MORE THAN HE PAID FOR

Chapter 5: Ashford

Tonight has been a monumental f**k-up. One not even my firm could rescue, and we specialise in risk and disaster planning.

Storming out of the Hotel Belmont’s casino a few hours earlier, I’d been on a personal mission.

Not to f**k and pay a hooker, Obviously. But everyone makes mistakes.

That’s a lie. I don’t make mistakes. I’m normally more switched on. But Cora…she did something to me.

She made me smile for a start. Her long, tanned legs had my c**k pulsing within seconds. Her coy, unsure smile. That burnt orange dress was designed to make every man within one hundred metres obey her. Her laugh acted like a magician teasing a ribbon or wire out from between my ribs.

But it doesn’t matter now.

How I’ve never come harder, f****d deeper, fallen quicker. Cora was still a mistake. An expensive one at that.

That cellphone of hers.

It slammed the hours we spent together into sharp, painful focus.

Walking into her shitty hotel bar in the first place wasn’t even the first mistake I made tonight.

Trying to shed the icy coldness that’s creeping into my daily life, I’d agreed to meet the latest girl my brother Sol had decided to set me up with, Melinda.

Dumping the suit jacket and rolling my sleeves up, I’m not a household name. It should be possible for me to just be a guy, trying to connect with a woman. To find that spark. The one my father won’t shut up about.

It was depressingly, instantly clear that my bank balance was the chirpy Melinda’s sole focus. That and keeping her arm around mine, flashing triumphant glares at everyone.

This nonsense makes Sol a prize i***t.

He knows I want everything. The whole package.

I won’t settle for less. Sol swore blind to me Melinda, a friend of his girlfriends, had potential. “She’s someone Dad would absolutely love, you know. Big heart,” he purred over the phone.

Sol knows that’s the way to make me agree to most ideas. The dickhead.

We might look similar, dark eyes, hair and gym-honed bodies but he smiles much more easily than me. Not always sincerely either. But then he’s a stockbroker, so he needs that fake smile ready on command.

When we meet up for drinks next week in the city, I’m going to tell Sol he is forbidden from suggesting any more dates.

He’ll laugh when I described how Melinda simpered and pouted from the second I walked into the red and gold-carpeted casino at Hotel Belmont.

Sol knows my type. Honey-coloured hair lures me in every time.

Why Sol thinks I want a fake pout, teeth and breasts, I don’t know. I despair of my brother sometimes.

In the casino I’d tried talking to Melinda about roulette. The odds, the way it seems easier than other games but isn’t. How important the green double-zero is. But her eyes only lit up when I confirmed I was a CEO of a risk-management firm.

“So, I think I read that your company is listed?”

“Sorry?” I couldn’t hide my grimace. A full internet search on me before meeting? It creeps me the hell out. Surely a first date should be a level playing field.

“Your company? On the stock exchange?”

“London, yes.”

“Oh, that’s fascinating.”

“Is it? Why? Tell me.”

Maybe that was cruel, but Melinda’s pouting, slightly-too-shiny face twisted with confusion. No answer came. “That’s what I thought,” I muttered bitterly.

It isn’t fascinating. It’s work. Its statistics, professional fault-finding and fixing. It’s not what I want to spend my Friday nights talking about.

That’s why I flung my remaining chips down on double zero. Ditch the date by pretending to be annoyed about the inevitable roulette loss. Easy plan.

Only, for the first time in years, that goddamn number came up. Double zero. My $1500 became $52500 in seconds.

Melinda squealed at the chips, her hands wrapped around mine. I grunted, passing her chips worth $2500 and getting her hand off mine. “I have to go. Excuse me. Have a nice night Melinda.”

“Call me! Ashford!”

Not a f*****g chance.

But having just left fifty grand on the bedside table of a different woman, clearly I’ve still not learned my lesson.

Sighing in the elevator, Cora’s perfumed scent still fresh on my skin, I think of my father’s face. Lean and sallow from so many hospital treatments. All supposed to extend his life. They only seem to add layers of pain to his shrinking world.

Hope still fills his dark eyes when he asks the same old question. “Have you met a special girl yet?”

“No Pa.”

“Ah then what are you waiting for! I met your mother at nineteen, we were married and expecting you before she turned twenty!”

It kills me. The hope he has that I can make something happen.

