Page 10 of The Cinderella Secret
“Josh?” she asked hesitantly. Now that the moment was here, she was feeling less confident. It had seemed so easy in her head. Just go ask Josh for Number Nine’s information and then she would find him and she could say… something. This was the part where her fantasies and plans got mixed together. In her most private thoughts, he pulled the mask off and he was gorgeous and dashing and promised to give up fighting and devote himself exclusively to her. She knew that she was probably in for a severe disappointment or, at the least, someone with cauliflower ear who barely remembered her, but at minimum she wanted to say thank you and give him back the five hundred dollars he’d loaned her. It wasn’t everyone who’d give up their last five hundred dollars and risk life and limb for a scrawny seventeen-year-old they just met. Number Nine was a hero—her hero—and she wanted him. To find him. She wanted tofindhim. Ella let out a nervous breath as Josh looked up from filling the water bottle.
“Yeah?” Josh scanned her from head-to-toe with a frown.
“Hi, I’m looking for someone and I hope you can help.” She held up the five hundred dollars in cash that she’d been able to pull from two ATMs on her way here. She really needed to start keeping cash on hand. If he wanted more she was going to have to PayPal him, and that wasn’t exactly untraceable.
“Depends on who it is,” he said. He didn’t look too impressed with her cash.
“Number Nine,” said Ella.
Josh was silent and Ella waited. “Never heard of him,” he said at last.
“Please,” said Ella. “This isn’t… I just need to talk to him.”
“Don’t know the guy,” he said.
“I can get more money.”
“This isn’t about the money,” he said firmly. “I don’t know your Number Nine. Now you need to leave before I toss you out on your ass.”
“Can you at least get him a message?”
“Read my lips, girly, I don’t know him.”
Ella opened her mouth to argue further when she heard the bellow of the security guard. “Hey! You’re not supposed to be here!”
“Tamade!”Ella swore in Mandarin and ran behind the nearest curtain. While the security guard ran after her, she cut straight through the next curtain. Three curtains later she was outside the fighter’s area. She decided that discretion was the better part of valor and headed back up the ramp to parking garage. Now that she was living in New York, she could try again later. She would find Number Nine if it was the last thing she did.
6
Jackson Deveraux – Sunday Dinner
Jackson sat in the study of Deveraux House and watched Aiden and Evan flip through papers, their voices quiet but intense as they pulled apart whatever they were working on. The fact that he didn’t know what that was bothered him. That they were getting along so well ought to have made him happy, but what he really felt was jealous. He looked across the room at Dominique to see what she thought. She stuck her tongue out at him and he cracked a smile, trying not to laugh loud enough to disturb Evan and Aiden. Youngest of the Deveraux cousins, Dominique was tall, like all of them, and slender. None of them were ever going to be heavy weights. Aiden was the thickest and he hid it behind tailored suits and casual wear with stretchy properties—as if admitting to muscles was a fashion sin. Dominique took another look at Aiden and Evan and then held up a bottle of wine and waggled it at Jackson. He nodded. She poured them both a glass and came over to him on the couch.
“I feel left out,” she said quietly, handing him his glass.
“Mm-hmm,” he agreed.
She sat down and carefully balanced her wine glass on the arm of the couch—something their grandmother would not approve of. He knew the second Eleanor entered, Dominique would whisk it away or find a coaster. Her rebellion had not yet stretched to obvious endangerment of the furniture. He also noticed that she still mostly wore slacks and formal clothes to Sunday dinner. He wondered how much longer that would last.
“Do you know what they’re working on?” she asked.
“No,” said Jackson.
“And we’re not worried about that?”
“We’re definitely worried about it,” said Jackson.
Aiden went out of his way to never appear serious about anything. His nickname in the society pages was Prince Charming. He was known for being fun, a little bit of a dumb blond, and always up for a party. Never mind that his partying had drifted to a stop the year after Jackson had arrived. Or that he had been on the dean’s list in college and currently worked for one of the top law firms in the city. Some reputations were harder to shake than others. Not that Aiden tried very hard to shake it. If anything, Aiden played into the reputation. But if Aiden was being serious, then whatever troubled his cousins was probably something that Jackson ought to know about.
Dominique removed a rubber band out of her pocket and pushed and pulled her long blonde hair into a pony tail, watching her brother and cousin with a frown. Odds were that she was thinking along the same lines as Jackson. Of all of his cousins, he and Dominique were the most on the same wavelength. He suspected that wavelength bothered her US Marshal boyfriend, Maxwell Ames. Society girls probably weren’t supposed to get along so well with their convicted felon cousins.
“Where’s Max today?” Jackson asked.
“Dinner with Grant. He’s decided to copy our family dinners and try to bully his dad into behaving like a parent.”
Jackson chuckled. Dominique’s boyfriend had a textbook passive-aggressive relationship with his father. “Well, good luck to him.”
“It’s been working for Grandma,” said Dominique. “We’re almost like actual grandchildren at this point. I mean…” She gestured to Evan and Aiden.
