Dream Maker

by Kristen Ashley

  And since he knew that, he gave it to me.

  And that was how I would always and forever need Danny.

  “Gotcha,” Danny said, and when I looked to him, I saw his head bent to his phone, his thumbs moving on it.

  I looked the other way when Sidney hooked her arm in mine.

  We locked eyes.

  “They’re not a loss,” she whispered.

  “I know that now,” I whispered back.

  The relief in her face made my heart skip a beat.

  How had I not noticed how worried my little sister had been about me?

  “Good,” she kept whispering. Then she prompted, “Tour.” She pulled me along as she called, “Rob, you coming?”

  Rob broke away from the island and came to us.

  He then forced his way between us and slung his arms over our shoulders.

  I took that as a yes.

  I also looked over my shoulder when Rob had to angle us so we could walk in the door of Danny’s room and not come unattached (guess Rob was kinda still tweaked).

  But what I saw when I looked over my shoulder was that Danny was no longer informing Postmates of our dinner selections.

  He was standing at the island, watching us.

  And he was smiling.

  And that, too, was what I always and forever would need from my Danny.

  Epilogue

  Super Fly

  Evie

  I was really kinda into what I was doing.

  So when Danny slid his hand along my cheek, cupping his other under my arm, tugging gently, and I got his message, I lifted my gaze up his glorious chest to his handsome face to share nonverbally I didn’t want to stop.

  When we locked eyes (and his were completely dilated), he growled.

  Okay, I changed my mind.

  I was totally onboard for whatever Danny decided was next.

  I slid his cock out of my mouth.

  He pulled me up his body then he put his hand between us to position me as he sat up.

  And I took his cock inside when I went up with him.

  At the feel of him filling me, my head fell back, and I glided up and down until he caught my hair in a loose fist, which meant I got his new message.

  I tipped my head down, put my mouth to his, and we kissed.

  God, I loved kissing this man.

  Danny sadly broke the kiss, but fortunately, he did it to trail his lips down my neck, my chest. He curved a hand over my breast and lifted it, taking the nipple into his mouth.

  He sucked.

  Electricity shot from my nipple to between my legs, I stopped gliding, ground into him and clutched him everywhere I held him.

  I heard as well as felt his groan, and all that was so fabulous, my head fell back again.

  God, I loved loving Danny Magnusson.

  Every way I could do it.

  He released my nipple, ran his hand at my breast up my chest, the side of my neck and around to the back of it, and called a gruff, “Evie.”

  I looked down at him again, resuming my movements, riding up, floating down.

  “Yeah?” I breathed.

  “Love you,” he whispered.

  Oh yeah.

  I loved loving Danny Magnusson.

  “Love you too, Danny.”

  I felt my eyelids drift halfway down at the effort it took to witness his beautiful smile before I gasped when he whipped me to my back.

  I rounded him with my legs to hold on.

  Because one other thing I loved about Danny.

  When he was on top.

  “Serious?” I asked my sister, staring at the stuff that was littering her kitchen table.

  This being face products. Cosmetics. Graphic tees. Housewares. Jeans.

  “What do you think I do?” she asked in return.

  “You’re building a social media following.”

  “I’m building a social media following because I have a lifestyle blog. People send me shit to test and review on my blog, and if I dig it, we make a deal and they pay me to promote it.”

  She flipped open a rose-gold laptop, hit a few buttons and turned the screen to me.

  On it was a highly stylized, and uber-cool website that was clean, bright, classy, modern, personality plus and just freaking awesome.

  The top had a killer graphic flower surrounding a cool font spelling out THE SID SITUATION, and all of it looked like it was a neon sign.

  “I do sponsored posts,” she stated. “I’m an affiliate at a variety of sites, and I started my own shop where I sell my swag. I’m launching my podcast later this year with a video component for people who want to watch as well as listen.”

  I looked to her and asked, “To what?”

  Her face pinched and she said, “Not that you’d notice, but I’m really good with makeup, hair, I got a dab hand with decorating, and I take great photos. The Pioneer Woman built a fucking empire with less than that and there wasn’t even Snapchat and Insta back then.”

  “I wasn’t saying anything mean,” I noted softly.

  “You weren’t?” she retorted snidely.

  “No, Sidney, I wasn’t,” I replied firmly.

  “I know you and Rob think it’s full of shit,” she retorted.

  “What me, and probably Rob, did not do is actually ask you about it. I didn’t know what you were up to, which makes me not only the shittiest sister in the world, but just a plain bitch.”

  Her entire body relaxed, and she replied, “No you aren’t. I wasn’t exactly deep in your life either. I kept out of it because it took me a while to find my way, and you weren’t a big fan of coming along for that ride. I get that. I did some stupid shit, some crazy shit, some shit I wasn’t proud of until I found my niche. And then it was…” she shrugged, “safer. All that, you and Mom and Rob, Dad and Mick, it was messed up dysfunction and I didn’t want any part of it. I knew you were getting buried under it, but I was so into my own thing, gung-ho to make it something, I let you get piled under their garbage. So who’s the shittiest sister in the world and just a plain bitch?”

