Page 28 of Sweet Virgin

Dropping down beside me, Kealen laid his hands on his knees. “The first time I saw it, there was something about it that just stuck with me.”

“Wait—” Flicking my face up to his, I pointed at the floor. “You made this?”

“I had a part in it.” Holding out his hand, he eyed his fingers. “See that scar?” he asked, pointing at a thick white line on his right middle finger. “I can thank this picture for that.” Standing back up, he held out his hand and lifted me to my feet.

“Where are we? What is this place?”

“This is my home away from home.” Chuckling, he led me to a row of elevators and hit the button to go up.

Everything about this building screamed money. It was fancy and flashy, with details on top of details.

The exposed wood beams were carved, burned, and etched. The ceiling wasn't just a ceiling, but a sheen that looked as smooth as the inside of a seashell with multiple colors all bleeding together.

As the double doors opened to the fifth floor, a huge desk made of dark cherry greeted me with the name Knight Architecture scripted into the wood.

“What's this?”

“This is my office.” He walked to a thick door, swiping a key card into the box on the wall and punching in a set of a numbers. “If you won't ask me questions about who I am, I'll just have to show you instead.”

I didn't know what to say or think.

When I met him in Waterford, Kealen came off as just your regular kind of guy. A man who worked with his hands and spent his days outside. His skin was kissed by the sun, his hair had highlights that looked natural, not salon born.

All of this. . . This took me by surprise.

I guess it just showed me that you can't tell who someone is from just looking at them. I would have never thought that before. In my world, you knew the people who had money and those who didn't.

You could easily see when a family came from a long line of wealthy people in their tree of ancestry and the ones who found it by chance.

Then you had my dad. A man who wanted that life, a man who tried and did anything to give his name weight. We weren't poor, but he wasn't happy with what we had. He always wanted more.

My mother used to tell me that happiness comes from inside you, that material things only fueled greed and hatred for others. She used to say that it didn't matter how much you had, because there was always someone with more.

And if you spent your life trying to attain what someone else had, you'd lose touch with what was important.

Those words came true when I finally saw what my father was built from. He was greed, he was hatred. And he turned his back on me a long time ago.

Strolling into his office, I ran my hand across the seam of a black leather couch, leading myself heel to toe around the room.

There was a floor to ceiling bookshelf, filled to the brim with books. A huge mahogany desk was pushed almost against the windows with rolls and rolls of paper all piled up on top. Large pictures of bridges and buildings were hanging on the walls, all labeled with tags of where the photo came from.

“Alright, I have a question. . .”

“Ask, ask me anything.” The leather squeaked gently as Kealen sat down, resting his arm on the back.

I could feel his eyes watching me as I explored the room. Even though I wasn't looking at him, they burned my skin. Prickles excitedly rode my spine as I walked to the giant windows that created his back wall.

“Who are you?”

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