The Grand Duel (The Grand Men #4)

Chapter 32

THIRTY-TWO

Lissie

T he food at King Blu is divine, if not a little intense—the company just as much so. If there’s anything I’ve learnt over the last couple of days, it’s that it is almost impossible to stay mad at Charles Aldridge.

The waitress removes our empty plates from the table at a snail’s pace, and I force a smile, thanking her. When I look back across at him, Charles is staring at me with a look that’s not meant for the dinner table.

In fact, I’m not sure he’s taken his eyes off me since we stepped from the car.

“Are you going to give me that look all night, Mr Aldridge? I thought you brought me here to talk, not fuck me with your eyes.”

A woman at the table beside ours turns and looks at me in disgust. Regardless of the fact the tables are spread out enough to not feel on top of one another, it hasn’t escaped my notice that her companion’s not spoken to her all night.

I lift my wineglass to my lips and take a sip.

Bitch has been eyeing Charles all evening.

I catch him turn to look across at her and then back to me. He smirks. “I did bring you here to talk, for your information, but then you opened your front door and started being overtly nice, looking savagely beautiful.” He shakes his head as his eyes roam, as if they have a mind of their own. “And I’ve not found a good enough excuse to ruin that yet.”

I tilt my head and sit forward in the seat. “Am I that awful you think I’d cause a scene that would ruin our night?” My eyes drop to his lips.

“No,” he promises, his tone soft. “I’m just enjoying this a little bit too much. It’s me who could ruin it.”

I shrug. “Well, I’m fed.” I reach for my wine. “Wined.” I smile. “You have my full attention, Charles.”

His lips quirk, and then he signals for the waitress again. She’s with us within an instant. “Could we get the bill, please.”

“Of course, Mr Aldridge.” She blushes.

I chuckle and lean over the table, not caring what anyone thinks as I work to fasten the two buttons on Charles’s shirt that I opened earlier in the car. “Whatever’s wrong with me is catching. You’ve got the entire restaurant blushing.”

He sits with his head inched back, allowing me the room as he watches me down the length of his nose. He narrows his eyes on me once I’m done. “Happy?”

I sigh. I can’t help but want him to take me home. “Much.”

Charles pays and then walks me to the door, holding it open for me. “Why are we leaving?” I ask, leaning into him.

Our hands brush, and I catch his fingers, finding the receipt and another smaller piece of paper. “Because I don’t want to have the conversation we’re about to have here,” he says, looking down at me. “And you don’t seem to like it here very much.”

“I don’t dislike it. I just don’t get it.” I take the small piece of paper, and he doesn’t stop me. When I look down at it, my nose winkles in confusion before I realise what it is. “No!”

His lips twitch. “Don’t make it obvious.”

My mouth drops open. “That little hussy!”

“Lis,” he warns.

I laugh in disbelief, handing him back the number scrawled on the back of the business card. “She’s here with someone.”

He takes the number and screws it up in his hand before pocketing it.

“Would you go there?” I ask, walking out the door and into the blistering cold.

“No,” he says, following me out. “Christ, no.”

“Then why take the card?” As we walk past the restaurant, I see the woman peering over her shoulder, watching us leave.

I’m not sure what possesses me to do it, but I smile at her and walk the entire length of the window with my middle finger held up at her.

“I’m going to pretend you’ve not just done that.” Charles snakes an arm around my neck and pulls me into his side, directing me to the passenger-side door and into the warmth of the car.

He looks over at me once he’s inside and shakes his head, laughing.

“Is this more you?”

I sink into the booth at Macca’s and pull him in beside me. “It is actually. And you won’t have to re-mortgage your home to get dessert either.”

He pulls the jacket he placed over my shoulders tighter and tucks a loose strand of my hair behind my ear. “True. The usual?”

I nod, and he slides out of the booth and goes to the counter.

I can’t help but watch him.

He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever been with. Without question. And he’s becoming someone I feel for deeply.

I don’t like to admit that fact, and hell to saying it out loud, but there’s something about him that I can’t explain. A feeling in my gut that soars whenever I’m with him.

