The Glass Slipper (Cinderella 3)

“Win…”

“I have an early meeting tomorrow.”

“You’re going to renege on your deal? Since when, Constantine?” Her eyes are hot with anger. “This isn’t your style.”

“And fucking poor, lying maids isn’t either but here we are. It appears I’m doing all sorts of new activities I’d never see myself doing.” I slide out of bed to start yanking on my clothes.

“You can’t do this,” she hisses, sitting up on her knees, hot as hell naked and temptation personified. “Don’t go. This is a breach of our agreement.”

“Sue me.” I smirk at her. “We both know I have more money. You’ll run out of steam long before I do, little girl.”

“This makes you a liar, Win.” Her gaze hardens. “This makes us even.”

I throw on the rest of my clothes and then start for the door. “I’ll send Daniel again in the morning. Don’t be late.”

“Winston!”

“Go to sleep, Ash. For fuck’s sake, just go to sleep and let me go.”

* * *

Turns out, I obviously didn’t want to sleep alone. My dick and my mind both punished me after walking out on Ash last night. I was tortured with memories of the evening which only served to make my dick hard. I’d slept fitfully and now I’m grumpier than usual.

“Sir,” Deborah says from my doorway, “your eight o’clock is here.”

“Send him in. And bring me more coffee.”

She scurries off. Seconds later, Ulrich saunters in. At six and a half feet tall, Ulrich is a Russian giant who towers over everyone in sight. Since he was tall for his age, growing up, his mother would use him to help her con men out of money. He’d pretend to be her abusive boyfriend or some shit, and when the mark came to her aide, she’d rob them clean. Poor Ulrich took a lot of ass beatings, hence his horribly crooked nose, but it also made him a bit fearless. Once, he tried to scam Dad, before I was born, but my father was quicker at putting the pieces together than most men. When he called them out on it, Ulrich’s mother took off running, leaving her son to deal with the aftermath. Dad offered him a job, at first getting information from enemies, and it only escalated from there. The only caveat was he wasn’t allowed to go crawling back to his manipulative mother who used him for her own gain. In return, Dad took care of Ulrich. Now, all these years later, I’m the one taking care of him.

Luckily, he’s worth his weight in gold.

Ulrich drops into a seat, reeking of stale cigarette smoke, smacking his file folder down on the desk with a thwap and sending his smell my way. It makes my eye twitch knowing the scent will linger. If my maid wasn’t so useless, I’d have her do something about it.

“What do you have for me?” I ask, cutting straight to business.

As promised, Ulrich pulls a photo from his file folder and slides it over to me. “This for starters.”

I pick the aged photograph up by the corner and bring it closer so I can see it. My heart does a regretful twist at the image of Meredith when she was younger, around the age when I’d stopped dating her if I had to guess. Her golden-blond hair curled under back then giving her a wholesome look. Little did I know, it was all an act. She had no problems luring Vincent Morelli into her bed. My gaze slides over to the other woman in the picture. Manda. Back then she was older, maybe nineteen or twenty or so. You can’t tell for sure that Manda is pregnant, but the way her hand cradles her stomach, it’s pretty obvious.

“They go way back,” Ulrich explains.

“I didn’t know they were friends back then.”

Deborah hurries in to drop off my coffee and keeps her eyes averted while doing so. When she’s gone, Ulrich speaks again.

“It wasn’t common knowledge,” he says, tossing another picture of them, this time with them both in evening gowns. “Back when Manda got pregnant, she was barely making a name for herself in the social circle. She’d come into some money, though she remained tightlipped about it. After you and her split, Meredith had gone to some rich women’s retreat up north.” He shoves a copy of an email at me. “They were both there. It was after that they were inseparable.”

I thumb through the file. It amazes me how resourceful this guy is. Over the years, he’s learned some tricks and made some connections. Plus, he has damn near an unlimited amount of my money to work with and make shit happen.

“Check this out,” he says, thumping the folder, “half of those botched surgeries I found the other day were of women who they also went to this retreat with.”