LUCIEN: A Standalone Romance

by Glenna Sinclair

  She took me in, standing there in my wedding dress. “You were just trying to protect Nicolas, and I was hurting so much that I wanted to punish everyone but myself for the child I raised and lost. But I think it’s time I finally accept who Aurora was and stop hurting people she already crushed.”

  “Mrs. Davis,” I began, not sure where I was going with my words. However, she stopped me, placing a hand on my arm.

  “Aurora set you up. She never intended to be a mother to those beautiful babies. She was going to use them to ruin Nicolas, and to hurt you in the process, an innocent young woman who only wanted to help her mother.” Virginia looked away, tears of shame filling her eyes. “She never donated eggs. Those babies…they’re yours, child.”

  I shook my head. “There were embryos. Aurora and Nicolas were there when they implanted them…”

  “No, child. My attorneys spoke to the doctor in question. He admitted that he didn’t do anything he told you he was doing. He simply put you on a course of fertility drugs and then introduced Nicolas’ sperm to your system. You got pregnant quite naturally—if a little clinically. And those DNA tests prove it.”

  I shook my head, but she wasn’t finished.

  “I arranged for a test on blood leftover from tests you submitted to when you first agreed to this process. The tests are undeniable.”

  “They’re mine?”

  “They’re yours.” She smiled softly at the wonder on my face. “Congratulations. They’re perfect.”

  She turned and began to walk down the hall.

  “Mrs. Davis?”

  She paused then turned to look at me.

  “My mom is gone,” I said softly, “and Nicolas’ mom is gone, too. Those babies could really use a grandmother.”

  She stared at me like she couldn’t quite believe what I was saying. And then she smiled, the first smile I’d seen that actually touched her eyes.

  “I’d be honored.”

  ***

  Nicolas and I spoke our vows fifteen minutes later, Vivienne asleep in my arms and Cole nestled restlessly in Kelly’s. They woke and wanted to be a part of the ceremony, and we couldn’t say no.

  Nicolas brushed a piece of hair out of my face as he bent to kiss me.

  “I love you,” he whispered, “Mrs. Costa.”

  Tears filled my eyes as I stared at him. All the choices I’d made these past few months flowing through my mind. If mi mami hadn’t gotten sick, if I hadn’t volunteered to be Aurora’s surrogate, if I hadn’t opened that door on that hot Texas summer night….

  Thank God for random choice.

  ~ End ~

  Beauty and the Billionaire

  Chapter 1

  The world swung and tipped in a way that felt both fun and scary as I swirled the last of the beer in the bottle, the glass clinking heavily against my teeth. A burst of laughter made me turn slowly, ponderously, to see just what was so funny. Was it me? Was it the bottle against my teeth? Even as I could still taste the crisp carbonation of the beverage in my mouth, I wanted another.

  I felt like I could drink all night. It made it easy to forget about how stupid my parents had been. There wasn’t a damn thing wrong with a cold beer—especially when I was enjoying it in the company of good friends.

  “I’m gonna slap that look off your face if I see it again,” Caro warned me, shaking her finger so vigorously it made me a little dizzy to try and follow it.

  “What look?” I asked, belligerent. I knew exactly what look she meant. It was the look that knitted my features together when I thought about things that pissed me off. Tonight’s subject was definitely my parents denying me the right to attend the very party I found myself so drunk at.

  “That one,” she insisted, poking me hard enough on the nose that I felt the cartilage pop. “And if you don’t stop it right this minute, Amanda Beauty Hart, I’ll tell your parents myself what a party pooper you are.”

  “Stop!” I hissed, glancing quickly around, trying to see if anyone had heard her. “Don’t say that stupid name.”

  “It’s your name, Amanda,” Caro sighed. “Aren’t you ever going to get over it?”

  Amanda I could deal with. And Hart wasn’t bad either. But sandwich Beauty right in between those two and it equaled the most ridiculous name in the history of the world. I hated it with a passion and did all that I could to keep my peers from knowing my middle name.

  I’d gotten up the courage exactly once to ask my parents what they’d been thinking when they inflicted such a name on me, but their answer had done little to satisfy my angst.

  “I guess that means Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder,” my dad had joked, earning him a sigh from my mom.

  “You’re already beautiful on the outside, sweetheart,” my mom had explained. “We just wanted to remind you that it’s important to be beautiful on the inside, too.”

  They didn’t have to remind me by giving me that name. I didn’t know how to feel beautiful on the inside, and I certainly didn’t feel beautiful on the outside. I felt most comfortable in a t-shirt, my brown hair was almost always in a messy ponytail, and I was hopeless at makeup.

  “That’s it!” Caro declared, whirling away and yanking me from my angry ruminations. “I’m calling your parents!”

  “Don’t you dare!” I cried, chasing her across the messy kitchen, bumping into the counter, a chair, and a fellow partygoer. I couldn’t plot my course correctly, and my legs seemed to have minds of their own. “Caro! My parents will murder me if they find out I’m here!”

  “They will not,” she scoffed, waving her phone at me.

  “Well, they’ll ground me for the rest of my life,” I said. That was much more feasible.