Like maybe he’s the best man I’ve ever met.

My phone vibrates in my bag, and with Charles only a few feet away from me, I know it’s one of three people.

My mum, Jovie, or Ed.

Jovie

We need to talk. I’m so sorry Lissie

I smile sadly down at her message, wondering why she needed so long to send that message.

When Charles slides back into the bench seat beside me, I thank him for the ice cream and drop my phone back in my bag.

“Everything okay?” he asks, his frown quizzing.

“My sister is currently hosting my parents.” I look up at him. “I don’t know how long for.”

“In Australia.”

I nod.

He reaches for his spoon and scoops up a chunk of his triple chocolate. “So, your sister has contact with them?”

I shake my head, moving my gaze to my ice cream. “Can I ask for some advice, Charles? I’ve been thinking it over for days now, and I don’t know who else to ask.”

“Anything.”

The word triggers a memory, and we both look up at one another at the same time.

I bite my bottom lip, knowing my cheeks are pinking. “Fiend.”

He shrugs, and I smile.

“So, when my sister got pregnant, our parents thought it was the end of the world. Like I told you, they wanted us to take over the company eventually as they had. The fact Jovie was sixteen was the icing on the non-existent birthday cake, and they basically told her she was going to have to have an abortion.” I sigh as the pain I felt back then comes right back to the surface, prickling my skin. “At the time, Jove didn’t want that, and I…I couldn’t understand how they could ever, in any right mind, think it was okay to demand it in that way. Not after what we went through in the few years leading up to that point, anyway.” I swallow the burn in my throat and blink over and over before rushing on and past the memories that flash. “I can support Jovie and Willow now, I know I can. And I’m saving to buy the house I always dreamed we’d own…” I sigh, the same question plaguing me as it has for the last few days. “I’m just…I don’t know if what I want…or what we…”

“You’re worried it’s your dream and not hers.”

I snap my head up, my eyes stinging.

How did he…

“Because she’s let them back in when you’re not ready to.”

My shoulders sag. “I feel really selfish. Like I’m hurt and angry, feeling all betrayed by Jovie when she’s just doing what I can’t—what I don’t want to. I don’t want her near them, but how do I say that?”

“You don’t.”

My heart sinks. “I know.” I stare across the ice cream shop, not seeing a way in which I’ll ever be able to sit and listen to Jovie tell me all about them. “I think the hardest part is the fact I know they’re trying. They don’t have the business anymore, and they want to spend time with us…” I purse my lips. “Why did it have to take so long for them to want that?”

“Sometimes in life we don’t realise what’s important until it’s gone.”

We sit in comfortable silence for a minute as we both seem to reflect.

I know that Jovie hasn’t done this to hurt me, but it has. And that’s not on her. That’s on them and the decisions they made.

“Can I tell you about my sister, Lissie?”

I twist in the seat to face him, my brows gathered. “Of course you can.”

He sits back and looks down at his bowl of ice cream. “She was by far the greatest human I ever knew.”

I smile, a lump catching in my throat. “What was her name?”

“Phoebe,” he tells me. “Phoebe Liliana Aldridge. She was shooting for a full scholarship to Oxford University to study electrical engineering.”

“She was smart,” I murmur, leaning my head against the padded seat as I listen. “Like her brother.”

“She was incredible. Had so much ahead of her,” he says, as if still not comprehending the fact she isn’t here. “I remember my mum calling me on the night she passed away and just…knowing. The second I answered I just knew she was gone.” He sighs, glancing up at me before dropping his eyes again. “She was sexually assaulted around two years before that night. She told me about it three months before she took her own life.”

My chest tightens, my heart growing heavy as my eyes well. “Charlie, I’m so sorry.”

He shakes his head. “I miss her. Like crazy. But I don’t talk about it often.”

I nod, swallowing down the lump in my throat.

“I struggled for a while to get my head around it. Around the who and the why. It made me look at myself differently. I was a twenty-four-year-old lad at university, having sex with women who could barely walk straight most nights.” His jaw flexes. He still doesn’t look at me. “To see someone you love, go through something like that…”

I reach out and take his hand, a tear slipping down my cheek.

