He grinds his jaw. “I beg to differ.”
The beast inside me rears up at the implication that he’d keep me away from Ophelia. Stay calm. Don’t overreact just yet. The man just watched me fuck his daughter doggy style—he’s earned the right to be a little pissed. “I’m here to ask for permission to marry her.”
His stunned silence and subsequent laughter bring my hackles up. “Sure.” He folds his hand on top of one another and leans forward. “Sure, marry my daughter. Just let her know she’ll be forfeiting the twenty-million-dollar trust fund I’ve set aside once she graduates from Princeton. Because I’m not coughing it up if she’s married to someone like you.”
I try not to show my reaction to twenty million dollars, but my insides are crumbling like a sandcastle under a wave. Four years from now, Ophelia could be made in the shade with an Ivy League degree and enough money to build a mansion out of dark chocolate if she so chooses. There’s no way in hell she’d pick me over money like that.
There’s no way in hell she should.
She’s known me for less than a week and has no reason to believe I’ll give her a comfortable future. Hell, I’m fresh out of Rikers. I’ve got years of work before I can even buy her a home. I’ve got nuts of pure, reinforced steel, but even I don’t have the balls to ask her to give up twenty million bucks.
“That must sound like a lot of money to someone like you,” says Ophelia’s father.
“You keep saying that. Someone like me. You don’t even know me.”
He looks me over with distaste. “I know I could never bring you around friends of the family. Or colleagues. You look like a man who carries a knife in his boot. Or maybe one who keeps going when the father of the girl he’s fucking walks in.” He wipes the spittle from his mouth. “And you might think I don’t have an ounce of street smarts, but I recognize prison ink when I see it. You’ve got it all over you. So unless you want to rob my daughter of her future, in addition to her dignity, you need to leave her the hell alone.”
“I love her,” I manage around the lump in my throat. “There isn’t a man alive who would work harder to make her happy. Or provide for her.” Feeling like I’m standing in quicksand, I glance away, toward the wall of windows. “It isn’t easy for me to ask another man for anything, but I’m asking you to give me a shot. Don’t take her trust fund. If I haven’t made good on my promise to give her a comfortable life by the time she graduates college…I’ll bow out. She’ll have all that money to herself and I’ll have no claim on it.”
“You’d leave her alone? Just like that?”
“No, it wouldn’t be just like that. It would rip my fucking heart out. It would kill me,” I push through clenched teeth. “But I’ll beg, bargain and steal for Ophelia.”
“That’s the thing,” he says, his smile gone. “She shouldn’t have to settle for someone who needs to beg, bargain and steal.” After a quiet moment, her father stands and I swear, I can hear the nails being hammered into my coffin. “Stay away from her or her trust fund ceases to exist. Stay away from her or I’ll toss her out of this family so fast, her head will spin. We have a reputation to maintain and you’ll soil it. And her.”
I almost double over from the pain of failure. I failed Ophelia.
There’s no way to give her up. I can’t. I won’t.
But I have to come up with another plan. Right now, I have nothing but my promises—and my promises don’t mean anything to her father. The man who holds the keys to the treasury. A treasury far too big to ask her to give up.
Defeat weighing down on my shoulders, I stumble from the room. At her bedroom door, I stop to take one final look at her. My princess, sprawled out on the sheets that smell like our lovemaking. Just hang tight, Ophelia. Just wait for me.
With her father’s eyes boring into my back, I force myself down the staircase and out of the house.
CHAPTER SIX
Ophelia
“I’m sure he’ll come back,” my friend, Sienna, says soothingly. “After everything you told me about Ezra, he sounds super possessive. Men like him don’t just walk away without a word.”
She would know. Her stepbrother-turned-husband has six bodyguards stationed outside my bedroom door right now. I’m pretty sure Sienna has more security than the vice president. It took months of convincing for Grant to let Sienna come over to my house. Everyone in the household went through a screening process—and thankfully passed. I’m so glad she’s here now. I haven’t heard from Ezra all day and tonight is my meeting with Wagner. My chest is being weighed down by sand bags and it’s everything I can do not to stare at the clock.
Where did he go? I was going to tell him everything. Now, with every passing moment, I rely on Ezra a little less…and my fears over Wagner grow. By tonight, the scales could be tipped and I’ll have no choice but to go to the meeting. My phone is on silent and stashed beneath my pillow so Sienna won’t know that Wagner continues to message me, reminding me not to be late. God, I hate that man. I hate that he’s doing this to me. Where is Ezra?
I hold my pillow against my chest. “When I woke up, he was gone. No note. Nothing.” My lower lip starts to tremble, but I bite on it first. “I told him I loved him. He’s freaked out. Of course he is. Right? I should have waited until he said it first.”
“Are you sure he isn’t just following your lead? You told him you couldn’t be together.”
“Trust me, he didn’t care. He was all, Ophelia is mine. Chest pound, belch, ball scratch.”
Sienna giggles. “That sounds familiar. Although Grant is more cuff link adjustment, scowl, panty ripping.”
“His panties or yours?”
“Mine!” Sienna collapses sideways with a laugh. “Now I’m imagining Grant in panties.”
“I bet they would be extra formal, with a bow tie.”
My blonde friend snorts. “Stop.”
Smiling hurts when I’m so freaked out, but I manage a sideways one. “So how is married life?”
Sienna rolls onto her back and stretches her hands up above her head, her face turning pink. “Magical.” She sends me a look. “But we had our share of barriers to overcome in the beginning. You and Ezra will get there eventually.”
“I don’t know. Last night, I thought we would do anything to make it work. But in the light of day…it seems so hopeless when we’re from such different worlds. And look around, he’s not even here and my father has been gone for hours.” I chew my lip a moment. “Speaking of my father, did I tell you he walked in on us last night?”
She jackknifes on the bed. “Shut up.”
“It’s true. I was getting the business right where you’re sitting.” I laugh at Sienna’s frozen smile. “Poor guy couldn’t even look at me in the kitchen this morning.”
“Fathers aren’t meant to see that.”
“No.” I blow out a breath and topple onto my side. “They’re definitely not.”
Sienna considers me. “You say the situation seems hopeless because you and Ezra aren’t from the same world, but is that really why you think you need to keep away?”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugs. “You just never seemed the type to care about…” She gestures to my gigantic bedroom. “This stuff. Wealth. Going to a fancy school—”
“I don’t,” I whisper. “Not at all.”
“So what’s the real reason?”
I feel the vibration of my phone under the pillow and know it’s Wagner. Again. There’s no way I can tell my friend about the blackmail. It’s too humiliating. And I can’t just float through life, letting everyone else handle my rich girl problems. I didn’t get into Princeton on my own. If I had, this wouldn’t be happening. It’s my cross to bear. No one else’s.
My silence is starting to make Sienna suspicious, but I’m saved from having to answer when footsteps come down the hallway. They’re crisp and precise and Sienna sits up automatically, her chest starting to rise and fall rapidly. “It’s Grant.”