Luckily, whoever was in the hall didn’t enter the room. The murmur of voices eventually faded, leaving silence in their wake.
But the spell had shattered, and there was no gluing the pieces back together. Not tonight.
“I have to go.” I stood so abruptly my knee banged against the underside of the piano. I ignored the pain ricocheting up and down my leg and summoned a flippant smile. “As entertaining as this has been, I have to, um, feed my snake.”
Ball pythons only needed to be fed every week or two, and I’d already fed Monty yesterday, but Kai didn’t need to know that.
He didn’t show a visible reaction to my words. He just inclined his head and replied with a simple, “Good night.”
I waited until I was out of the room and down the hall before I allowed myself to relax. What the hell was I thinking? My night had been a spectacular series of bad decisions. First, going to the piano room instead of heading home to work on my manuscript (in my defense, I usually wrote better after a piano session), then staying and semi-flirting with Kai.
My run-in with him must’ve knocked my good sense loose.
I made it halfway down the stairs when I ran into Parker, the bar manager.
“Isabella.” Surprise lit her eyes. With her lean frame and platinum pixie cut, she bore a striking resemblance to the model Agyness Deyn. “I didn’t expect to still see you here.”
My shift had ended two hours ago.
“I was in the piano room,” I said, electing to tell the truth. Some Valhalla managers got testy about employees using the facilities even in accordance with the rules, but Parker knew about my hobby and encouraged it.
“Of course. I should’ve known.” Her eyes twinkled.
Parker was a gem, as far as managers went. A thousand times better than Creepy Charlie or Handsy Harry from my previous places of employment. Besides my friends Vivian and Sloane, she was also one of the few people in New York who knew—and kept—my secret. For that, I would always be grateful.
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you earlier, but congratulations on your upcoming work anniversary.”
A smile warmed her face. “I’m glad I have you on my team.”
Warmth sloshed in my stomach, eroding some of my earlier guilt. “Thank you.”
Take that, Gabriel. He might not have faith in me, but my manager said I was one of her “best employees.”
Parker’s words followed me all the way across town to my apartment, where Monty snoozed in his vivarium and my manuscript sat, seventy-nine thousand words short of its eighty-thousand word target.
Bartending paid the bills, but like with piano, I wasn’t interested in it as a career. Still, it felt good to be good at something. Parker had worked at Valhalla for years; she’d seen plenty of people come and go, and she was impressed by me.
I couldn’t let her down.
That meant keeping my nose clean, staying focused, and staying far, far away from a certain British billionaire.
But when I climbed into bed that night and fell into a fitful sleep, my dreams had nothing to do with work and everything to do with dark hair and stolen touches.
CHAPTER 7
Isabella
“Romantic comedies are overrated and unrealistic.” Sloane frowned at the montage of cute dates and passionate kisses flickering across her TV screen. “They’re setting people up for failure with false hopes of happily ever afters and cheesy grand gestures when the average man can’t even remember their partner’s birthday.”
“Uh-huh.” I grabbed another handful of extra buttered popcorn from the bowl between us. “But they’re fun, and you still watch them.”
“I don’t watch them. I—”
“Hate-watch them,” Vivian and I finished in unison.
We were curled up in Sloane’s living room, gorging on junk food and half paying attention to the cheesy Christmas rom-com we’d picked for the night. Some people might say it was too early for Christmas movies, but those people would be wrong. It was October, which meant it was practically December.
“That’s what you say every time.” I popped a fluffy kernel into my mouth, taking care not to drop any crumbs on my laptop. “You’re not entirely wrong, but there are real-life exceptions. Look at Viv and Dante. They’re proof lovestruck men and cheesy grand gestures exist in real life too.”
“Hey!” Vivian protested. “His gestures weren’t cheesy. They were romantic.”
My brow arched in challenge. “Buying you dumplings from the thirty-six best restaurants in New York so you can choose which one you like best? I’d say it’s both. Don’t worry.” I patted her with my free, non-popcorn-filled hand. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way.”
If anyone deserved extra love and cheesiness in their life, it was Vivian. On the outside, her life seemed perfect. She was beautiful and smart and owned a successful luxury event planning company.
She was also heiress to the Lau Jewels fortune, but the money came with a price—she’d had to grow up with Francis and Cecelia Lau, who were, for lack of a better word, total assholes. Her mother constantly criticized her (though less so than before) and her father disowned her after she stood up to him.
Francis was the main reason Vivian and Dante’s relationship had had such a rocky start, but luckily, they’d moved past it and were now so sickeningly sweet together my teeth hurt every time I was in their vicinity.
Freaking dumplings. It was so cute and depressing at the same time. I’d never dated anyone who cared enough to remember my favorite food (pasta), much less buy me multiples of it.
If I weren’t terrified of inadvertently summoning the devil (thanks to my lola, who took great pains to instill the fear of God in her grandchildren), I’d make voodoo dolls of my worst exes.
Then again…I eyed my laptop.
I had something better than voodoo dolls. I had my words.
“You know what? Maybe…” I straightened, my fingers already moving before my brain had the chance to catch up. “I can incorporate Dante and Viv’s date in my book somehow.”
This was the part I loved about writing. The lightbulb moments that unraveled new sections of the story, bringing it closer to completion. Excitement, motion, progress.
It’d been a week since Gabriel’s call. I’d yet to hit my daily word counts, but I was getting closer.
That morning, I wrote a whopping eighteen hundred words, and if I squeezed in a thousand or so more before movie night ended, I’d meet my target.
Sloane’s brows dipped in a frown. “Dumplings in an erotic thriller?”
“Just because it hasn’t been done doesn’t mean it can’t be done.” My February deadline loomed ever closer, and I was willing to try anything at this point.
“Perhaps one of the characters can choke on one,” Vivian suggested, seemingly unfazed by my morbid take on her husband’s romantic gesture. “Or they can lace the dumplings with arsenic and feed them to an unsuspecting rival, then dissolve the body with sulfuric acid to hide the evidence.”