by Katy Kaylee
“You really don’t have to worry, Mr. Conner,” Warwick assured me. “I’m going to keep everything tasteful. But the world will want to know why you’re not helming this merger. In fact it’s already wondering. Why not show them what your new priority is?”
Personally, I didn’t think that it was anyone’s business what I did outside of my work. I had a private life just like everyone else. It wasn’t my obligation to share details about what I was up to with the press, with the general populace. I was letting my friend and business partner handle the merger, which was something that Tommy was eminently qualified to do, so what was the big deal about it?
“Excuse me.”
Oh, no.
Claire was pushing her way past Warwick and into the room, looking a bit confused as to who this random woman in a suit was. “Sorry, and you are?”
“Barbara Warwick, I’m with the press.” Warwick watched as Claire visibly restrained herself from rolling her eyes and walked over to look at Tabitha’s vitals. “I take it that you’re Miss Conner’s doctor?”
Claire made a few notes while looking at Tabitha’s chart. “No, I’m a random witch who walks around going into patient’s rooms and looking at their vitals so I know which one of them to kidnap and take to my gingerbread house.”
Tabitha giggled and Claire winked at her. It warmed my heart, despite the circumstances, to see how well Claire looked after Tabitha and how much Tabitha liked her. I wanted Tabitha to really like her doctor, and I couldn’t have even thought of dating anyone who my daughter didn’t like, or who didn’t like my daughter. It was a win on both levels.
But dammit, I had been hoping to talk to Claire about just that—about our relationship—but not with this damn journalist in the room.
“I was thinking that the angle we should take is ‘Alex Conner, billionaire playboy, now a reformed family man’, what do you think?” Warwick asked.
“Well, I think you’re going to print whatever you want regardless of what I say, if I’m being frank here.”
“What do you think?” Warwick asked Claire.
Claire’s back was to Warwick, so I didn’t think that Warwick could see the way that Claire’s eyes widened for a moment before she wrestled her composure back. “I think that my priority is taking care of my patient, not speculating on news articles about my patient’s parent.”
She put back Tabitha’s chart and wiggled her fingers at Tabitha, who wiggled them back. It was the way the two of them waved at each other. “I’ll be back to check on you later, things are looking good.”
Claire looked pointedly at Warwick, who was still taking up most of the doorway.
Warwick stepped aside, and Claire hurried out.
I was pretty sure I was the only one who could tell that was Claire’s version of fleeing. She might seem composed to someone who didn’t know her, but I had seen her intimately now, and before that I had seen her every day at this hospital for a month. Claire would never want some random person to see that they had gotten an emotional response out of her, but just going and leaving like that instead of talking to Tabitha and chatting with her as usual? Yeah, Claire was fleeing.
God fucking dammit. I needed to talk to her. And I needed to do it before too much time passed. The longer we went without discussing what had happened between us the more she was likely to think that it had just been a one night stand to me. Especially because she could just do a quick internet search and learn all about my reputation. Hell, Warwick had just said that reputation out loud—billionaire playboy.
I had to find a way to fix this, and quickly, before I lost Claire forever.
“We’ll set up a time to talk later, how does that sound?” I said to Warwick. “Right now this is my time with my girl—the only girl in my life.”
Tabitha grinned.
“I’d rather not talk in front of her, so if you give me your card, we can arrange something.”
Warwick looked like a cat on catnip. “I look forward to speaking with you.” She pulled her card out of her pocket and handed it over.
“Fantastic.” I took it and ushered her out, relieved when the door closed behind her and I was alone with Tabitha again.
Great. Now I had to give Tabitha the we don’t talk to reporters lecture way before I wanted to have to do that, and I had to track down Claire and find a way to fix this mess.
Fuck.
16
Claire
I kept going on my rounds, but I was distracted, and I knew that my patients could tell. I’d done a good job of avoiding thinking about the whole Halloween thing all weekend, and I’d been rather proud of myself. Look at me, moving on, being an adult, I’d said. Adults had one night stands all the time. I’d had one, it was great, I’d enjoyed myself, and now I was moving on.
Except then I saw Alex and it was painfully clear that I hadn’t moved on.
Dammit!
Seeing him made my blood spike all over again. It was so much worse than before, when I’d just been fantasizing about him. Now I knew exactly what it felt like to run my hands over his skin, to kiss him, to have his mouth on my breasts, between my legs, in my aching cunt. I knew what it was like when he fucked me, what his cock felt like, how big he was. The expression on his face and the noises that he made.
As if that hadn’t been bad enough—there had been that reporter.
Ugh.
I’d had to deal with a few reporters, being such a young doctor and speeding through college and medical school the way that I had. I was the prime candidate for a wunderkid human interest story on the news, and my mom had done a lot of work to get those reporters to leave me alone, so luckily I hadn’t had to face a lot of them, but every once in a while one of them would track me down at a class, or even wait for me after my residency shift had ended, and try to talk to me for a story.
Luckily I had been a healthy, intelligent, mature adult who had been able to handle those kinds of things. But Tabitha? A sick kid? No way. That wasn’t fair to her, not at all.
