CRAVING DADDY'S BEST FRIEND

Chapter Eight: The Afterglow of ruin

Abigail Macron

Chapter Eight: The Afterglow of Ruin

The roar of the Tokyo traffic fifty floors below was a distant, muted hum, entirely detached from the heavy, sweat-slicked quiet of the penthouse suite. The morning sun had climbed higher, casting sharp, blinding geometric blocks of golden light across the dark hardwood floor, illuminating the tangled ruins of my knitted dress and the torn lace of my panties discarded near the wall.

I lay across the expansive, minimalist platform bed, the crisp Egyptian cotton sheets twisted around my waist. My skin felt hypersensitive, flushed and tingling with the residual heat of a fire that had finally broken its containment. Every muscle in my body felt heavy, a delicious, aching exhaustion that was entirely new to me.

Beside me, the mattress shifted.

Caleb sat on the edge of the bed, his back turned to me. Even in the soft morning light, his silhouette was intimidating—a broad expanse of muscled shoulders, the long line of his spine tapering down to his waist, his skin still bearing the faint, red marks of my fingernails where I had clung to him for dear life. He had pulled a dark silk robe over his lower half, but it hung loosely, a fragile barrier against the raw reality of what we had just done.

He was quiet. Too quiet. The ruthless, consuming alpha who had claimed me against the wall only an hour ago was gone, replaced by a tense, rigid stillness that made a cold knot of anxiety form in my stomach.

"Caleb?" I whispered, my voice sounding small, cracked, and entirely stripped of the bravado I had walked into the room with.

He didn't turn around immediately. He reached for the pack of cigarettes on the nightstand, lit one with a heavy silver lighter, and took a long, slow drag. The sharp, acrid scent of tobacco mixed with the lingering, musky aroma of our skin and my expensive perfume.

"You need to get dressed, Abigail," he said, his voice dropping into a flat, gravelly register that felt like a bucket of ice water poured over my bare shoulders.

I sat up, pulling the sheets tight against my chest, the warmth evaporating from my veins. "What? Caleb, look at me."

He finally turned his head, looking at me over his shoulder. The dark, desperate hunger that had consumed his eyes during the storm was entirely gone, locked away behind a wall of pure, professional detachment. It was the face he wore when he was liquidating a company or cutting his losses on a bad investment.

"We made a mistake," he said calmly, blowing a stream of gray smoke toward the high ceiling. "A massive, catastrophic mistake. I let my guard down, and you... you knew exactly which buttons to push."

"A mistake?" I echoed, a sharp, bitter laugh escaping my lips as the sting of his words hit me. I leaned forward, completely uncaring that the sheet slipped slightly, exposing the dark bruises his fingers had left on my collarbone. "You didn't look like you were making a mistake when you tore my clothes off, Caleb. You didn't sound like you were making a mistake when you told me I belonged to you." Did you?

A muscle jumped violently in his jaw, the only crack in his armor. He stood up, towering over the bed, looking down at me with an expression that was a complex mix of anger and suffocating guilt.

"I was out of my mind, Abby!" he growled, his voice cracking with the first real emotion he’d shown since the afterglow. He threw the cigarette into a glass tray on the desk, stepping closer to the bed. "Do you have any idea what the fallout of this is? Your father is my business partner. He is my closest friend. He trusts me with his empire, and more importantly, he trusts me with you. If David finds out that I laid a hand on his daughter—in a hotel room on a corporate trip that he funded—it won't just destroy our business. It will destroy him." It will destroy us.

"Then he won't find out," I argued, my voice rising as defiance fought through the hurt. I stood up, wrapping the silk sheet around my body like a makeshift toga, refusing to look small beneath his gaze. "Jasmine knows, and she’s on our side. My dad is clueless. We can keep this between us, Caleb. We can have this."

"Have what?" Caleb stepped into my space, his large hands coming up as if to grab my shoulders, but he stopped himself, his fingers curling into tight fists before dropping back to his sides. The restraint was back, and it was agonizing. "A secret affair in dark hallways and international hotel rooms? Slipping around like thieves behind David's back? You deserve a hell of a lot more than a man who has to hide you in the shadows, Abby. And I am forty years old. I should have had the goddamn decency to walk away."

"I didn't want you to walk away!" I cried out, a hot tear finally escaping my eye and tracking down my cheek, ruining the last remnants of my makeup. "I've been waiting for you to stop looking at me like a child for years. I came across the world for this, Caleb. You can't just take what you wanted and then put me back on a shelf."

Caleb closed his eyes, drawing in a sharp, ragged breath. For a second, the mask slipped again, and I saw the immense weight of the torment he was carrying. He reached out, his thumb gently wiping the tear from my cheek. His touch was incredibly tender, a sharp contrast to his harsh words.

"I'm not putting you on a shelf, kiddo," he whispered, the old nickname sounding like a death sentence. "I'm trying to save us both from a wreckage we can't recover from."

Before I could reply, the heavy electronic chime of the suite’s front door echoed through the quiet room.

We both froze, our breathing stopping in unison.

Caleb’s eyes snapped to the digital clock on the nightstand. It was 8:30 AM. His first briefing with the local acquisition team wasn't for another hour, and Jasmine had promised to keep the concierge occupied.

"Caleb? You in there, man?"

The voice boomed through the speaker system connected to the outer entryway. It was loud, familiar, and devastatingly clear.

It was my father. David Macron had flown into Tokyo early.