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The crowd applauded for something I hadn’t been paying the slightest bit of attention to, and I moved, pushing through the crowd again with my glass of wine, my eyes locked on her. But David stepped forward, one hand positioned on the top of her back, and ushered her up the steps to the stage. I stopped in my tracks.
The man behind the podium lifted one hand as a goodbye as stepped back. David left his daughter alone with the handful of men and women standing at the edge of the stage, David took up his original position where he’d been when I’d arrived.
At the microphone.
“Thank you so much for coming this evening and raising so much for researching…” He glanced down, likely checking his notes.Don’t say kids without lungs.“…childhood interstitial lung disease.”
Thank fuck he hadn’t butchered that.
“I do have one more thing for auction if you lovely people have another minute to spare,” he grinned.
My eyes wandered for the briefest of seconds toward Ava, and to my utter shock and surprise, her wildly green eyes were already trained on me, wide as fucking saucers.Ava, I mouthed.
Her cheeks flushed pink through her makeup.
“Just to pull in a few extra dollars and maybe open the floor up to a bit of networking,” David laughed, glancing across atAva. But her eyes were still trained on me, “I’d like to offer up a dance with my daughter, Avalynn Riley.”
What…the fuck?
Ava’s head whipped toward her father. With nothing but anger on her face, she said something to him, but the music and the murmurs from the crowd drowned it out. All David did was laugh in return.
“Three hundred dollars!”
I turned, and roughly thirty people away to my left, the green side of a paddle shot into the air.Fuck.
“Five hundred!”
“Six hundred!”
Shit, shit, shit.She looked fucking mortified up there on the stage. All I could think to do in the heat of the moment was bid so she wouldn’t have to dance with a stranger, but all I had was a glass of wine, not an unused paddle in sight.
I lifted my glass instead.
“Fifteen hundred,” I challenged.
David rolled his eyes at me before being distracted by another paddle. “Two thousand!”
For fucks sake.“Three,” I said, lifting my glass again.
Stop, Ava mouthed. I shook my head.
“Five thousand!”
“Ten,” I shouted. I raised my glass.
The crowd quieted for a moment, and just as David opened his mouth to speak into the microphone, a paddle raised again. “Twenty!”
Jesus.Twenty fucking thousand dollars for two minutes with the woman who looked like she’d rather be anywhere else. How desperate were these people?
This wouldn’t stop until it hit ridiculous numbers, and the horrified look on Ava’s face as I raised my glass again onlyconfirmed that I was either saving her or damning her to hell. I wasn’t sure which one.
“Fifty thousand,” I said.
“Seriously, Adrian?” David asked, but I was hardly paying attention to him. I didn’t bother responding, and instead, I held Ava’s gaze, the whites of her eyes fully visible. Her chest and neck were bright pink as she stared down at me. David didn’t need an answer—I’d spent far more money on far more trivial things than this, and he knew that damn well. “All right, fifty thousand dollars, going once.”
I broke my gaze away from Ava as I pushed through the crowd toward the side of the stage she’d climbed up on.
“Going twice.”
