Wicked Paradise: An Alpha Billionaire Romance

by Tia Lewis

  I swallowed over the lump in my throat and wrapped an arm around Amanda’s shoulders. She shook—not hard, not constantly, but the rhythmic shaking of a person struggling to contain sobs. She fought to hold them in, even though I didn’t think anybody there would’ve held it against her if she let go. She had her reasons, I guessed.

  Later, her mom walked past the casket and dropped a white rose on top. She didn’t make eye contact with her daughter but gave me a small, tentative smile.

  The food was set up when I got to the diner ahead of the crowd. Debbie and a few of the girls were nice enough not to go to the service so they could get things set up.

  “We’re gonna get slammed,” I reported as I rolled up my sleeves. “The entire town was out there.”

  “We have more food in the back, too,” Debbie reminded me. “We’ll be fine.” She rubbed my back as I washed my hands.

  “I know. I know. I’m just a little shaken up, I guess.”

  “You buried a friend today, kid.” I looked at her and noticed the smudges under her eyes. I guessed all that eyeliner and mascara wasn’t waterproof.

  Amanda walked in then and looked around. “Wow. This is amazing.” She gave Debbie a brave smile and accepted a long hug. “You guys did such a great job for him. I…wish I had been here to do more.”

  I heard what she was really saying. All that time, Craig was just hers. Her best friend. They had their own little world. But then this happened, and she found out he belonged to all of us. That wasn’t an easy thing to come to terms with. Then again, if she had ever stepped foot over the border into town—just once—she could’ve seen that while he was still alive. The thought made me feel sorry for her. She had missed out on a lot.

  I couldn’t face you again when it felt like you never cared about me. I heard her voice in my head, accusing me, reminding me that it wasn’t all her fault that she hadn’t come back.

  No time to think it over, since cars were starting to pull up. We’d be stacked three deep by the time everybody got in, I guessed. I didn’t even get the chance to pull Amanda aside and ask how she was holding up before the door opened and people started pouring in. It was enough work to keep things moving smoothly. Friends came and went, most of them not staying too long, so there was a pretty regular turnover. Bill worked double time washing the dishes, which the girls just brought right back in after they were used.

  “You should sit and have something to eat.” Jake patted a stool by the counter. “Seriously. You’re gonna fall over, and we’ll be doing this for you next.”

  I winced. Jake’s face went red. “Sorry. That was tasteless.”

  I waved it off and sat with half a roast beef sandwich. “If I’m running, I’m not thinking.”

  “That makes sense,” he said. “I know the feeling. Whenever things get tight at home, or we’re not doing so well, going to work makes it easier. You don’t have to focus on what’s wrong.”

  I clapped him on the back. “I’ll do my best.” I looked around then. “You seen Amanda?”

  “Not lately. So what’s going on with you two?”

  I shot him a look. “Not the time.” I went looking for her, since it bothered me to think of her being alone just then. Not when she looked like she was wound so tight, she might pop any second. It was pretty crowded in there—maybe she went outside for air. Far away from the smokers, of course. I sidestepped a big cluster of them and walked around to the side of the building, following the sound of her voice. She was talking to somebody. She didn’t sound happy about it, either.

  When I rounded the corner, I found her pacing back and forth with her phone to her ear. She didn’t see me with the dumpster between us. I watched as she hit her forehead with the heel of her hand.

  “You’ve called this a vacation three times now, Jim,” she hissed. “I don’t think that’s very nice.”

  A vacation? Her boss? I shouldn’t be listening but couldn’t help myself. She almost never talked about work except when she was throwing around the name of her firm. I didn’t even know how she felt about the work she did or the type of law she practiced. She wanted to know all the details of my life, but I didn’t get anything about hers.

  She threw a hand in the air. “I understand that, and I’ve been managing things from here. I’ve also been waiting for a dead body to get released so I can have a funeral. The funeral was this morning, by the way.” She wrapped her free arm around her waist and bent forward a little, like she was protecting herself. “Yes. I know. Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  Her shoulders fell. I wished I could beat the hell out of whoever was giving her shit. Yeah, she’d been gone for a week, but whatever happened to vacation and personal time? She had to get that, right? Working for a big firm like hers. She had mentioned something about being a partner, or almost being a partner. That meant she was a big deal. Even I knew that.

  She looked up at the sky with her lips pressed tight together. I could almost hear a man’s voice on the other end of the call. He had to be talking pretty loud if I could hear him from where I was standing. She shook her head again and again. Finally, she cut him off. “I need until the end of the week. I’ll haul ass and get the house finished up and do what has to be done by this weekend. By next week, I’ll be able to come back.”

  My heart sank. I told myself that was how things were always going to be. She had to go back to her life. Her life wasn’t with me. She had worked hard, for a lot of years, to get where she was. If all the last week had to give me was the time with her and the chance to work things out a little bit, that would have to be enough. It wasn’t right to ask for forever.

  Even though I wanted to.

  She ended the call and sank back against the wall with her arms tight around her waist. Anybody could see the pain on her face as she stared out across the parking lot. Was it all about Craig? Or was it something else?

