by S. M. Soto
When he doesn’t respond, I risk a glance up, met with his brows raised. “And why should I let you leave? There’s always more to be done.”
My nostrils flare. “Because we have a long day tomorrow, and I’d like to get my daughter settled before I have to leave her.”
Something flashes in his eyes at the use of the word daughter. A long moment passes between us, him searching my gaze, and me, willing him to take pity on me for once. Today has already been hell. I just want to go home to Faith and forget my problems for a little while. I want to enjoy my time with her while I still can.
“That’s fine.”
I try to mask my surprise. I wasn’t expecting him to give in so easily. “Right. Okay.”
“Stephan will be at your place to bring you to the airport. Be on time,” he dismisses me just like that. I pause, and our eyes meet once again. For reasons unknown, a shiver travels down my spine.
His mood swings are beginning to give me whiplash.
That’s the thing about him. Callan Reed is like the seasons. Sometimes he runs hot, like the summer days of our childhood, or he is like the spring, the vibrant blue skies and blossoming flowers, but it’s the other seasons I hate. When he is like every changing color of the leaves in the autumn. When he is like the frigid winter, eyes cold as ice.
My driver pulls up outside the unkempt building, and my nose turns up when I see where she’s been living. I’ve seen my fair share of shitty neighborhoods while living here in New York. When you’re a college student trying to make ends meet, you’re willing to make even the shittiest of places work. But here? This is worse than I could’ve imagined.
“You sure we have the right address?” I ask, taking in the men huddled on the corner. Just across the street, there’s a dark alley, which can only breed more chaos. Especially for a woman like Daisy. A woman living on her own with a child.
“This is it, sir.”
I grit my back teeth together, and my jaw aches from the pressure. She shouldn’t be in a place like this. How the hell could my parents let this happen?
How could Rose, of all people, let her do this?
This is the worst goddamn neighborhood in New York to live in, and she’s expecting to raise a baby here safely. What the fuck is she thinking?
“Should I head up there and bring her down, sir?” I shake my head, already making my way out of the car. This wasn’t a part of the plan. Stephan was supposed to pick her up and then get me before heading straight to the airport, but some strange part of me needed to see where she lived. I don’t know anything about Daisy Casillas anymore, and this was my way of changing that.
“That’s not necessary. I’ll grab her myself,” I call over my shoulder.
Just as I’m heading up the rickety steps, the door opens from somebody leaving the building, and I walk in easily. There’s no doorman, no security, nothing to prevent a stranger from walking in off the street. It’s glaringly obvious this place isn’t safe for Daisy. Not at all.
Why do I care?
That’s not something I’m willing to delve any further into.
I keep telling myself it’s because she’s my assistant and I don’t have the time to lose her and search for another, but I know that isn’t the reason.
Not at all.
As much as I’d like to forget it, Daisy and I have a history together, and most of it isn’t good.
Shooting off a quick text to her, I wait on the lower level of the complex. It’s incredibly noisy. The sound of babies crying, people yelling, and doors slamming all carries to the first floor where I stand waiting.
Callan: Apartment number?
Daisy: ???
Daisy: 121C
I pocket my phone and climb the steps.
She’s probably wondering why I need to know, especially seeing as my driver already knows where she lives. Just as I’m sure he knows where her apartment is located. That’s just Stephan—thorough and a gentleman to a fault. I’m sure she expected me to meet up with her later, but she’s in for a rude awakening.
My frustration with her living arrangements only grows when I get to her floor and hear how loud it is up here. If I thought the noise was unbearable downstairs, I was wrong. I underestimated just how dingy this whole area of the neighborhood looks on the outside. The inside doesn’t improve in the least.
Hell, the number two on her door is crooked, hanging on its hinge, about ready to fall off.
My teeth gnash together.
I knock sharply on the door. It’s followed by the sound of a baby crying and soft footfalls. When she opens the door, I mask my features, keeping my gaze trained on her instead of the baby who’s wailing in her arms.
I try to fight it. I really do.
Of its own accord, my gaze darts down. There’s an inexplicable heaviness settling over my sternum. It was there the night of the dinner at my parents’ house, the first night I saw the baby. Just like last time, I’m unable to drag my gaze away. When you spend years hating a person, envying everything they have, it’s hard to compartmentalize those feelings. Even when said person is dead.
“Callan?” My gaze drifts up to meet hers. There are questions in her big brown eyes. A thinly veiled layer of confusion. “What are you doing here? It’s still early,” she murmurs, glancing down at her phone. Her eyes widen when she sees the time.
Yeah, babe. If we don’t speed this up, we’ll be running late.
“I’m so sorry,” she breathes out, eyes growing wide. “I didn’t even realize that was the time. I’ve been waiting on the sitter. She isn’t here yet.”
“I thought my parents were watching her?’ I ask, genuinely curious.
“Your mom isn’t supposed to watch her until later tonight and—wait, how did you know that?”
I glance away from her, taking in the apartment. “Rose must’ve mentioned it.”
“Oh, right. That makes sense.”
“All you have to do is call her, and she’d come. You know that just as well as I do.”
