“So, I’m going to get mint chocolate chip. Isabella, you want strawberry, right?” Lucas asked me as we stood at the counter in the ice cream shop.
“Yes, please.”
“Jack, what do you want?”
“I’ll take the vanilla bean,” he said.
“Vanilla bean. Really, Jack?” Lucas shook his head. “Who thought you would be plain vanilla?”
“I guess you don’t know me as well as you thought you did, hey, Lucas?”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Jack?” Lucas rolled his eyes.
“You’re always full of drama. You know that right?”
“I’m full of drama?” Lucas shook his head. “Whatever.”
Jack looked at me. “So, you guys have been friends since college, I gather.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said already.” I nodded, as I looked at him, “Really good friends. Lucas used to hang out with me, Abby, Emma, and Chloe all the time.”
“Abby, Emma, and Chloe?” Jack looked curious. “And they are?”
“Oh, sorry. They’re my roommates and my best friends.”
“They’re lovely girls. All of them hot.” Lucas grinned. “Trust me, if I were straight, I’d have fallen for all of them.”
“Very funny.” I laughed.
“Lucas, you’re an idiot.”
“Why? It’s true.” Okay. Let me pay you for these ice creams.” He looked at Jack. “No need to offer, this is on me.”
“I didn’t hear myself offering,” Jack said with a laugh. “I think you can afford some ice cream. You do get a nice allowance each month.”
“Oh my gosh. We’re not going to talk about my allowance again, are we?” Lucas shook his head and looked at me. “Jack is in charge of the family trust fund, and he doles out money to all of us. You’d think it was his personal money, the way he goes on.”
“I don’t think it’s my personal money. It’s our family money,” Jack said dryly. “And let’s hope it’s here for many generations.”
“Well, we’re the last generation right now. No one else even has kids. And the way things are going, no one else is going to have kids.” Lucas laughed. “So why not spend it all now?”
“Lucas.” I touched him on the shoulder. I could see that Jack was looking annoyed.
“Why? It’s true. We have millions of dollars. Billions for all I know. And yet I’m going to get called out for buying a watch last month?”
“You bought a Cartier watch for $20,000,” Jack said dryly. “That was no small chunk of change.”
“For us it was.”
“For us?” Jack said, “If you want to be spending money like that, come and work for the family business. There are many different things that I can have you doing. And I can provide training before I put you into any real position of power.”
“Uh, that’s okay,” Lucas said quickly and pulled out his phone. “Actually, I have a call to make, can I come back and talk to you guys in a second?”
“Um, what?” I didn’t want to be left alone with Jack.
“It’s fine,” Jack said. “We’ll get our ice creams. Go. We’ll be here.”
“Great.”
“See you in a second Isabella. See you, Jack.” And with that, Lucas was out of the ice cream shop.
“Well, how’s this for life, huh, Isabella?”
“Hmm?”
“We meet again at another eatery.”
“Yep. We meet again.” I nodded, wondering where he was going with this.
“And you still look nothing like Pamela Anderson.” The smile on his face gave me butterflies.
“Ha-ha very funny.”
“What?”
“You keep looking at me like I’m the one that’s in the wrong here.”
“You’re the one that sent the message and said to me that people sometimes mistake you for Pamela Anderson.”
“What?” And then I sighed. “Oh my gosh. So, I need to explain something.”
“Okay. And that is?”
“You weren’t chatting with me in the app.”
His face darkened. “You mentioned that. Who was I chatting with?”
“You were chatting with my best friend, Abby. She had this idea that we should all create profiles and chat with different guys to find the right guy for each other. She’s the one who created my profile, and she chatted with you to get me the date.”
“So, everything that she said was not true.”
“I don’t know if everything she said was not true because I don’t know what she said. We had a deal where we wouldn’t look and see what the other person had written.”
“Well, that sounds really stupid.” He rolled his eyes and then he started laughing. “But it makes a lot of sense now.”
“Oh, why?”
“She also wrote that if she was lucky enough to come back to my place, she’d make me dessert after dinner.”
I groaned. “So that’s why you told me to go to the kitchen.”
“Yeah. I thought you were being coy or nervous to go to my kitchen because you were so impressed by my house, but that’s the reason I didn’t get dessert at the restaurant. And that’s the reason I told you to go and make me something because you—or rather, your friend Abby—had told me that was going to be happening when we got back to my place.” He shook his head. “She also told me that you liked a little bit of kink.”
“What do you mean?”
“She told me …” he started laughing. “She told me you were into spanking. And …” He started laughing even harder.
“What?”
“She told me that if things worked out, we could both get our nipples pierced.”
“What? No, she didn’t!”
“Yeah, she did. I was having a problem seeing how her conversation and how the way you were acting at the restaurant went together, but I just figured a lot of people are a lot braver when they’re chatting online.” He sighed. “But I guess now I know that you weren’t being brave. You weren’t having the conversation with me at all.”
“Oh. So, are you disappointed then?”
“Disappointed? Hmm. I don’t know how to answer that.”
“Well, it’s either yes or no. Right?”
“Well, yeah, but it’s more complicated than that. I saw the photo, which was you, of course. And I was attracted to that photo. If I’m honest …”
“Yeah?”
“If I’m honest, I liked your picture more than I liked your conversation.” He shrugged. “So, I guess, no, I wasn’t disappointed.”
“If you didn’t really like my conversation, why did you meet me?”
“Because I thought you were hot, and it turns out it wasn’t your conversation I didn’t like. It was your friend’s.”
“But—”
“But nothing. Now we know why we had such a bad first date. Or rather, now we know why we had such a bad first and second and last date.” He rolled his eyes “Because we were not on the same page at all. “
“Yeah. But—” I stopped.
“What?”
“That didn’t mean you had to treat me the way you did after we slept together.”
