Enticing Daphne

by Jessica Prince

  But there wasn’t a chance in hell of that happening if she hated me.

  I got to my desk and sat down with a heavy sigh. I needed to formulate a plan, something to get back in that woman’s good graces, but before I could start the intercom on my phone buzzed.

  “Mr. McMannus,” my assistant, Stacy, called through the speaker. “There’s a call for you on line one.”

  “Thanks, Stacy. Put them through.”

  She did as asked and I hit the button to answer the call. “This is Caleb McMannus.”

  “Hey, dipshit. You sound so professional over the phone. I almost couldn’t tell you were a raging asshole.”

  I rolled my eyes at the sound of Deacon Lockhart’s voice. He was my buddy Grayson’s little brother, and I’d grown up around both of them. He was a good guy for the most part, but he loved to give me shit for my reputation as a man-whore just like his brother did.

  “Well if that’s not the pot calling the kettle black,” I returned. “Have you spoken to your big bro lately, or are you still avoiding him for reasons unknown?” It was a touchy subject between the Lockharts, who I considered to be my second family. The three of us had all grown up close, but sometime after college, Deacon and Gray’s relationship turned sour. No one really knew why except for Deac, and he wasn’t talking about it. It got so bad that he refused to come work for Bandwidth, his father’s company, choosing to use his trust fund to open a bar instead of joining the family business.

  I’d ended up as CFO, the position Nolan Lockhart had been grooming his youngest son for, when Deacon informed his dad he wasn’t coming on board, and it was still a bone of contention between the family to this day.

  “As much fun as delving into my family’s drama is for you, that’s not why I’m calling. I need you to get down to the bar.”

  My back shot straight. “Why? What’s going on?” I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I knew what he was going to say before he even said it.

  “It’s your mom, man. I hate to have to call you with this, but she’s in a bad way. Figured you’d want to be the first person I called to handle it.”

  Fuck. I knew it.

  “I’ll be right there.” I disconnected the call before he could say anything else and rushed out of the office, ignoring all the strange looks I was getting from the employees as I passed.

  It only took fifteen minutes to get from my office to Deacon’s bar, but past experience had already taught me that my mother didn’t need even that long to get into trouble. I’d been taking care of her for most of my life.

  She’d always been an extremely sensitive woman with a fragile disposition. I’d grown up walking on eggshells, always mindful not to do anything that could send her into one of her alcohol-induced crying jags.

  Most of the time it had been all for nothing, considering she’d fallen in love with, and tied herself—for better and for worse—to a coldhearted bastard without an empathetic bone in his body.

  My father was an asshole who cheated and manipulated to get his way, not taking into consideration the people he stepped on along the way. He broke my mother’s heart over and over, and I was the one left to clean up the mess. I’d spent years trying to convince her to leave his sorry ass, but she always refused, claiming Dad was the love of her life, that she’d be lost without him.

  Their dysfunctional shit show of a relationship was why I wouldn’t allow myself to be tied down by a woman. I’d seen firsthand what love could do to a person, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

  I shoved through the thick wooden doors of Deacon’s bar, The Black Sheep. It was a name so incredibly telling it was almost laughable. I never said it out loud, choosing to let the Lockharts bury their heads in the sand the way I did about my own flesh and blood, but I often wondered if it would have been subtler for Deacon to name his bar My Parents Loved My Older Brother More Than Me.

  I guessed every family had their own dirty little secrets. And mine was currently sitting on a barstool in a dimly lit bar in the middle of the goddamn day sucking back martinis like she was worried there was about to be a global shortage of gin.

  Sidling up to the bar, I took a stool next to her. I tilted my chin up at Deacon, getting a similar gesture in return, then looked over at my mom to see she was already good and liquored up.

  I placed my hand on her back to get her attention. “Hey, Mom.”

  Her glassy eyes trailed a few seconds slower than her head as she turned to look at me. “Oh, Caleb,” she slurred, rocking precariously on the stool. “Darling, I think your father’s having an affair.”

