Christian (The Casanova Club Book 11)
Christian
Casanova Club #11
Ali Parker
BrixBaxter Publishing
Contents
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Description
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
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Description
Your girl can’t seem to catch a break.
Right when I start to get used to this new reality, where my parents aren’t talking to
me and I’m falling in love with a new man every month, life pulls back its ugly fist
and sucker punches me.
Hard.
I knew Dad was pushing himself too hard. I knew I should have been home to help
out at the restaurant and at home. But I wasn’t. I was with him.
Christian Peterson is not the man I expected him to be. He’s a tall dark and
handsome Archaeology Professor at Harvard by day and a dashing gentleman by
night. He exudes confidence and charisma and I’d be lying if I said he didn’t remind
me of Indiana Jones.
But my heart is in New York City with my Dad in his hospital room. It’s all I can think
about and it’s entirely out of my control.
Everything is out of my control these days.
I need Christian to save me this month.
Otherwise I might not be able to see this thing through to the end.
Introduction
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Chapter 1
Piper
The grinning pumpkin painted on the coffee shop window stained my table with orange light as the sun filtered through the peeling window paint.
It hadn’t been peeling when I sat down.
But in my nervous, borderline irrational, high strung, anxiety-ridden state, I’d set to picking at the edges of the paint with my fingernails until it was a compulsion I couldn’t stop. It was a distraction I desperately needed to spare me thinking any longer about the conversation looming over my head.
My younger brother Phillip and I had arranged for the two of us and my parents to sit down for coffee before I caught my flight to Cambridge, Massachusetts. My late-night phone conversation with him last night had left me feeling hopeful. Mom and Dad had both agreed to sit down with me over coffee to, in their words, “talk things through.”
Weeks had passed since we last spoke.
I could still recall the night I told them about the Casanova Club while sitting at their dining room table in the house Phillip and I were raised in. Mom’s vacant stare. Dad’s bewildered and then angry expression. His stoic silence and the vein that tripled in size in his forehead as he tackled the thought of his daughter dating twelve different men over the course of the year.
I turned my half-empty latte in slow circles between my hands to spare the thinning pumpkin on the window. My gaze wandered to the time on my phone, sitting face-up on the table beside me.
They were eight minutes late.
It was unusual. My father had a thing about being punctual. Growing up, he used to tell me there was nothing ruder than arriving to a party or event late. Tardiness was not a classy quality, and it spoke louder than words. Timeliness and respect were mandatory in my household, and I’d grown up feeling the same way.
Being late gave me anxiety.
Waiting on people also made me nervous. Especially when I was already bent out of shape about sitting down to talk with them about how I’d betrayed their trust.
I let out a weary sigh and stopped turning my cup.
They would be there. They were coming.
They probably just got caught up in the usual New York City traffic. Maybe they had to switch cabs. Maybe Mother had to switch something out of the oven before they came.
Maybe Phillip was half dragging them down the sidewalk and they’d gotten cold feet and didn’t want to confront their daughter about her dishonesty.
I drummed my fingers on the table. The time rolled over.
Nine minutes late.
My flight left in four hours. I had to check in for said flight two hours before departure. Which meant, by my calculations, I had about an hour before I had to leave the cafe and head to the airport.
Well, an hour minus nine minutes. Soon to be ten.
The door to the coffee shop swung open, and a bright beam of October sunlight streamed across the hardwood floors. Hope soared in my chest as I peered over the heads of other cafe guests toward the shadows moving across the line of the sun.
A young couple stepped inside, and my heart sank.
Ten minutes late.
The couple moved to the counter, where the man, a little shorter than average with a burgundy scarf thrown around his neck and a cool gray jacket clasped tightly at his throat, proceeded to order both of their coffees.
I rested my chin in my hand and smiled as I watched them knit their fingers together and bump shoulders.
It looked like a fairly new relationship. Not too new because he knew her coffee order by heart, but new enough where they both gazed at each other with that lost puppy dog look in their eyes. I knew that feeling all too well.
It was like everything was glazed over in a rosy hue of pink. Everything was sparkly. And fresh. And romantic.
My thoughts wandered to the men I’d spent the year with and the sweet moments we’d shared.
Last month with Asher at the water fountain at his family’s estate. I remembered how much my feet ached and how he’d made me laugh after his mother tried to shoo me away like an unwanted farm animal encroaching on her perfect palace.
