Scandalous

“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.”