“Bra-fucking-vo, Robin Hood. Newsflash—fifteen years ago, my mother couldn’t have paid her electricity bill if you’d stolen her wallet. Stop making indolent assumptions. It’s unbecoming.”

“You should remind yourself of that—you just labelled me as reckless,” I pointed out.

“Because you are. I don’t think you’ll be a good fit for Luna.”

“I never auditioned for the job, so no harm done.”

The speed with which he moved away from me was startling. Trent scanned me coldly, a sneer on his face. “You’re coming to the party. Non-negotiable, Van Der Zee.”

“Don’t,” I said, grabbing my phone from the counter and angling my body toward the door. “I see what you’re trying to do here. I like Luna, and I‘m willing to be there for her—even after hours, no problem. But on my own terms. And ideally, without you around, either. Camila is great, but you and I don’t get along.”

He opened his mouth to say something when Dean Cole waltzed in, grabbing a plate and loading enough fruit onto it to choke an elephant, his eyes impassive on the colorful basket.

“Hey, man.” He stuck a toothpick into a piece of watermelon and shoved it into his mouth, chomping. Trent spun to face him and offered him a wordless frown that screamed fuck off. Dean continued, undeterred. “As your best friend, I feel like I should give you a fair warning. Hitting on your business partner’s daughter, who could practically be your own kid, is a bad move. We noticed you were in each other’s face from across the hall, and we all know hate turns into something else more often than not. So here’s my two cents—keep your crotches to yourselves, kids. Right. Fucking. Now.” Dean was still smiling cheerfully as he delivered the message. An onlooker from the other side of the glass would think he was discussing the weather or football. I looked between the two men. Trent’s eyes screamed something Dean was obviously able to read, his lips remaining pursed.

“Gotcha, dude. Was just warning you.” Dean lifted one palm up in mock defeat.

I excused myself, sneaking out of the kitchenette and leaving the two men locked in a stare-down. Before I managed to make my escape, Trent grabbed my arm—gently, not like my father—and whispered into my hair, “What did you tell Luna to make her laugh?”

I closed my eyes, leaning toward his neck, holding my breath so as to not inhale him and feed the growing addiction. “I told her that her dad is an uptight jerk.”

I didn’t look back to see who won the stare-down, Trent or Dean.

It didn’t matter, because I was the one who was losing.

My sanity, my logic, and my mind.

I was on the losing end, and I needed a fast win if I ever wanted to run away with Theo. Which I did. A lot.

“ANY NEWS?” I LET MY shirt fall to the cathedral marble floor with a soft thud. Amanda stripped out of her dress mechanically, as she did most things, hanging the colorful number over the brown, tufted wingback chair in my bedroom and watching the Todos Santos skyline from the floor-to-ceiling windows.

I realized that this was not a healthy way to conduct a relationship with the private investigator whom I’d hired to hunt down the woman who’d abandoned my child. I also realized that two-timing her and my child’s therapist could go disastrously wrong. Yet, I’d always liked messy, and mixing business and pleasure was a great idea—if you didn’t mind the blowup and knew how to leverage the pleasure part to your own benefit.

Amanda worked extra hard for me. Sonya saw Luna twice as much as any other kid at her clinic.

And then there was another thing that kept me drawn to them: convenience.

As far as my family, parents, and friends were concerned, I haven’t touched a chick since Val fucked off to God-knows-where, and I wanted to keep it that way. I didn’t want them to try to set me up with a woman, knowing I was in the market for one. Didn’t want them to keep tabs, and to tell me how goddamn wrong it was to be alone, and how I needed to settle down.

Luckily, Amanda and Sonya didn’t see me as more than a hot piece of ass who paid a healthy fraction of their salaries and fucked them so raw and hard (with a rubber—lesson learned) that they needed a whole week to recover. Amanda unclasped her white lace bra from behind and it slid off of her arms. It looked like heaven against her chocolate skin.

“Still looking,” she murmured, lighting a joint between her rosy lips.

“Where now?”

“Brazil. Trying to figure out if she’s staying with her relatives there.” Val’s mother lived in Chicago. She’d run away from Val’s abusive father in Rio when Valenciana was three years old. The chances of finding Luna’s mother in Brazil were slim, but after three years and no news, I was going on a wild goose chase. Money wasn’t an issue these days, though it still felt weird spending it on such an abstract cause. Ever since Valenciana decided to fuck off, I’d been searching for her relentlessly. It wasn’t the leaving part I cared about; I’d given up on her acting as a mother long ago. I wanted to make it official. Wanted her to sign over custody rights to me. If Val decided to waltz into my life again—which wasn’t that farfetched, since she loved money, and I had plenty—Luna not speaking at four would be something she could exploit in court to get her way. Because if Val took Luna, she would get enough child support to sustain her love for everything designer and expensive.

