I wanted to taunt Rexroth back. I wasn’t even entirely sure why. Maybe because he was humiliating me—though part of me acknowledged I deserved it.

His eyes shot daggers at me, burning the skin wherever they landed. My cheeks blossomed into crimson, and it hit me hard, because he was nearly twice my age, and outrageously off-limits. I was feeling juvenile enough getting caught red-handed without the side-bonus of feeling my thighs clench as his fingers dug into my wrists like he wanted to split them open and pop my veins out.

“What are you going to do? Hit me?” I jerked my chin up, my eyes, voice, and stance defiant. His mother was white, so his dad must be either black or biracial. Trent was tall, built, and tan. His black hair was buzzed close to the scalp, marines-style, and he wore charcoal slacks, a collared white shirt, and a vintage Rolex. Gorgeous prick. Stunning, arrogant bastard.

“Two.”

“You’ve been counting down from five for ten minutes, smartass,” I notified him, one eyebrow arching. He let loose a grin so devilish, I swear it looked like he had fangs, dropping my wrists like they were on fire. I immediately collected one into my palm and rubbed it in circles. He hovered over me like a shadow, completing the countdown with a growl, “One.”

We both stared at each other, me in horror and him in amusement. My pulse skyrocketed, and I wondered what it looked like from the inside. If the ventricles in my heart were bursting with blood and adrenaline. He raised his hand teasingly slowly and tugged my hoodie down, letting my mane of long, wavy blonde hair cascade all the way to my waist. My nerves shredded into ribbons at how exposed I felt. His eyes explored me lazily, like I was an item he was debating whether or not to buy at the Dollar Tree. I was a good-looking girl—a fact that both pleased and upset my parents, but Trent was a man, and I was a senior in high school, at least for the next two weeks. I knew rich men loved their women young, but jailbait was rarely their jam.

After a stretched beat, I broke the silence, “What now?”

“Now I wait.” He almost caressed my cheek—almost—making my eyes flutter and my heart loop in a way that provoked me to feel both younger and older than my years.

“Wait?” I furrowed my brows. “Wait for what?”

“Wait until this leverage on you becomes useful, Edie Van Der Zee.”

He knew my name. My Christian name. It was surprising enough that he recognized me as Jordan’s daughter just from seeing me across the lawn at his friend’s barbecue weeks ago, but this…this was oddly exciting. Why would Trent Rexroth know my name unless he’d asked for it? My father wouldn’t talk about me at work. That was a hard fact. He tried to ignore my existence whenever he could.

“What could you possibly need from me?” I scrunched my nose, skeptical. He was a powerful, thirty-something mogul and so completely out of my league we weren’t even playing on the same field. I wasn’t being hard on myself. It was by choice. I could be rich like him—correction, I was potentially fifty times richer. I had the world at my feet, but I chose to kick it aside instead of making it my oyster, much to my father’s consternation.

But Trent Rexroth didn’t know that. Trent Rexroth didn’t know that at all.

Under his arms and scrutiny, I felt incredibly alive. Rexroth leaned in my direction, his lips, made for poetry and sin and pleasure, smiling into the skin between my throat and my ear, and rustled, “What I need is to keep your father on a short leash. Congratulations, you’ve just reduced yourself to potential sacrifice.”

The only thing I could think of when he moved away and escorted me to my car, gripping the back of my neck from behind like I was a wild animal in desperate need of taming, was that my life had just gotten so much more complicated.

He tapped the roof of the Audi and smiled through the rolled down window, tipping his Wayfarers down. “Drive safe.”

“Fuck you.” My hands shook, trying to pull down the hand break.

“Not in a million years, kid. You’re not worth the jail time.”

I was already eighteen, but it hardly made any difference. I stopped, seconds short of spitting in his face, when he rummaged in his mother’s bag and threw something small and hard into my car. “For the road. Friendly advice: stay away from people’s pockets and bags. Not everyone’s as agreeable as me.”

He wasn’t agreeable. He was the very definition of a jerk. Before I could fashion a comeback, he turned around and walked away, leaving a trail of an intoxicating scent and interested women. I looked down at what he’d tossed in my lap, still dazed and disturbed by his last comment.

A Snickers bar.

In other words, he’d ordered me to chill—treating me like I was a child. A joke.

I drove away from the promenade straight to Tobago Beach, getting a small loan from Bane to pay my way through the next month. I was too distracted to try to hit another mark for some fast cash.

But that day changed something and, somehow, twisted my life in a direction I never knew it could take.

It was the day when I realized I hated Trent Rexroth.