  I cleared my throat. “Don’t bother pretending you didn’t hear that whole thing,” she sighed, still looking straight ahead.

  “You’re pretty perceptive,” I tried to joke.

  “Or you’re terrible at sneaking around. No, I take that back. It was your cologne. I could smell it even standing next to a dumpster.” She glanced at me with a grin. “I like it.”

  “I’m glad because you’re gonna smell a lot of it just now.” I took her in my arms and held her tight. She had no choice but to stay there, with me, at that moment. She wasn’t going anywhere. If I could’ve stood there until we were both dust, I would have.

  Something my mom said years earlier bubbled up to the surface. I was sitting at the kitchen table while she made dinner—as an adult, remembering it, I could see how tired and thin she had become. As a kid, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Too busy worrying about myself.

  I had been complaining to her about Amanda leaving for college after graduation. Complaining because I couldn’t be honest and tell her how it was tearing me apart inside. Who wanted to admit to their mother that their first love was going to leave for at least four years and they didn’t know what to do about it?

  She had turned around with two plates of spaghetti in hand and slid them on the table before sitting across from me. We were eating alone that night—nothing new, but it would become the norm by the end of that summer when Dad left for good. I could see her sitting there as clear as if she was in front of me again. She smiled her tired smile and said, “You can’t make a person stay, no matter how much you want them to. That’s what love really is. It’s not begging a person to stay with you. It’s letting them find what’s best for them and wanting them to be happy.”

  “But what’s the point if I’m not happy?” I had asked.

  That smile of hers never faded. “You have to be happy for her. She’s going after what she thinks is going to make her a whole person. You don’t want to keep her here when she feels like she needs something else. She’ll only be unhappy, and you’ll be miserable with her.”

  I was sure s
he was wrong back then, but I figured out how right she was as I grew up. And I started to wonder if she wasn’t talking about herself just as much as she was talking about me. There had to be hints that Dad was going to leave. I hated to think about her fighting with herself over letting him go.

  “I’m so tired,” Amanda murmured against my chest. She snapped me back to reality.

  “It’s been a long day. A long week.”

  “It has. I feel so sad. Doesn’t that sound juvenile? Like, of course, I feel sad.”

  “Not juvenile. It’s the truth. I’m sad, too.”

  “Can you come back with me when this is all over? To the house, I mean?”

  “I’ll meet you there later, okay? I have to help clean up and turn over for dinner service later on.”

  “Of course.” She smiled up at me and gave me a quick kiss before going back inside. It wasn’t the answer she wanted, but she wasn’t the only one who had a life to take care of.

  I wished as I followed her back into the diner that I was strong enough to let her go a second time.

  Amanda

  I was sure the people on the news were wrong when they said it would go up to seventy degrees the day after Craig’s funeral—the morning of the service had been just shy of cold, and it had only been a few days since we had a light snowfall. Yet when I first stepped outside into the almost balmy morning air, it looked like they were right for once.

  I stopped by Mom’s first thing, to make sure she had breakfast. There were empty containers in the trash—soup and tuna cans, a spaghetti sauce jar, coffee grounds. So she was eating. I fixed eggs and toast, home fries, coffee. Then I offered to come over and fix a more substantial dinner than soup and tuna sandwiches. She tried to act like she didn’t care either way, but I knew it made her happy to feel taken care of. After years of being ignored by her husband, she needed to feel important to somebody. Craig had made her feel important, so she’d flourished. The woman I left that morning was a complete one-eighty from the one I first saw when I got to town. She even went outside to clean up old weeds in the front garden as I climbed into my car.

  I rolled down the window and let the breeze flow through my hair. It seemed disloyal to feel so positive and relaxed the day after a funeral, but I couldn’t deny feeling better than I had in a long time. Just driving down familiar streets with the breeze blowing and a good song playing on the radio was a simple pleasure I hadn’t experienced in a long time. It wasn’t until I started taking deep breaths that I realized how uptight I normally was.

  Maybe it was the almost spring-like air or the positive vibes I was feeling. Either way, I got an idea.

  It seemed like old times when I drove to the diner with a packed picnic basket in the back seat. Just like we used to do back in the day, the two of us looking for a place where we could be alone. A picnic by the lake was always the perfect excuse to escape for a little one-on-one time. That way, Dawson’s mom wouldn’t ask too many questions. My mom never did. She would’ve had to pay attention, which she wasn’t capable of doing back then.

  It was just shy of noon when I pulled into the lot and dashed up the stairs of the chrome-lined building. There were only a few tables full of early lunch patrons, and I waved to the people I recognized. We had just seen each other a day earlier, after all. Funny how life went on after something like that. People went back to their lives and their jobs and their families.

  Debbie smiled when she turned and saw me standing there. “Do you ever take a day off?” I asked with a grin.

  “I made a deal with the boss. He takes a day off; I take a day off.” She leaned on the counter and winked one heavily made-up eye. “So far, he hasn’t taken one.”