  I tried my hardest not to roll my eyes as she sniffled and wiped at the lone tear that broke free and trickled down her cheek. It was the exact same song and dance we’d been doing since I was old enough to speak. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why she kept doing this to herself. This wasn’t my father’s first affair. Hell, it wasn’t even his third. He’d delved right into double digits before I graduated college, for Christ’s sake. For all intents and purposes, my mother had been his trophy wife, the young, beautiful woman he’d flaunt at events and parties. She was the pretty thing he stored on a shelf while he ran around with his mistresses, pulling her down only when the occasion called for it. And she’d allowed it for as long as I could remember, diving deeper and deeper into the bottle and prescription pills to soothe the ache instead of doing anything about it.

  I was sick and fucking tired of having to be the mature one in my relationship with my mother. Most of my life it felt like I was the parent, and I resented the hell out of her for putting me in that position. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t stand up for herself, why she didn’t demand better. She’d settled for the life my father provided because the money was too good to pass up, and had willingly thrown me into a position no child should’ve had to endure.

  But the fact remained that she was my mother and I loved her, so I did what I had to do. It was because of situations like this that I hadn’t had room in my brain to remember something as outstanding as my night with Daphne.

  McMannus skeletons were to remain firmly in the closet, never to come out and risk tarnishing the family name and its legacy. If I wasn’t running interference with my parents, drying out my gin-soaked mother after another bender, or being her shoulder to lean on, I was doing damage control to keep her nasty little secret out of the press. That was my life. As far as my father was concerned—and had plainly stated on many occasions—it was the only thing I was good for.

  “Come on.” I stood, taking her thin elbow in my hand and guiding her from the stool. “Let’s get you home.”

  Just another day in the life of the McMannus family, I thought gloomily as I guided her out of the bar and into a cab.

  And people speculated why I was the womanizing playboy depicted in the rags all over the country.

  The answer was simple.

  Because after spending night after night sobering my mother up and talking her off the ledge, I needed to bury myself inside a nameless, faceless woman so I could forget about my shitty life.

  Chapter Four

  Daphne

  Google was quickly becoming the bane of my existence.

  What had started as curiosity about Caleb McMannus had blossomed into a full-blown obsession. Once you Googled, there was no going back. I was disgusted with myself.

  Not only because it seemed I’d banged a guy whose dick had already been in half the female population of the United States, but also because I couldn’t stop thinking about the stupid man-whore. It was a sickness. A gross, disappointing sickness that I’d spent weeks trying to cure myself of to no avail.

  Each gossip column of his sexcapades, each picture of him in a compromising position—and there were many, all of them with a different woman—was cringe-worthy. But I couldn’t stop myself from searching them out.

  What was worse, I couldn’t stop thinking about our night together. It had been the most intense, toe-curling experie
nce of my life. And even though I pretty much hated him for forgetting about me, I wanted it again.

  Damn my needy, traitorous vagina!

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?”

  I’d been so ensconced in my online stalk-fest that I hadn’t heard Sophia come up behind me. I’d been hunkered down close to the screen because… well, because I thought I could see a hint of abs in one of the pictures of him, and at the sound of her voice I shot up straight, slammed the lid of my laptop down, and spun around in my swivel chair.

  “What? No! Nothing! Huh? What are you talking about?” As if my screechy, rapid-fire questions weren’t telling enough, I started laughing like a manic hyena.

  She looked at me like I’d just lost my mind. “Uh, okay, crazy. Tone it down a bit, would you? You have creepy killer eyes right now.”

  I unscrewed the loony from my expression and tried to look as normal as possible. “Sorry, you scared me is all. I thought you’d already left for the day.”

  “I did, but I forgot my cell phone and the number for that Chinese delivery place is in it, so I had to come back. What are you still doing here?” she asked, looking at me with suspicion.

