Daddy's Virgin (A CEO Boss Romance Novel)

Vanessa

I disgustedly shoved a bookmark in my book and put it on the coffee table, having read the same line over and over about ten times without really taking in anything that it said. I just couldn’t seem to focus on the words, or on anything else, for that matter. I desperately wanted to call up Trethan, to ask him to come over and help me get out of this funk, but I knew that he was out with Brent, having one final night together before Brent moved to Helena. I had to respect that.

I only hoped they weren’t having too much fun. I knew the kinds of things that he and Brent got up to. Even if I trusted them not to be doing drugs now, with Brent just recently cleaning up his act, I was worried that together, out at the Roasted Bison, Trethan might start chatting up some other woman and forget all about the thing that we had.

Not that we really had much of a thing. We hadn’t discussed what we were to one another. For all I knew, we were just casually fucking, as far as he was concerned. He would be well within his rights to sleep with someone else if he wanted to. It wasn’t as though I was his girlfriend. Not anymore.

I swallowed hard, fighting an irrational surge of jealousy at the thought of Trethan with someone else. I was tempted to head down to the Roasted Bison myself, just to check things out, but I reminded myself again that this was meant to be one last guys’ night before Brent moved out of town. It wouldn’t be fair for me to intrude on that. And, I didn’t want to seem like one of those girls, who couldn’t go one night without their man. Trethan would never put up with that, nor should he have to.

Anyway, I knew exactly why I couldn’t concentrate on anything. It was this gallery business.

I still couldn’t figure out how to make up the remainder of the money. At this point, I considered lying to the bank to get the money. What if I applied for a student loan, but instead of applying it toward college courses, I put it into funding the gallery? The gallery could be counted as an internship project, couldn’t it? At least in some tangential way?

I knew that was wrong, but I couldn’t come up with any legitimate way to raise thousands of dollars in a short amount of time.

I started to get worried, too. Not because I didn’t think that things were going to happen in due time. Not because I was worried about having to move out of White Bluff at the end of the summer, my dreams unfulfilled for now. Although I really, really hated the idea of leaving Trethan again, especially knowing how badly he’d taken things that last time I’d left.

No, the main worry was Dad. His heart was in the right place, and I knew he was just trying to do whatever he could to support his baby girl. He’d always tried his best to give me the world, and that had only increased since Mom had died. But at the same time, I didn’t want him to do something drastic like sell the ranch or cash in on his savings.

As much as I hated to admit it, Dad was getting older. At the moment, he wasn’t having any problems getting things done around the ranch, especially not with Trethan helping out as much as he could. But there would come a time soon enough, when Dad wouldn’t be able to do much around the ranch anymore. I didn’t want him to have to keep slaving away on the ranch because he couldn’t provide for himself otherwise.

And not knowing how long it would take before the gallery took off meant I couldn’t plan to help Dad out, either, if he needed me to. Not that I thought he would accept my money anyway, even if it was money earned because he had sacrificed his own retirement funds to help me get the business off the ground.

The main problem was that the ranch had never turned that much of a profit. It had always done all right, of course. But Dad emphasized having fair rates for our riders and boarders, building a community rather than an empire. And there were always those things that could devastate a ranch, like diseases. Or even just years when there weren’t that many people interested in boarding their horses for the summer. That also happened sometimes.

But the ranch was still home, and I wasn’t going to risk anything happening to it.

It wasn’t just Dad who wanted to help me out with the gallery, though. Julie called me nearly every day to discuss options for funding, to see if we couldn’t brainstorm our way to something brilliant. We had yet to come up with a solution. She was busy with her own life, with taking her kid to daycare and running errands. Still, I was touched that she called and tried to devise a solution.

And then there was Trethan.

I hadn’t expected Trethan to be as interested in the gallery as he was proving to be. It all came back to what I’d said to him when he’d first asked about it: I just hadn’t thought he was all that interested in art. I still doubted he was interested in the art part of it, but it was touching how much he genuinely seemed to care about my happiness.

Or maybe he was just worried about the idea of me moving away from White Bluff again.

I grimaced. I hated the fact that Dad had mentioned that one to Trethan, but it wasn’t like I could have told him not to. Dad still didn’t know that Trethan and I were dating again. He probably suspected something was happening since I wasn’t around the ranch all that much, usually at times when Trethan also wasn’t around the ranch. But he hadn’t mentioned anything yet, and I hadn’t mentioned anything to him, either.

As soon as I told Dad that Trethan and I were seeing one another again, I was going to start getting my hopes up. I was going to start thinking that maybe Trethan was the one, that maybe we were destined to be together. We had both changed so much since high school, and maybe we could do things right this time around.

I couldn’t get my hopes up, though. As good as things were going with Trethan in my life, I couldn’t help but worry that they were all about to come crashing down soon.

For now, though, Trethan was a spot of brightness in my otherwise frustrating time here in White Bluff.

I sighed and curled up in a blanket on the couch, looking out at the night sky. It was a clear night, not a cloud to be seen, and the stars shined brightly. But with Dad off at a friend’s house for poker night and Trethan out with Brent on their guys’ night, I couldn’t help feeling lonely.

I debated calling Julie and seeing what she was up to, but I felt bad calling her this late in the evening when I knew she needed her rest. Danny was toddling around the house already, and with Liam taking some night courses over at the local college in addition to the work that he did during the day, Julie had her hands full when it came to running errands and cleaning up the house during the day. At night, she needed to relax.

Especially since she had another one on the way already.

I smiled to myself and put a hand over my own flat stomach. I wondered what that must be like, to have a child growing inside of you. Julie seemed to think of it as one of the best things in the world. And, I had to admit that Danny was pretty cute.

I wondered wildly if Trethan and I would ever have kids. We weren’t to that point yet, and once upon a time, I would never have considered him father material. But I was starting to see a different side of him, and I could only imagine what a few more years of maturity might bring to both of us.

Plus, I liked thinking about that — Trethan with a little daughter in his lap, reading her a book, teaching her to ride a bike.

It was another of those things that we’d have to talk about. I st

ill struggled to come to terms with the things that he’d admitted about his father. I had a hard time reconciling the image of the man I’d always known with the man that Trethan had known. And, I knew that Trethan must be terrified about being just like his dad.