Page 114 of From Rivals to I Do

“Well, at least she had breakfast,” I mumble to myself as my daughter makes her way to the bathroom.

Unfortunately, tardiness isn’t a new thing for me. I have a bad habit of being fashionably late for just about everything, but even I know how important it is to be early at the airport. We have to hurry.

One hour or more later, I take a last look at the clock as Charlee, and I run through the door carrying the last of our bags out to the car. I grit my teeth. We drive to FedEx first, and I impatiently wait in line with several large boxes with just about everything I own in them.

I check the time once again when we finish. We now have only an hour and a half to make our flight. I almost accept that we’re going to be late, thanks to the terrible traffic in LA. But we finally make it through TSA with fifteen minutes to spare. Our plane is boarding by the time we arrive.

When I finally sit down and buckle Charlee into her seat, a smile crawls across my face. I pull out my phone and see Reece calling, but…We’re gone.

Chapter two

Chapter Two

The waiter at Saffron stops by the table and refills our wine. I thank him, and my date, Kiera, smiles at him. The waiter has no idea just how thankful I am for him. This date has been awful. Worse since I hadn’t wanted to come out tonight, to begin with.

Mick, an old friend from college currently living in my apartment, set this one up. He’s a photographer and recently did a shoot, and Kiera was on the set. So he thought we’d hit it off. Once he told Kiera who I was, she was apparently so excited about the prospect that I couldn’t say no.

The problem is it’s so easy to tell when women want to be with me for my position. I was born and raised in New York, and because my father founded Kapino Homes, I’ve grown up in the public eye. Of course, it has its ups, but one of the major downsides is never fully knowing what someone’s motives are when they meet you. Some people want to be friends, and others want to use your name to push their careers as influencers.

Kiera seems nice, but I can tell she is just looking for brand deals.

She leans forward over the table, sticking her legs out to play footsie with me. I smile and pull myself away from her without making it too obvious. Neither of us says anything for a few moments. Finally, she takes to staring at me, fluttering her eyelashes.

My cell phone vibrates, and for the first time, I hope it’s something important so I can have a good excuse to leave. But it turns out to be just a text from my father asking me to meet him in the morning.

“Excuse me for a moment. I just need to check on something business related,” I say, standing up and walking outside the restaurant.

I stand outside and pretend to dial.

I even pretend to converse to make the whole thing look realistic. I fumble around with different pleasantries for a minute and pretend to hang up the phone.

“I hate to have to do this,” I say to her when I reach the table. “But I have an emergency at the office I need to take care of.”

“Duty calls, I understand.”

We say our goodbyes, and I call a cab to take me home. When I get in, Mick is in the kitchen with his photography rig set up, taking pictures of an exotic cat with an Akoya pearl necklace, music blaring over his phone.

“How was it?” he yells when he sees me, pausing the screeching music.

“I don’t think I’m going to be seeing her again,” I reply, sitting on one of my barstools near him.

Mick is still busy photographing the cat and kneeling to capture it from different angles.

“Not your type?” He asks between captures.

“I just don’t think we’re looking for the same thing,” I say, dancing around the real reason I don’t want to see her.

“Dude, you’re way too picky,” he says while I shake my head and laugh. “Look at your track record.”

I laugh again. “Record? What record?”

“When was the last time you had a relationship lasting more than a month?”

“I’m not picky,” I say in my defense. “It’s not like I don’t want a relationship. It just doesn’t work out for me. Every woman I date sits there like I’m their prey. I feel like…like they want to get something from me. They don’t care about who I am. And maybe I want a real relationship, someone to have a real conversation with, someone who loves me for me. So that’s not being picky.”

“Hate to break it to you, but you’re frightened by your past and paranoid. You think everyone is just using you,” he says, setting his camera down and sitting across from me.

I sigh and stare at him. He’s right, and I hate that. Every time a woman gets near, I feel like running. I start questioning their sincerity and motives and have not found the woman that makes me feel different.

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