10. Adrian

Chapter 10

Adrian

T he slight resistance of the wooden keys beneath my fingertips did little to take my mind off the way Ava's skin had felt beneath them, but I played on nonetheless.

The morning sun trickled in through the wall of windows to my right. Cascading beams of slightly dusty yellow bounced off the top of my closed Steinway. I wasn't normally one to play this early, but I'd hardly gotten any sleep and needed something for my hands to do besides touching myself. I'd done enough of that tossing and turning well into the morning hours, and my body's internal clock hadn't let me regain that lost time.

I'd waited the hour it had taken for Lucas to get up for school before letting myself focus on the grand piano, though.

Every note that I played filled all three floors of my penthouse. It drowned out the sound of sizzling eggs in the kitchen, drowned out the cartoons from the living room, drowned out Lucas's insistence that he didn't want to wear his vest today but would agree to wear his sweater, drowned out the clacking of his brand-new shoes against the tile as he ran across the house.

But it did nothing to drown out the sound of Ava's voice as she said my name. The memory was repeating over and over and over again in my mind. The little gasp, the strained moan of it, the way she'd laughed when she'd called me the worst.

Maybe I was the worst.

I'd be a liar if I tried to tell myself that she wasn't plaguing my thoughts or tempting me to do things I promised myself I'd never do again. Even knowing that neither of us wanted more from the situation after the charity ball, I couldn't help but feel an inkling of what if . But that was thinking with the wrong one of my two heads. I'd promised myself I wouldn't date seriously again—for the sake of my sanity and the fragility of Lucas after losing his mother, I couldn't do that. And even considering it with Ava came with its own challenge: David fucking Riley. Her father. My friend.

Just as I turned the page of sheet music and my fingers stilled for a moment, clacking bounded closer, climbing up the stairway outside of the music room. Lucas popped his head in just as Grace caught up with him.

"Sorry, Mr. Stone," she wheezed, out of breath. "Lucas was wondering if you'd mind taking him to school this morning. I tried to tell him that you were busy?—"

"Not at all," I said. I pulled the fallboard back over the keys and pushed up from my seat. "Have you got twenty minutes to spare for me to get dressed?"

Lucas nodded over-enthusiastically before tipping his head forward and holding an imaginary hat with his fingertips. " Aye , captain."

I knew bingeing three Pirates of the Caribbean movies last night had been a poor decision.

I chuckled as I stepped around the piano, ruffling the top of his black mop of hair when I passed him. I still had an hour until I needed to be in the office—I could swing it. " Arr , I'll be back in a jiffy, matey ."

————

Lucas' question seconds before we'd walked in through the front doors of his school had left me in a sour mood.

Dad, do you think you could maybe work a little less?

I knew he didn't mean for it to feel like a knife to the chest, but it did regardless. In truth, I was working an average amount at the moment, minus a small handful of nights a week where I had an event to oversee or a meeting to stay late for, but I understood. He was getting older, and he was starting to notice my absence more and more.

A nanny didn't make up for the emptiness of our penthouse or the emptiness that Jan had left behind. But it was all I could offer him for now, save for trying to take a few more nights off.

But it left me bitter and annoyed that I couldn't do that for him now, and coupled with the nonstop onslaught of thoughts of Ava, I wasn't in the greatest of headspaces for a fucking board meeting.

"So, Les Brown has confirmed. We still haven't had confirmation from Tony Robbins yet, but his team has pretty much given us the green light," Andrew said as he aimed his laser pointer at the projected image of a man's face. He was one of the board members with the most shares in Stone & Co Global besides me.

"We can't assume that," I said, looking up from the empty document that I'd opened almost an hour ago to take notes. So much for that. "If he's not outright confirmed, we can't plan or price tickets accordingly. Have you gotten on his team's case?"

Andrew pushed his glasses up his nose, his glare leveled at me as if I'd just sprouted a second head. "Of course I have."

For the briefest of seconds, an image of Ava with her makeup smeared and her hair a mess flitted through my mind. I clicked the top of my pen against the table to give my hand something to do. "And what have they said in response?"

A muscle in Andrew's ginger-beard-covered jaw twitched. "Had you been listening, Adrian, you would have heard that I've already said they are dealing with a scheduling conflict and working around it."