I thought of Jeremiah alone in his log home.
Of Aaron writing his books at his loft window, the sweet smells of the bakery on the street below wafting into his home on the autumn breeze.
I pictured Wyatt walking slowly through the coppery fields of his ranch, his hat shielding his eyes from the glare of the setting sun, his boots scuffing up dry dirt in his wake, his vest hanging from his shoulders and highlighting the broad lines of his back and the narrowness of his waist.
Of Levi.
Of all of them.
They’d all left marks on my heart that I doubted would ever fade away entirely.
The door swung open again.
Twelve minutes late.
A young man with a mop of blond hair stepped through the door and stopped to look around. Big brown eyes much like my own landed on me, and he gave me a lopsided smile before waving and then weaving through the congestion of tables and chairs.
I stood up and gave my brother a tight hug. “Phillip. It’s good to see you. You look good.”
“You too, Pipes.” Phillip broke away, still smiling, and pulled o
ut the chair opposite mine. He sat and rested his elbows on the table as he studied me like I was someone he’d never seen before, like all of my features were new to him. “You look good too. Different. But good.”
“Different?”
“Yeah. Older somehow.”
I blinked. “Pardon?”
He laughed and leaned back like I might swat at him. Depending on the next words out of his mouth, I might have.
“Sorry, that’s not what I meant,” he said. “I think the word I was looking for was wiser. You look wiser.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Uh huh. Right.” Chances were, I did look a little older. I wouldn’t be surprised if being the Casanova Bachelorette for the last ten months had left me with some wrinkles around my eyes and gray hairs. Falling in love a handful of times might do that to a girl. “Where’s Mom and Dad?”
Phillip’s smile fell and so did my heart.
I sighed. “They’re not coming, are they?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Pipes. I tried. I really did. And they were on board up until about an hour ago and Dad got cold feet. Said he…”
“Said what?” I pressed.
Phillip rubbed his chin. “He said he wasn’t ready to talk to you yet. He said he needed more time to, you know, wrap his head around what you did.”
“What I did?” Disbelief colored my voice. “I did this for him. For us.”
“I know. You don’t have to tell me that.”
I rubbed at my temples and shook my head. “How long are they going to punish me for this, Phillip? I’ve said sorry. I’ve tried to make things right. What more do they want from me?”
“I wish I knew. I wish I could make it all go away. But I think the only thing we can do is give it time. Right?”
“How much time?”
“However much they need to realize you are acting selflessly. Right now, all they see is the glamour of it all. The expensive dates. Fast cars. Hot billionaires. And from where they’re standing, I kind of get it. I mean, for the last ten months, we’ve been sweating our balls off in the kitchen, trying to make the restaurant work, and you’ve been out on yachts and going to masquerade balls.”
I pinched my bottom lip between my teeth and stared at my coffee cup. I willed the tears that burned my eyes to fuck right off. “That’s not fair.”
“None of this is fair, Pipes.”
I swallowed hard. Was he starting to resent me for not being around this year? I knew all three of them had been through a lot in my absence, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t been through my own shit.
And plenty of it.
Falling in love with men I couldn’t have wasn’t my idea of paradise. The fact that my parents could only focus on the more luxurious sides of this process irked me.
No. It more than irked me.
It pissed me off.
“Pipes, I’m on your side. You know that, right?” Phillip’s eyes searched mine, and he reached across the table for my hand.
I pulled it into my lap. “I know. But this is bullshit, Phillip. I’m sorry. It just is. It’s like Mom and Dad have completely forgotten the kind of person I am. How hard I worked to keep their business afloat. Not mine. Theirs. And this idea they have that you and I want to inherit that money pit and how blatantly they ignore us when we tell them we don’t want it…” I trailed off and shook my head. “It’s making me wonder why I even did this in the first place.”
Phillip grimaced. “I know this hasn’t been easy on you.”
“No. It hasn’t. All I was asking for was coffee. And they can’t even do that.”
Phillip let out a long sigh. “Hang in there, sis. It’ll all work out in the end. You’ll see. Just give them a bit more time. You know how they are. Stubborn. Kind of like you.”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
Phillip chuckled and nodded at my coffee cup. “We still have forty-five minutes before you have to leave, right? Can I buy you another? I don’t want to pass up on any time I have with you.”
