His for the Summer: 50 Loving States, Florida (2 page)

But now, a mere three months after finding her again, living miraculously less than ten miles away, his obsession reached a fever pitch. He couldn’t get her out of his mind. Couldn’t stop thinking about her…and fantasizing. A couple of days ago, it had gotten so bad he’d had to go into one of the construction trailer bathrooms at the site and whack-off to thoughts of her. Just to get through the goddamn day!

He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take. How much longer he could go without her.

But Plan C…it was unconscionable.

“Sir?” Hank said on the other end of the line. “What do you want me to do?”

Gus scrubbed a hand over his face. Willing himself to do the right thing.

Only to hear himself say, “Yeah, make contact with her landlady. And place the envelope.”

Dios, he was a bastard.

2

“No! No! No!”

Cera broke off her stream of denials with a frustrated curse. Okay, the only thing worse than spending the whole day looking for “Help Wanted” signs in Little Havana shop windows? Spending the whole day looking for and not finding a job, only to come home to an eviction notice.

But that was exactly what she’d found on the door of her little lime green apartment. And more “Nos” poured from her mouth as she read over the notice, informing her she had three days to pay her back rent in full or get out.

This could not be happening. This could
not
be happening.

She only had $113 in her bank account. And good luck finding another place in a halfway decent neighborhood that would be willing to let her move in without a significant down payment. Besides that, she hated the thought of moving out of the unit without paying her widowed landlady, Ms. Knarik, what she still owed her.

However, Ms. Knarik had apparently decided to give up on ever getting the money she was owed from the grad student she’d taken a chance on two years ago, despite her shitty credit situation. Boatloads of guilt crashed down on Cera as she grabbed the mail out of the box beside the door.

With a whole lot of trepidation, she tried her key in the lock…and to her relief, it still worked.

But for how long? She really, really,
really
needed a job, she thought as she plopped down on the couch with the stack of mail. That, and a roof over her head. But now thanks to her lack of one, it looked like she was going to lose the other.

“Cera, pick up the phone! It’s me, Dana! Pick up the phone!!!”

Her sister’s hyper twelve-year-old voice broke through Cera’s desperate thoughts of future homelessness. Dana was seventeen now and didn’t sound quite so aggressively excited these days. But she’d recorded the ringtone before Dana left for Rise Academy, a boarding school for high-functioning autistic kids, where she’d learned, among many other things, how to modulate her tone for everyday conversation.

The only reason Cera pressed accept on the call was because she needed one good thing at the end of this horrible day. And her sister was the only good thing she had left.

“Hey, honey! How’s it going?”

“It’s going great, honey,” her sister answered calmly on the other side of the phone in careful, reflective tones. Then she asked, “How are you?”

To other people, her sister’s way of talking probably sounded a little wooden and a lot rehearsed. But Cera still remembered the child who couldn’t make any friends because she’d get so hyper-focused on a topic—like the answer to “how’s it going?”—that she’d go on and on for several minutes about minute details that no one but her cared about or even noticed.

So what sounded rehearsed to others, sounded like years of socialization work paying off to Cera. And she thanked God every day for the strides her sister had made at Rise. Even if she did miss Dana terribly, now that she lived over two-thousand miles away in Montana.

“I’m good,” she answered lightly, glad Dana, who’d been trained by experts to read other people’s body language, couldn’t see her wince as she told the boldfaced lie.

“Okay…is that enough small talk? Can I tell you my good news now?”

“Yes, honey, please tell me,” Cera answered with a laugh. She could hear the excitement in Dana’s voice and could picture her little sister sitting on her bed, petting Maria Callas, her therapy dog. “I could really used some good news.”

“I got into the New Mexico Opera program!!!”

And just like that, the black cloud returned to overtake the temporary ray of sunshine.

