Chapter 64: Her One Boy and Her Promise or First Client, Gift-wrapped.

A while later Damon was steering the G-Wagon away from Blackwood through the dark New York streets, traffic finally thinning enough to let him actually enjoy the thing instead of crawling along behind somebody doing thirty in a lane engineered for people with places to be.

Good trade. He’d made worse ones today.

What Damon didn’t know was that several buildings behind him, Celeste Bellamy was watching the G-Wagon leave.

Unlike most of Blackwood, Celeste didn’t share her dorm. The whole unit was hers — two bedrooms and a living room, though only one of them looked like anywhere a nineteen-year-old actually slept. The other had no bed, no dresser, nothing so quaint as furniture for living. Just screens. Tens of them; keyboards, spare phones, a nest of drives, routers, machines tucked into the shadows under the desks, and enough cabling to make the whole room look less like a study and more like the inside of something that shouldn’t legally have a residential address.

She sat in the middle of it, one leg folded beneath her. One screen held a map. Another held the G-Wagon sliding off campus. Several more were open to things nobody could’ve walked in and understood fast enough to stop.

The G-Wagon rolled farther and farther away.

Celeste lifted a hand toward the screen and waved her fingers at it, slow.

"Bye, Damon."

A smile spread across her face, unhurried and warm.

’Gods, he’s so cute.’

Heck no, he was not; objectively, factually, he was not — Damon Corvin Viremont was several things, but cute was a genuine stretch, and even handsome came with an asterisk depending on which member of his family you asked on which day.

His whole life, people and her whole family had wondered about it, openly, at dinner; why a girl like Celeste — the Bellamy name, obscene money, a mind that made adults twice her age quietly excuse themselves from conversations, and a face that turned heads clean around when she crossed a courtyard — could have had half the sons in their circles circling her like gulls, doing absolutely nothing to earn it.

If her personality had come out even slightly within normal parameters, elite families would’ve been in a bidding war to get their boys near her.

Instead, Celeste had exactly one recurring interest:

Damon.

And no one in his or her family had ever once understood why.

She watched the G-Wagon vanish off the edge of the last camera and moved her fingers back to the keys, unbothered. She didn’t need to physically trail him anywhere. Knowing where he was going had always worked better than following, and it left her hands free.

_

By the time Damon reached the estate, he’d driven the whole way home in a manner best described as contemplative,which was a generous word for slow. The gates parted ahead of him, he rolled the G-Wagon up to the house, parked it, went inside, traded a few words with whoever crossed his path, and made straight for his room.

His clothes hit the floor before he reached the shower, and the water came on cold. Very, aggressively cold — because his head was still too full and freezing his own balls off sounded structurally simpler than sitting on the edge of the bed thinking about Camilla’s feet, Charlotte’s chest, Marguerite’s three infuriating percent, and Celeste’s smile, all while acknowledging that his dick had, objectively, been through more plot today than any of his actual classes.

He stood under the spray with his head bowed, water sheeting through his hair and running off his shoulders, and let the one question that had ridden shotgun the entire drive home finally sit down and make itself heard.

Should he actually let Celeste run his whole path?

He already knew he couldn’t do it alone.

That wasn’t some revelation she’d handed him this afternoon — he’d known from the start that if the Service Path ever got serious, he’d eventually need somebody else in it. Scheduling. Screening. Security. Payments. Privacy. Locations. Clients canceling, clients moving times, clients getting attached, and every other complication that came bundled free with the business of secretly sleeping with wealthy women whose lives were already knotted beyond reason.

He just hadn’t bothered thinking about any of it yet, because — if he was being honest with himself under the cold water — none of that was the fun part. He’d built the bedroom and skipped the house, exactly like she’d said.

Rich boy problem. Genetic, maybe.

Celeste had forced him to think about it.

And then she’d promised that if he handed her the wheel, he’d never have to think about any of it again — which was precisely the kind of offer that made the back of his neck itch. Then she’d sweetened it past the point of comfort: if he didn’t believe she could deliver, all he had to do was say the word, and she’d hand him his first client, gift-wrapped.

Damon pushed wet hair off his forehead and stared at the tile.

That sounded far too convenient.

’She could just pay somebody to do it.’

She had the money; she could find some older woman, wave a stupid number at her, coach her to act like she genuinely wanted this, ship her over. Easy.

Except that proved nothing, and worse, it didn’t fit the target market. They weren’t after random mature women you could pull off an app and rent by the hour. They wanted powerful women — businesses, families, reputations, and enough of their own money that whatever Celeste could offer wouldn’t so much as register as temptation.

Then he thought of the uglier option.

’Blackmail.’

That one he believed instantly and it was easier to believe than the paying, which said something unflattering about the picture of Celeste already assembling itself in his head: Find a powerful woman, get leverage, squeeze her into being client number one, then present the result like a proof of concept with a bow on it.

Damon wiped the water out of his eyes: ’Fuck. She could actually do that and she’d probably enjoy the paperwork.’

But the longer it turned over in his head, the less it held up.

Say she blackmailed the first one. Then what — blackmail the second? The third, the fourth and string the whole Service Path together on threats until it collapsed under its own weight? That wasn’t a business but a hostage situation with a subscription model, and it wouldn’t survive five clients, worse, land him in trouble.

Their first woman wasn’t supposed to be a hostage. She was supposed to be the bridge and the foundation, the first door into circles that only opened from the inside and if she enjoyed herself and trusted that the discretion held, and came back on her own, then eventually she’d whisper his name to another woman she trusted, and that was the moment the Service Path actually started to breathe.

Celeste knew that. Knew it better than he did, probably.

She wasn’t going to torch the single most important relationship in the entire plan just to win an argument on day one. She was insane — he’d fully accepted that — but insane and stupid were different animals, and Celeste wasn’t within a mile of stupid.

He stood in the freezing water a while longer before something in his own thinking finally snagged.

Their first client.

Their bridge.

Their Service Path.

When the fuck had it become their anything?

He hadn’t agreed to partner with her. Hadn’t shaken a hand, signed a thing, said a single word that resembled yes or I trust you — and he pointedly did not trust her. And yet somewhere between that classroom and this shower, his brain had quietly started running the entire operation like Celeste Bellamy was already a fixture in it. Already inside the walls and already reffering with a their.

"...Fuck."

He dragged both hands down his face and tried, deliberately, to look at the whole thing from a colder angle.

Celeste was obsessed with him.

That wasn’t in question anymore, wasn’t even interesting to debate — it was just weather now, a fixed condition of his life going forward.

And what did every single person obsessed with someone have in common?