“ANY NEWS?” I LET MY shirt fall to the cathedral marble floor with a soft thud. Amanda stripped out of her dress mechanically, as she did most things, hanging the colorful number over the brown, tufted wingback chair in my bedroom and watching the Todos Santos skyline from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
I realized that this was not a healthy way to conduct a relationship with the private investigator whom I’d hired to hunt down the woman who’d abandoned my child. I also realized that two-timing her and my child’s therapist could go disastrously wrong. Yet, I’d always liked messy, and mixing business and pleasure was a great idea—if you didn’t mind the blowup and knew how to leverage the pleasure part to your own benefit.
Amanda worked extra hard for me. Sonya saw Luna twice as much as any other kid at her clinic.
And then there was another thing that kept me drawn to them: convenience.
As far as my family, parents, and friends were concerned, I haven’t touched a chick since Val fucked off to God-knows-where, and I wanted to keep it that way. I didn’t want them to try to set me up with a woman, knowing I was in the market for one. Didn’t want them to keep tabs, and to tell me how goddamn wrong it was to be alone, and how I needed to settle down.
Luckily, Amanda and Sonya didn’t see me as more than a hot piece of ass who paid a healthy fraction of their salaries and fucked them so raw and hard (with a rubber—lesson learned) that they needed a whole week to recover. Amanda unclasped her white lace bra from behind and it slid off of her arms. It looked like heaven against her chocolate skin.
“Still looking,” she murmured, lighting a joint between her rosy lips.
“Where now?”
“Brazil. Trying to figure out if she’s staying with her relatives there.” Val’s mother lived in Chicago. She’d run away from Val’s abusive father in Rio when Valenciana was three years old. The chances of finding Luna’s mother in Brazil were slim, but after three years and no news, I was going on a wild goose chase. Money wasn’t an issue these days, though it still felt weird spending it on such an abstract cause. Ever since Valenciana decided to fuck off, I’d been searching for her relentlessly. It wasn’t the leaving part I cared about; I’d given up on her acting as a mother long ago. I wanted to make it official. Wanted her to sign over custody rights to me. If Val decided to waltz into my life again—which wasn’t that farfetched, since she loved money, and I had plenty—Luna not speaking at four would be something she could exploit in court to get her way. Because if Val took Luna, she would get enough child support to sustain her love for everything designer and expensive.
And if there was one thing I’d definitely never survive or allow, it was someone taking my kid away from me.
Amanda walked over to where I leaned on the window, still in her kitten heels, a Caribbean goddess who had no time for a husband or kids herself. She stopped by my wet bar (so nineties, but I’d been a poor kid back then and that was my dream, and Old Trent worked part-time on making Young Trent’s dreams come true), and plucked a bottle of limited edition Jameson. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but after butting heads with a teenybopper today and having her scrawny ass refuse me, a little sip wouldn’t hurt. Amanda sat on the bed and patted the velvet linen beside her, and I sat next to her, pressing my head against her bare tits as she poured the liquor into my mouth from above.
“I feel inclined to tell you, Rexroth, you’re probably not going to find Val. No one cares if you cross the border into Mexico, never mind farther south. Val didn’t even need burner phones, a darknet email address and a fancy, fake identity. She could likely skip to a beach town and stay there with a friend, or pick up an odd job. She sold most of the things you’d purchased for her prior to her disappearance and had a healthy sum of child support, which could tide her over for a long time.”
I felt the burn of the liquor slithering down my throat and wondered how the fuck Dean could have been an alcoholic in the past. Booze depressed me. Plus, I found myself doing stupid shit when I was drunk. Like writing notes about my daughter and showing them to her therapist. I plucked the joint from Amanda’s lips and tucked it between mine, tilting my head back and puffing out a ribbon of sweet-scented smoke skyward. Amanda’s coal black hair engulfed my pecs as she leaned to kiss my bare shoulder, across the tattoo I’d gotten right before college, when I was sitting at home with a broken ankle and burning time was a priority.