The New Mexico Opera Program was a new summer camp for teenagers on the autism spectrum. A credit to its founder, some Russian billionaire who’d taken a sudden interest in Rise Academy a few years back, it provided summer training to promising musicians, crew, and singers like Dana. However, as generous as the program was, all the training and rehearsal space at the New Mexico Opera meant it still cost a crap ton of money.

Which was why Cera did not consider this “good news” no matter how excited her sister was.

After acceptance, the program participants were on the line for room, board, supplies, and airfare to get them from Montana, where Rise was located, to the camp in Santa Fe. Which might not be so bad for the other students at Dana’s boarding school, many of whom came from wealthy families. But unfortunately for Dana, one of her parents was dead, and the other was either dead or still a slave to the addiction that had driven her to “sell” Dana to her older half-sister for a one-time fee.

The only real family Dana had in this world was Cera. Her jobless big sister who would be homeless in three days.

“That’s great,” Cera said, her voice weak with forced enthusiasm. “Can you tell me about the program again? I just want to make sure I have the details straight.”

Also, she needed time to come up with a good argument against it that wouldn’t a) trigger a meltdown and/or b) let her sister know how close she was to complete and utter destitution.

But as Dana rattled off a list of all the specialized master classes the program would be providing with renowned opera singers, Cera couldn’t think of a single legitimate reason against Dana’s participation. It sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime.

One she unfortunately would still have to say no to. Cera’s heart sank like a stone in her chest.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said, cutting her sister off. “Someone’s at the door. I’ve got to go.”

“But I haven’t told you where to send the check. Or about the opera we’ll be performing at the end of the program. Or about the special one we’ll be rehearsing in our workshop. It was written by two Rise students whose parents met because of them, they actually got married so Kenji and Sparkle could finish writing it together—”

“Can you email me the rest?”

“I guess, but—”

“I really have to go, honey. Sorry!”

Cera hung up before her sister could ask any more questions.

Yep, that was the way to teach your autistic sister good interpersonal skills. Cut her off, then hang up on her.

Cera sighed out loud. Well, now that she was good and depressed, she might as well go through her mail. She picked up the pile of envelopes on her lap.

Bill…bill…postcard reminding her she was now two years overdue for a dental check-up…bill…plain white envelope with no return address—wait, what?

Cera frowned at the letter. Her name was written across the front in strong, black handwriting. Maybe it was a personal letter from Ms. Knarik explaining how pissed of she was about the late rent.

Cringing, Cera opened it…only to nearly fall off the couch when she saw what was inside.

An unsigned cashier check for $15,000. Made out to her.

“What the…” she said out loud and her eyes immediately darted to the Memo line. Searching for some clue about why anyone would send her a check for this much money. Enough to pay her back rent. Enough to make sure she could do without a job until she graduated from her program in May, and hopefully started a new teaching job at Lighthouse, the private school for kids with autism where she’d done her student teacher hours. It would also be enough to pay for her sister to go to the New Mexico Opera program.

But the only thing on the Memo line was the word, “June” and the current year typed out beside it.

What did it mean? Was this a repayment of some kind? But then why would the issuer have written the current year in the Memo line? Or signed the check?

No, it seemed like—scratch that. It
felt
like this was some kind of payment for something. Something that hadn’t happened. Yet. Something she’d be expected to do, if she cashed it.

Cera dropped the check.

I can’t,
she thought to herself as she watched it flutter to the ground. No, she definitely couldn’t…

Could she?

3

“She deposited the check,”
Hank’s gruff voice told him on the other end of the line.

Gus let loose a feral grin as he boarded a private jet with Benton Brothers Ventures scrawled across both sides. It had been two days since Hank placed the envelope. Gus had nearly given up hope of Plan C working. But only one day before the police were due to forcibly evict her, she’d deposited the check.

Which meant she’d agreed to his terms.

Which meant his obsession with her was about to take a $15,000 trip out of fantasyland and become a very real thing.

His cock pulsed at the idea of her. Real and in his bed.

“You’re not really one of my brother’s friends, are you?”

