“She’s got jokes…” Shifting the hand on my face to brush his thumb against my lower lip, he gives me one of his devastating grins. “Even half naked and ready to fall to her knees so she can choke on my cock, my cool, unflappable Millie’s got jokes.”
Swallowing hard, I feel my knees start to shake. “Dean…”
“You’ve convinced me, Mills…” Hooking his finger around my fallen dress strap, he lifts it up. “Wearing this dress to dinner with me is anexcellentidea.” Settling the strap on my shoulder, he smooths it into place with the callused pad of histhumb. “You’re right, we should probably go—” Before I can argue or possibly beg, Dean pulls his hand from under my dress. Taking a step back, he pulls his hand away from my face to skim his knuckles over the stiff peak of my breast. “I know how much you hate being late.” Dropping his hand away from me completely, he leans in to me again, this time to press a soft kiss against my cheek before he leaves me where I am, a complete and utter mess, to walk out the door.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Somewhere between Paige threatening to outmeand Millie walking through the door, I’d decided enough was enough. Things between us had gotten out of hand—I’dgotten out of hand—but that didn’t mean they had to stay that way.
It wasn’t too late to turn it around. Just because I fucked Millie, it didn’t mean I had tokeepfucking her. I can keep my distance. I’d been doing it, with varying degrees of success for the past week. I can muscle through the next seven days without another slip-up. I can stay away from her. Keep my hands off her. My mouth too. I can fall asleep next to her without reaching for her in the middle of the night.I can pretendto be her rebound fling in public without deluding myself into thinking it’ll ever be more than that.
I can do it.
I showered and got dressed for dinner, all the while working on convincing myself that it could be done. That Millie would see what happened between us as an impulsive, irrational mistake and she wouldn’t want to repeat it. Once she had a chance to think about it, she was probably mortified that she’d let me anywhere near her.Me—insufferable, conceited,couthless, asshole Dean Mercer. There’s no way in hell she isn’t regretting every decision she’s ever made with my name attached to it.
Exit strategy in place, Millie walked through the door and completely fucked me up without even trying. The second I saw her standing there, I knew there was no way in hell I was going to survive the next seven days without touching her. No way in hell I was going to be able to so much as look at her without remembering what it felt like to be inside her.
While she showers and gets ready for dinner, I formulate a new plan. One that involves making up a fake, business related emergency back home. One I have to leave the island to contend with.Sorry, Mills, we can’t all be the spoiled daughter of a multi-trillionaire. Some of us have to actually work for a living.
She’s not stupid—far from it. She’ll know exactly what I’m doing. That I’m running like a scared little bitch and she’ll probably be angry about it because leaving her here alone plays directly against the narrative we’ve spent the last couple of days building—the narrative that was my idea in the first place. Thinking about it, I stand on the deck and build my wall, scrambling through the broken pieces of it, trying to put them back together, when my phone rings.
Sure it’s Paige again, I almost don’t answer it but I do because maybe it’s divine intervention. Maybe it’s a real business emergency. I’m a one-man operation, managing nearly a hundred employees. That I just impulsively decided to fuck off to a tropical island for two weeks is beyond stupid. I’ve been doing what I can to manage my clients and employees over email, but it hasn’t been easy. An emergency isn’t too much to ask for, but it isn’t an angry client or a frazzled employee and it isn’t Paige either.
It’s Millie’s father.
Accepting the call, I lift the phone to my ear. “Hello, sir.”
“I thought I made myself perfectly clear, the last time we spoke, Dean,” he says without bothering to say hello. “I was sure of it because when I asked, you explicitly said,I understand, sir.”
If anything happens to my little girl, I’m holding you personally responsible. Are we clear on that, Dean?
“Millie is perfectly safe, sir,” I reassure him while pretending to be oblivious to the veiled accusation in his tone. “I’ve made sure of it.”
“Safe?” Millie’s father makes an ugly sound in the back of his throat. “Is that what you’re calling it?”
Staring out over the ocean, I feel my shoulders stiffen. “I see you’ve been talking to your niece.” Paige is as smart as she is manipulative. She threatened to out me to Millie but after what happened, Paige knows there’s a good chance she won’t listen. Just like she knows the quickest and most effective way to get me away from Millie is to enlist the help of her very rich and powerful father. No doubt Paige hung up with me and immediately called her uncle.
“According to her, all this is your doing,” he tells me, his accusations not so veiled anymore. “That you’ve been obsessed with this family—my daughter, more specifically—for years nowand all of this was just an elaborate plan to manipulate her away from us and into your control.”
“So, I fabricated the text messages between Paige and Allister and sent them to Millie. Convinced her they were having an affair so I could manipulate her into calling off the wedding and into my bed,” I say, the first whispers of panic starting to swirl in my gut because while it’s so absurd, it borders on ridiculous, I also can’t prove otherwise. “Is that what she’s telling you?”
“Are you denying it?” He barks back, his tone hard and disbelieving. I can understand why. Allowing Paige to paint me as the villain in all this makes it easier. Blaming an outsider—some gold-digging bartender who set his sights on his vulnerable daughter—is so much simpler than facing the fact that there’s a snake in his own house. “Do you deny taking advantage of my daughter?”
“With all due respect, Mr. Blackwell, Millie is a grown woman, with a full set of faculties. What happens between us is none of your business,” I say, fighting to keep my tone as level as possible because maybe I did. Maybe that’s what happened because Paige is right—there’s no way in hell Millie would let me within a mile of her under normal circumstances. Maybe I did what they’re saying. Maybe I manipulated Millie. Took advantage of her.
“So you don’t deny it,” he counters like he’s just caught me in a lie.
“That I’m obsessed with Millie? No—I’m not denying it. I’ve been obsessed with her since the day I met her.” Admitting it out loud makes me a little sick because I can hear just how crazy it sounds. “She’s smart, beautiful, funny as hell, and completely unafraid to tell me exactly what kind of asshole she thinks I am—so yeah. I’m obsessed with her. But I am abso-fucking-lutely denying that I had anything to do with those text messages being leaked.”
“Right…” He makes that ugly noise again. “You just had the good fortune to be standing in the middle of that aisle, waiting for my daughter to run right in your arms, is that it?”
“What can I say—” Behind me, I hear the mute drone of the shower shut off. “good things come to those who wait.”
“I’ll have you know that I’ve enlisted the help of a very computer savvy young man—the son-in-law of a good friend,” he informs me. “I’ve been ensured that not only will he be able to verify their authenticity, he’ll be able totrack the emails that were sent to my daughter, back to their source.”
“Good.” When he says it, it’s all I can do to keep from laughing out loud. Even though this situation is beyond fucked and not in the least bit funny, the irony is almost too much for me.
“Ten million.” He spits it at me like he’s suddenly tired of the conversation. Like he’s done with me. “My plane will be on the tarmac tomorrow morning, ready to take you wherever you want to go. On it, you’ll find a check for ten million dollars. Get on the plane, leave my daughter alone, and you’ll never have to worry about me again,” he tells me, his not-so-veiled accusations twisting themselves into outright threats. “I’ll leave it alone. I’ll leaveyoualone.”
