Page 11 of True Hearts

“I’m not family,” I point out while grabbing a swimsuit. It’s been a long time since I needed one.

“Anything else I can help grab?” he asks, sidestepping my comment about me not being family.

“I think I’m ready. It’s only a few days.” Graham shuts the suitcase for me. When we open the door to my place, two of the suits are standing there.

“There are a slew of paparazzi out front. Maybe we should take a back exit?” one of them says as Graham ushers me onto the elevator.

“I think there is one.”

“The front is fine.” Graham hits the button for the lobby.

"People are really going to get the wrong idea if they see us leaving my place together with a suitcase."

"Let them." He shrugs as though he is unbothered by this entire situation.

It makes me wonder again about why the heck he is doing all of this for me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. It’s nice having someone take care of me for once in my life without any expectations.

When we step off the elevator, the two other guards are there waiting. “Holy crap,” I whisper when I see the people outside with the cameras.

“I’ve got you.” Graham tucks me closer into his side.

I tell George, my doorman, sorry as I pass by, but I can tell he’s eating this all up. No one loves gossip more than him, and now he has a front-row seat.

The four guards come in handy when we exit the building, getting us quickly into the waiting car. It still doesn’t stop the barrage of questions that are coming at us. I don’t miss the gold digger comment nor the accusations that I’ve been cheating all along. I don’t hear one bad word about Michael Montclair.

“He’s going to spin this and make me look like I’m crazy,” I say to Graham as we pull away from the curb. He still has me tucked into his side.

“You let me worry about that.” Graham kisses the top of my head. “The only thing that is crazy is that you ever agreed to marry him.”

I couldn't agree more.

ChapterNine

GRAHAM

It’s been three days since we arrived at the family house, and Luna hasn’t gone skinny-dipping even once. She does enjoy lounging by the pool in a one-piece that plunges to her waist. She must have felt like it exposed too much because she covers herself with some kind of gauzy material which only makes her sexier. Or maybe that’s the purpose of the cover-up because it fails to disguise anything. It caresses her curves, highlights the swells of her breasts, the indentation of her waist, the roundness of her hips. It teases and taunts, hides and reveals as she shifts on the lounge chair, reaches for a strawberry, stretches her arms. A maddening piece of fabric, actually, meant to drive men crazy. Me, specifically.

I tap the envelope that was just delivered against my palm. We’ve had a nice three days. I’ve asked her questions about her family. She hasn’t said a lot about them, and I could look it up, but I want to learn from her, not from what some PI company could scrape off the internet. She has told me that she loves prints, desserts that aren’t too sweet, and baby animals because regardless of what they look like when they get big, babies are always adorable. To prove her point, we looked at about a thousand photos on Instagram of the little mites. I conceded after seeing a photo of a baby snake. They were cute. When I mentioned that her babies would be extraordinarily cute, she agreed. I should have told her that I was going to give her that cute baby, but it didn’t feel like the right moment because she was showing me a photo of a baby bat.

For hobbies, she likes to walk, do her nails, and read—mostly romances but also whodunits. A favorite author of ours is getting one of her books made into a streaming series, and we spent an entire afternoon arguing about casting choices. As much as I like Luna, I wasn’t signing off on her male lead choices. They were all bad actors and not even remotely as handsome as she claimed they were.

On the second day, she broke a nail, so I ordered a bunch of supplies for her to do her own at the estate. She objected, arguing that I was spending way too much money. I explained I would be evaluating the product to carry in our companies, which isn’t true because I’m in real estate, not personal products, but it did get her to stop trying to cancel the order.

I am called to sign for a delivery, which I thought was the nail supplies, but it isn’t. I consider tearing it up, but that would mean there would be a more public attempt to deliver the envelope, and I don’t want that for Luna.

I slide the screen door aside and approach the gorgeous blonde. She sits up, the damned fabric sliding right over the curve of her breast like a caress. This is not the time to be getting a hard-on, I tell myself.

“Did my nail stuff come?”

“Not exactly.”

Her gaze falls to the large manila envelope in my hand and then tracks up to my face, where I don’t try to hide that I’m the bearer of bad news.

She puts out her palm. “Lay it on me.”

I like that about her. She confronts everything. Very sexy.

“He’s suing me for defamation and asking for $10 million in damages?” Her face is white with shock and anger. I take the papers from her trembling fingers. “How is what I did defaming him?”

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