I might be looking at Lumi, but I’m asking my sister, who seems to realize it because she’s the one who answers me. “Yeah.”
It’s all I need to know before I take my little elf’s lips and show her just how I feel about her in this dress.
“Son,” a hand lands on my shoulder, and I reluctantly break the kiss, “let’s get to the party before you try to eat Lumi.”
Lumi gasps at my mother’s words as I give her a big goofy smile and straighten us back up. “Yes, ma’am.”
I lead my angel outside and to the limo and help her in the back, thoughts of me sneaking away with her to eat her somewhere private dance through my head. Once we arrive at the party, every head in the room turns to stare at my little beautiful Christmas present, and I can’t help but pull her closer. I’m giving her one -maybe two- dances before I’m making the visions in my head come true.
My mom and Lanie have other plans. They start introducing her to everyone, and it takes me a while to sweep her away so I can dance with my little angel. Her eyes twinkle, and I can tell she is having a good time. It’s there in her smile and the easy way she starts talking to everyone once she’s introduced to them. She was made to be by my side. She was made to dance in my arms like a princess from one of those fairytales my mother used to tell me when I was a child.
I’m about to whisk her away when Saul from shipping stops me. He gives me a big grin and completely ignores my little angel, which is fine by me because I don’t want Saul anywhere around her.
“Is it true? What they’ve been saying down in marketing?”
I make a quick mental note to fire him. After the holidays. I’m not a monster after all.
“What have THEY been saying, Saul?” Anyone who knows me knows the tenor of my voice is the first clue he should back up slowly while apologizing for overstepping boundaries, but Saul isn’t a smart man, and he doesn’t know me at all.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Denver head for us because he does know me.
“They say you’re a caught man. All but trussed up in the hangman’s noose.” He wiggles his third finger for a visual. “They say you got a little chicky on the side at some dump over on Eastman Street.”
Beside me, Lumi gasps out loud, but that still doesn’t stop Saul.
“Bill in Security says you sit outside her place at night to make sure no one else gets a piece of your pie.”
I take a breath to tell Denver to throw Saul off a bridge, but he is already dragging him from the room with utmost discretion. I turn to look at Lumi and see hurt and betrayal on her face.
“You…you watch me!”
“I told you I always keep what is mine, angel.”
She shakes her head and pulls her arm from my grasp as she takes a step back.
“That was you. The biker outside my apartment, who I thought was making drug deals. That was you.”
She’s still not asked me a question, so I don’t answer her. She already knows the truth. She’s known the truth from the beginning. She’s mine, and I plan to take care of her. She takes off running, and I let her go. For now.
My mom comes up beside me, “Is everything alright, dear?”
“It will be, Mom.” It will be. Because my little angel is about to learn who I really am…and there is no getting away from me.
It’s time to come clean.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lumi
Idon’t take a real breath until I make it into my shitty little apartment with all its dark and silence. Why did I run? I guess I was hurt he didn’t tell me it was him. Or maybe knowing he’s always been there but never telling me was just too much for me. Or the shock that I don’t think I really know him.
He doesn’t even know all of me, so how could I know all of him? Still…it seems he has more to show than I do. I mean, who the hell is he really? He’s this hotshot CEO with tattoos and rides a bike like he was born on it. And the real question swirling around my head just makes me sick. Was any of it real, or was it just his way of getting his kicks? Was I just a kink for him because I wasn’t like all his high society girls?
And everyone knows. The entire place was talking about it, and I had no idea. God, I was such a fool, grinning like an idiot while everyone knew he was just slumming it. I throw my heels across the room as a sob comes welling up from somewhere deep inside my soul. I trudge to the bedroom and flop on the bed. I'm not sure how I’m going to get out of this dress, but for right now, all I want is to cry myself to sleep. I don’t care if I am in a thousand-dollar dress.
A sound has me catching my next sob and listening harder. Is that…the lock on my door? I sit up quickly and start thinking about what to do next. Surely it isn’t my landlord. Not at this time of night. So, is my luck so bad that I’m being broken into on the same night my heart has been stomped on?
A shadow falls across the door, scaring the hell out of me and causing me to scream out before the light in the room comes on and I recognize the big man standing in the doorway.