  “Oh, uh… I just got distracted doing a little online shopping,” I lied. “Lost track of time, I guess.”

  “Online shopping, huh?” she asked with a knowing smirk. “Wow, I didn’t realize that hottie from the hall a few weeks ago was for sale. You should totally buy that.”

  Son of a bitch! I dropped my head in my hands and groaned. “Ugh. Fine, you caught me. I was… Googling.” I swallowed the last word down as if it left a terrible taste in my mouth.

  Her smirk turned wicked as she propped her hip on the edge of my desk. “Ooh, interesting,” she teased, crossing her arms and stroking her chin creepily.

  I curled my upper lip. “Will you stop doing that, weirdo? You look like a skinnier, less-bald version of Dr. Evil with boobs.”

  She laughed and dropped her hand. “Okay, fine. But seriously, why are you scoping pictures of… what’s his name again?”

  “Caleb McMannus,” I answered way too quickly. And it wasn’t lost on her.

  “Mmhmm.” She bit her lip to suppress her smile and I clenched my fists to suppress the urge to smack her. “Anyway, why are you scoping pictures of Caleb McMannus? I thought you hated the guy. You came back all rage-y after you talked to him.”

  “I did… I do. I was just… I mean….” I gave up on my excuses and dropped my forehead to bang it on my desk. When I sat back up, I admitted, “I kind of had sex with him a few months ago.”

  “You what?”

  I winced at how shrill her voice got. “I had sex with him,” I enunciated. “And you mind not shrieking like that? The glass can’t take it.”

  She pushed back, sitting fully on the desk. “Oh my god,” she said quietly. “You slept with him? When did this happen? How did you meet? Was it any good?” she asked in rapid-fire questions.

  “Yes. Almost three months ago. I picked him up at a bar when he was trying to pick me up. And….” I hesitated to tell the truth, but finally admitted, “It was the best I’ve ever had.”

  She did that high-pitched girly squeal thing and clapped excitedly. “That’s so awesome! Wait… if it was the best you ever had, why’d he act like it was the first time he saw you in the studio?” My cheeks flamed with humiliation as realization dawned on her face. Her eyes rounded, her jaw nearly hitting the floor. “Oh. My. God. He didn’t!”

  “He did,” I confessed in a hushed voice. “He acted like that because the bastard didn’t remember me.”

  Her mouth opened even wider and her eyes looked like they were at risk of falling out of their sockets. “That son of a bitch!”

  That time, instead of bitching at her about her screaming, I joined in. “Right? I mean, not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m damn good!”

  “I just… I can’t believe you had sex with the guy and he didn’t remember you!”

  I shot her a look I hoped would set her hair on fire. “You know, you don’t have to keep saying it. I’m already embarrassed enough as it is.”

  “What an asshole!” she declared. “I hate that guy. We hate that guy, right?”

  “Uh, yes!” I replied sarcastically. “We definitely hate the guy.”

  Sophia quirked an eyebrow. “So if we hate the guy, then why are you cyber-stalking him?”

  “Because he’s the best I ever had!” I shouted, throwing my hands in the air. “He broke me, Sophia. I haven’t been able to have an orgasm since that night!”

  She gasped loudly. “Seriously? Not even by yourself?”

  I nodded pathetically.

  “Holy shit,” Sophia breathed, lifting her fist to her mouth. “That’s just… I can’t….” Then she burst into laughter. I stopped suppressing the urge and slapped the shit out of her arm. “Ow! You bitch!” She rubbed her arm and bit her lip while frowning. I could have sworn she was fighting a smile.

  When I tried to kill her with my eyes, she held up her hands in surrender. “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh. I’ll stop, I promise.”

  My temples began to throb. “God, Soph,” I groaned, massaging at the pain. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I mean, the asshole doesn’t even remember screwing me, but I can’t stop thinking about him! What is that? Something is seriously wrong with me.”

