Page 199 of Powerhouse: Boxed Set
I wasn’t particularly close to anyone in my family. My father and my “condition” had seen to that. However, I stayed in touch with my cousin. He was the closest thing I had to a friend.
I heard a woman’s voice next to him, moaning out awho is it?and realized it must be a repeat conquest considering that she was asking the question with such a groan. Familiarity. Hardly a usual occurrence for a playboy. He rarely fucked the same pussy twice.
“I’m coming over,” I told him, and he grunted a sigh.
“What the fuck, Lucian? It’s barely eight a.m.”
“I’m coming over now,” I said. “Get that random out of your bed, will you?”
“Sure thing, whatever,” he said, and hung up.
I hailed a cab, knowing full well the woman would be gone from his apartment by the time I got there. Sure enough, Elliot was padding around his living room, dressed in nothing but some low-slung pants as I stepped across his threshold.
I dropped myself onto his sofa and let out a breath as he rubbed his eyes.
“What the fuck brings you here on a Sunday morning?” he asked, and I spat it out before I came to my senses.
“Elaine fucking Constantine.”
He looked at me like I’d taken a blow to the head since he’d last seen me.
“Why the holy crap would Elaine Constantine doanythingto you? Please tell me you’ve stayed away from her. Your dad will lose his shit. Her family will start a war.”
Predictably for Elliot, my one friend in the world, he read my mind.
“You fucked her, didn’t you?”
“Not quite,” I told him, and cursed myself under my breath.
He crouched down in front of me, eyes searching for signs I’d taken a battering to my brain. “Not quite as in what? What the hell’s going on?”
I shouldn’t have told him any of it. I should’ve put it to bed in my mind and turned my back on it for all time. But I didn’t. I was still twisted up enough from her bullshit ways that I didn’t. “Tinsley Constantine’s masked ball,” I said, and he pulled a face.
“Yeah, what about it? Everyone’s been raving about it. Tabloids have been lapping it up.”
“I was there,” I told him, and he laughed at me. Actually laughed at me.
“What in the living fuck were you doing at Tinsley Constantine’s ball?”
“Finding a wife.”
He scoffed. “Right. Sure. Next thing you’ll tell me you’re going to be a father. And what the fuck has that got to do with Elaine?”
I wished I was a smoker, just to take a drag on a cigarette and break up my own damn mood. “You can guess.”
“The whole world knows she’s a fucking party girl. I heard she was in debt to the Power brothers last time the Constantine gossip was going around the Regent.”
That pricked my interest—one small sliver of Constantine intelligence that had slipped my ears. “The Power brothers?”
“Big time, apparently. They say her mother is coming down hard on her.”
I was mulling over this new information when he spoke again.
“So, what happened when you saw Elaine Constantine at the ball?”
I despised the shame and humiliation brewing in me. Elliot had been a trusted ear for decades, but I was struggling to voice this confession to him.
He saved me the battle. “You grabbed her, didn’t you? You let your dick rule your hate, and you grabbed her?”