“Fuck,” was my sophisticated answer to her little speech. My dick was already hard and thick. She sucked on my neck, declaring her intentions by biting my shoulder. The air conditioner in the room hummed between us and I listened closely for noise from the outside. Luna was fast asleep in the other wing of the penthouse, her room right next to Camila’s. She would never meet Amanda. She would never know what her daddy did at night.
“Let go of her, Trent. Find a good woman who can take care of your kid. Literally every single woman in the continent with eyes and ovaries is a willing candidate. You’re the whole package,” she said.
Catching the blunt between my teeth, I slid her matching white thong down her thighs and shoved three fingers into her at once, working my way up to her G-spot and rubbing it lazily. She didn’t even have time to drop her ass back on the covers from giving me access to her pussy. Her sudden moan sliced the air when I pushed my thumb to her clit and started massaging, working her up.
“It’s going to hurt today,” I said.
“Why?” she purred, instantly warming up to the idea. “Who pissed you off this time?”
Her name sat at the tip of the tongue, but letting it loose was acknowledging Edie was on my mind. She was young. So, goddamn young. And even if I didn’t care about the age—which I did, her body was straddling the rope between ripe and juvenile. It still hadn’t reached its full potential and gotten all its defined curves. I cared about Fiscal Heights Holdings and had plans for it. Plans that didn’t include Edie or her vindictive father. She was therefore a calamity, a downfall, and a sure-as-fuck distraction.
“No one.” I licked my way to Amanda’s throat, stopping to stare at her. Amanda didn’t expect a kiss. No one did. “No one important.”
It was a lie I wanted to believe in.
It was a lie I cultivated with my brain, my heart, and whatever was left of my soul.
It was a lie which would become truth. It had to.
My phone alarm buzzed with enthusiasm we obviously didn’t share at four a.m. sharp. Waking up in the ink dark wasn’t my idea of fun, but surfing was, so I bit the bullet, convincing myself that it was temporary, even though I had no reason to think that.
Yawning, I stretched inside my twin bed, my eyes slowly regaining focus. Pink walls. Two chandeliers. White, antique furniture restored and imported from Italy. Everything in my room suggested I was a happy, cheerleader-type teenage girl. No one could suspect this room represented a cage, a persona I was supposed to perform. No one knew that I had to shove my surfing gear, wax, wetsuits, and whatnot to the back of my closet, even though I used it every day, in the off-chance someone would find out I wasn’t an ice princess.
Surfing wasn’t prestigious enough to be an approved-of activity for a Van Der Zee.
My surfboards were hidden under heavy brown fabrics in one of the garages, where guests couldn’t see them, even by accident, and all the family pictures I’d hung on my coral walls had been taken down the same day I’d put them there, the only evidence to the fact this room was once warm and mine were the naked nails hammered to the wall.
No one knew a thing about the real me, because I wasn’t perfect, and the Van Der Zees were.
At least on the outside.
We were The Brady Bunch, sans the gazillion kids. Blonde and beautiful and with the biggest, whitest smiles in our zip code.
I slipped into an orange bikini, a matching wetsuit, and a black hoodie, and texted Bane. We didn’t get to surf together now that I was working a dead-end job, but I still offered. It sucked to surf in the pitch black, not to mention it was exceedingly risky. But I didn’t have much choice. I started work at seven in the morning and didn’t get off until seven in the evening. And when I did, I had to check on my mom, cook for her, make sure she was okay. Someone had to, after all, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be Jordan.
I entered the kitchen for some coconut water and a granola bar. Blood-red granite countertops and stainless steel appliances shone from every corner. The kitchen was one of my favorite places in the mansion because my father rarely ever wandered there. He had his food delivered to his room by one of our housekeepers whenever he was home. When he did make an appearance, it was to make my mother some tea, which was the only thing that seemed to have soothe her troubled mind.
“Mom?” I gasped when a frail, hunched back greeted me, wrapped in an off-white sateen robe. “What are you doing up?”