Gritting my teeth as the elevator opens back out into the now-empty bar. I need to get back to the Hotel Belmont fast. Get my head clear.

Because the stupidest part about tonight, was that I thought of my father tonight, when I was with Cora. And that cannot happen.

Not when f*****g, that would have been psychotic. But before, when she made me laugh with that stupid hors d'oeuvres joke.

Cora was a livewire. A spark of something new and fresh. A girl who loved telling me what to do. Who wanted to claim my c**k like a f*****g trophy, grab me by the belt strap and make me beg.

Hazel eyes that exuded warmth, but tilted eyelids, enough to make it clear she had the naughtiest thoughts just below the surface. I felt myself trying so damn hard to win her. I wanted her laughs, her compliments, her coy little glances so badly.

Turns out Cora was just pretending. From the very start.

With Cora fast asleep, I slowly sorted out the room. In the shower I convinced myself climbing back into bed with her and grabbing a few hours of sleep was fine.

Totally normal one-night stand behaviour.

I could hold her and maybe feel her squirm against me in the morning. Wrap my arms around her, squeeze her gorgeous breasts and n*****s until she opens her legs for me. Until she called me “Ash” in that breathy little murmur.

I wouldn’t have left without her cellphone number.

We should have laughed over breakfast in bed about the hooker role-play.

But when picking up her orange dress from the floor, I saw her cellphone. Lighting up. Filled with notifications. I only went to put it back on her bedside table alongside a glass of water.

There was no snooping planned. But it lit up again, flashing notifications my eyes automatically read.

***THREE YEARS! WHERE IS THAT RING!***

***3 Yrs OMG!***

***Happy anniversary babe! Are you guys doing anything nice? XXX***

Frozen in the dark of the hotel room, a towel still slung low round my hips I tried to make sense of the messages.

Cora never mentioned a boyfriend or partner. I never asked if she was single.

Swiping the notifications away, I saw the real, gut-churning truth. Cora and some guy. A guy with washed-out grey irises and broad shoulders. I don’t like the smugness in his face, but Cora is snuggled next to him, planting a kiss to his cheek.

There is no other way to see or understand this.

I’m a fool.

When she said fifty thousand dollars, matching the exact amount of chips in my pocket, it truly felt like something was really aligning with the stars between us.

But what if she was actually in the know? Was her seat at the bar, looking into the Hotel Belmont, all to grab a sucker like me?

We said “in theory.” We joked and laughed.

Never did I think I’d ever leave those poker chips and leaving alone.

But that’s what I have to do.

It took me a few moments. I lingered and watched her sleeping for a little longer. God she’s pretty. Her honey-coloured hair twirled up into a loose bun. I know if I pulled those covers back I’d see those hickeys I left between her thighs.

In the cold, sober light of day I feel sick.

Cora has a boyfriend.

It looks like she’s getting engaged if the giddier messages are true. So she can never, not in a million years be the girl for me.

Back in my cold, beige room at the Belmont I call Sol.

“Jesus what time is it where you are?”

“Early. I need to tell you something.”

“If it’s this time, it means you’ve not had much sleep. Melinda? Yeah? It was your date tonight wasn’t it? I told you she’s a looker, and got a good heart-”

“I’m done. I know it’s what Dad wants but I’m sick of looking for the one. What he and Mom had was special. But it’s not out there. Not for me anyway.”

“Ashford, come on now. The whole point is that love, that once in a lifetime girl can get you out nowhere-”

“Don’t I f*****g know it,” I mutter to myself, instantly remembering how I felt my stomach lurch at seeing her low, bare backed dress gleaming from across the room. She stole my breath, heartbeats and fear away.

Sol’s voice turns serious. “What’s happened? Talk to me.”

Pinching my nose, I can’t face getting into it right now. “Just…stop it with the dates okay? No more.”

“Come see me next week? I’m in the city.”

“Sure. But no more blind dates. I’m out.”

“Fine. Heather was starting to doubt I was looking at apps just for you anyway.”

“Then definitely stop. You’re the only one of us who has a shot at making Dad happy.”

Hanging up the call, I flop onto my bed and wish to f**k my room didn’t face the crappy hotel across the road. I wish I had the willpower not to trace the windows and try to work out which one room 525 is.

I might have made some mistakes tonight. But I won’t be repeating them.