If I could properly grind my teeth without the horrible scraping noise, I would have. Andrew and I didn't see eye to eye often, and especially not on days like today when I found it hard to sink myself into my work.

I shot him a warning glare as I clicked my pen again. "Continue, Andrew."

————

The sun had slipped behind the building opposite ours by the time I made it back to my office. For once, I was glad for it—the building headache between my temples really didn't want to deal with the harsh rays of light or having to go to each of the five massive windows to manually shut the sliding blinds.

Making a mental note to install automatic ones, I dropped my laptop onto my desk and collapsed into the leather chair, scrubbing my face with the palms of my hands.

I had to get her out of my fucking head.

I couldn't stop replaying her saying my name on a loop, couldn't get the image of her in that goddamn dress out of my head. The way she'd looked on that stage, lit up like a mirror ball, or the way she'd looked with her legs just slightly spread and her hand in my hair, my mouth devouring her.

God, I could practically taste her.

I pulled at the seam where the legs of my slacks met, giving myself just a little extra room to deal with the minor, uncontrollable swelling of my cock. There was zero chance of me getting anything noteworthy done today.

I nearly jumped at the crackle of the speaker on my desk. "Hey, it's Michael. Can you buzz me in?"

Groaning out an ounce of my frustration in the one bit of privacy I had left, I reluctantly pressed the button on the side of the speaker that unlocked my personal portion of the forty-fourth floor. It wasn't that I didn't want to see Michael. I just didn't have the energy to keep my mind from wandering any more than it already was, and I didn't necessarily want to inevitably dump my bad mood on one of my closest friends.

But I also knew myself. I could hold things together in front of most people, including my son—but not Michael. He knew me too well.

"Heard what happened with Andrew," Michael said as he slipped through the door. It shut behind him automatically, and a second after I pressed the little button beneath the top of my desk, it locked. "Either someone's royally pissed you off today, or something's going on with Lucas."

"Would you believe it's neither?"

Sharp, brown eyes met mine across the room. "Unless you're the person who pissed yourself off, then no."

He looked far too casually dressed for the office, but as he walked across the floor and slumped down into the wingback, black leather chair across from my desk, I bit my tongue. It wasn't bad , but Michael had a habit of dressing in a way that teetered between casual and business casual . At least he was wearing slacks today, even if it was with a flannel shirt.

"So that's what it is," he chuckled.

"Just because I didn't reply to that doesn't mean it's automatically true," I scoffed. The creak from my chair as I leaned back filled the annoyed silence he shot in my direction, and I made a mental note to have someone grease the hardware on it.

Michael's eyes narrowed, his dark brows knitting together.

"Don't look at me like that."

"Goddamn, you really are in a mood." His fingers twisted around the end of his sleeve and popped the button. He began to roll it up, and I could have sworn a vein in my forehead nearly burst. "Would it make you feel better to know that we just got confirmation from Tony Robbins?"

"In all honesty, I don't give a fuck about Tony Robins," I snapped. "My issue with Andrew wasn't because I was worried he wouldn't confirm. It was because Andrew, I thought, was assuming confirmation without having it."

"But that wasn't the issue, was it?" Michael chuckled. "Not really, at least. If it was, you would have been fine when you heard otherwise."

"Do we have to do this? We could just go out for a late lunch and talk about literally anything other than work," I offered.

He pushed a hand through his mop of curly black hair. He'd started graying at his temples, but that seemed to be the only lighter bit of hair that had sprung up—a stark contrast to the lighter ones that peppered my head. "I have a sinking feeling you'd be just as snippy anywhere else. So why don't you just talk about it, get it off your chest, and get on with it?"

"You're not my therapist."

"Oh, you finally got one?" he laughed. "I've been saying for years ?—"

"Don't." I steeled my jaw as I met his gaze across the desk.

He was my closest friend. My confidant. I could tell him anything, could trust him to the moon and back, but he got on my fucking nerves sometimes—mostly on days like today when I couldn't see past the cloud that plagued me. But I could talk to him. I knew that and so did he, and on top of that, I knew damn well he wouldn't leave my office until I actually spoke to him instead of jabbing at him. I could give him half of the truth.