His sad, broken eyes lift to mine. And it’s as if a veil has been lifted from between us. “I joined the club because of the consent, Lis. The drink limit and long list of rules that kept the women I slept with safe. I know it probably sounds fucked up, but I was a mess. Young. Confused. And in my head, it meant there was absolutely no possibility of making someone feel the way my sister did for that year and a half before she thought the only way out of her pain was to take her own life. I couldn’t be responsible for someone in that way twice over.”

I frown at his choice of words, but then he continues.

“I didn’t think it would be a forever thing—I wasn’t thinking at all, really—but then years passed, and it worked too well for me.” His eyes spark as they pin me. “For the most part.”

Me.

“I talked myself into the fact that not telling you about that night was for you, but deep down, especially now, I know it was because I didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that my fool-proof plan failed.”

I frown, my eyes filled with tears that threaten to spill over.

“I hurt you.”

“No.” I shake my head. “Don’t say that. You didn’t fail anything, Charlie.”

“I made you feel like shit, Lissie. Regardless of telling you the day you walked into my office or the way it eventually came out, it never would have been a good time, and I knew that.” He reaches out and thumbs away the tears on my cheek. “I should have told you, regardless. I just didn’t know how to explain what I am and how this works for me.”

The ache in my chest spreads, and I frown. “And what are you?” I ask, my words laced with a broken, simmering anger.

He huffs out a humourless laugh and looks up at me. “I don’t honestly know anymore.”

“I do,” I say without missing a beat.

He shakes his head as he looks into my eyes. “In here…” He taps his chest. “I know what I want to the point it drives me crazy with need. But in my head…” He sits back, and my stomach drops. “I don’t think I can physically give myself in that way yet. And not because I don’t want to but because I literally don’t know how, and you don’t deserve that.”

“What are you saying?” I ask, rolling my lips to stop my chin from trembling.

“Nothing about the way I sleep with women is normal. What I want from you isn’t normal.” His jaw goes taut. “You’re young, and you are…beyond beautiful. There isn’t a word good enough. And I won’t put you through?—”

“What do you want?” I force out past the lump in my throat.

“Something that’s not fair.”

“The club?”

He stares through me as his brow furrows. “You couldn’t ever convince me to ask it of you. I…”

“Be honest with me,” I tell him. “Please. It’s me. Tell me the truth.”

“I have.” He frowns.

I nod, simply staring up at him.

He stares right back, his eyes ablaze if not a little lost.

After a minute, he shakes his head. “I don’t know what I want anymore, Lissie.”

My stomach twists, his candidness making my heart pound.

“And if I take a minute and think about that for too long, I tend to get the same answer.”

“What’s that?”

He swallows, tracing my lips with his warm gaze. “The club might not be what I want anymore. You couldn’t make me ask you to be a part of that life because it’s not how I want to do this with you.”

We sit in the quiet booth and watch one another, so much said and so much still trapped in the fear of trying.

Eventually, I lean forward and slide my arms around his neck, running my nose across his skin there. His arms wrap around me tightly, a shuddering breath ruffling through my hair.

“I don’t know if there’s space to try a different way,” he rasps.

I run my hands through his hair, my insides feeling like they’re pulling me impossibly closer towards him. “That’s okay.”

I ease back after a minute, uncurling myself from his lap as an idea comes to me. “I have something to show you. Do you want to see it tonight?”

He frowns. “What is it?”

“A surprise. But one I think is needed.” I take his hand, squeezing it in mine, letting him know without words how much him telling me about Phoebe means to me.

How everything makes so much more sense now.

He links our fingers. “A surprise? Why would you get me anything?”

“I planned it before everything happened,” I confirm. “Just after we got back from Italy.”

I can see him doing the mental calculations.

“Do you want to see it or not, Charles?”

He watches me, his eyes warm and his lips slightly curling. “It’s Charlie.” He smiles fully at me and my heart flips. “But yeah, I do.”

Charlie

“Are you fucking joking with me?”

I look from the house to Lissie, finding her with her eyes closed.