  Her hand rested on my shoulder. “Sweetie, there is nothing wrong with you. More than likely, your issues with getting off are all in your head. This guy’s gotten under your skin in a serious way. The only way to fix it is to work him out.”

  “Oh?” I asked with a roll of my eyes. “And how do you suggest I do that?”

  Sophia’s finger on my shoulder convulsed as a wicked smile stretched across her face. “There’s only one way to do it. Bang him like crazy until you’ve gotten your fill, and then walk away.”

  I shot out of my chair, letting out a very unladylike snort. “You’ve officially lost your mind. I’m not sleeping with him again! He’s a man-whore! He’s screwed so many women he doesn’t even remember our faces. I’m never, ever having sex with Caleb McMannus again!”

  I feigned revulsion at the idea to mask the fact that her theory was actually something I was considering. Truth was, I’d been able to think of little else since that jerk walked into our studio a few weeks earlier. My brain wanted to punch him in the neck while my body wanted to cuff him to my bed and have its naughty, dirty way with him.

  “Okay, honey,” Sophia said sarcastically, giving my shoulder a condescending pat. “Keep telling yourself that.”

  She walked away, leaving me all alone with my self-pity. I opened my laptop back up and made a noise of disgust at myself when the image of Caleb I’d been drooling over popped back to life.

  “You’re pathetic, Daphne,” I chided as my desk phone began to ring. I looked at the unfamiliar number flashing across the caller ID and picked up the line. “This is Daphne King.”

  “Hey, Ducky.”

  At the sound of the voice, my lungs deflated like two balloons without helium. A painful, raspy wheeze emitted from my chest through the phone line.

  “Daphne? Hello? You there?”

  I sputtered for a few seconds before I was finally able to speak. “Stefan?”

  “Yeah.” I could hear his smile through the handset and imagined what he looked like at that moment, with those stupid capped teeth shining in all their bleached glory. “So good to hear your voice, Ducky.”

  Christ, that name. When we first got together, he’d playfully shortened my name to Daphy, then thought it would be funny to call me Daphy Duck. That eventually led to Ducky. It was a stupid fucking nickname that I’d hated so much my teeth clenched each time I heard it, but I’d thought I was blissfully in love at the time so, like an idiot, I let it slide. Now it was like hearing nails being scraped down a chalkboard.

  “Can’t say I return the sentiment, Stefan. Why the hell are you calling me?”

  “Look, Du
cky—”

  I cut him off with a groan. “Please, for the love of god, stop calling me that. You sound like a dumbass.”

  He cleared his throat, and from years of experience, I knew he was tugging at his earlobe just then. It was something he did any time he was uncomfortable. Any time we fought, he’d make that noise like he was trying to hawk something up and pull at his ear. It was so annoying. “Okay, I’m sorry. I-I’m just nervous. I didn’t actually expect you to pick up.”

  “Yeah? Well had I known who was on the other line, I wouldn’t have answered, trust me.”

  “Come on, Duck—er, Daphne. Please don’t be like that. I know we left things in a bad place—”

  “In a bad place?” I laughed a bit hysterically. “That’s what you call it? Really? Because if I remember correctly, where we left things was with you buried balls deep in my mother!”

  “Daph, I’m sorr—”

  “Nope,” I broke in, officially over the conversation. “Don’t you dare apologize to me. I don’t give a shit if you’re sorry. I don’t care how you feel at all. I can’t for the life of me understand why after seven years either of you would try reaching out to me, but I’ll tell you now, it’s pointless. I want nothing to do with either of you.” He tried to get a word in, but I was done. “Nope. I don’t want to hear it. Unless you’re calling to inform me that the backstabbing cow gave you a raging case of herpes so bad your dick shriveled up and fell off, you’ve got nothing to say that I want to hear. Never call me again.”

  With that, I hung up, slamming the phone back down in the cradle so hard it almost broke.

  I grabbed my purse and started toward the elevator bank. My destination was the nearest possible place to get alcohol, because after that conversation, I felt the need to get really, really drunk.