“I think you read something into what I said or did. I don’t really know. You women are so complicated.”
“What do you mean, ‘you women are so complicated?”
“I just mean that …” he paused for a second and brushed something off my cheek. “Sorry, you had a bit of dirt or dust or something.”
“It’s okay. Thanks.”
Even the brief flick of his finger against my skin took me right back to that night where he’d been touching me all over. I could tell he knew what I was thinking about.
There was a wicked glint in his eyes as he leaned forward and whispered in my ear. “You want me again, don’t you?”
I stepped back, shaking my head vehemently. “Of course not. Why would I want you?”
“Because I’m probably the sexiest man you’ve ever been with.”
I snorted. “I wouldn’t say the sexiest. Maybe the most cocky and arrogant and—”
“Shh …” He pressed his finger against my lips. “I’m about to start thinking that you just like to hear yourself talk, Isabella.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you’re always talking, but you’re not doing much of anything else.”
“Much of anything else? Like what?”
“I don’t know, like kissing me or touching me …” And then he pressed his lips against mine and I swooned. I fell into his arms and his hands wrapped around my waist to keep me steady. “Well, I didn’t expect that reaction,” he said as he pulled away from me slightly, there was a chuckle in his voice. “You have quite the reaction to me, don’t you, Isabella?”
“No, not really. You just took me by surprise and …”
“And what? You didn’t like it?”
“I didn’t say that I didn’t like it, but I also didn’t say that I did like it.”
“So contrary.” He shook his head. “So …”
“So what?”
“You’re going to have to keep your eyes and your hands off of me when we get back to the house, you know. My grandparents are going to get suspicious if you keep looking at me like you want to fuck me.”
“I do not keep staring at you like I want to fuck you. What are you talking about?”
“Okay. Well, maybe it’s me.” He laughed. “Maybe it’s me staring at you like I want to fuck you, even though I’ve already fucked you.”
“Wow. So classy.”
“Hey, what can I say?” He shrugged, “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to fuck you again.”
“Stop it. That’s absolutely—”
“I know it’s crude. Isn’t it? I’m not generally a crude man. I don’t know something must have just come over me. But, anyway, we need to stop acting like we want to be with each other.”
“I’ve never acted like I want to be with you. I—”
“Uh-huh, you can say whatever you want, but Edith and Edward cannot find out, because if they realize that we’re together, then they’re going to figure out Lucas’s secret. And I don’t want that for him. At least not like this.”
“You really care about him, don’t you?”
“Of course I care about him. He’s my younger cousin. I love him. Yeah, he’s an idiot half the time, and yeah, he’s a spendthrift, but that doesn’t mean I don’t admire him and I don’t understand where he’s coming from. I want the best for him. I don’t want anyone taking advantage of him.”
“I’m not going to take advantage of Lucas. I’ve never even thought about it. I didn’t even know he was rich up until a couple of hours ago.”
“Really?” He raised an eyebrow, “And now that you know that he’s rich?”
“Now that I know he’s rich, nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. And anyway, he’s not really rich, his family is rich, and you control all the money. So …” I just shrugged. “What does it matter?”
“Wish you could still try and be with me again, huh?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Now that you know that I’m an ex-NFL player, CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company, chairperson of a multi-billion-dollar trust fund. Yeah, multi-billions. I don’t let Lucas know the exact amount because I don’t want him getting greedy.” He laughed. “Though he probably already is, but I like the fact that he wants to start a business. I like the fact that he’s thinking about the future and not just planning on depending on the family money. It gives me faith in him.”
“So, you really are going to fund it?” I said, hoping that he was being truthful. It would mean so much to Lucas to have this support.
“Of course I am. I told him I would, but I’m going to need to know more, including your part in all of this.”
“What do you mean, my part in all of this?”
“Like, was it your idea for him to open this coffee shop so that you could have somewhere to showcase your art? Which I haven’t even seen yet?”
“What you think I’m lying about being an artist?”
“I don’t think you’re lying about being an artist, but really what is an artist? Anyone can draw and paint. Are you good? I don’t know. I haven’t seen your work.”
“Oh. So, until you see my work, you won’t believe that I might be a good artist.”
“I didn’t say that,” he shrugged, “but you got to understand something. Isabella.”
“What’s that?”
“My family is the most important thing to me and I will not let anyone take advantage of them for any reason, you hear?”
“Well, that’s good. I wouldn’t want anyone to take advantage of my family either.”
“Because I know nothing about your family. I know nothing about what you actually do for a living. I already know that you’re a little bit of a liar.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, you went on a date with me and you pretended we’d been chatting when we hadn’t been. It was your friend.”
“I explained why.”
“The why’s don’t matter. Once someone proves themselves to be untrustworthy, it’s very, very hard for me to actually trust that they can be a good person.”
“Okay.” I rolled my eyes. “So, what does that mean?”
“Just let it be known that you’re on notice.”
“Okay. I’m on notice. Well, let it be known to you, as well, Mr. Jim Morrison— oops, I meant Jack Morrison.”
He laughed. “See, you can’t even remember my name.”
“Of course, I remember your name, I just got caught up. I just …” I was flustered now, “But whatever. I don’t care what you think about me. Lucas is one of my best friends, and I have his best interest at heart as well. And if you’re not going to give him the money for the coffee shop, because I’m a part of it, then I’ll step back. I don’t need to be a part of it. I want this for him.”
“Okay.” He gave me a look of grudging admiration, “Well, try to keep your hands off of me this weekend, then we might have a deal.”
“Whatever, Jack.” I grabbed my ice cream and headed outside. “You don’t have to worry about anything. I don’t want anything to do with you. That should have been made clear when I left your apartment in the middle of the night after mediocre sex.”
“Mediocre, my foot,” he chuckled as he followed me through the door.