  “You’re going to college at the end of the summer, stupid,” Caro said. “They might say you’re grounded, but they can’t actually do anything to you once you go away to school.”

  She had a point, but it still made me cringe to imagine my parents showing up to the party to drag me home. They’d denied me permission to come here, and I’d promised them I’d stay home. But the siren’s song of a house party full of the friends I’d made in high school—complete with beer and missing all parental supervision—was too strong to resist. I wanted to see everyone in one place one last time before I went away to college. And when my parents decided to go out to dinner and a movie, I stayed home just long enough to see their car roll out of the driveway.

  “Just don’t call them,” I begged Caro.

  “I wouldn’t actually call your parents,” she said, rolling her eyes at me as she shoved her phone back in her pocket. “I just want you to have a good time and not be all mopey.”

  “I’m not mopey,” I protested.

  “Then prove it on the dance floor,” Caro said, grabbing me by my hand and pulling me into the living room.

  All the furniture had been shoved to one end, clearing the wooden floor of obstacles, and the music boomed so loud that it rattled the windows. Dancing felt ethereal, like I was weightless, buoyed up only by the beat and the crush of people around me. It was easy to forget that anything was wrong as long as I was dancing, whipping my hair to the rhythm of the song, taking the first cold bottle of beer I was offered, not caring who it came from or why.

  There was only the beer. There was only the music.

  And then, there were the flashing red and blue lights of the police outside.

  “Shit! The cops!” Caro yelped, grabbing my hand. “Let’s go!”

  There was a mad scramble at the loud knocking on the door, the music still blaring, the beer still cool in my mouth. I let my friend drag me through the house, fleeing through a back door into the humid Texas night.

  “Stay where you are!” a voice over a bullhorn commanded, but then the rest of our friends who’d followed us in our escape congealed briefly around us and then scattered.

  “Run for it!” Caro urged, and it was all I could do to get my legs to obey, in danger at every second of tripping and falling over mysel
f. If the cops decided to give chase, they couldn’t catch us all, but I didn’t want to be the weakest link in the pack.

  We dashed several unsteady blocks in a blind panic then cut down a side street and started to double back cautiously to assess the situation. By the time we returned to the scene of the party, the house was dark, as if nothing had ever happened there. The cops had left, either satisfied they’d scared all of us kids straight or with a couple of us in the backseat of the patrol car, about to learn a hard lesson about underage drinking.

  “Dammit,” Caro complained, as we shuffled down to her parked car. “I don’t want this night to end.”

  I was still high on the adrenaline of the chase, the endorphins of our successful escape, and, of course, all the beer I’d imbibed.

  “I’m going to miss you so much when we go to college,” I said, waxing suddenly sentimental and looping an arm around Caro’s shoulders. She was my best friend, and we’d somehow managed to enroll in colleges hundreds of miles away from each other.

  “We have to do something to salvage this night,” she declared, hugging me back. “I’m not ready to accept defeat!”

  “Let’s just drive,” I suggested. We’d escaped the cops. We were invincible. “If we just drive, the universe will show us what to do.”

  The wind whistling in the open windows was cool bliss to the pressing thickness of the night, lifting the tendrils of hair that had escaped the ponytail off of my neck. It was better than Caro’s faulty air conditioning and felt purer than any box fan I’d stood in front of, seeking relief.

  We turned the radio up, sang as loud as we could to the songs we knew, and faked it to the songs we didn’t, choosing our course at random, careening through the streets until we were outside of the city, on the country roads that we knew some of our classmates liked to race each other down. It was thrilling to witness the rows of crops whip by in dizzying patterns, to be the only set of headlights on the roadway, for the curves in the road to move the contents of my stomach, to stick my hand out the window and cup the air as it whooshed by.

  Caro muttered something out of rhythm of the song we were listening to, and I glanced over at her. She was a better singer than I was, so I was always eager to point out if she missed lyrics or her voice broke.

  She didn’t glance back. Her eyes were fixed on the road, her mouth set in a grim line.

  I felt, more than heard, the tires slip into a skid, my gaze still fixated on Caro’s face, watching her eyes get wider and wider and then nothing.

  Chapter 2

  Beer didn’t taste so good to me anymore. I couldn’t so much as look at a bottle of the stuff without feeling that heavy clash against my teeth, knowing what came next, knowing what I’d caused.

  No, to dull my brain these days, I could only stomach the bite of liquor. I preferred it to hurt a little, going down. It was a tradeoff, a tiny form of penance for the numbed bliss I found in being drunk.

  If I drank enough of it, I didn’t feel anything.

  “You’re up, Beauty,” the bartender said, jerking his thumb toward the dinky little stage across the floor. “Hope you’re sober enough to make a little money.”

  “I’m fine.” I downed the rest of my cocktail and wove my way toward the stage. There weren’t many customers tonight. Hell, there were usually not many customers ever—but it paid the bills.

  My music started before I could hop onto the stage, but I didn’t much care. As long as I kept the customers drunker than I was, my tits and ass would be the only things that mattered to them. I figured I could probably even make money by just standing up here and not dancing at all, but I’d never been brave enough to try it.

  It wasn’t fun going to bed hungry, and I needed the money to feed myself and to keep gas in my car.