The day when I put him on my shit list, with no possibility for parole.

And the day I realized I could still feel alive under the right arms.

Too bad they were also so, so wrong.

She’s a maze with no escape.

An ethereal, steady pulse. She’s there, but just barely.

I love her so much I sometimes hate her.

And it terrifies me, because deep down, I know what she is.

An unsolvable puzzle.

And I know who I am.

The idiot who would try to fix her.

At any cost.

“HOW DID YOU FEEL WHEN you wrote it?” Sonya held the whiskey-ringed paper like it was her fucking newborn, a curtain of tears glittering in her eyes. The drama levels were high this session. Her voice was gauzy and I knew what she was after. A breakthrough. A moment. That pivotal scene in a Hollywood flick, after which everything changed. The strange girl shakes off her inhibitions, the dad realizes he is being a cold-ass prick, and they work through their emotions, blah blah pass the Kleenex blah.

I scrubbed my face, glancing at my Rolex. “I was drunk off of my ass when I wrote it, so I probably felt like a burger to dilute the alcohol,” I deadpanned. I didn’t talk much—big fucking surprise—that’s why they called me The Mute. When I did, it was with Sonya, who knew my boundaries, or Luna, who ignored them, and me.

“Do you get drunk often?”

Chagrined. That was Sonya’s expression. She mostly kept it schooled, but I saw through the thick layers of makeup and professionalism.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but no.”

Loud silence lingered in the room. I strummed my fingers against my cell phone screen, trying to remember whether I’d sent out that contract to the Koreans or not. I should have been nicer, seeing as my four-year-old daughter was sitting right beside me, witnessing this exchange. I should have been a lot of things, but the only thing I was, the only thing I could be outside of work, was angry, and furious, and—why, Luna? What the fuck have I done to you?—confused. How I’d become a thirty-three-year-old single dad who didn’t have time, nor the patience, for any female other than his kid.

“Seahorses. Let’s talk about them.” Sonya laced her fingers together, changing the topic. She did that whenever my patience was strung out and about to snap. Her smile was warm but neutral, just like her office. My eyes skimmed the pictures hung behind her, of young, laughing children—the kind of bullshit you buy at IKEA—and the soft yellow wallpaper, the flowery, polite armchairs. Was she trying too hard, or was I not trying hard enough? It was difficult to tell at this point. I shifted my gaze to my daughter and offered her a smirk. She didn’t return it. Couldn’t blame her.

“Luna, do you want to tell Daddy why seahorses are your favorite?” Sonya chirped.

Luna grinned at her therapist conspiratorially. At four, she didn’t talk. At all. Not a single word or a lonely syllable. There was no problem with her vocal chords. In fact, she screamed when she was hurting and coughed when she was congested and hummed absentmindedly when a Justin Bieber played on the radio (which, some would say, was tragic in itself.)

Luna didn’t talk because she didn’t want to talk. It was a psychological issue, not physical, stemming from hell-knows-what. What I did know was that my daughter was different, indifferent, and unusual. People said she was “special”, as an excuse to treat her like a freak. I was no longer able to shield her from the peculiar looks and questioning arched eyebrows. In fact, it was becoming increasingly difficult to brush off her silence as introversion, and I was beginning to grow tired of hiding it, anyway.

Luna was, is, always will be outrageously smart. She scored higher than average on all the tests she’d been put through over the years, and there had been too many to count. She understood every single word spoken to her. She was mute by choice, but she was too young to make that choice. Trying to talk her out of it was both impossible and ironic. Which was why I dragged my ass to Sonya’s office twice a week in the middle of a workday, desperately trying to coax my daughter to stop boycotting the world.

“Actually, I can tell you exactly why Luna loves seahorses.” Sonya pursed her lips, plastering my drunken note to her desk. Luna would sometimes speak a word or two when she and her therapist were all alone, but never when I was in the room. Sonya told me Luna had a languid voice, like her eyes, and that it was soft and delicate and perfect. She had no impediment at all. “She just sounds like a kid, Trent. One day, you’ll hear it, too.”

I cocked a tired eyebrow, propping my head on my hand as I stared at the busty redhead. I had three deals I needed to attend to back at work—four if I’d forgotten to send the contract to the Koreans—and my time was too fucking precious for seahorse talk.

“Yeah?”

Sonya reached across her desk, cupping my big bronzed hand in her small white one. “Seahorses are Luna’s favorite animal because the male seahorse is the only animal in nature to carry the baby and not the mother. The male seahorse is the one to incubate the offspring. To fall pregnant. To nest. Isn’t that beautiful?”