She purses her lips. “I know, but your family has already done so much for me. It feels like I keep throwing my problems on them.”
With an aggravated sigh, I pull out my phone and shoot a text to my father. He’s the quicker option since my mother never answers her phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Asking them to watch her.”
“Callan!” she chides. “You can’t just do that. I already hired someone.”
“She isn’t here, is she? Plus, I’m sure you’d feel better about leaving her with my parents while you’re gone. Tell me I’m wrong.” I quirk a brow, knowing she can’t.
She frowns and narrows her eyes suspiciously. “Why do you suddenly care?”
Ice shoots through my veins.
My hands curl into fists.
“I don’t care. I just don’t want to miss my flight because my assistant is incompetent.”
“Of course, that’s why,” she mumbles under her breath.
We stand there in awkward silence. Me with my hands stuffed in the pockets of my slacks and her, rocking the baby in her arms. She’s finally stopped crying, but now, she seems just to be antsy, moving around, trying to get comfortable. It’s as though she knows Daisy will be leaving soon. Splitting my time between watching them together, I take in her apartment as we wait. Everything is sparse. The furniture is old, nothing relatively new. For someone who is making a pretty penny as my executive assistant, she should be living in something far better than this.
“Do I not pay enough?”
“What?” she asks, out of breath from her rocking.
“Is that why you’re living here? Do I not pay enough?”
Heat rises to her cheeks. She looks away, focusing on anything but me. “It’s good money, but… I wasn’t sure how long I’d have the job, so I didn’t want to overextend. Especially with a baby.”
I nod stiffly. There’s a foreign sensation in my chest. Feels a lot like regret.
&
nbsp; I shouldn’t have said the things I’ve said, but hell, this woman draws every extreme emotion from within me. She always has. It’s only gotten worse now that we work together. All I can see when I look at her now is pain and heartbreak. All I can see is Dean’s hands on her, and I fucking hate it.
I loathe it.
Who in their right mind is jealous of a dead man?
Me, apparently.
“It’s actually not so bad.”
As if proving that statement wrong, there’s a sudden loud bang from above that shakes her walls. A frame falls, crashing to the floor, causing the baby in her arms to cry again.
Slowly, I quirk my brows as if to say, “Oh, really?”
She licks her lips. “I mean, you get used to it. After a while.”
“Right.” I sigh.
“You don’t have to wait here. You can wait in your car downstairs, you know,” she says, getting snappy.
I fight the upturning of my lips. “Is that your way of kicking me out?”
“I’m not going to kick you out, Cal,” she mumbles. The way my name sounds rolling off her lips is everything I’ve missed about our childhood. It has the walls I’ve built around myself growing taller. Stronger. Impenetrable.
Our gazes hold.
Flashes of my childhood with her bombard me all at once. Flashes of her tearstained cheeks, flashes of her and Dean, and I force myself to look away at the sound of knocking on her door. It’s perfect timing, really.
She lets my mother and father in, going over details I care nothing about. I can feel my father’s gaze on me, but I don’t bother looking. That’ll only leave the window open for him to ask me questions I’m not obligated to answer at the moment.
“Everything will be fine, sweetheart, I promise,” my mother whispers, pulling her into a hug. My father helps her with her bags, and I take the lead, heading down to the car and Stephan. I glance at my watch. We’re cutting it awfully close.
My driver, ever the gentleman, opens her door and gives her a smile.
That’s new.
After saying goodbye, she slides in, and my driver shuts the door behind her, and I turn toward my parents.
“I need a favor while we’re gone.”
Daisy is stiff and quiet as she sits next to me on the aircraft, her head craned toward the window. We’ve barely shared a handful of words. And I have no doubt that’s my fault. I’m not exactly the easiest person to be around. My track record with Daisy hasn’t been all that great either.
I shouldn’t have snapped at her the way I did. That was my fault. Hell, I shouldn’t treat her the way I do, but fucking hell, something about Daisy Casillas gets under my skin. Something that makes me want to inflict pain, not just on her but on myself, too. It was unprofessional. Something about Daisy Casillas has always brought out the absolute worst in me. She’s the kind of person who can invade your thoughts. It’s what she does. I’ve spent years pushing her existence out of my mind.
Over those years, I’ve pretended that Daisy meant nothing to me. She was living happily on the West Coast, and I was here on the East Coast, far enough away that I wouldn’t be tempted to do something stupid. I had to pretend the news of her marriage didn’t bother me. I pretended that Dean marrying the only woman I’ve ever loved didn’t matter.
It fucking did.
I can remember the day I saw her wedding photos. It was a blow to the chest, one I certainly wasn’t expecting. I was rich, had my own business, and was incredibly successful. It shouldn’t have mattered. She shouldn’t have mattered.
But she did, much more than she realized.
It was an unspoken rule in our family—I refused to speak with them about Daisy and I could only hope for the same from them. I’d never ask about her. No matter how badly I wanted to. I’d never let anyone know that merely hearing her name was painful.
