Chapter One
It had been three weeks since my mother’s death and I felt like I hadn’t been able to fully catch my breath since. First the shock, then reality had set in. I really was alone in this world, a motherless girl, a fatherless girl. A girl with no family to call my own. Once that reality set in, I had become depressed. It hadn’t helped when Mr. Cole came home in his own depressed state. We mourned our losses together. He thought my mother had taken off on us, abandoning her only child when really, she was as dead as dead could get. Marcus Cole would never find out the truth, not from me he wouldn’t. My lips were sealed.
His brother had been in a terrible car accident and, unfortunately, he hadn’t made it. I had never met the man, but I had been forced to meet his entire family when Mr. Cole had dragged me along with him to the funeral. They were nice and all, but I hadn’t wanted to go in the first place so the entire ordeal had been awkward on my part.
That’s not even getting into the way people had looked at me. They’d met my mother and they hadn’t liked her. And it was made worse by them thinking she’d up and left Mr. Cole while his brother was dying in the hospital, leaving me behind for him to deal with. The looks I’d been given were a lot of things and nice hadn’t been one of them. If I hadn’t been so depressed and deep in my own sorrow, I might have been bothered by this. As it was, I didn’t have it in me to give a crap.
With my mother dead, I needed to figure out what I was going to do with myself. I was seventeen, eighteen in less than nine months, I should be able to take care of myself. Mr. Cole had other ideas. Which is why we were facing off in the kitchen, discussing the future.
I stared at him, trying to not look as freaked out as I was on the inside. I’m almost positive I failed at this endeavor. I had no poker face to speak of. Thankfully, he didn’t call me out on it.
Mr. Cole was an undeniably handsome man.
My mother had never had a shortage of good looking men around for her to sleep with whenever she felt like getting off. Which had been often.
None of the others had been anything like Marcus Cole. Although, good looking, they’d all been from the bottom of the barrel. The kind of men who had had no problem with their lady love being a woman who danced mostly naked on a stage to pay her way in life. There wasn’t anything wrong with being a stripper. If done right, the way a dancer’s body moved while on stage could be, not only highly erotic, but extremely beautiful. Mesmerizing even.
Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.
When I was younger, before my mother simply started leaving me home alone, she would drag me to work with her. I was supposed to stay backstage in one of the dressing rooms, always out of sight. Sometimes I’d sit there quietly like a good girl, doing my homework while pretending to be somewhere else in my head. Sometimes I would mess around with the dancer’s makeup, making myself into a bright red lipstick-wearing, glittery-eyed beauty.
Often times, I would sneak out of the dressing room and make my way to the side of the stage. And I would watch them dance. This is how I know some dancers made it look beautiful, like its own form of art. Vivian Kimber had not been one of those women who’d made stripping and pole dancing into a beautiful, sexy, seductive form of art.
No, much like everything else in her life, my mother had made it look cheap and tawdry.
And the men she attracted and brought home with her had reflected upon this, her being trashy. No matter how good looking they were, it never diminished the fact that they’d been just as trashy as my mother. And a lot of the time, they’d been worse than my mother because they had actually taken notice of me and it had never been good. They had all been the very bottom of the barrel.
Marcus Cole wasn’t at the bottom of anything. The only time he’d even ever gotten close to the bottom of the barrel had been when he was sleeping with my mother.
Harsh, but true.
What’s worse is that he’d paid for it. I tried really hard not to think about this fact because I didn’t want it to taint the way I looked at him. He was the only one out of the whole bunch who was different than the rest.
Starting with his looks.
Marcus Cole wasn’t simply good looking. He was downright handsome. There was a difference. Handsome seemed a more refined word and totally suited to Mr. Cole.
He was in his late fifty’s but looked maybe forty. Tops. He had short, what looked to be incredibly soft, light brown hair with a sprinkling of salt at his temples. That salt at his temples being the only visible mark on him to hint at his age.
