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ChapterFourteen
Dominik
I collapsed into bed without a second thought and didn’t move until the rays of the morning sun streamed their way through my bedroom window.
I pushed myself up from the pillow, feeling the crusted mess of my drool tainting my cheek. I grinned as I pulled myself out of bed. I stretched my arms over my head and felt every joint in my back pop into place. I shivered as my muscles relaxed and tensed all at once, holding me upright as I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes.
Then, my cell phone started vibrating.
“What the fuck?” I murmured.
I snatched it off the bedside table and took a look at the flood of emails coming in my direction. I furrowed my brow as I opened them up, and very quickly the thought of breakfast fell away from my conscious mind. My research team already had files on Eden and her family ready for me. They flooded into my inbox in various emails, and I couldn’t wait to pick through them.
However, an email on that wretched boy from the banquet caught my eye, and I knew what my reading material over coffee would be.
The smell of caffeine drew me from my bedroom into the living room, but I didn’t see Eden. The only thing I heard of her were the rushed movements of her feet shuffling down the hallway before she slammed the door closed. I had half of a mind to waltz down there and tell her that as long as she was a guest in my place, she’d treat it with the respect it deserved.
But privacy was what I needed in order to give these documents my full and undivided attention.
“I’ve got work to do,” I murmured.
After fetching myself a mug of coffee and grabbing a muffin from the kitchen counter, I headed back to my desk. I sat down and opened the file on the boy, and I was shocked to find that his record was squeaky clean. The kid didn’t even have so much as a damn parking ticket and that was because the kid didn’t even have a god damn license!
And if there was anything I knew about sexual assaulters, it was that they always had some sort of a rap sheet.
His file folder was the smallest of the folders that I’d been sent. It had all of five pages of documentation, and three of those pages were his basic information. He had no sealed juvie record. He had no run-ins with the law. He’d never had the cops called on him in any fashion. I’d worked with enough scum of the earth to know when a squeaky-clean record looked suspicious, but there was nothing in the boy’s barely-there file that even remotely piqued my interest.
That is, until I got to the very last page.
“Oh, boy,” I murmured.
There were a few surveillance pictures that my in-house P.I. had taken. The dates on them were from less than twenty-four hours ago, and the sight of the boy from the banquet kissing another boy around his age halted me in my tracks. There were pictures of him holding hands with that boy and smiling with him. There was even a picture where him and the other boy were sharing a plate of fries and a milkshake.
A gay young man assaulting a young woman?
“I think not,” I whispered.
While it wasn’t hard and fast proof of anything, it sure as hell didn’t fit the profile of what I expected to see. I mean, from what his file showed me, the kid was just a senior in high school trying to pull in extra money for a disabled mother that couldn’t work. From the information my team garnered, the kid’s father ran out on them while his mother was still pregnant, and they had struggled to make ends meet ever since.
I abandoned the young man’s folder for something a bit more… robust in information. Things didn’t currently add up, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t eventually come together. I opened the first email I had been sent on Eden and her family, and the smirk that crawled across my face ached my cheeks.
I sipped my coffee as I leaned back, relishing the fact that this first file folder sent to me contained over thirty pages of information on Eden and her family alone.
And I was ready for a bit of entertainment.
As my eyes scanned the pages, there was the usual kind of information I expected to see: Eden’s mother had always been a stay-at-home mother, dedicating her attention to her children while her mechanic father worked in a garage he opened well before Eden or her sister were ever born. There were pictures of the garage; a rundown place with rust crawling up the edges of the building and cars lined up for blocks just to get in to see the man.
Those are always the best places to take a car.
The back half of that first file, however, was focused on Emily, the girl Jackson had been so smitten with. The caterer that ruined my fucking banquet. I read through how she had struggled in the world of academia before dropping out of college. Her list of dead-end jobs was damn near a page in and of itself. And when I read over the fact that Eden had donated a chunk of cash out of her own pocket to help her younger sister start her catering business, I snickered.
“So typical of you, Miss Rochere.”
I closed out that file and pulled up the next one, which was nothing but background information on Eden herself. I mindlessly picked up my muffin and took a massive bite out of it, chewing and reading and drinking in the information I had at my disposal. My team had pulled her grades from Harvard Law, and I chuckled at the fact that she was a straight-A student. She had taken on extracurriculars that she had excelled in. She had held down an on-campus job where her manager had complimented her with promotions and soaring recommendations. She was a people pleaser, just like the eldest daughters in families like hers usually were.
I was almost disappointed in how… normal she was.
However, the more I read about her, the more I wondered what made her so different from the rest of her family. I mean, her father was a mechanic, for crying out loud. Her sister couldn’t hold down a damn job until someone footed her the money she needed for a catering business that had inevitably caved into ruin on the evening of my yearly banquet. Her mother’s only ambition had been to stay at home with her children. Hell, the woman didn’t even have an Associate’s degree, much less any sort of higher education on top of her high school diploma. As far as I was concerned, more often than not children followed in their parent’s footsteps. Hell, it’s what I did. I built my company from the ground up just like my father had built his ecommerce business from the ground up.
Eden was different in that regard. She didn’t settle for menial. She didn’t settle for “okay.” She didn’t settle for “typical.”
Eden was different.
And my cock really liked “different.”