Whenever she came up in discussion, I’d leave or do my best to ignore any information regarding her or Dean. I did it through every huge milestone in her life. My sister and parents were my only source of information. It was how I knew Daisy only grew more beautiful as the years passed. It’s how I knew she had tried out a short bob with highlights in her engagement photos. It was how I knew she’d finally gotten those yellow shutters on her house she’d always wanted. It was how I knew her wedding was in some stuffy church, the one place she said she never wanted to have it.
I remember finding her wedding photos at Rose’s place one evening after dinner. It was like watching a wreck happen and being unable to look away from it. That was me when it came to Daisy from afar. I couldn’t stop staring at the photographs. The way Dean had his arms wrapped around her tiny little waist. Her hair was long and back to its natural dark brown color, curled in these soft waves that made her look so stunning, it was hard to look away from.
Staring at those photos was like staring into the face of all my past mistakes. I tried not to think about it too hard, but it was obvious, if I’d done things differently all those years ago, that would’ve been me in those photographs.
It hasn’t been easy, hearing about her through my family and any of our mutual friends. Seeing her pictures with my sister at our parents’ place is always a blow to the gut. There’s no escaping her. There hasn’t been since the moment she and her family moved next door to us.
After I moved across the coast for college, it seemed like the rest of my family fell in line like dominoes. A few years after Rosalind graduated high school, she moved out east, and my parents weren’t far behind her. The only person left behind was Daisy, and I much preferred it that way, the miles of distance between us.
I shouldn’t have been infatuated with her then. She was young, too young for me, and she was my sister’s best friend. None of that mattered to me back then. Daisy Casillas was beautiful and had a heart that was far too big for her curvy little body. She was too giving, too sweet, and too goddamn funny for her own good. Before I knew what was happening, not only was she my sister’s best friend, she became mine, too. I wanted to be her protector. I wanted to be the sole object in her orbit. Just like she was in mine.
It wasn’t until we started getting older that those feelings changed. I became angry because I didn’t want this unwelcome attraction. I didn’t want to feel this way about her. I didn’t want to go to sleep with her smiling face in mind. I didn’t want to wake up with the urge to draw her, but I did. The only logical thing I could do was push her away.
We wanted different things out of life. That, I was sure of.
Daisy longed for that white picket fence life in the future. The only thing I wanted for myself was success. Women came with complications. You couldn’t run your own business while simultaneously living a picture-perfect life with an even better marriage. That’s why so many corporate men cheat. That’s why there are so many trophy wives. And Daisy? She deserves more than that. More than I’d ever be willing to give her. She always has.
It was easier being labeled as the asshole and treating her like shit in our teen years than it was to confront my feelings for her. So that’s exactly what I did. I made her hate me. I convinced myself I hated her, too. But that was never the case. No matter how hard I tried, I’d never be able to hate Daisy Casillas.
“Stop fidgeting,” I order, unable to help myself. She freezes her shifting on the seats, and despite herself, she nods, following my orders. Even so, she’s still not giving me any words. Either because she’s still angry with me or she’s frightened. I’m sure some part of her is still afraid of flying. I remember when we were kids, she had to get on a plane once for a family vacation and she came back looking like she’d had a kidney removed. Daisy was a shit flyer, and judging by her pale complexion, that hasn’t changed.
I normally like to fly in silence. I loathe when I sit next to someone on any kind of form of transportation and they try to strike up a conversation with me. But for some odd reason, I find myself breaking all of my normal rules whenever I’m in this woman’s presence. Ev
en sitting in first class, to make things as comfortable as possible for the both of us, she’s still fidgeting like she’s squeezed somewhere in coach. Heaving a deep sigh, I strike up a conversation with her to help get her mind off takeoff.
“How is your dad?”
That gets her attention. She whips away from the window, turning to face me. Her brows are drawn in, and that cute crease is resting between there, just as it normally does when she’s waging some internal battle.
“Why do you care?”
I stifle the urge to smile. I’m sure that wouldn’t bode well for me if I set one free, seeing as I’m already on thin ice with her as it is.
“I don’t. Just thought I’d ask.”
She shifts her body away from mine, crossing her arms over her chest. She’s pouting, and if she weren’t so annoying, I’d find it comical. “I don’t really know, actually. We don’t talk. He ignores most of my calls.” The tone of her voice has dropped a few decimals, now filled with nothing but sadness.
I press my lips together, disappointment slamming into my chest. Wrong choice of topic, obviously.
“He’s still at that new place in Manteca?”
She nods, staring straight ahead. It’s as though she can no longer stare out of the window but also doesn’t want to face me anymore either. I imagine the discussion of her father isn’t easy. I can’t imagine losing my mother, then having a falling-out with my only living relative. She’s been through a lot. I should take it easy on her from here on out.
Too bad I don’t plan to.
“Yeah. Moved out of our house a while ago.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Before the funeral, it was about a year ago.”
My brows raise. A fucking year? Jesus Christ, Victor.
Suddenly, she tenses on the seat. Slowly, she turns to face me, brows pinched together, coffee eyes searching my gaze. “Wait, how did you know my dad moved out?”
I glance down at my watch, growing impatient as I check the time. I’m also uncomfortable under her scrutiny. “My parents mentioned it a few times.”
