Chapter 24: : Chapter 23

Then I became homeless.

I’d terminated my lease effective Sunday, the day I was supposed to fly out to Los Angeles. Only it was technically Monday morning now, and I was nowhere near the west coast. That meant I had to spend the night somewhere, and fortunately that place was Judith’s Brooklyn apartment.

To my cock’s disappointment, I slept on the couch. But it was still better than sleeping in a million-star hotel or at the Laurent Towers, which I couldn’t even look at after I’d learned what I had about Mathias not being my father.

I wasn’t the one who’d cheated on him.

Yet I was the one who’d taken most of his wrath.

In the morning, Judith made her father a shake from what looked like sewer water, puke, and misery, and slid a bowl of cereal my way. It wasn’t even a brand. It was poured right out of a six-pound industrial box with a Costco logo.

“Cavities and diabetes. Breakfast of champions,” I muttered into the bowl as I took a spoonful.

“My apologies. Our room service doesn’t work on Mondays.” Jude took a seat next to her dad and patted his veiny hand.

I fucking loved this girl. What she lacked in funds she made up for with love.

“That’s fine.” I waved her off. “I can be in charge of breakfast when we move in together.”

Utensils clattered on plates, and Rob’s eyes ping-ponged between us. There was a lot of amusement in them.

Jude studied me, trying to gauge whether I was kidding or not.

I wasn’t.

“I’m not a breakfast person,” she said. “And yes, I know it’s the most important meal of the day.”

My eyes slid down her midriff and stopped where the table covered her. I smiled. “No, it isn’t.”

“You’re awful.” She hid her smile behind her coffee mug.

“And you’re going to let me pick your Chucks today,” I retorted.

Robert laughed. “Can you hear it?”

“Hear what?” Her cheeks were doing this hamster thing, where she stifled a laugh and looked too cute doing so.

It was sickening, really, how I felt about her. I would find the word fitting if I didn’t own up to that shit.

“Your chests humming. You’re happy, kids.” Rob took a sip of his shake, grimacing. “The happiest you’ve ever been.”

A little while later we took the train to work, both staring at her dove white Chucks. My pick. I wanted a clean slate. A fresh start.

“You know, you can still take the job in Los Angeles.” She flipped Kipling absentmindedly, staring at it as she spoke. “LBC is falling apart, and I don’t expect these revelations to change your commitment to your new job.”

“My only commitment is to the company I need to inherit, and to the only girl who’s capable of calling me out on my bullshit.

in that order.”

She looked up. “And who would that be?”

I twisted the collar of her shirt into a ball and jerked her to me in a kiss, not giving a fuck that everybody was watching. Or that we were standing up, clasped between dozens of sweaty, exasperated people starting their Monday. Not caring about anything but her. Our lips touched, and my cock was a second away from shouting . Her mouth was soft and warm and , and her body melted against my own in a way that could only mean one thing.

It was back on. And this time, I wasn’t going to let go.

“Célian?” Blu, AKA my so-called replacement as news director, scratched his curly, dandruff-ridden hair.

He was standing in my office, shuffling full boxes from side to side. I breezed right in, carrying my Starbucks and throwing two pieces of mint gum into my mouth. With all due respect—and let’s admit it, I didn’t have a whole lot of it for him, the guy was a former associate producer at a cable news channel in Nebraska—I didn’t owe him more than a brief explanation.

“Sharp on a Monday morning. I like that, Blu. Now get the fuck out of my office.” I dumped my leather briefcase under my desk and powered up my laptop.

Brianna came running from the hallway, panting out my name. “Sir! Célian! Sir! What are you doing here?”

Poor thing thought she’d gotten rid of me. I . I decided to go easy on her, since I was going to have to be a little more tolerable for Jude’s sake—especially after my so-called dumping of her so publicly.

“Brianna. Good morning. Feel free to drop my items at the usual dry cleaners’. You can use the wait time to chill.” I hated that word, but it needed to be said. I also still hated doing my own dry cleaning, and I really did think Brianna could use a little down time. “But you can no longer drink on shift, unless you want your ass thrown into rehab.”

“Rehab?” she wheezed. I motioned with my hand, drinking from an invisible small bottle of liquor. She nodded and bowed her head. “Yes, sir.”

Blu and I were left alone in the room again. I crossed my ankles atop the desk, leaning back. “Well, Blu, there’s good news and bad news. Which would you like me to break first?”

The middle-aged, beer-bellied man in front of me looked down at his shoes, his chest quivering with an uneven breath. “Bad news.”

“The bad news is you will not be taking my position—not in the next few months, anyway—and the good news is that you still get a job, if you want it. And you know what the great news is?”

He looked up, and hell, the smile on his face told me he was on board. That finally, things were falling into place for me.

“What?” he asked.

“The news I am going to make in this newsroom today.”

I’d expected Mathias to blaze onto the floor and make a spectacle out of the situation. The fact that he remained silent suggested he was strategizing about how to tackle the bane of his existence, AKA yours truly. I gave him his time because I actually had work to do.

