I realized that this was not a healthy way to conduct a relationship with the private investigator whom I’d hired to hunt down the woman who’d abandoned my child. I also realized that two-timing her and my child’s therapist could go disastrously wrong. Yet, I’d always liked messy, and mixing business and pleasure was a great idea—if you didn’t mind the blowup and knew how to leverage the pleasure part to your own benefit.

Amanda worked extra hard for me. Sonya saw Luna twice as much as any other kid at her clinic.

And then there was another thing that kept me drawn to them: convenience.

As far as my family, parents, and friends were concerned, I haven’t touched a chick since Val fucked off to God-knows-where, and I wanted to keep it that way. I didn’t want them to try to set me up with a woman, knowing I was in the market for one. Didn’t want them to keep tabs, and to tell me how goddamn wrong it was to be alone, and how I needed to settle down.

Luckily, Amanda and Sonya didn’t see me as more than a hot piece of ass who paid a healthy fraction of their salaries and fucked them so raw and hard (with a rubber—lesson learned) that they needed a whole week to recover. Amanda unclasped her white lace bra from behind and it slid off of her arms. It looked like heaven against her chocolate skin.

“Still looking,” she murmured, lighting a joint between her rosy lips.

“Where now?”

“Brazil. Trying to figure out if she’s staying with her relatives there.” Val’s mother lived in Chicago. She’d run away from Val’s abusive father in Rio when Valenciana was three years old. The chances of finding Luna’s mother in Brazil were slim, but after three years and no news, I was going on a wild goose chase. Money wasn’t an issue these days, though it still felt weird spending it on such an abstract cause. Ever since Valenciana decided to fuck off, I’d been searching for her relentlessly. It wasn’t the leaving part I cared about; I’d given up on her acting as a mother long ago. I wanted to make it official. Wanted her to sign over custody rights to me. If Val decided to waltz into my life again—which wasn’t that farfetched, since she loved money, and I had plenty—Luna not speaking at four would be something she could exploit in court to get her way. Because if Val took Luna, she would get enough child support to sustain her love for everything designer and expensive.

And if there was one thing I’d definitely never survive or allow, it was someone taking my kid away from me.

Amanda walked over to where I leaned on the window, still in her kitten heels, a Caribbean goddess who had no time for a husband or kids herself. She stopped by my wet bar (so nineties, but I’d been a poor kid back then and that was my dream, and Old Trent worked part-time on making Young Trent’s dreams come true), and plucked a bottle of limited edition Jameson. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but after butting heads with a teenybopper today and having her scrawny ass refuse me, a little sip wouldn’t hurt. Amanda sat on the bed and patted the velvet linen beside her, and I sat next to her, pressing my head against her bare tits as she poured the liquor into my mouth from above.

“I feel inclined to tell you, Rexroth, you’re probably not going to find Val. No one cares if you cross the border into Mexico, never mind farther south. Val didn’t even need burner phones, a darknet email address and a fancy, fake identity. She could likely skip to a beach town and stay there with a friend, or pick up an odd job. She sold most of the things you’d purchased for her prior to her disappearance and had a healthy sum of child support, which could tide her over for a long time.”

I felt the burn of the liquor slithering down my throat and wondered how the fuck Dean could have been an alcoholic in the past. Booze depressed me. Plus, I found myself doing stupid shit when I was drunk. Like writing notes about my daughter and showing them to her therapist. I plucked the joint from Amanda’s lips and tucked it between mine, tilting my head back and puffing out a ribbon of sweet-scented smoke skyward. Amanda’s coal black hair engulfed my pecs as she leaned to kiss my bare shoulder, across the tattoo I’d gotten right before college, when I was sitting at home with a broken ankle and burning time was a priority.

“Fuck,” was my sophisticated answer to her little speech. My dick was already hard and thick. She sucked on my neck, declaring her intentions by biting my shoulder. The air conditioner in the room hummed between us and I listened closely for noise from the outside. Luna was fast asleep in the other wing of the penthouse, her room right next to Camila’s. She would never meet Amanda. She would never know what her daddy did at night.