Novel Full Chapter 1072: Asking Permission
Chapter 1072: Asking Permission
"Not long," her mother replied, with the small conspiratorial lift of an eyebrow that mothers deployed when the honest answer was far more interesting than they were prepared to share out loud. "Long enough."
Ashley narrowed her eyes. Decided, wisely, not to press.
Her mother had the settled, unreadable calm of a mother who had already finished whatever conversation she'd been having with Eros before the headlights arrived, and who was not in any mood to replay the footage for the audience.
Fine. There would be a later about this. A very thorough, very suspicious later.
But tonight Ashley had him back, and she wasn't about to waste the moment chasing whatever scandalous secrets her mother was clearly hoarding like contraband.
Eros gave her mother a small, graceful half-smile and turned his body a fraction toward her, hands still clasped behind his back like the perfect gentleman he absolutely was not.
"Since we're all outside anyway," he said calmly, "may I ask you something properly?"
Her mother tilted her head. "Please."
"I'd like to take Ashley with me."
Ashley's heart did a small, ridiculous backflip against her ribs.
Her mother didn't react on the surface. "Where."
"Paris."
"Paris."
"Tomorrow morning," Eros continued, mild as spring weather. "I'm flying out for a few weeks. I'd like Ashley to come with me. Meet my family — officially. It's long overdue."
Officially meet the family.
Ashley's mouth pressed into a small, tight smile to stop the hysterical laughter bubbling behind it.
Because the "family," of course, was not the tidy domestic unit her mother was currently picturing.
The family was a harem of mature, devastatingly accomplished women and several girls of Ashley's own age, all orbiting a teenage boy who was currently standing on her mother's front path in a coat that cost more than the house and casually lying about the nature of that word with the unruffled grace of a man who had done this many, many times before.
And then there was Madison.
Sweet, terrifying Madison, who had somehow slid into the center of the whole thing like a key into a lock and was going to be waiting on the other side of whatever private jet Ashley was about to board, greeting her with that warm, older-sister smile that whispered welcome home, finally.
Ashley wondered, in a small private corner of her head, what her mother's face would do if she knew any of it.
If she knew the polite boy asking for permission to take her daughter to Paris was not just a charming seventeen-year-old with a pretty horse.
That he was a teenager with two identities, a family built of a harem of women, an empire worth more than several small countries, and enough weight in the world that a conversation with her mother about permission to take Ashley to Paris was, from his end, a courtesy rather than a negotiation.
She glanced at her mother.
Her mother was nodding thoughtfully, looking at Eros, and — apparently — registering none of that at all. She saw a well-spoken young man asking for her blessing, and was weighing it with the quiet dignity mothers reserved for such moments.
Either she was oblivious… or she was scarily good at pretending she was.
Ashley seemed oblivious to whatever had escalated between her and Eros a few minutes ago. And maybe she was. Maybe she had tucked it somewhere, the way mothers tucked things, and would not unfold it again tonight.
Maybe she had not tucked it at all and was simply better at hiding than her mother had ever given her credit for.
Either way, it was not Ashley's hour to ask. As it was too soon—far too soon—for Eros to tell her mother who he really was.
There was no reason to. Not yet.
Was there?
No. No, there isn't.
Not tonight.
Emma, meanwhile, had given up even pretending to be cool about any of this.
She had migrated from the sidewalk onto the path, halting at a respectful distance from the grown-up conversation, arms folded the exact way Ashley's mother's were folded, and her eyes had not left Eros since he had finished the word Paris.
"Private jet?" she asked, sweetly, casually, as though she were asking what time brunch was.
Eros's mouth twitched. "Yes."
"Of course it is." Emma nodded, slowly, like this was information she had been expecting. "Are you in a royal family."
"No."
"Are you sure."
"Reasonably."
"Because you are being very evasive about it."
"I promise I'm not royal."
"That's exactly what a royal person would say."
Ashley, hugging his arm where she had relocated it to, let out a small helpless laugh into his sleeve.
Her mother's mouth was doing a careful thing that suggested she was enjoying Emma more than she was going to admit.
"Are you a CEO?" Emma asked.
"Something like that."
"How old are you?"
"Seventeen."
"How."
"Good genetics."
"How old were you when you started whatever it is you do?"
"Younger than seventeen."
"I hate you," Emma said, pleasantly. "I'm saying that with love. Ashley, I hate your boyfriend. In a loving way."
"Noted," Ashley said into his sleeve.
And as Emma carried on—innocent, oblivious, certain she had landed on some variety of secret European aristocrat and cycling through her tenth polite way of asking—Ashley thought, with a kind of dizzy affection, about how it had never once crossed Emma's mind that the boy she was interrogating was actually Peter Carter.
Despite the resemblance between Eros and Peter. Despite the same jawline, the same height, the same quiet way of holding space that made the air feel heavier around him. Despite everything. Emma simply could not see it.
She could not connect the elegant, coat-wearing figure on the front path with the boy the entire school still believed was lying half-dead in the ICU.
Her friend Madison's fiancé. Emma Carter and Sarah's step-brother. The same Peter Carter who, according to the entire student body and the world that cared to remember, was currently still in the ICU recovering from a shooting.
Emma had no way of knowing any of that.