"Lucas asked me this morning if I could try to work less," I sighed. Michael's mouth formed the shape of a silent oh. "He's at that age where things are starting to make more and more sense to him, and with one parent permanently out of the picture, my absence is…obvious. And although I can cut down my hours, there will still be nights I won't be home, there will still be trips I need to take, or meetings I need to attend. I can't do it alone."

"Right," Michael sighed. "That's fair. I mean, he has the nanny, right?"

I gripped the leather arm of my chair. Michael didn't have kids—he wouldn't fully understand how that wasn't a helpful sentence. "Yes, but ideally, he needs another parent."

"Oh. Well, you've been dating recently, right? Is that why?"

I shook my head. "No, that's more for…fun," I explained. I told Michael most things, but I didn't need to explain exactly what I got up to on those dates, and he definitely didn't need to know about my alias. "But I'm considering doing it more seriously. David's daughter, Ava, is setting up some kind of matchmaking service, and David's convinced that she can find someone to solve my problems for me. But the idea of letting another person into my life, whether they're there only for my son or something slightly more, feels like an invasion that I'm uncomfortable with."

Michael nodded along to my words, steepling his fingers in his lap. "Shall I order in a chaise lounge for your office and finally get my psych degree?"

I glared at him.

"Kidding, kidding," he laughed. "I get it. I do. After Jan, that can't be fucking easy. But really, a matchmaking service? Aren't the cool kids using Hinge nowadays?"

I shrugged. "I spoke with Ava's assistant about it, and she said that their goal is to cater to people like me. Confidentiality, expert vetting, and finding me someone who is okay with what I want would be at the top of their priorities list."

He interlocked his fingers and slid his joined hands between the puffed leather and the back of his head. "And what is it that you want?"

"A marriage of convenience," I shrugged. "I'm not diving in head-first again. I don't want to love whoever she is. I want to like her and be comfortable with her helping raise my son. That's it. I'll hire her, find someone, and my problem will be solved."

"Right. And this has nothing to do with you chasing after Ava at the charity ball?"

My gaze snapped to his.

He shrugged. "You spent…what was it? Sixty grand, on a dance with her. Did you think I wasn't paying attention to that?"

What the fuck? "Honestly, Michael, I had no idea you were even there that night."

"Only for about thirty minutes to solve a supply issue," he chuckled. "I came in right as David announced that you'd snatched it up. Saw you two dancing a few minutes later. Watched, uh, that whole thing. Do you realize that you're an incredibly intense person? Anyway—you booked it after her, and I stored it in my noggin, and now here you are mentioning her again. I had to ask."

Shit. You need to think of an excuse. "The other people bidding on her were slimy, and she looked uncomfortable. I know her fairly well, so I bid on the dance, knowing she'd be comfortable with me."

He snorted. "She looked very comfortable with you. Until she went running off."

I let my head fall back against my seat. I didn't feel comfortable lying to him while looking him dead in the eye, and I needed time to think, time to steer the conversation away from her. But every time I tried to think of anything but Ava, she barged her way into my head like some kind of barbarian, taking over the space that wasn't meant for her.

"Look, you don't have to explain yourself to me. I was just saying?—"

"You saw nothing."

He went silent for a moment, and it hung in the air like the smell of rot. "Okay."

"Have you spoken to anyone about that?"

"No."

"Good," I sighed, tipping my head forward to look at him again. "Keep it that way."

"I can do that," he said, nodding.

"If David found out?—"

"I get it."

"Do you?" I challenged. I leaned forward on the desk, taking up all the space I could without getting up. The images of her on my fucking bed were still in my mind, and I really didn't need to hammer this point home by standing and making the swelling bulge in my trousers noticeable. "As much as I love him, David is not the sanest person around. He could do me damage if he wanted to."

"I don't think he'd have that much of an issue with you having a slightly charged dance with his daughter, but yes, I understand."

I held his gaze. There wasn't a single part of me that was sure that he grasped the extent of what this was, and I couldn't decide if that was a positive or a negative.

Michael blinked, and a second later he was groaning in frustration, rubbing his face with his palm. "For fucks sake, Adrian, it wasn't just a dance, was it?"