  “Why don’t we just leave it at the fact we both could have done better, we didn’t, and now we will,” I suggested.

  “Yeah, I could do that,” she muttered, gazing back down at her laptop.

  “Sidney,” I called.

  She looked to me.

  I flung out a hand. “This is really rad. I mean really. And if you need any help on the backend of your website and podcast or whatever,” I touched my chest, “you call me.”

  “I hate the tech stuff,” she said, her expression growing bright. “I took some online courses and went to seminars, but it still sucks.”

  “It’s awesome.”

  “Because you’re a freak.”

  “And I let my freak flag fly.”

  Her face split in a grin.

  I returned it, then asked, “Are we going to lunch or what?”

  “The last stand before you’re back to school?”

  I did two quick lifts of my shoulders. “Not really. I’m enrolled, but I don’t start until the summer semester. But I’m going full-time Computer Raiders starting next week, so tonight’s my last night at Smithie’s.”

  She studied me closely. “You down with that?”

  “Who would have thought I’d miss stripping,” I mumbled.

  “Babe, you know it’s not the stripping you’re gonna miss, right?”

  I did another couple of quick shrugs.

  Sidney got closer. “Those losers at school who didn’t get you, they were losers. Everyone’s a loser in school. Even the popular kids were losers, they just were better at pretend than the rest of us. The key to survival was to find your pack of losers. You never got that, so you never formed a posse. So allow me to share, if you have sisters, no matter what kind of sisters they are,” she reached out and touched the back of my hand, “no matter where life leads you, you never lose them.”

  Man, I was glad I never lost my actual sister.

 
; “You know the worst part about the Dad, Mom, Mick deal?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “I have them to thank for that. For making me realize what I had. For leading me to Danny.” I reached out and didn’t touch the back of hers. I took it in mine. “And getting me back to you.”

  She made a raspberry noise with her lips and returned, “You’re a genius. You would have found your way to all of that, eventually.”

  “You’re right. I’m super fly,” I agreed.

  “You are the definition of not super fly just calling yourself super fly, which is so dorky, it actually makes you super fly.”

  I burst out laughing.

  My sister did it with me.

  After lunch with Sidney, heading home, getting the mail, and finding what was in the mail, I made a few wardrobe adjustments, slicked on a heavy dose of some lip treatment, and was getting out of my car in the parking garage at Danny’s offices.

  And my phone rang.

  I checked it and didn’t know the number, so I didn’t take the call.

  It stopped ringing as I walked toward the elevators.

  It started ringing again after I hit the button.

  I looked to it.

  Same number.

  Statistically (my personal calculations were), it was a 92 percent chance it was a robocall.

  But we’d had three whole weeks of no drama.

  My landlord was kind of a dick about letting me out of my lease, even if I offered to pay April, let him keep my last month’s rent, and I knew he had a waiting list so it wasn’t like he couldn’t turn it over immediately.

  Then Danny paid him a visit, and he brought Mo along, and poof! I was released.

  But that was all the hoopla we’d had.

  I was moved in.

  I gave official notice to Smithie I was quitting.

  Charlie was ecstatic that I’d go full-time at Computer Raiders.

  Gert demanded to go to the house showings Danny arranged in order to give her opinion on where we might end up next (but mostly, to get out of her house, also, because she liked to give Danny shit, and last, because he gave her shit right back and she had a hoot taking it—we’d only looked at two houses, both of which I liked, both of which Danny and Gert hated, so no offers had been made on a house).

  And Rob had filed for divorce.

  Oh, and none of the girls had caved to go out with the guys, which was upsetting me and ticking Lottie off.

  To make matters worse, both Boone and Axl had started seeing other women.

  And yes, even if it was so illogical, it was wrong, both Lottie and I (and I could tell, Ryn and Hattie) considered them other women.

  But Danny told me it wasn’t my life, even if it was semi my business because they were my friends.

  Regardless, he advised that I needed to chill and let nature take its course.

  “It’ll happen how it happens. There are people more afraid of having it good than facing the bad,” he’d said.

  “And why do you think that is?” I’d asked.

  “Because if you have it good after having it bad, the good would be harder to lose.”

  “I’m not gonna lose you,” I pointed out.

  “Babe, you told me that you were gonna end it with me just to protect me. They need to get past stupid shit like that.”

  We had then bickered about him calling it “stupid shit.”

  Danny had ended the bickering by kissing me then proceeding to go down on me on the couch.

  And he’d been so good at ending the bickering, we hadn’t bickered for a solid three days after that.

  So, even though things seemed to be going great in the world of Evan Gardiner, I had lived my life as that life came, and a lot of it wasn’t so great, so who knew what would come next?

  I just knew I’d face it with more awareness and more support than I’d done before.

  This all meant, two calls back to back from the same number, I took the call.

  And I found immediately, as usual, I shouldn’t have taken the call.

  Because right after I said hello, my mom cried, “Evan, don’t hang up!”

  The elevator came, the doors sliding open, and I stared into it.

  But I didn’t get into it.