“Lissie.”

She opens her eyes and steps back. “I’m going to give you a couple more minutes to let out all of this”—she motions towards my chest—“and go get the dogs.”

I flip the keys she just gave me over in my hand and then look back up at the house.

Or cottage.

It’s entirely too big to be a cottage.

“Jesus Christ.” I run my hands through my hair and turn, finding her walking towards me with Luna held in her arms. Daisy stays at her feet.

“Isn’t it beautiful? You should see it in daylight. It’s a doer-upper and not habitable just yet, but?—”

“Lissie, what the fuck?” I cut in. “What world are you living in? Did you buy this?”

“No!” she says, as if the idea is ridiculous, and I let out a sigh of relief. “You bought it.”

“What?”

“Or, Ellis and Frey Real Estate did. Elliot, per Mason’s orders, wasn’t allowed to be a part of it but, technically…”

Her meeting with an old friend was with Mason. My old friend. “What have you done?”

She sighs and takes the keys from me. “Come with me.”

I stand with my hands on my hips and watch as she walks to the front porch and fights to unlock the door with Luna held on her hip like a child.

“Charles,” she sings.

Reluctantly, I walk over and take the keys, unlocking the door.

She steps in first and reaches for the lights. “Ta-da.”

My gaze follows her as she steps to the side to let me get a better look. When her head tilts, pleading with me, I loosen my jaw and glance around the living room we’ve walked into.

And once my eyes catch on one thing, they don’t stop, jumping from the exposed staircase to the wooden beams and open fire.

“There’s five bedrooms and one bathroom but I’d make it three or four bedrooms and make the main bedroom an en suite with a walk-in wardrobe.” My eyes flick to where she stands, but she’s too busy looking around the house to notice. “There’s so much potential.”

“How much was it?”

She twists her neck, her face growing guilty before she hides it in Luna’s fur.

“Lis?”

“Mason said you could afford it.”

I walk to where she stands and take Luna from her, placing her on the ground. She quickly runs off up the stairs to find Daisy, her paw doing much better.

“It has the most beautiful kitchen which looks over acres of land. All your land, Charlie. Imagine the lives the dogs will live. Your friends’ children too. Ave and Ellis.”

“How much was it?”

“Mason got a deal.”

“Lissie.”

“Space,” she quickly tells me, swallowing before stepping closer so that I have to look down at her. “I didn’t know it when I had the idea but look at this place. You don’t know if there’s space to try another way, and in some wild twist of fate, I had Mason buy this.” Her eyes flare with something I can’t place. “There’s space, Charles.”

She reaches up and toys with one of my buttons.

“Make it yours. Make it your dream home and spend time here. I’ll work on it with you when I can.” She shrugs. “Can you not picture me in my cutesy wellies and farmer’s hat? The dogs in the garden?”

I shake my head and look away, around the house, my traitorous lips twitching.

“I know you said you don’t think you can do this differently, but I almost know that you could. I don’t want to force something.” I look back down at her, her eyes holding so much sincerity, they make my throat go tight. “I wouldn’t. But I want to try. As a friend, maybe? I want to help you, Charlie. And not for me, but for you, and maybe whoever you meet after.”

I try to make sense of her words, my eyes flicking around her face.

After?

“Mason loves this place. He wasn’t about a repeat of the penthouse, so he bought it in his own name with his own money. But it can all be changed.”

“Of course he did.”

She chews on her bottom lip, her eyes wide and pleading as she looks up at me. When I don’t say anything, she dips her head.

And I hate that I took a second too long to think about it.

Because there’s not a single measure of time needed when it comes to her.

I take her chin and lift it, my smile reluctant and there for her and her only. “Do you even own a pair of wellies, Lis?”

She chuckles, her eyes lighting up. “No.”

“I’ll have to buy you some.”

“Yeah?” she says in disbelief.

I’m scared to my fucking bones of hurting the woman in front of me. But that woman—this beautiful, thoughtful, tenacious woman, she makes me feel like I can take on the world.

Sounds stupid, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way before.

“Yeah,” I tell her.