His eyes were a soft, warm brown that always seemed to be filled to the brim with kindness when they were aimed in my direction. I had never seen such kindness in a man’s eyes before when they looked my way.
He ran several miles every day on the treadmill and I was pretty sure he lifted weights. Only pretty sure because I had never actually seen him do it with my own eyes. But the evidence was plain to see in the well-defined muscles on his arms. He had a fit body and was in shape due to the fact he’d worked hard to earn one.
He also dressed nice, like no other man my mother had been with before. He was a wealthy business man and he always dressed the part. Like now, standing across from me in his kitchen. He was dressed up in his wealthy, business man attire.
Pristine, winter white long-sleeved button up shirt. He’d left off the suit jacket, but it wasn’t abnormal to see him with his hips resting against the countertop in the kitchen, a coffee cup in his hand with his suit jacket on, for all the world looking like he was getting ready to head into the office for the day.
Given he worked from home, I never understood why he dressed the way he did. Silk tie, expensive looking slacks and black dress shoes that always shined. His clothes looked expensive because they simply were expensive.
He wore them well and they looked good on him.
“I want you to come with me,” he told me for the second time and I shook my head in frustration. “I understand you’re almost an adult, and seeing as I’m not a parent or a legal guardian, I have no real say over what you do. But I want you to seriously consider coming with me, Ariel. Your mother may never come back and, after I sell the house, there will be no place left to come back to. And where will you stay?” He shook
his head and frowned at me. “No. The best place for you is with me. At least with me, you’ll have a roof over your head and the chance at a real future, a bright future.”
I bit my bottom lip hard and the pain chased the tears away, like it always did.
I could not believe this shit.
With his brother dead and my mother gone, Mr. Cole had decided to up stakes, sell his house and move closer to his family. And he wanted me to go with him.
Before school had started and I’d met Tyson and the guys, I might have even considered going with Mr. Cole simply to get away from my mother. Now my mother was dead and I was left devastated at the thought of leaving this place for good. I couldn’t move away from the guys, not when they were my only link to magic. Not to mention, I’d been away from them for three weeks now and I missed Tyson and the twins terribly. I didn’t want to never see them again, but if I didn’t go with Mr. Cole I’d find myself homeless real quick. I didn’t want to be homeless. Being homeless sounded horrible.
I swallowed my heart back down my throat and stared down at the fuzzy black socks covering my feet. I could really use a break from my life right about now.
“Just think about it, sweetheart. You don’t have to make a decision right this second. But you should figure it out sooner rather than later because I don’t think the house will be on the market for long and I plan on being all moved out by the end of the month.”
I felt faint. The end of the month. I counted in my head. Sixteen. He planned on being all moved out of here in sixteen days. And he wanted to take me with him. I had sixteen days to figure out what in the heck I was supposed to do with myself.
Anger, something I hadn’t felt in over three weeks, flared to life inside of me. The lights in the kitchen flickered on and off for a second, shocking me. I blinked slowly, letting the anger go as fast as it had come on.
Holy shit. I needed to get control of myself before I turned into Carrie.
An extremely warm hand landed softly on my shoulder, bringing me out of my thoughts and making me flinch. I really did not want him touching me, even out of kindness, and he’d been doing it a lot lately. Maybe he found it comforting to touch me, to reassure himself that he really wasn’t alone, I didn’t know. What I did know was that I was lying through my teeth to him about my mother and had added to his, already tremendous, grief. I didn’t like lying to him, and I didn’t like feeling guilty when I’d, essentially, done nothing wrong (well, save for the whole lying bit, that part was wrong). Every time he’d gently pat my shoulder in a fatherly manner, my guilt would threaten to devour me, eating me alive.
Mr. Cole squeezed my shoulder gently. “What she did, her leaving, doesn’t say anything about you, Ariel. It doesn’t reflect on you, either. It does, however, say everything about your mother and what kind of a woman she is. You’re not alone. You have me and we have each other. We’ll get through these hard times, together.”
Oh boy.
I liked the sound of that, but at the same time, it sounded terrible.