Alex seemed to be thinking along the same lines as I was. When I walked in he was literally standing in between the reporter and Tabitha so that the reporter couldn’t even see Tabitha. I tried desperately not to feel a rush of affection for Alex over that, and failed.
But then there was the rest of what the reporter said.
Billionaire playboy?
I knew that Alex was rich, but I hadn’t really thought about it in terms of numbers, nor had I ever looked up to know about his private life. To me, he was the rich single dad who wanted the best for his little girl. What else did I need to know?
Now, curiosity ate at me like acid.
The moment that I got home that day I looked him up on the internet. And… holy shit.
Here I was, sitting in my small apartment, the apartment that I had painstakingly picked out and decorated, the apartment that I knew I was lucky to afford because of my job, but with my loans from college and medical school still peering over my shoulder—here I was, and here Alex was, owning more money than any one person could possibly need or afford.
More than his wealth or his work, however, the internet—the world—was concerned with his dating life.
Or rather, the sheer insanity of his dating life.
Alex, apparently, didn’t have what one would consider a typical dating life. Oh no. He had never been photographed with the same woman twice, was the world’s most eligible bachelor, was rumored to have been the lover of basically every actress and model you could name, and had more women claiming they’d slept with him than you could shake a stick at.
If even half of these accounts were true, this man had had more sex in a year than most people had in their entire lifetimes.
Shame rose in my throat like bile and I felt inexplicably like that girl in a high school film who is tricked by the bullies on prom night. Perhaps I should have felt flattered that someone like that had slept with me. After all, he clearly could have had any woman that he wanted, b
ut he’d chosen me.
I didn’t feel flattered at all, though.
I felt used. I felt like just another notch on his belt. I felt so foolish—how could I have fallen for his charms? He’d used them on hundreds of women before and now here I was, just as much of a fool as any of them.
Sure, I hadn’t expected this to be the start of true love or anything ridiculously romantic like that. Hospital rules forbade it, for one thing. But I’d thought that this was something a bit more significant to both of us. I’d thought that he’d been with me because I had genuinely attracted him, not because he couldn’t keep it in his damn pants. I wanted to be someone who had meaning to him, even if it was just for a one night stand—not another conquest he could add to his prodigious list.
God, I felt sick, but I couldn’t stop scrolling. There were so many images on the search, every single picture showing him with a different woman. All of the interviews with him strayed, at some point, to his playboy lifestyle and asked him about various women he’d been with. Every time someone asked him if any of those woman had captured his heart, Alex would say something about how that wasn’t possible.
“I mean, never say never,” he said in one interview that I read, “but it hasn’t happened yet and I’m not holding my breath for it to happen. Neither should you.”
God, what had I gotten myself into? What kind of idiot had I been? Clearly I had waited too long to get into a relationship, if I’d maybe dated some people before this I might have been more savvy about this kind of thing. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
There was one interesting thing, though. A year and a half ago, all interviews stopped. The date for the last one was a year and seven months ago. Interesting. There were a few think pieces on his company since then, of course, but no actual interviews with Alex himself. What…
My phone rang, jolting me out of my curious musings. It was Mom. Hoo boy. Well, I had to answer her eventually, and I did love her—I just felt like she clung to me a little too much. I had no interest in being codependent.
But she was still my mom, and I did still care.
“Hey!” I said, forcing myself to sound as relaxed and cheerful as possible. There was no way in Hell I was going to let her know that I had just had a one night stand that I was stupidly still in knots over, and I definitely wasn’t going to let her now that it was with a known billionaire playboy. “How’s your day going?”
“It’s all right.” Mom’s voice was tight, the way it got when she was upset. “Your father called me the other day.”
Oh, man. Mom and Dad hadn’t spoken in years, as far as I knew. “What did he want?” It had to be something big. Maybe he had cancer or something.
“He wanted to see if I would give him any information on you. He wants to get in contact with you.”
That was definitely not what I had been expecting. “I… why?”
Why, after all this time, would Dad want to get in contact with me? Why would he even bother? The time for him to be a dad had been years ago, when I’d actually been a kid, not now that I was a damn grown adult.
“He’s probably just looking to get something from you.” I could practically hear Mom rolling her eyes. “Maybe he needs to look like a good dad for some deal or other. Maybe he wants an in at your hospital, it is the best hospital for children in the country, you know, not everyone gets to work at a place like that, you worked very hard to get in there and I’d hate to think that he was exploiting you or your job there…”
“He’s not going to exploit my job, Mom, I won’t let him.” Sometimes it felt like my mom was more proud of my job than I was.
“Good. You remember how awful he was, taking me for every cent, not letting me see a penny of anything… and I was with him for so long…”
“I know, Mom.” It wasn’t that I didn’t have sympathy for what my mom had gone through. I did. But I had heard this stuff so many times that it had long ago stopped being something profound and impactful and had grown into an irritation, another sob story that she could use to keep me close and under her wing like I was still a newborn baby chick.