And if there was one thing I’d definitely never survive or allow, it was someone taking my kid away from me.

Amanda walked over to where I leaned on the window, still in her kitten heels, a Caribbean goddess who had no time for a husband or kids herself. She stopped by my wet bar (so nineties, but I’d been a poor kid back then and that was my dream, and Old Trent worked part-time on making Young Trent’s dreams come true), and plucked a bottle of limited edition Jameson. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but after butting heads with a teenybopper today and having her scrawny ass refuse me, a little sip wouldn’t hurt. Amanda sat on the bed and patted the velvet linen beside her, and I sat next to her, pressing my head against her bare tits as she poured the liquor into my mouth from above.

“I feel inclined to tell you, Rexroth, you’re probably not going to find Val. No one cares if you cross the border into Mexico, never mind farther south. Val didn’t even need burner phones, a darknet email address and a fancy, fake identity. She could likely skip to a beach town and stay there with a friend, or pick up an odd job. She sold most of the things you’d purchased for her prior to her disappearance and had a healthy sum of child support, which could tide her over for a long time.”

I felt the burn of the liquor slithering down my throat and wondered how the fuck Dean could have been an alcoholic in the past. Booze depressed me. Plus, I found myself doing stupid shit when I was drunk. Like writing notes about my daughter and showing them to her therapist. I plucked the joint from Amanda’s lips and tucked it between mine, tilting my head back and puffing out a ribbon of sweet-scented smoke skyward. Amanda’s coal black hair engulfed my pecs as she leaned to kiss my bare shoulder, across the tattoo I’d gotten right before college, when I was sitting at home with a broken ankle and burning time was a priority.

“Fuck,” was my sophisticated answer to her little speech. My dick was already hard and thick. She sucked on my neck, declaring her intentions by biting my shoulder. The air conditioner in the room hummed between us and I listened closely for noise from the outside. Luna was fast asleep in the other wing of the penthouse, her room right next to Camila’s. She would never meet Amanda. She would never know what her daddy did at night.

“Let go of her, Trent. Find a good woman who can take care of your kid. Literally every single woman in the continent with eyes and ovaries is a willing candidate. You’re the whole package,” she said.

Catching the blunt between my teeth, I slid her matching white thong down her thighs and shoved three fingers into her at once, working my way up to her G-spot and rubbing it lazily. She didn’t even have time to drop her ass back on the covers from giving me access to her pussy. Her sudden moan sliced the air when I pushed my thumb to her clit and started massaging, working her up.

“It’s going to hurt today,” I said.

“Why?” she purred, instantly warming up to the idea. “Who pissed you off this time?”

Her name sat at the tip of the tongue, but letting it loose was acknowledging Edie was on my mind. She was young. So, goddamn young. And even if I didn’t care about the age—which I did, her body was straddling the rope between ripe and juvenile. It still hadn’t reached its full potential and gotten all its defined curves. I cared about Fiscal Heights Holdings and had plans for it. Plans that didn’t include Edie or her vindictive father. She was therefore a calamity, a downfall, and a sure-as-fuck distraction.

“No one.” I licked my way to Amanda’s throat, stopping to stare at her. Amanda didn’t expect a kiss. No one did. “No one important.”

It was a lie I wanted to believe in.

It was a lie I cultivated with my brain, my heart, and whatever was left of my soul.

It was a lie which would become truth. It had to.

My phone alarm buzzed with enthusiasm we obviously didn’t share at four a.m. sharp. Waking up in the ink dark wasn’t my idea of fun, but surfing was, so I bit the bullet, convincing myself that it was temporary, even though I had no reason to think that.

Yawning, I stretched inside my twin bed, my eyes slowly regaining focus. Pink walls. Two chandeliers. White, antique furniture restored and imported from Italy. Everything in my room suggested I was a happy, cheerleader-type teenage girl. No one could suspect this room represented a cage, a persona I was supposed to perform. No one knew that I had to shove my surfing gear, wax, wetsuits, and whatnot to the back of my closet, even though I used it every day, in the off-chance someone would find out I wasn’t an ice princess.

Surfing wasn’t prestigious enough to be an approved-of activity for a Van Der Zee.