I smiled. “Yes. Decaf, please.”
Phillip pushed away from the table and got in line to order our coffees. I stared at his back as he inched closer to the front of the line, and I marveled at how lucky I was to have a brother like him.
At least he and Janie were in my corner. And they had been since day one. Phillip understood why I was doing this and so did Janie. And if, in the end, my parents didn’t come around, I would have them to lean on.
And only them.
By the time that happened, the men I’d fallen in love with would all feel betrayed, and they would probably turn their backs on me. They’d blame me for wasting their time. Which I had done. And for breaking their hearts.
Which I was also going to be guilty of.
From where I was sitting, it looked like I was the villain no matter what way you looked at it. I’d betrayed my parents’ trust. And I was going to betray the faith of the men. Each and every one of them. The ones who were my friends and the ones who were my lovers.
My eyes burned.
Keep it together, Piper. You’re so close to the end. Only three more to go. Then you’re free.
Chapter 2
Christian
The auditorium hummed with the voices of my students when I stepped inside. I crossed the front of the room to the podium, where I shrugged my book bag from my shoulder and propped it up on the floor against the post. My students continued to chat, swapping stories of their weekends no doubt, of parties or late-night study sessions, hookups, breakups, and things of that sort.
The projector screen at my back was on but displayed no slides. The pale gray light it cast was the only light in the room, except for the ones on the edges of every second stair up to the last row in the auditorium, like a movie theatre. For today’s lecture, we would be using the screen so I’d opted to leave the lights out when I entered.
I busied myself preparing the slides, and the room slowly descended into calm and quiet.
My students were all second years in this class, so they knew what they could expect from me. I preferred not to have to ask them to be quiet. To be honest, it felt a little too high school to have to ask or demand the attention of a Harvard class. They were adults, after all, and they were the cream of the crop.
This wasn’t community college. This was Harvard.
And I would not ask for their attention. They’d paid big money to be here. If they missed out on what I had to say and screwed up their grades, that was on them, not on me.
By the time the first slide appeared on the screen behind me, the room was silent, except for the tinny sound of music coming from someone’s headphones near the back. A quick elbow from a fellow classmate put even that noise to rest, and I found myself gazing up at my room, the master of their attention and of this lecture.
“Good morning,” I said, greeting them with a smile and a spread of my arms.
“Good morning, Professor Peterson,” the room echoed back.
That never got old. I’d worked hard to stand in front of a room like this. Really hard. And even though I still got shit for landing such a role at a ripe young age of thirty-five, I didn’t let it cloud my truth: that I deserved this.
Sure, my parents had known some people in the elite offices of this university, and my name might have held a little more weight to it than other candidates vying for my position, but that didn’t negate the years of dedication I’d put in to land myself in this very room.
Education was in my blood. Passion for history coursed through my veins, and I was, without a shadow of a doubt, the best person to spread the knowledge of ancient civilizations with the young people at Harvard.
“Open your books to page four hundred and seven please,” I said.
Pages fluttered. Lips remained sealed. Eyes focused on the screen behind me as I nodded up at it. “Today, we move on to discuss the discovery of one of the world’s most famous collection of tombs. The Valley of the Kings.”
Pe
ns scribbled on pages. The sound was music to my ears.
I clicked my remote, and the slide rolled over to reveal a golden-hued picture of sand mountains. Not dunes. Mountains. Carved through them at the base was a road, and paths snaked up the hills toward the limestone tips of the mountains. The Nile wove in gentle curves in the background, appearing at one edge of the photograph and disappearing on the other.
“As you can see, there is nothing around the site for miles,” I said. “It lies on the West bank of the Nile, which I’m sure most of you know by now, and is near Luxor. Prior to 1922, there were sixty-two tombs discovered. In the passing years since, it has become clear that this expanse of sand and rock holds more secrets than we could have imagined, and there are still active digs in the area where archaeologists, some of whom sat in this very room when they were your age, are still searching for more crypts of old.”
The rest of the lecture went smoothly. As per my usual standards, I saved the last twenty minutes for questions, where the students leaped at the opportunity to pick my brain about Egypt’s tombs in the sand.
A girl in the front row leaned forward eagerly when I called on her to ask her question. “Have you been to the Valley before, Professor?”
I stooped over to pick up my bag and sling it over my shoulder. “A good dozen or so times, yes.”