Page 13 of The Marriage Auction 2: Part 1

I rattled off a phone number I’d had memorized my entire life. Though it wasn’t my own. It was the same I gave sketchy dudes while being hit on in a bar or club.

“I’ll be calling,” he said as the paramedic flashed a pen light into my eyes.

“I’ll be holding my breath,” I snorted, and he blessedly took his leave, disappearing into another elevator.

Jack Larsen was weird.

Usually, weird was my jam. But after the harrowing experience we’d just gone through together, where I was all kinds of awkward and fumbled around like a dumbass, and he was rude, I was glad to be rid of his presence.

Besides, I was here to marry a rich businessman, and Jack Larsen was not him.

Episode 5

Swindled By a Little Girl

RHODES

“Dad, ugh. Hold my backpack,” Emily griped for the hundredth time that day.

I ground down on my teeth as I stopped in the middle of the Las Vegas airport, where I was already pushing her carry-on and my own.

She held out her arm, her backpack dangling from her hand. “It’s getting stuck in my hair.” Her shoulders were slumped, a scowl firmly in place on her face, per usual.

“You can handle your own backpack, Em. We still need to get your suitcase, even though I told you to pack light for this leg of our trip.”

She rolled her eyes. “Mom never goes anywhere without at least two suitcases. And she looks perfect. I want to be just like her.” She curled her lip into what I liked to call her Elvis snarl. She brought out the snarl every time she wanted to wound me. I allowed it, mostly because her anger with me was in fact my fault. I was the one who’d divorced her mother and made her life miserable. According to her. And Emily took every chance she could to shove that fact in my face.

I inhaled fully and allowed the breath to slowly seep out of my nostrils. I reached out and took her backpack and tossed it on top of her carry-on. “There. Happy?”

“Whatever.” She crossed her arms over her chest and pushed past me, walking ahead.

Lord give me the strength to get through the summer with my teenager.

I had it all planned out. First, we’d start in Las Vegas where I would show her the Strip and take her on a helicopter tour over the Grand Canyon. I saw it for the first time with my parents when I was maybe ten. It was one of the most memorable family trips we’d had. My brother was still alive then and things were different.

Simpler.

Happier.

After we lost him, everything changed.

“Dad, what the heck? You’re staring into space again. I’ll meet you at baggage claim.” Emily sighed dramatically, turned around with a flip of her long blonde hair, and continued on, leaving me behind. My instinct was to chase her down, but she was almost 14 years old, and had been traveling since being in the womb. With the careers her mother and I kept, she knew airports better than playgrounds.

At least we’d have company during the first part of our stay, I reminded myself. We were meeting up with Alana and Christophe Toussaint, people who Emily happened to like. And I wanted Emily to be around a woman like Alana. She was always kind, poised, and incredibly put together. She had a way about her that Emily had always gravitated toward like a duck to water. Probably because her own female example spent most of her time unclothed and partying, living the life of a lingerie supermodel.

Portia was the best and worst decision I’d ever made. If I hadn’t married her, I wouldn’t have Emily. The downside, however, was that Portia wasn’t the faithful type and had made that painfully clear in year one of our marriage when she cheatedon me multiple times. I kept taking her back, believed her tales of woe. I suffered through five years of an unhappy marriage in the hope I could keep Emily from having to grow up in two separate households. I would listen to Portia’s sob stories about wanting to stay a family. Hear all her excuses about how she accidently ended up on some man’s cock while I was taking care of our toddler and running an architectural empire, and I’d cave.

All of it was lies. It had always been lies and half-truths with Portia, and I feared she’d been rubbing off on our daughter as of late. Hopefully a little one-on-one time with her old man would bring things into perspective.

Besides, the Toussaints were good people, and Emily needed to be around mature adults who were successful. They were longtime friends of mine and the first clients I’d designed a home for after I opened my business. The same business that went from working out of a small, 900-square foot space in downtown Los Angeles while I pinched pennies into a billion-dollar business, including the skyscraper that I designed and owned alongside many other profitable architectural ventures.

I was also planning on meeting up with the owner of my most recent hotel build, Joel Castellanos. The Alexandra had been a passion project for both of us, and now that it was fully operational, I wanted to show it to Emily. Not that my thirteen-year-old daughter would be impressed with anything I created. Very few things brought a smile to her face, but I hoped this summer together could bring us back to a healthy and happy father/child relationship.

Just as I turned around, I slammed directly into someone. A flurry of dark hair and soft skin pressed against me. While I tried to catch my balance, the person who hit me started to fall. My legs crashed into one of the suitcases as I wrapped my arms around the small body, flattening her to my chest as we both went down.

My hip hit the shiny airport floor painfully and I rolled to my back breaking the fall of the small woman who landed right on top of me.

“Oomph!” she breathed, her dark hair a curtain over my face as her forehead conked mine. “Shit!” she yelped.

---