He could still remember her, pretty as a magnolia blossom in a pale green sundress as she set a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice down in front of him. She’d made the accusation with a quizzical smile. Squinting at him, like he was out of focus and she was trying to figure out how he fit into her brother’s perfectly preppy world.

“Why you think that, baby?” he’d asked. “Your brother don’t usually hang out with spics from da Ninth?”

Gus had meant it to sound like a joke. Smooth and a little bit dangerous, a combination he knew from experience girls liked.

But the words ending up coming out of his mouth all defensive. Made him sure she could see right through him with that smiling squint of hers. All the damage in him. The fucked-up heart, the shitty foster homes, the arrest record, and about a million other things that would have made a rich girl like her think twice before offering him a glass of orange juice while he waited for her brother to get home—even if he did have a real pretty face.

But she’d just chuckled. Actually laughed, like him dropping the name of one of the most notorious wards in New Orleans in the kitchen of her high-class Bellaire Drive two-story was just the kind of thing he did for shits and giggles.

“No, it’s not where you’re from,” she’d answered, sitting down across from him with her own glass of orange juice. “It’s just that you seem a lot smarter than the dumb Lacrosse guys he usually hangs out with.”

Yeah, well he had to be. The guys on her brother’s lacrosse team could run up and down a field, no problem. If he even looked at a treadmill wrong, he was in trouble. The only reason he had enough lean muscle to make girls linger past his face was because light strength training was about the only form of exercise he could do without worrying about his fucked-up heart turning on him.

So yeah, he’d learned to be smart. But accepting her brother’s invite to meet him here did not feel smart. Neither did sitting across the table from Bruce Winslow’s daughter.

The daughter he had to work hard not to stare at while he drank the orange juice he’d just watched her make herself with an actually juice machine. His dick had gone hard as steel inside his baggy jeans as she flowered around the large kitchen, playing the perfect hostess. And now that she was sitting across from him, it felt to Gus like the goddamn thing between his legs was growling with the need to be inside her.

Yeah, this whole night already felt like one huge, seriously dumb-ass mistake.

“How did you say you and Bruce Jr. knew each other again?” she asked, her dark brown eyes curious as she raised the glass of homemade OJ to her full lips.

He watched the magnolia girl take a dainty sip of orange juice and wondered how old she was. Her body was lush with curves. Full breasts modestly tucked into a cap-sleeved, button-up top and wide hips that refused to be completely hidden underneath a somewhat dowdy plaid skirt. She also had long, thin braids that had probably never been left in for even a day longer than they had to be while her single mama waited for the next paycheck.

Gus’s hand itched to touch those braids. To push them behind her ears, so they didn’t get in the way when he leaned across the table to—

“I didn’t say,” he answered, forcibly cutting off that vision before it could finish forming in his mind.

But it had been too late. He could feel his dick thick and hard inside his pants, pulsing with the need to see that fantasy come true. Pulsing back then just like it was now, fifteen years later, at the thought of finally having her.

“Good,” Gus said to Hank, taking the first seat he came to on the plane.

A well-made-up flight attendant appeared like a genie as soon as his butt hit the leather with a glass of champagne in her hands. “Good to see you again, Mr. Benton.”

At the same time the voice on the other side of the line asked, “Anything else?”

Gus took the champagne, ignoring the flirty look that accompanied it.

“Yeah, keep on watching. Make sure nothing interferes with the rest of the deal,” he answered. The last thing he needed was another predatory boss offering her a job. Or even a nice boss, for that matter. He needed to keep her hungry for Plan C to work. “Then wait until the end of the month, and implement the July phase.”

“Will do,” Hank answered.

They hung up and Gus turned to look out the window, purposefully acting like he wasn’t aware of the still-lingering flight attendant with the hopeful look in her eyes.

He’d banged her on the way out to Miami back in November, and she was probably expecting a repeat performance. But he wouldn’t be taking the flight attendant up on her unspoken offer to renew his mile high club membership. Or any other woman.