Page 19 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“Your point?”

“I will put out the good vase, in case any find their way back here.”

“They won’t come back here.”

Her smile is sarcasm itself. “I’m sure she’ll accept them.” Barely hidden dubiousness coats her tone. She leaves with the tray, and I look at the folder for a while instead of working.

The rest of the week is less cheeky than my housekeeper. Freight moves on schedule, and the casino’s quarterly numbers come in two points over projection. Hugo returns from his honeymoon tanned and loud, hosting lunches, working the board members of three charities we fund, building whatever it is he believes he is building. Two of those lunches included men whose calendars I keep an eye on, and a week ago that fact would have owned my entire evening.

This week, it gets twenty minutes and a margin note. The reports reach my desk, and I read them with half my attention, which is a new defect, and I know exactly where the other half is.

She’s beautiful, but I have known beautiful women the way a banker knows currency, fluently and without sentiment, and none of them ever cost me a freight call. She’s clever, but I employ clever people by the hundred.

So… Why is she stealing my focus?

In the coat closet, with every reason to be afraid of me, Luna inventoried me instead, scar by scar, and decided I wasinteresting. People decide I’m useful, dangerous, profitable, or in the way. Interesting is a new assessment.

She’s impressive in the strangest ways.

I have to focus on the strategy of it all. Luna’s a part of my plan, nothing more than that. Her strategic function is clear. Hugo will see her at the gala when he’s glad-handing the VIPs. Hugo will be destabilized, as he was at his own wedding reception. Regardless of the fact he’s married and regardless of the fact that he cheated on Luna, she still holds some sway over his attention.

When the VIPs see this, they will doubt him.

The calculus in the room will shift in my favor. That’s the purpose she serves. That’s why I invited her. That’s why I’m reviewing her file instead of preparing my remarks for that evening.

The way she moved through the crowd at his wedding reception was masterful. I couldn’t have asked for a better distraction technique. And the way she looked in her dress that night? I, too, would have been distracted were I in Hugo’s shoes. Just the memory of her round ass swaying in black silk, and what it was like to slide the garment from her body…

Stop. You’re distracted again.

I close the file and place it in the drawer.

It’s definitely time for bed.

I disrobe and crawl into the sheets far later than anticipated. When it’s late, my mind wanders, and the first thing that springs to mind is Luna. I wonder why Hugo was interested in her at all.

She is far from being his type. Hugo collects women who are ornamental and passive, those who reflect his status without challenging it. Women who need him, or who perform need well enough to convince him.

Luna does not perform need. She doesn’t perform anything. She’s entirely herself, even when she’s playing the role of the living distraction at her ex’s wedding reception.

Hugo had something extraordinary, and he didn’t see it. He sought comfort elsewhere because he could not tolerate being with someone who did not require his management. Her self-sufficiency threatened him. Her scarred temple, her candle shop, her dropped-out-of-college confidence, her quirks, all of it made him feel unnecessary, and Hugo has never learned to appreciate a woman’s independence.

He doesn’t have the capacity to understand how extraordinary she is.

This should comfort me. I’m not Hugo. I don’t need to be needed. I don’t confuse ornamentation with value.

But I’m lying in the dark, thinking about her scar, and the lie doesn’t hold. I keep turning it over, and it keeps not resolving, and a problem that does not resolve is either insoluble or important.

I already know which it is.

It’s not the strategy of Luna Ambrose that captivates me.

It’s just…her.

7

LUNA

The dressthis time is deep burgundy, which is growth in my book.