Page 65 of Beautiful Beast

The façade is slipping, and Uncle Dennis gives me a weak smile, reaching out to steady himself on my arm. We really can’t get home soon enough.

Now that we’re spending so much time together, the steady decline in his condition is painfully apparent. Palliative care is inevitable as the clock keeps cruelling ticking away the precious time that we have left.

“Well, we’ll have to go for a drink when we’re both back in New York,” Betty suggests.

“Please connect with Patricia and find a spot in my calendar,” I return, referencing my executive assistant to ensure Betty knows any meeting we have will be strictly professional.

I don’t plan to go into the office until my face is fixed anyway, so she has a long wait ahead of her for in-person one-on-one time with me.

Uncle Dennis and I are sharing a suite, and he immediately heads to bed as soon as we get back to the room. It’s really hitting me in the face that soon he won’t be here, and the anxiety is ripe in my chest.

I’ll be running a multi-billion-dollar enterprise when most of my experience is with automatic weapons, not laptops.

There are going to be bumps while I learn to apply what Harvard taught me – quickly – but I’m not going to let Uncle Dennis down or fail to own the legacy that he’s worked so hard to give me.

And that I honestly probably don’t deserve.

I take a moment to stare at the skyline, absorbing it into memory, since it’s the last time I’ll see it for a while, and peel the bandage off my face.

And then my phone rings like clockwork because Belle is someone I can most definitely count on to never let me down.

“You should be in bed,” I scold.

It’s the same thing I say to her every night – early morning for her – but she never listens.

“Hello to you, too. How was your day?”

“Hey, princess.”

She’s so fucking beautiful, even filtered through a phone screen.

Most women would have given me grief about being stuck away on business travel longer than expected, but Belle hasn’t guilt-tripped me even one single time.

We still haven’t missed a single day connecting since I’ve been away, and even though we’re over 8,000 miles apart, this is the closest I’ve ever felt to her.

Belle pans the camera around and I realize that she’s in my apartment. It doesn’t set me on edge, though, because I’ve quickly gotten used to her presence in my life and space.

My eyes land on the roses, and I smile. “Little Miss Green Thumb.”

“My garden is doing ah-mah-zing, and Buster loves having a backyard. Well, a kind of backyard. Maybe one day we’ll get out of the city and have a real home with green space.”

Belle is the girl who wants white picket fences, babies, and Labradoodles. I’m not that guy, and there is no way we have a future together for so many reasons.

But I can’t quit her.

I’ve tried so many times.

When I went downstairs to tell her we couldn’t see each other anymore, she ended up giving me the best sexual experience on the planet.

It was the best failure of my life.

I order myself not to answer the phone when she calls, but I always do anyway. The worst part is that I actually look forward to knowing my phone will ring and that it will be her pretty face waiting for me.

And as much as I tell myself not to confide in her, there’s no way I can resist her gorgeous brown eyes pleading to know all my secrets.

She’s so far under my skin, she’s become part of my DNA.

“You’ll have a real backyard one day,” I tell her.

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