you.”
My heart missed a beat, the air stood still, and all I could feel was calamity seeping through every crack in the room, poisoning us like invisible gas.
Click, click, click, the pieces of the puzzle fell together.
Val didn’t have any point of contact with anyone Luna and I knew. Her mother, who lived in Chicago, gave up on her relationship with Luna before it had even begun. She was too busy with an ex-boyfriend-turned-inmate to Skype with her granddaughter. Val, therefore, had a snitch from my inner circle. Now I had to figure out who.
Luna’s eyes sparkled with surprise and delight, and she grabbed the seahorse, clutching it close to her chest. Luna smiled at her, and if there was such thing as a soul—mine blew up and scattered all over the fucking floor. Because everything had just become a million times more complicated. I hated Val for being so reckless. For telling Luna who she was. I hated her and knew she’d done it for a reason. She wanted something from me, and it wasn’t the kid full of hope and awe who stood in front of her, wearing a black leotard and an eager gaze.
“Hey, Luna? Daddy’s gonna go talk to a friend on the phone. You stay with Camila and Val here, okay?” I jerked my thumb toward my bedroom, purposely uttering Valenciana’s name. She’d done nothing to earn the title of Mom. I made eye contact with Camila to make sure she knew Val was not to be left alone with Luna at any point. She gave me a slight nod. I sneaked into my bedroom and called Vicious, who immediately said he’d contact Eli Cole, a family lawyer and Dean’s Dad, and that they would be on their way to me shortly. When I came out, I heard the front door slamming shut.
“Who was it?” I frowned.
“No one important.” Val let loose a sugary smile, patting Luna’s head as she explained to her something completely wrong and untrue about seahorses. Camila motioned with her head for me to follow her to the kitchen, her face twisted with anger. I looked between Val and Luna. I couldn’t leave them alone, even a few feet away from me, in the living room. Val caught up with the problem quickly.
“I need to go freshen up in the bathroom.” She straightened her spine, waltzing down the hallway like she owned the fucking place.
I mustered a small smile and offered it to my daughter. “Germs, can you do me a favor and go to your room for a few minutes? Daddy and Camila need to talk about something that concerns grown-up people.”
Germs. I called her Germs.
When the coast was clear, Camila turned to me, fire in her eyes. “Edie was at the door.” She exhaled sharply, rubbing her forehead, one hand on her waist.
“Not following,” I said, mainly to buy time, because what the fuck?
“She looked upset to see Val. What was she doing here? What’s going on?”
I looked up and offered her the answer she didn’t want to hear. It made no fucking difference if Camila knew or not. It’s not like she had access to Jordan or would ever tell him.
“Dear Lord, Trent, she is just a kid!”
I shook my head, tired of hearing the same old shit. “She’s more of a woman than the bitch who walked into my house two seconds ago and told my kid she’s her mother.”
“Your so-called woman ran away from here in tears, looking every inch of the teenager she is.”
Another sucker punch to my stomach. They just kept on coming today. I wanted to grab my keys and run after Edie, but of course, I couldn’t. Not with Val here. I didn’t even care about the goddamn flash drive anymore. All I cared about was saving Edie and Luna’s ass. If I could get mine to stay intact after this was all over—that was a nice bonus.
I heard the bathroom door creaking open and turned around with the intention of marching to the living room and ending this shit show. My doorbell rang again.
Edie.
I was about to get it, but Val beat me to it—again, as if she lived here—and when she swung the door open, the final piece of the puzzle fell.
Jordan Van Der Zee.
Camila and Luna left for a McDonald’s (you know it’s the apocalypse when you let your daughter have McDonald’s at half past eight on a weekday) on cue, leaving me to deal with the clusterfuck that had walked into my life the same afternoon an eighteen-year-old had decided to smash my heart into micro-pieces. Asshole Van Der Zee strolled toward Val, pressing a possessive kiss to her temple and jerking her by the waist to his side. “Long time no see, beautiful.”
“It’s only been a week.” Her plump red smile had that extra confident curve, telling me whatever Jordan had planned for me, she was part of it. I glanced between them, doing the math. Collecting the pieces of this fucked-up riddle and patching them into the full picture.
“You haven’t been going to Zurich.” I threw my head back, laughing bitterly. “SwissTech doesn’t need your ass to pay them regular visits. We already renewed their contract weeks ago. We thought you were banging a European piece and writing off the expenses.”