She was sitting at the marble dining table, staring at an article in a local newspaper. I walked over and pressed my lips to the crown of her blonde head.
“Hey,” I said softly. “Late night?”
“Who is April Lewenstein?” She pressed a thoroughly-chewed fingernail onto an image of Dad hugging a young businesswoman, both smiling to the camera at one of FHH’s functions. She dragged her finger across their picture and ink smeared both their faces. I allowed myself an indulgent sigh, my shoulders loosening.
“April’s in accounting, seventh floor. Married, five-months pregnant. You have nothing to worry about. Go back to bed.”
She whipped her head in my direction. Her lips were unnaturally plump, her skin too tight from endless injections, and her red-rimmed eyes told the story of another unbalanced cocktail of medication which we’d have to get replaced and prescribed.
“You would tell me if you knew he was cheating on me.” She grabbed the fabric of my wetsuit and balled it, pulling me into her face.
I offered a non-committed shrug. “Sure.” No chance in hell. At this point, Lydia Van Der Zee couldn’t deal with the simple fact that our pool was going to stay closed for the rest of the summer for maintenance. But I told her what she wanted to hear, because white lies paved the path to living with her brand of instability in relative peace. For me, not her, of course.
“How’s work for you, my darling girl?” She relaxed her grip on my wetsuit. My eyes flicked to the clock above the fridge, knowing I owed her the company, if nothing else. I slid onto a chair next to her and unscrewed the coconut water’s cap, bringing it to my lips. “It’s fine. Jordan picked the biggest assholes in town to work with. I can’t wait for him to find another pet project to spend all his time on.”
Fiscal Heights Holdings was just another loop in my father’s corporation belt. He had purchased and taken over so many companies before, I could hardly keep up with the count. He treated his businesses like needy lovers—giving them everything they needed in the first year, then dumping them to fend for themselves once he grew bored and found another exciting venture.
“I don’t know about that,” my mother mumbled, pulling at her fat lower lip. “He likes the idea of brushing shoulders with Baron Spencer and the like. They’re big names in Todos Santos, and he wants to run for mayor.”
Fiscal Heights Holdings was based in Beverly Hills, in big L.A, but we lived in the town of Todos Santos. And Todos Santos was small. Frighteningly so (see also: me trying to steal my boss’ mother’s purse by accident.)
So, Mom didn’t have to remind me Trent Rexroth was a big deal. Recently, I’d found myself thinking about him obsessively, in and out of the office, which was why I made it a point to push him away whenever he was in my vicinity.
“Your dad’s been acting weird. Cheating again, I’m sure. I think it’s serious this time.”
“Doubt it.” I offered a consoling smile. I meant the serious part, not the cheating. He definitely cheated.
She rubbed at her cheek tiredly. “His business trips have never been this long or this often before.”
“Maybe he is gearing up to become mayor. Meeting donors, yada yada.” Though he hadn’t talked about his political aspirations in a while, and that meant they weren’t on his mind. Jordan Van Der Zee had one true love, and that was the sound of his own voice.
The kitchen door made a soft noise, and I snapped my head around on an instinct, ready to yank a drawer open and chase a bastard with a steak knife. When I saw that it was the devil himself leaning on its frame, I exhaled, but knew better than to relax.
“You’re up, too? What’s up with you guys? It’s half past four in the morning,” I muttered, clutching my drink. The weekend was fast approaching, and I didn’t want to piss off Jordan. I needed this visit on Saturday, so playing nice was crucial.
“Edie and I have something to discuss. Go back to bed, Lydia. I will make you some tea in a moment.” Even though his disapproval was directed at my mother, it didn’t make the burn less marring. She got up on defeated feet, walking out of the room not unlike a ghost. Every step she took screamed negligence, abandonment, and weakness. My mother was abused just enough to break her, but not enough for me to go to the police with it. Balance, Rexroth said. Is everything. And oh, how right he was.
