Page 23 of Falling for Them (Cinderella’s Daddies #1)

Twenty-One

Sebastian

Tuesday night. I’m bored as fuck, and worried about Ella. Maybe Kingston was right, and we should’ve gone after her.

Hell, there’s no maybe about it. We definitely should’ve gone after her.

I pick up my guitar, strum a few chords. I write down an interesting melody that pops into my head. I strum a few more chords. I mean, it’s fine. Could be catchy, even, with the right rhythm behind it, the right lyrics.

Setting down the guitar again, I grab one of the millions of composition notebooks that lie around my place. I turn to a page at random and find something I wrote last night.

Pursuing you

Is the only thing I’ve got

Your featherlight touch

Passionate moans

Memories driving me

Forward, forward

To you

Fixing the fight

Searching the night

Pursuing your light

Tortured by the chase...

I turn the page, and find similar lyrics. Then I go back a few pages, looking for something else. All of these pages are filled with yearning, frustration, even some anger. And a fuckton of loneliness.

The fuck. Everything I’ve written during the past week is about Ella.

I toss the notebook onto the coffee table in the middle of the room, disgusted. I’m not disgusted with Ella, but with myself. “Give her space.” Stupidest idea I ever had.

Time to fix this.

Picking up my phone, I intend to call Ella, but I’m hit with a whopping number of notifications from all of my social media accounts.

Oh, hell. The video of Ella and me is no longer only getting noticed by a few fans here and there. It went viral.

Even as I look at the screen, more notifications pop up. If Ella’s aware of this, she might be freaking out. I slide past them and open my contacts, then tap Princess .

But instead of getting the ring tone, or being moved straight to voicemail, I hear an automated message. I’m sorry, but this number has been disconnected .

What the fuck? Did Ella give me a fake number?

I replay the hour I spent with her in my head.

Nothing in the way she acted made me think she didn’t want to be with me.

There were no signals that she was hoping to get away sooner—in fact, I kind of thought that if I’d turned on the charm, or hell, just asked nicely for her to come home with me, she would have.

So why the fake number? No, wait. I texted her back. Her phone chimed when I did it. So the number she gave me isn’t fake, but it no longer works.

Is she getting tagged in the same notifications I am? Maybe she turned it off. Turning off the phone is not the same as the number no longer being in service, though. Shit. What would do this?

She wouldn’t change her phone number to avoid me and Kingston. I hate that it even occurs to me she might, but this isn’t making sense.

Several more notifications pop up while I’m considering the possibilities. I click over to the VideYou app and find the recording of Ella and me, right there on the home page. Shit. It has over a million views.

I text my driver, Kellan, to see if he’s still up. He usually keeps the same hours I do, and if he’s asleep, I’ll call a service instead. Sure enough, he’s awake. He has the car waiting for me by the time I reach the sidewalk outside my apartment building.

“Where to?” he asks when I slide in.

“The Tyler building.” Kingston will still be there, and I need to talk to him—face to face, this time.

The security guards nod at me when I enter the Tyler building.

“Is he still up there?” I ask.

“Yep,” one of them says. “He’s been staying later and later.”

Aw, fuck. My vice was drink. King’s has been—and probably always will be—work. It’s what he throws himself into when shit gets hard.

Sure enough, he’s sitting behind his desk in his office, his scowl in place as he types something on his computer.

“King,” I say, knocking on the doorjamb.

He looks up and scowls harder. “What?”

“Dude, you’re falling into old habits. Snap out of it.”

He jabs a few buttons on his keyboard and pushes back from the desk. “Yeah, well, it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

“We should come up with a plan to find her,” I say. “It’s time.”

Glancing at his phone, he says, “She hasn’t called me. I don’t think she wants to.”

“I think she does want to, but she can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her phone’s out of service.”

“You have her fucking number?”

I wince. I forgot to tell him about that. “I got it when we went to the karaoke place,” I say. “Sorry I didn’t mention it.”

He grumbles something unintelligible, but I don’t have to be a genius to figure out he’s pissed.

Clearing my throat, I say, “Tonight, I thought that we’d waited long enough for her to come to us, and I tried to call her. It’s disconnected.”

“So you’re saying her phone doesn’t work.” He strides to one of the small sofas and throws himself into it. “What’s your plan, then? Hire a detective? No good private investigator is going to want to work for two men looking for a woman half their age. Unless we tell them she’s our daughter.”