“You were wrong.” Jordan sighed and sat on my couch with a grin, oh-so-fucking-proud of himself. “Georgia is closer, and so much more tempting, with this lady by my side.” He pulled Val down, and she fell onto his lap, giggling breathlessly like some fucking 50s New York showgirl. “Now, be a good servant and get us some drinks so we can all have a talk.” Jordan winked, looking more approachable and nice than I’d ever seen him. I stood in front of them, one shoulder propped against the wall separating the kitchen and the living room, hawk-eyed and ready to dive for an attack.
“I’d advise against these kinds of jokes. If you keep them up, you might need to live off liquids anyway, because I’ll break every tooth in that smug mouth of yours.”
“Eh, there we are. A thug, showing his true colors.”
“Quite the contrary. I’m beginning to see my color was never your problem. Val was.”
“Luna and you are my problem,” Jordan corrected, his eyes slicing to mine, glittering with uncontained hatred. “You walked into my life and messed it all up without even realizing what you’d done, Rexroth. Why do you think I bought your piece-of-shit company, ran by a bunch of pampered little assholes?”
“Because you’re only good at buying successful corporations? All the ones you started from scratch went under in less than five years. I’ve read between the lines of your squeaky Forbes interviews,” I quipped, unblinking.
“No. I did it to make sure you’ll never be with Valenciana,” he said.
“Explain to me the logic in that, Van Der Idiot. Smaller brain and stuff.” I tapped my temple sarcastically.
Jordan smirked, leaning down for his briefcase. Val slid down from his knees to the sofa, plucking a pack of Marlboro Reds from her purse and lighting a cigarette. Val puffed a screen of smoke upward and I walked over to her, snapping the cigarette in two.
“You’ve already abandoned your daughter. It is grossly unnecessary to make her a secondhand smoker, too.”
She pouted, giving me her big Lolita eyes like they’d do something to me. Like they could touch what Edie had managed to somehow clutch and squeeze and fuck so raw I no longer felt like any of my inner organs were mine anymore.
“Party pooper.” Val scowled.
“You have no idea. I’m about to shit all over your fucking life, sweetheart. Now, the seahorse. How did you know about it?”
Val unknotted her long legs and sat back, letting Jordan sift through his documents while humoring me at the same time. “Your little girlfriend was planning on buying it for her online. Jordan has full access to the search history on her phone and checks it daily. I beat her to it. Sorry, Trent. That’s what you get for dating someone who still needs Daddy’s allowance.” You’re the one living off her daddy’s money.
“You’re a fucking demon.” I laughed, crazed.
“I could have been your demon,” she whined, wild.
“You could never be anyone’s demon. Soulless people cannot be owned or loved.”
With that, I walked off to the kitchen, needing something…something to calm me the fuck down. I downed a bottle of water and came back to the living room. Jordan was arranging stacks of paper all over my coffee table. It looked like a plan. One I wasn’t going to like.
“So let’s make it short and sweet, shall we?” He rolled up the sleeves to his crisp, button-down shirt, licking his fingers as he thumbed through the pages, acutely concentrating on them. “Five years ago, I had a company called SilverStar, Inc. It was located in—”
“Chicago,” I finished for him.
Jordan’s shoulders shook with a chuckle. “That’s right, boy. And so, during one of my many trips to Chicago, I met Valenciana and we started dating.”
I was tempted to remind him the word he was looking for was “affair,” but semantics weren’t really top priority at that moment.
Jordan plucked one document out of a pile.
“Val caught my attention in one of my trips. How could she not? Look at her. We began to see each other every time I was in town. Which was a lot. I admit, I was smitten. Val, however, did not share the sentiment, as she continued her straying ways. I let her, because, let’s admit it—she wasn’t my only mistress, either.”
He handed me the document, and I took it, examining it through a mist of red anger. It was a report conducted by a private investigator named Barry Guilfoyle. There were highlights of the times I’d been away from the apartment, from Luna, showing I was working long hours and going on frequent business trips, leaving her with Camila or with my parents.
“We were supposed to get stronger as time progressed, Val and me. I told her to have an abortion. It didn’t matter who was the father. I didn’t appreciate being fiscally chained to some stripper, either.” Jordan drew a breath, handing me some more documents. “Val said you were the father. That you were too good a financial opportunity to pass up. I didn’t offer her money, assuming that you would. I’d knocked up a couple of women in my day after marrying Lydia, and I bought my way through their abortions easily enough. But you chose not to pay, and by the time I calmed down and got back into the picture, Val was already five months pregnant. Too late for her to get rid of the kid.”