  I used the pole to haul myself to my feet and started doing a slow spin around it before exploding into a swing, responding to an upbeat burst of notes in the song that was playing. Swinging around and around with all the alcohol I’d had to drink was practically a form of meditation. All the colors and faces around me blurred, and I could pretend I wasn’t here, pretend that nothing had happened, that I still lived in Texas, that my parents…

  I dropped out of the spin abruptly, ignoring my dizzy head, going on all fours to approach a grizzled man seated at one of the tables closest to the stage.

  “Is your name really Beauty?” he shouted over the music, as I arched my back and then popped my ass out abruptly, emphasizing the curves my body had softened into, making the little tin coins on the wrap I was wearing tinkle.

  “Sure is,” I said, putting a leg on either side of him and gripping him so hard he nearly spilled his drink. “Buy a dance from me and I’ll let you see my driver’s license to prove it.”

  That was the one thing I could do for my parents, after everything. I could embrace the name they’d seen fit to give me. I could stop disrespecting that little bit of legacy left behind, own it, and let it be the one thing that still tied me to them.

  I noticed another man approach the stage in the periphery, so I held my thong strap out and let the first man slip a few bills beneath it, snapping it securely against my skin.

  That was the way this game was played. I danced and they came, mesmerized by the sway of my hips or the way I spun and shimmied, ready to bestow dollars upon me. Later, they could buy me drinks at a jacked up price and I’d get a cut of the profits. If they really liked me, I’d perform a special dance for them right at their table so other customers could get jealous at how attentive I could be and want to buy more dances. Those little intimacies were much more expensive than the tips I got up on the stage, but I had to dangle the bait in front of their faces to get them to bite.

  One song ended and I rolled right into a dance for the next song, adjusting my moves to go with the beat. It was Caro who’d taught me to dance, adapting the moves she’d learned from her older cousin into routines we could master to impress the naïve boys at our school into thinking we were much more worldly than we really were.

  I didn’t want to think about school, or Caro, or any of that. I couldn’t.

  I climbed to the top of the pole and abruptly hung upside down, spinning slowly so everyone could see, not caring that one of my breasts had popped out of my cheap bikini top before I’d planned for it to do so, wondering just how much it would hurt to let go and slam headfirst into the stage fifteen feet below me. Would it kill me or just maim me? Would anyone even notice me fall?

  As I gripped the pole with my hands, I righted myself, sliding downward, remembering how badly I’d hurt my legs the first time I’d tried this move. Now, the friction was only an afterthought.

  The trick had earned me a few piles of singles along the stage, and I kicked them toward the center of the platform so the customers couldn’t go changing their minds and taking back what was rightfully mine.

  A third song and my bikini top was tossed aside, earning a few whoops from the back of the room. I shed my thin wrap, coins ringing like bells, and it was just me, a pair of battered heels, and my black thong, spinning around the pole, wondering if the money I earned tonight would fill up my gas tank so I could get the hell out of here, wondering where I would even go if I could.

  There wasn’t anything here for me anymore. Not after that night.

  The song ended, and I gathered my clothes and money, waiting for the first customer to request a special dance from me—now that they’d seen everything I had to offer.

  I bellied up to the bar again in the meantime, laying out the handful of bills I’d earned, doing my best to straighten the wrinkles out of them. When I’d first started out in this business, shame had driven me to exchange the bills for higher denominations—and much crisper paper. But now, I didn’t care to buy my groceries with the singles I’d danced for. It was a way of life, and the knowing glances from cashiers didn’t sting me like they used to.

  Alcohol could dull everything.

  I counted out enough money f
or another cocktail and signaled the bartender.

  “Vodka Red Bull,” I said. I didn’t like the bubble in the drink, as it reminded me too much of the carbonation in beer, but I needed a little boost to my game or I wasn’t going to make it through the shift.

  “Can I buy that for you?”

  A customer settled into the chair beside me, and I couldn’t help but stare. He was gorgeous; he clearly took much better care of himself than most people who frequented this establishment. His blue eyes sparkled with mischief, and his neatly trimmed beard did a poor job of hiding his smirk. I couldn’t guess fashion labels just by looking at an outfit, but I could tell that they were high end because of the way they fit this man’s body—his suit jacket hugging his strong shoulders, the trousers highlighting his trim waist, and his shoes polished to an opulent shine.

  “That sounds nice,” I said, propping my chin up on my fist, continuing my casual perusal of his physical attributes. He had nicely manicured nails, I saw, as he smoothly withdrew a few bills from a money clip, alerting me to the fact that this was a man who earned his money with his mind instead of his hands. I unwittingly wondered what those hands would feel like on either side of my hips, guiding me as I gave a dance just for him, right here at the bar.

  “You’re a pretty good dancer for not being here that long,” he said, returning my gaze, unperturbed.

  “Excuse me?” I said, blinking rapidly, shocked out of my appraisal.

  “This is the longest you’ve been in the same place since you left college,” he continued without missing a beat, taking the drink the bartender offered him and pushing mine toward me. “But for this line of work, the way you work that pole after just a month…if I wore a hat, I’d take it off to you.”