I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath. You will not lose your shit over this, Edie. Screw surfing and his little ego games and making a point. Look at the big picture.
Jordan snatched the coconut water from my hand, slam-dunking the bottle into one of the two giant sinks in the kitchen island.
“I was drinking that.” There was spite in lethal quantities in each of my innocent words.
“Not anymore. That, and the surfing…it makes you look like a hippie. Van Der Zees drink coffee every morning. It keeps us sharp.”
“You make Mom tea twice a day.” I grinned.
“Your mother is not a Van Der Zee. Her claim to fame is marrying one.”
There wasn’t a way for me to acknowledge him that wouldn’t start a third world war, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Edie, we need to talk.”
“I thought that’s what we were doing.”
He leaned forward, his elbows on the table. The grave look on his face told me he was disappointed with me again, though hell if I knew why.
“I saw your exchange with Rexroth yesterday in the break room. The whole floor did.”
My eyes darted to him, my mouth falling open before I could fashion a comeback. If my father suspected I was flirting with Rexroth, he would strip me out of everything I cared about and had left. I couldn’t allow it.
“Listen—” I started, but he cut me off with a wave of a hand.
“No daughter of mine would be stupid enough to fall for his brute charm. I do know that, Edie.” He started slipping on his tie, tying it without even having to look in the mirror. I sat back, folding my arms over my chest.
“But I saw the way he looked at you, and the way he leaned into you, both of which weren’t appropriate considering your age difference and your recent employment with us. I’m not sure what Trent Rexroth has in mind, but he will not get his way, whatever that is. Now, you know your father well enough to understand the consequences of associating with him, correct?”
Was Jordan going to off Trent Rexroth? I wouldn’t put it past him. He was positively certifiable when it came to protecting his family’s honor, with honor being the operative word here. Love, feelings, and general wellbeing were disposable in his world. The realization that this conversation could go in so many different ways—all of them wrong—hit my stomach first, then rolled up to my chest, making my throat close up. My heart was littered with broken promises and half-baked happy moments. A wasteland of hopes and dreams that could never be fulfilled without Theo.
“Rexroth doesn’t interest me, so don’t waste your breath warning me off him,” I said, flicking old sand from between my chipped fingernails. It was always there, no matter how much I picked at it. Truth be told—I loved it there. The sand reminded me of the ocean, of surfing, of freedom.
“Would you like me to increase your hourly rate?” Father lurched forward like a heavy machine, taking my hand in his and clasping it robotically. His skin was cold and dry, a perfect metaphor to the man he was. I considered my words carefully, my gaze gliding over our hands, how unnatural they looked and felt.
“Well, you do only pay me minimum wage.”
“And would you like for me to arrange it so that you could see Theodore on Saturdays and every other Wednesday evening?” He followed, his smile cunning. Theodore. Not Theo. Never Theo.
My fingers were shaking, itching to withdraw from my father’s grasp. They trembled to touch Theo again. To feel his face between my hands. His laugh on my skin. His soul next to mine. At the same time, I knew Jordan well enough to recognize the carrot he was dangling in front of me was poisonous. My hand still stung from his touch, and I wanted to wash it with soap, scrub it until the first layer of skin peeled. He leaned closer, his breath full of minty toothpaste and venom.
“I need you to help me, Edie. There’s a job to be done, and you’re the perfect candidate.”
“I’m listening,” I said, wanting to see where he’d take it.
“Trent Rexroth. I want you to sniff around him. Find out what his deal is.”
“Why?” It didn’t take a genius to know these two hated each other. Then again, my father collected enemies like one would stamps or Christmas cards. Dutifully and fondly. Every powerful person he came across was labeled, seen and treated as a national threat. The term egomaniac was invented, coined specifically for him. Jordan Van Der Zee had no problem being agreeable to people less worthy, rich and important than he was. But the minute you became a competitor, or an obstacle, he would run you over and reverse back and forth just to double-check and be on the safe side.