To get rid of the kid.
I clenched my fists, my jaw, my fucking ass, in an effort not to murder him. He passed me a few low resolution printed pictures. They showed Camila frowning at Luna. That was just Camila’s stern expression sometimes. It didn’t mean shit. Another picture of me pulling Luna’s curls into a ponytail. She liked her ponytail tight, no bumps, so it looked like I was hurting her. But I wasn’t. She was standing between my legs in a coffee shop, both her arms resting on my thighs, looking elsewhere. The pictures looked bad, but the situations were completely innocent. Still, why take any chances?
“You better watch your mouth,” I warned, “or you’ll be very fucking sorry.”
Jordan laughed, sighing with contempt. “When we did a test and realized the baby was yours, I left. But I got back with Val…eventually. See, in the space between the time Luna was born and when she turned one year old, Val was trying to win you. Seduce you. Be with you. I get it. You’re younger, hungrier, better looking. But you’re not smarter, Trent. You’re a bloody idiot who got lucky because his friends were too generous and let him have a piece of the pie. You should have never gotten a piece of the pie. The pie is not for you to eat.”
I gritted my teeth, letting him finish, processing everything. The pictures. The reports. The case Jordan had been building against me for fucking years. My greatest fear—Val coming back to take Luna—was materializing in front of my face, with a cherry on top in the form of Jordan scheming against me. I knew exactly what Val’s angle would be. We did coke together the night I knocked her up.
She could say I had a drug problem in court.
She could even make it believable.
Our case had years in court written all over it.
I took a step in his direction, and he almost flinched. I tipped my chin up, looking down at him. “Why go through all this trouble?”
“Because I never lose, peasant. Especially not to another ex-poor boy like you.”
Ex-poor boy. I should have known that Jordan was like me. The chip on the shoulder was there—it was always there—only difference was mine was skin deep. His—bone deep.
Every muscle in my body told me to pounce on him and rip him apart. My mind told me to wait it out and hit harder than with my fists.
“I won Val back, but not without a fight. While I kept her in Atlanta, she begged me to contact Luna. I, of course, told her it was out of the question. I purchased your company, wanting to be close to you, wanting to study you, to see what made you tick. Because the end game…” Jordan got up, scooping the papers on the coffee table and tucking them under his arm. “The end game was to end you.”
The moment of epiphany made me feel like Samson on his last breath, when God gave him the strength to pull the pillars, bringing the roof down. Samson got killed in the process, but he took the Philistines down. I knew I’d do the same if I had to.
Jordan bought my company because he wanted to demolish me, personally and professionally, so that he’d have more control over that. And to punish me for something I wasn’t even aware.
He promised Val a happily-ever-after and her kid back.
He wanted to frame me, ruin me, and take what’s mine. The woman I didn’t want and the girl I’d do everything for.
Jordan flicked the papers, causing them to rain down on the floor, and tugged at Val’s limp arm to get her up from my couch. “And with Luna not wanting to talk, this is going to look very bad in court, Rexroth. You traumatized her with your lifestyle—she’s too terrified to make a sound. With that in mind, I suggest you hand us your resignation first thing tomorrow morning, sell me your shares in the company, and meet us this weekend to discuss joint custody with Val. She wants in on Luna, and she expects you to pick up the bill for her accommodation. I think it’s fair.”
I smiled as the documents scattered all around us. What Val wanted was access to my money. Bonus points: living in a glitzy SoCal town close to her multi-billionaire lover who was smart enough not to marry her ass.
Jordan stormed out, his shoulder brushing mine. “Keep the duplicates, Rexroth. My treat.”
I was still standing there with my heart in my fucking throat and my soul clutched in my fist when Jordan and Val reached the door. She looked like a guilty, apologetic mess, and he looked like the devil. He turned around.
“Trent Rexroth being mute. Hardly a surprise.”
“You want words?” I took a step in his direction, grinning. “Here’s something to tide you over: thank you for giving me the play-by-play of your game. Keep your eyes open.” I pushed both of them out of my apartment, my arm slung over the door. The last thing I said before slamming it in their bewildered faces was, “My turn.”