  “I’m not surprised. Go all-out or don’t go at all.” I sat on a stool and folded my hands in front of me like a schoolkid. “I have a favor to ask you. I want to get him out of here for a little while this afternoon.”

  Her eyes lit up. “I think that’s a great idea. He needs a break.”

  “I agree.”

  “Especially after yesterday,” she added with a sad little smile. “I kept telling him he didn’t have to do as much as he did—he should’ve been able to sit around and talk like everybody else—but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “He’s so stubborn,” I muttered, shaking my head.

  “Sure is, but I think throwing himself into work helps him. Some people are just like that. Remember, I was here when he first came back after being overseas. Terrible stuff. He wasn’t the kid I used to know. You might not even have recognized him back then. He was different. Like an old man in a young man’s body. I never did ask him what happened over there, because he obviously didn’t wanna talk about it, but it had to be pretty bad. So what’s he do? He takes Ken up on the job offer and throws himself into learning all about the restaurant business.”

  I nodded. “He told me a little bit about that.”

  “I’ve never seen a person work has hard as he did. He’d work every day, all day. Sometimes he’d sleep in one of the booths instead of going home because he would only end up coming back in a few hours to open for breakfast. It was his way of coping.” She shrugged as if she hadn’t thought it all through and wasn’t completely sure of herself. Like she wasn’t just as shrewd a judge of character as anybody. She had been waiting tables for decades in the same little town that had one diner and a small handful of restaurants to its name. She knew things.

  “All the more reason for me to sneak him away for a little while today,” I decided. “I have a picnic lunch in the car, and it’s a beautiful day.”

  “That’s all I need to hear.” She went to the kitchen, where Dawson had been since I got there, and pulled him out by one arm. She was half his size—it was ridiculous, watching her drag him around—and he smiled when he caught sight of me.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to drop by when I felt like it.”

  “You know what I mean. You hungry?” He had a menu in hand before he even finished the question.

  “Yes, but not for anything here.” I jerked a thumb in the direction of my car. “I have food in there. All I need is you.”

  He frowned. “You know how busy it is here. Lunch is coming up.”

  Debbie clicked her tongue. I grinned when I saw that she was already holding his jacket. “And you know we can handle a single lunch shift without you. Come on, now. You deserve an hour or two off, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Last time I checked, I’m the one running this place.” He took his jacket with a scowl.

  “Last time I checked, I’ve been working here longer than you, and that gives me seniority, young man.” She put her hands on her hips and stuck her chest out. “And I say you should go out and get some fresh air and enjoy your lunch. We’ll be here when you get back.”

  He looked at her, then at me. “I’m outnumbered.”

  “Damn right.” She put her hands on his back and shoved.

  Moments later, we were in Dawson’s truck. His only condition was that he drive, so I pulled the basket and blankets from my car and left them in the bed of the truck before we left.

  “What did you have in mind for our lunch?” he asked. Out of the diner and on our own, his attitude seemed to have softened. Every breath of fresh air he took through the open driver’s side window seemed to relax him a little more.

  “I thought we could go to the lake.” I watched him closely to get a feel for his reaction.

  He smiled a little. “Yeah. That would be great. It’s been a long time.”

  “Oh, come on.” I swatted his knee. “Don’t tell me you haven’t ever taken another girl to the lake.”

  He shook his head. “No other girl. No. Not ever.”

  “Not ever ever, or not ever at the lake?”

  He shot me a look out of the corner of his eye. “Not ever at the lake. I wouldn’t take anybody else to the lake. But no, I haven’t been saving myself all this time, if that�
��s what you’re asking.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “I was just checking.”

  “You were just fishing for information.”

  “Potato, po-tah-to.” I shrugged it off, still laughing. Of course, he didn’t save himself. A man like him? He probably had women crawling over him on the daily. I could just imagine them coming in to see him, touching his arm or his hand as he passed out menus and food. He could have his pick without even trying.

  That was none of my business. I had to live in the moment and enjoy the fact that the love of my life was driving us to the lake for a picnic.

  Considering that he hadn’t been there in so long, he knew the way. He turned down an unmarked road and drove into the woods along the edge of town until we got to the clearing. My heart swelled when I got a look at what I had been away from for so long.

  “Wow,” I breathed as I climbed out of the truck. It was like stepping back in time. The water was just as clear, the sky just as blue. It was funny seeing so few leaves on the trees when it was so balmy out, and the leaves that still clung to their branches were every shade of red and orange and gold. There were mountains in the distance, and the trees out there were just as colorful. It could’ve been painted on a canvas; it was so perfect.

  I breathed deep, taking in the fresh air. “I’ve missed this place,” I confessed. “I didn’t even know I did, but I did.”

  “Funny how that works,” he said as he pulled the basket from the back of the truck. I spread blankets out for us and unpacked our sandwiches, iced tea, and cupcakes.

  He laughed when he saw them. “Cupcakes?”

  “They’re easy to transport,” I retorted. “Sorry if I didn’t feel like packing an entire cake, or wrapped-up slices.”