  “Evan?” she called.

  The elevator doors closed.

  “Evan!” she snapped.

  “I am not talking to you about Mick, Rob or Dad, and if you say ugly things to me, Mom, about anything, including me, or Rob, I’m hanging up and blocking this number too.”

  “Sweetheart, I’m not gonna say ugly things to you.”

  I made no reply.

  “Your stepdad served me with divorce papers,” she told me.

  “I know. Danny and I see Rob a lot and I talk to him all the time.”

  She sounded hurt when she asked, “You do?”

  “He never treated me like shit,” I pointed out.

  “Evie—”

  “Mom, I’m doing something important. Is there something you need?”

  “So Rob has met your man?”

  “Yes,” I said shortly.

  “Your stepfather has met him, but your mother has not.”

  Now she sounded pouty.

  “I’ll repeat, Rob never treated me like shit. Now, is there something you need?”

  Silence.

  “Mom,” I prompted.

  “Well…”

  She said no more.

  “Spit it out.”

  She spat something out.

  The question, “When did you get so sassy?”

  I wasn’t going to answer that, with the answer being, “too late, but still, just in time.”

  “Mom,” I said warningly.

  “It’s your brother,” she said like she didn’t want to say it.

  “Don’t,” I again warned.

  “Your stepfather left me high and dry. I got a job, but I’ve only been at it a week. I don’t have the money to—”

  And there it was.

  Mick, with whatever Mick was up to now (though I noted he was alive and breathing to do it, unlike what he wanted me to think would be his state after all was said and done), needed money.

  And Mom was now his only avenue to getting it, what with Dad copping a guilty plea for burglary, vandalism and possession with intent to distribute. He bought a nickel, and according to Jet, who asked Eddie, if he behaved himself, probably would be out in two, at most three years.

  Not that Dad would ever front Mick money.

  In fact, not that Dad ever had any money.

  In the interim, after I heard Mick had survived a situation he tried to convince me he’d never survive, I had not kept track of Mick because I didn’t want to know about Mick.

  Not for the last two months.

  Not now.

  But clearly, he needed cash, and Mom needed someone—that someone being not her—to give it to him.

  “Goodbye, Mom.”

  “Evie!”

  I hung up.

  I blocked her new number.

  And I tagged the elevator button.

  When I arrived outside the door to the suite, I hit yet another button and looked up at the camera above the door outside Danny’s office.

  I then waited for them to scope me out on their kickass system inside, heard the click and low buzz that meant I was in, opened the door and strolled into the command center with its theater-style rows of stations facing an array of television screens with glass-walled offices and conference rooms to the sides.

  Seriously, and I didn’t care how nerdy it meant I was, I wanted to dig into this setup. There were so many cable covers over stuff snaking on the floor and up to the workstations and into the walls, I almost salivated every time I walked in there.

  I pushed thoughts aside of Hawk’s system, and after spotting Danny standing on the third landing (along which was where his workstation was) with Hawk, a gorgeous blonde with a better ass than mine, and a little, insanely beautiful, dark-hair
ed girl clinging to Hawk’s leg, I looked to the ground floor office at the left, and found it empty.

  Elvira was, again, proving elusive.

  Her office was unoccupied.

  Drat.

  She’d been out the two other times I’d been to the offices as well.

  Sidney had had cosmos with her three times and been vaguely invited over to Elvira’s place for something called “boards.”

  Sidney said she was spectacular (that was the actual word she used).

  And Danny and all the guys talked about her like she was their annoying, and ridiculously lovable, older sister.

  As for me…

  I’d never clapped eyes on the woman.

  In other words, I was dying to meet her.

  My heels clicked on the floor as I made my way to Danny, my attention moving to him, to see his gaze focused not on my jeans, not on my silky button-down top, but on my feet. And his lips were tipped up in a sexy way that made me wonder if my adjustments to my ensemble from lunch to now were for him, or for me.

  I had to look away when I came abreast with Boone, who seemed to be leaving.

  “I have words to say to you,” I told him, stopping as my way to indicate he should stop so I could read him about spending time with some other woman who was not Ryn.

  “Later, babe, I got an assignment,” he probably lied (or maybe not), bent, kissed my cheek, then took off.

  I turned to watch him go.

  Or, more aptly, I turned to glare at his back as he left.

  “You can’t escape me forever, Boone Sadler!” I called.

  He lifted a hand but didn’t look back.

  Fucking commandos.

  When the door closed behind him, I pivoted smartly and walked (okay, maybe stomped) the rest of the way to Danny.

  He greeted me by sliding an arm around my waist and murmuring, “Babe.”

  “Babe,” I said back.

  He silently chuckled. I knew this when his mouth curled, and his long torso shook.

  I looked to Hawk. “Hey, Hawk.”

  “Evan, hey,” Hawk greeted. “This is my wife, Gwen, and my girl,” he put his hand on the dark head of the little one clinging to his thigh, “Vivi.”

  “Hey,” I said to Gwen.

  “Heya, Evan,” she replied.

  I looked down to Vivi.

  “Hi there.”