27

When I wake up, the room is in total darkness, without even a line of light from the curtains or from under the door. It disorients me, and I sit up, trying to remember where I am.
Who I’m with. Someone is breathing beside me, but not touching me. Is it Novi? Is he—?
“Cadence.” Max’s sleepy voice drifts from beside me.
Max. Max is with me. I draw a shaky breath.

“You okay?”
“Yes.” Another shaky breath and another until my heart slows its breakneck pace. “Bad dream.”
“You probably didn’t know where you were either. Want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Want to try to go back to sleep?”
Instead of answering, I lie down on my side, flip to my back, and back to my side. Very conscious of Max an arm’s length away.
Not that I’m uncomfortable with him being there, but…
I don’t like uncertainty.
“Was it about Tate?” There’s something in his voice and I roll over to face him. “The bad dream?”
“I, I think so.” The absolute quiet of the room, the heavy body over mine… “Who’s Caroline?”
“Who told you about her?” he asks with surprise.
“I was out on the balcony and overheard the three of you talking. I came back inside after that,” I admit. “But I heard her name. It sounded like…”
“I was in love with her.” Max shifts, moving closer. “Once upon a time.”
“Did she hurt you?” I hear the nod, rather than see his dark head moving on the pillow. “I don’t like her.”
“I don’t like her much either,” he says. “She ended up with my father.” I suck in my breath with surprise, but Max keeps speaking. “We weren’t together long, but my mother introduced us and I thought she was perfect for me. Smart and classy, beautiful. From a good family.”
Everything I’m not.
“My mother liked the idea of us together. So did my father, at first, and that’s why I moved so fast. We dated for a bit and everything was going great and I thought, why not?”
“You asked her to marry you.”
“And she said yes, so I thought she loved me too. I thought she wanted me. But it turned out she was already in bed with my father. Literally.”
“What about your mother?”
“She left him as soon as she found out, but because of the prenup she signed, she got nothing. She gave up her career for my father, and he threw her away like she meant nothing. I hate him for that.”
“Why do you keep working with him?”
“For him,” Max corrects, a note of despair in his voice. “He never lets anyone see me as his equal. I’m always the son, doing his bidding.”
“Why do you stay?”
With a heavy sigh, Max rolls onto his back. “My third year at school, I got into some trouble with the betting sites.” Another deep breath. “Dex and Nick too. Marco tried to bail us out, but we were in too deep. These guys kept coming around.”
“I knew guys like that.”

“Yeah. I finally told my parents, because I really thought they were going to kill us.”
They wouldn’t have killed them because then they would never get their money. But I’m not about to tell Max that. I picture him as a scared frat boy, running home to his father at the first sign of trouble.
But that goes against how I see him now.
“My father paid them off. All the debts, mine and Dexter’s and Nick’s.”

“That was… good of him.”
“You’d think, right? Once it was all finished, he made me sign this contract. I was basically an indentured servant for as long as it took to pay off the debts.”
“Nick’s too? He’s a baseball player, and could afford to pay it off.”
“I never told them,” he says. “It was too—like how could a father do that? I would have paid him back, but he didn’t give me a choice on how he got the money. He wanted me in the company, under his control, because I was the only one left. My brothers want nothing to do with him.”
“Have you paid it off yet? How much money did you owe him?”
“It’s paid off now, but I renegotiated things after Mom was left with nothing. He gave her a nice settlement; I keep working for him.”
“Max…”
“Yeah, yeah, poor little rich boy. I know what you’re thinking.”
“Your father was a client of E. I have a list of all the women he bought and paid for over the years.”
Max huffs a laugh. “That’s not what I thought you were thinking.”
“I can give it to you if you think it would be helpful.”
“I don’t know what it would be. It feels like I should tell Caroline, though. Do you know if he still…”
“I sold the app, but I’m sure my people… they’re very good at finding out information for me.”
“I imagine they would be. Is that what you did for Novi Tate, or did he have his own people?”
I stiffen at the question. “Novi advised me in my business dealings, but I didn’t do anything for him.”
Except for being a proximate body at night so he could fall asleep.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You meant it in the same way as everyone does. They see me, they know how I started and they can’t imagine me being as successful as I am without Novi’s help. He helped, but I…” Now it’s my turn to heave a sigh. “He helped a lot. I’m not sure I could have done it without him,” I confess.
“That’s not true. I think you could do anything you put your mind to.”
“He’s the one who gave me the idea to buy the club. I was happy with the app; it was going well and I was making money from that so I didn’t have to dance, or the men…”
“I think the app was a big success for you, wasn’t it? When you sold that—wow.”
“The clubs help.”
“But you did it yourself.”
“This was supposed to be about you telling me about this Caroline person,” I complain.
“You wanted to know, did you? Curious about little old me?”
“About the man who needed a date to a wedding in a Caribbean country? Definitely curious.”

“Is that it? Nothing about being curious about just how I manage to completely satisfy every woman I’m with?”
With a shake of my head, I flip over. “Goodnight Maximilian.”
“Goodnight, Cadence.” A few minutes pass and then, “I think you’re a little curious.”
“Maybe.”

It doesn’t take me long to fall asleep.