The LA people were crushed to hear I wasn’t joining them, but I invited them to send their staff to New York and promised to train their new employees. Judith ran from place to place around the newsroom, her cheeks flushed. Kate, Jessica, and Elijah seemed glad I hadn’t left, and Brianna smiled guiltily and waved her hand every time I shifted my eyes to make sure she wasn’t reaching for her top drawer to take a mini bottle out.

Five hours into our workday, while I was knee-deep in something in the newsroom, I got a phone call from the sixtieth floor.

“It’s your father.” Brianna came as close as she could, holding the corded phone in her hand.

.

He hadn’t even called my cell. Instead he was making a whole fucking show about it, like I knew he would.

“He wants to speak to you,” she said.

“He knows where to find me.”

“He’s asking if you can come up to his office.”

“I can’t. But he can come down. Or not. Giving a shit is not on my agenda today.”

“He said he’ll call security.” Brianna’s face was so red, for a moment I worried she might explode.

“Tell him that’s a very good idea. I’ve been thinking about getting rid of his ass for a long time now.” The room fell quiet, everybody staring at me. I nodded my chin to the phone.

“Tell him that, Brianna. You’re just following my orders. Word for word, please.”

She repeated my message to my father, wincing the entire time.

Jude appeared at my side, squeezing my biceps and looking up at me with a smile. I pulled her into a hug and kissed her forehead. I had a lot of damage control to do when it came to the way people perceived us as a couple in this place.

When Brianna ended the call, there was a pause, after which the entire newsroom erupted with a lengthy standing ovation. She laughed. I smirked.

When I turned around to walk back to my office, Mathias was standing at the door, waiting for me. Next to him stood my mother, fresh off of her private plane, judging by her casual clothes.

Her eyes were horrified.

I knew mine were dead.

“Can I offer you anything? Bourbon? Whiskey? Water? Perhaps a lie-detector?” I motioned to the mini bar in my office, my smile casual and charming—the way they’d taught me at the Swiss summer school my parents had dumped me in every year.

My mother seated herself on the couch in front of my desk, staring at her hands in her lap, and Mathias paced, pulling at his ear in a nervous tick. I was the only person in the room whose heart didn’t seem to be beating a mile a minute, and that’s because I knew something they didn’t.

“I’m so mad at James for telling you,” my mother muttered. “I was only trying to protect you, Célian. Think about the way it would have been perceived in our circle. In circle, really. You’d have been a bastard. Your blood is blue. You are a Laurent.”

“My blood is red, and being a bastard is better than being son.” I walked over to the front of my desk and leaned against it.

“Listen, Célian,” Mathias raised a hand.

“Not even a word, Mathias,” I warned, arching a brow. “Not. Even. One.”

“I don’t know what you think you have on me—”

“Oh, I think you do. That’s why you’re shitting your pants as we speak.”

“You can’t use it in court. Dan was not supposed to record those private conversations,” Mathias stressed, his left eye ticking.

He had a point. After I’d left James’s apartment last night, he’d emailed Iris and Mathias a file with the recording, along with a brief note about how he’d come clean to me.

Ignoring his words, I threw Mathias a pointed look. “You will drop the ads, terminate the dodgy contracts, and hire back every single person you have fired from my team by the end of the day. And if any of them are unavailable, you will find me a top-notch replacement. If I were you, I’d start working right now. Work is a foreign concept, so it will take you time to get the gist of it.”

Mathias laughed. “What makes you think I will do for you? Nothing has changed, other than the fact that you now know why I couldn’t stand your face from day one. You weren’t mine. Your mother messed up. The only good things about my marriage to her were LBC and Camille. And you took them from me, too.”

My mother darted up from the couch, walked over to him, and slapped his face, hard.

I watched them, emotionless. What a fucking mess. Surely I could dump some of the responsibility for me being a heartless prick on the fact that these two clowns had raised me.

Mathias stared at her, dumbfounded, and rubbed his red cheek. He narrowed his eyes. He was about to raise his hand to her, but thought better of it once I stepped between them and shook my head.

“I will fuck up your face so hard, you will have six new holes to sneeze from,” I said dryly.

He took a step back, clearing his throat and fixing his gaze back on her. “You always loved him more than Camille.”

“You always treated him like he was garbage,” she countered. “And what happened to Camille was your fault, not his. You lied to me because you wanted to isolate him from his family.”

“And you were the ignorant little thing who was too busy chasing fitness trainers to go to your son and ask him yourself.” Mathias smirked, cocking his head with a devilish glint in his eyes.

He was right, and she knew it. I had visited my mother many times after what happened to Camille, but we’d never shared an actual meal, let alone a conversation. I’d tried, and every Sunday night, as I’d made my way back from JFK to my apartment, I’d wondered why I’d done that to myself in the first place.

“Now he’s buried with the Brooklyn girl, and he has to wait until I drop dead before he takes over.” Mathias waved a hand in my direction.

“Thanks for bringing her here, by the way,” I interjected, clucking my tongue in approval. “She was the answer, and the solution.”

“Huh?” He spun on his heel, staring me down.