“His silence is irking, and he always goes against me. He is up to something. I want to know what it is. I want to know all there is to know about what he does in his office behind closed doors. I want to know what days he takes his daughter to the therapist. I want to know his schedule. Where he keeps his safe and files and iPad. I. Want. To. Know. Everything.”
Clearly, he thought Trent Rexroth was scheming something shady behind his back. A hostile takeover, or maybe a surprise ambush that would affect his beloved investments company.
Trent Rexroth definitely gave the impression of being a control-freak. Maybe Jordan was right to be worried. It made no difference at all. Because as much as I hated turning down Wednesdays with Theo, I also didn’t want to dig myself a deeper grave by letting my father play me like this. It was a damned if I do and damned if I don’t situation. Either he was lying to me about giving me more time with the only guy I cared for or he was telling the truth, but setting a precedent to a chain of blackmails, now that he knew it’d work. The double-edged sword cut my heart in two.
“No, thanks,” I said slowly, flicking my thumb against the edge of the table. “Take your offer to someone who is interested in it.”
“My dearest daughter.” He grabbed my hand again, pulling at my arm on purpose. It didn’t hurt, but it was far from feeling comfortable. “You will do it. The perks are just a little push in the right direction. You have no choice in this matter.”
“I’m not going to spy on Trent Rexroth.” My voice grew louder, steadier. “He hasn’t done anything bad to me and besides, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Rexroth hates my guts.” That was an understatement. At this point, I was sure he’d rather confide in a neo-Nazi than tell me all his secrets.
My father, of course, chose to disregard my growing resistance. “If you won’t do it, Edie, I’ll be sending Theodore to New York. You know I can pull the right strings and make it happen. His facility in San Diego is grossly overcrowded as it is. I’d be doing him a favor.”
Back in familiar waters. This was more like it. The threats, I was used to. “Blackmailing someone into blackmail is an interesting method. I’d like to see you pull this off. Move Theodore to a lesser facility when you’re trying to run for mayor. Someone you don’t want anyone to know about in the first place,” I said dryly, hating him, and Rexroth, and the whole world for standing between me and happiness. I didn’t care about the money, and the glitz, or the broken Louboutins. I just wanted to surf and be next to Theo. The fact those things felt impossible to achieve made me feel like a trapped butterfly in a glass bell jar. A tiny creature, slamming against the barrier until I ran out of energy, breath, and hope.
“You’re throwing the word blackmail around way too often and loudly for my liking, young lady. Consider it research,” he suggested, releasing my hand again.
“You can call it research, or blackmail, or Uncle Joe. The answer would still be no.”
It was already five in the morning and I’d officially missed my surfing window. Screw it, I could come in at eight once a week. The chair beneath me scraped as I stood up.
Something hit the table with a heavy slap. I whipped my head around and looked at him once again.
A bag.
My mother’s medication bag.
It shouldn’t have sounded so heavy, but it did, because it was. Because nowadays, my mother required three pills just to get her out of bed, and that’s without her vitamins—which she was addicted to—and the gummy bears promising radiant skin, tough nails, and heavenly slumber, which she chewed on throughout the day. She also took another three to fall asleep at night.
“Reconsider. You have two people to think about. One of them—your mother—is a helpless child trapped in a woman’s body. You’ve burned every bridge in order to save them, Edie. Every single one. From your education, to your dream of becoming a surfer and getting away from here, from me. You’ve made all the sacrifices for your mother and Theodore…what’s one more?”
I stood facing the hallway, an eternal scream making my body shudder. He had me exactly where he wanted me, and he knew it. He sauntered toward me, a cloud of his smugness hanging in the room like a stench.
“Make no mistake, Edie. I will sacrifice your mother and your locked-up obsession without a second thought. You signed up to be my little obedient marionette…you don’t get to make the rules.” The last sentence was spoken so close to me, I could feel his breath brushing my back.
I stormed out of the kitchen, feeling his eyes shooting daggers at my back.
I’d bleed to death before turning around and seeing his face. I knew how he felt.
Victorious.