“Well, we are her daddies,” I say, holding back a smile.

He just shakes his head.

“Look, I know which building she lives in,” I say.

He raises his eyebrows at me.

“I gave her a ride back to it both times we went to the karaoke place. If we go…”

“Stalk her?” he says, looking like the idea is both distasteful and tempting.

“Well, when you put it like that, it doesn’t sound good,” I say.

He shrugs. “Maybe that’s what it fucking takes to get her to see some goddamn sense.”

“You don’t really think that.”

“No,” he says, “I don’t. I mean, a part of me does, but I don’t want to scare her. Her phone not working, though—that worries me a little.”

“Tomorrow,” I say. “We’ll go first thing. If you can, you know, take a couple hours off of work, since you’ve been slacking so much lately.”

“Shut up, smartass,” he says. “It’s a plan.”

I turn to go, but before I reach the door, I remember. “Do you want to hear her sing?”

Leaning forward, he says, “Fuck yes, I do.”

I sit down in one of the armchairs and hold out my phone. The video of the two of us singing can literally be found on every social media channel I can think of, so it’s hard to miss. But King doesn’t do social media.

“Here we go,” I say, finding it on VideYou and pressing play .

“Arsonist’s Lullaby” comes on. I can’t take my eyes off of Ella in the video. And the way her voice flows with mine, harmonizing, allowing me to complement it throughout the song, is fucking magic.

Viewer comments are popping up even as King and I watch the video, things like, Wowwwww fire and Fuck I didn’t know Bastian Crown was still alive and If they aren’t doing each other, I’ll eat my cat .

I think the cat one meant to say hat , but the typo is funny.

Someone responds to that comment, saying, If they aren’t doing each other, I volunteer as tribute to do either one .

“People are disgusting,” Kingston says.

I shrug. I’m used to it.

The song ends and Kingston looks at me.

“People are disgusting,” he says, “but Ella is magnificent. We have to find her, Bash. I’m going crazy.”

Ella

I wake at eight-thirty the next morning, thanks to my used-to-be-a-phone-but-is-now-just-an-overpriced-alarm-clock.

There’s no confusion when the alarm goes off. I know exactly why I set it and where I’m going. This day, January twenty-ninth, is the anniversary of my dad’s death. I’ve been both dreading this day and hoping it will bring some kind of end to the constant ache in my chest. Closure.

Although I don’t know if there can ever be closure after losing someone as special as my dad.

I dress in jeans and a sweatshirt and grab a packet of saltines that I filched from the pub the other night. In my defense, Kevin was watching while I took them, and he didn’t say a word—he just added extra french fries to the dinner he packed for me to take home at the end of my shift.

I’m not too proud for charity at this point.

The walk to the cemetery is loud with traffic, despite me leaving after rush hour.

I have to dodge a bike and a bus at two different intersections.

Eventually, though, the craziness of the busy streets fades behind me as I reach more residential areas.

Here, tucked behind a church and bordered by a series of townhouses, is the place where Dad is buried.

I find his modest headstone easily. A long moment passes where I can only stare at the letters.

There’s not much to it, just his name—Eric Thomas Marchand—and his birth year and the year he died.

We couldn’t afford anything elaborate. My eyes trace the serif font over and over, like somehow the little lines on each letter will make sense or bring comfort.

None of that happens.

Blinking away the extra moisture in my eyes, I plop down in the grass next to the headstone and just sit.

I didn’t bring flowers, but Dad wouldn’t care about a gesture like that.

He didn’t care about stuff, really. Cleaning out his place had been simple after his death, because he was never a collector of things.

Really, all Dad would want from me right now is company.

I know he’s dead, and I never really formed a great idea of what happens after death.

But if he’s around, somewhere, somehow, I hope he knows that I am giving him the gift of time.

I pull a notebook from my bag and scribble down lyrics. Composing, for me, has to happen at the keyboard. I need to feel the keys, hear the chords and melodies. I can hum something and jot down the general feel of it, but the magic only happens at the keyboard.

I used to dream that someday, I’d have a grand piano in a sunny room overlooking the ocean. As I sit here and miss Dad, I think about that imaginary place. That’s what my heaven would be. I wonder what Dad’s heaven would be.

I’m so lost in my thoughts and the random verses I’m writing down, that when a shadow comes over my notebook, I give a startled yelp. Looking up, I see my brother.

“Thought I might find you here today,” Tommy says.