I took sick pleasure in slowly pouring myself a glass of something I was never going to drink, whistling and thinking about white Chucks—of all fucking things in the world—and how damn good they were going to look with a white wedding gown, or better yet, without anything else at-fucking-all.

“Everything turned out for the best,” I explained. “I met Judith, and we’ve found something you two miserable assholes will never have.”

I swirled the liquid in my glass, looking up and saluting my parents. My mother looked on the verge of fainting, and despite everything, I still had sympathy for her.

“And I get to keep LBC,” I added.

“How so?” Mathias parked his hands on his waist, scowling.

A vein in his neck began to pump visibly. I traced my finger over the rim of the glass, staring at it intently as I answered him. I was worried I was going to get a hard-on simply from seeing him crumble if I looked up.

“Life works in mysterious ways. When Lily came here a couple months ago and told me Madelyn had died, I was crushed. I rushed to the Davises’ house and spent time with them. You probably weren’t aware, but I had a very close relationship with Madelyn. I craved human contact, something I didn’t have in spades at home.” I rubbed my jaw. “So imagine my surprise when they called me a few weeks after her passing to confirm that she had left her granddaughters with millions and millions of dollars and the estate, and little ole me with her ten percent of LBC.”

I didn’t tell them about the letter Madelyn had also left me. It was more of a note, really. But it brought my situation with Judith into a sharp relief.

With business out of the way, it’s time to listen to your heart.

Don’t lock my granddaughter in a loveless marriage.

Don’t lock my favorite boy inside one, either. It’s a miserable place to be. I’ve been there with Lily’s grandfather, and I never want my loved ones to pay this place a visit.

Make me proud.

Love, Madelyn I watched in my periphery as their eyes widened and reality set in.

My mother was guilt-stricken and on my side with fifty-five percent of the shares of LBC. I had ten additional ones. I could now throw any decision Mathias had made, easily.

“No,” Mathias said, stumbling backward and collapsing onto the sofa.

“Yup,” I confirmed, popping the “p” for good measure. “You’ve gotten everything you ever wanted by walking over people and making a fucking mess, Mathias, while I managed to save my company by forming a genuine relationship with an elderly, somewhat lonely woman who just needed someone to be there for her. Karma is a bitch, and I do believe she just justified her reputation by shoving a ten-foot pole up your ass.”

My mother galloped in my direction, throwing her arms around my neck. I let her. Not because I wasn’t mad at her. Not because I wasn’t livid, and not because I thought her behavior was remotely acceptable.

No. I let her because if my little Chucks could forgive me for being an inglorious bastard, maybe I could forgive Maman for lying to me in order to protect me, even though it was the truth that ended up setting me free.

Maybe I could break the cycle of hate.

Maybe I wouldn’t have any more misunderstandings that resulted in the unnecessary deaths of people I loved and cared about.

Maybe I could live. With Judith by my side.

With good music and bad exes.

And with so much sex, she couldn’t fucking see straight.

Making headlines dirty between the sheets.

“I need you to turn my maybe into a definitely.” Célian crawled into my bed at the end of that grueling Monday in the office.

I didn’t kick him out, even though a small, vindictive part of me wanted to. Life was too short to deprive yourself of spending time with those you love, something I’d learned the hard way.

His body seemed to mold into my small mattress. Somehow, he fit. If there was one thing I’d realized this year, it’s that sometimes we belong in the last place we thought we’d ever be.

“How can I do that?” I put my thriller in my lap and let his arm loop around my waist, dragging me into the crook of his shoulder. His lips fluttered along my neck.

“Stay at LBC, no matter how this shit turns out. I can’t make it without you.”

“Make what?” I laughed. “News?”

He sounded drunk, but he looked sober, almost grim. My arms wrapped around him involuntarily. We sank into the hug and didn’t come up for air for long minutes.

“Sense,” he said after a while—a minute or three, or maybe more. “Very little makes sense when Chucks is not around. This is the part where I should say something romantic and profound—that you’re my beginning, middle, and end. But I don’t even know what that shit means. All I know is the very idea of moving to the other side of the country was enough to make me want to kidnap your ass, and not in the sweet, joking way. You’re brave, sexy, and beautiful, and there’s not one woman on this earth who can push my buttons like you.”

“Please say you’re offering me the remote to make this super corny.” I bit down on my smile.

He rolled his eyes, thrusting his groin into my stomach. “Only if you agree on flipping channels. So, what do you say we make it official?”

“This sounds a lot like a proposal,” I snort-laughed.

“It is.”

“Then no,” I answered seriously.

“No?” He blinked, as if I clearly didn’t understand the meaning of the word.

“Jesus, of course not. I want you on one knee, humbled and ringed.”

He rolled out of the bed, walked over to his duffel bag, and threw something into my hands. A new iPod box. I laughed, opening it. But instead of finding an iPod, I found a ring—a multicolored gemstone ring with yellow and blue, pink and silver, red and purple. It looked like a crown, and nothing like an engagement ring.

Célian went down on one knee beside the bed, bowing his head. “Make me a happy bastard, Judith. You’re the only one who can.”

Not a question, but an order.

And just like that, for the first time since we’d met, it wasn’t difficult to be obedient.