“He lied and cheated—so many times, I can’t even begin to tell you how many women—he was never at home, never was there for you…”
“Mom, I know. I’m not going to reach out to him and you aren’t going to give him anything, are you?”
“I would never. He’s not going to get in touch with you through me, you can trust me on that. He acted like a bachelor even while he was married, even while he had a child, and frankly darling I don’t see how he could possibly think either of us could forgive him for that.”
“Well, he’s not going to get in contact with me, so it’s all good.” I couldn’t help but immediately think of Alex. My stomach churned. My father had been an awful husband and father, my mom had never let me forget that. She’d tell me story after story of all the shit he would get up to. I’d never reached out to him as a result, even though I very well could have for years now. I was an adult, nobody could stop me. But what would’ve been the point? I’d turned out just fine without him.
Was Alex just as bad as my father? Had I fallen for an asshole who was just the same as the man who’d abandoned my mother and me? Was I really being that cliché?
I felt sick to my stomach.
“Don’t worry,” I told Mom, because I knew she was waiting for more confirmation from me. “I’m not going to reach out to him. It’s all good.”
“Are you sure…”
“Mom, yes, I’m sure.” It had been a decade of this nonsense, I wasn’t going to suddenly change my mind now. “I need to finish up cleaning the kitchen okay so I’ll talk to you later! I love you!”
I hung up before my mom could say anything more, tossing the phone aside. My dad might have been a deadbeat to me but my mom’s smothering wasn’t all that great, either. I could practically feel her vibrating on the other end of the line with the need to pester me with tons of questions and tell me all about every minute of her week, and I just couldn’t do that. Maybe if we could just talk naturally, it would be one thing, but instead it was too much and now I didn’t even want to have a short conversation with her. It was like I was trying to run the other direction to try and retain some balance in our relationship.
God, I hoped that I hadn’t fallen for an asshole like my dad. Not that I’d even fallen for Alex—that suggested that I had serious feelings for him, and I didn’t. It was just a strong sexual attraction, one that I couldn’t even act upon again. I shouldn’t have acted on it in the first place.
I buried my face in my hands. What a fucking mess.
Of course… well, Alex had been good to Tabitha. He had been nothing but a loving and devoted father to her since I’d met them. And I hadn’t seen him flirting with any of the other staff, not even Pippa, and Pippa was the woman that usually got flirted with by everyone. I’d seen him only be polite to the staff, never rude, and he’d been very serious about Tabitha’s health. His apartment wasn’t lavish—I hadn’t seen a ton of it in the dark, when all I’d cared about was getting him to fuck me, but it wasn’t the kind of apartment you expected a billionaire to live in. It was modest and unassuming.
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t like my dad. Just a playboy with women. I could accept that. It wasn’t fun, but hey, everyone was consenting, everyone was having a good time. It was my fault for reading too much into it. And at the end of the day, I’d gotten what I’d wanted, hadn’t I? I’d been fucked within an inch of my life and I’d enjoyed every second of it. Time to wash my hands of the whole thing.
And even if I had wanted more—and I’m not saying that I did, but—even if I did, I couldn’t have it. We couldn’t have a relationship anyway. It was best if I just put it all out of my mind.
I just wished that it was as easy to actually do as it was to say.
17
Alex
I hated the way things were going between Claire and me. She’d been more aloof than ever lately, keeping our
conversations strictly about Tabitha and never anything more. I would try and engage her in discussion about our night together, but the moment that I even took a breath to say something about it she would practically run away from me.
To say that it was distracting me would be an understatement. I was going nuts. It was eating me up inside. I had to do something about it before I went insane.
Tabitha was in treatment, currently, so I was waiting in her hospital room for her with a new book for me to read to her, wondering how to figure out what to do about Claire.
Surely there was some way that I could just talk to her. I needed to tell her that I couldn’t stop thinking about her—a first for me. I’d even have her call up my old lovers to prove it, even though that probably wasn’t the classiest move. Whatever it took for Claire to see that we should give this thing an honest try. I wanted to be with her, and I suspected she wanted to be with me as well, even though she wouldn’t let herself because of the hospital rules. If I could only speak with her…
Pippa entered, walking over to the chart to check it. “Hey, Alex, how’s it going?”
“Good, good, Tabitha’s in treatment.”
“Yes, I heard, she’s doing really well.” Pippa made some notes. “She’s a great girl, Alex, we’ll be sad to see her go when she’s all better—I mean, of course we’re glad that she’ll be all better and won’t need us anymore, but…”
“No, I get what you mean.” I chuckled. “Hey, Pippa, I don’t suppose… you wouldn’t know if there was a chance that I could talk to Claire outside of the hospital, would you?”
Pippa raised an eyebrow at me, going from relaxed and friendly to suspicious in the span of a second. “Oh do you now.”
“I want to thank her for all that she’s doing for Tabitha,” I lied, and apparently not a very good lie at that, because Pippa looked like she was trying to hold in a derisive snort. “But I’d like to do it in a more casual setting. I feel like we’re always just in the hospital and I’d like to… get out, you know?”
