His Naughty Lessons
Chapter 104: Single Dad

Chapter 104: Single Dad

** Eli **

Could a day get any worse? Eli squinted up at the blazing sun as he emerged from the exclusive lobby of the lounge, wondering if the answer should be no, it couldn’t possibly be.

He should’ve seen it coming though. All it took was the right questions to ask, the right person to run into, the right revelation to hit. After spending an entire week processing all the complicated and confusing feelings in his head, he shouldn’t be surprised that this was what he arrived at — the reality he had been too much of a hypocrite to admit to himself all along ...

"Eli!"

His steps halted at the familiar voice. What was Harper doing, still coming for him after all that shitshow?

"Eli," she called again, this time making him turn around in his tracks. She jogged up to him, and she looked ... worried, so utterly different from that excited girl painting a silly bird on his face mere moments ago.

"I’m sorry for how things turned out in the lounge," she blurted before she could even fully stop in front of him. "I shouldn’t have done that facepaint on you ... Vanessa wouldn’t have gotten so mad then, and you would’ve been able to talk it out more calmly with her. I—"

"You didn’t do a single thing wrong, Harper," Eli cut her off. How could this girl be such an angel, blaming herself for what happened when she should be the one angry with him? "I messed it up, and it had nothing to do with you. I’m so sorry for getting you dragged into this and" — he ran a hand down his face, offended and ashamed at the same time — "Vanessa had no right to judge you like that."

"... Like what?" Harper stared at him blankly, and it seemed to take her a moment to remember that the other woman had called her a "downgrade". A word that almost made Eli lose it and make a scene right at the center of the club. "Oh, it’s nothing. She was just angry. You should know better than taking angry women’s words seriously." She gave him a lighthearted smile.

Eli was not in the right mood to agree with her though. "She was angry, but rightfully so." He shook his head with a scoff. "And she wasn’t wrong about the other things she said ... about me."

A playboy with nothing but a goodlooking face, fooling around and changing women faster than changing clothes.

"Eli!" Harper didn’t take long to register the reference this time. "What she said about you wasn’t fair at all! You’re not—"

"You haven’t seen me enough around other people, Harper. You don’t know that side of me." He cut her off again with a snap, irritation overtaking him. She had no idea about the true reality that was bothering him this whole time, did she? "The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Have you ever wondered why my father lived here in Davenshire, instead of at home with his son?"

The abrupt change of topic clearly surprised Harper. She stilled, as if uncertain if she had heard it right. This was a topic they had never discussed in all the thirteen years they’d known each other — she was always kind and considerate like that, never wanting to pry into things that made him uncomfortable.

"You don’t have to tell me," she said after a little while. "Chelsea didn’t mean to go that direction with the question. I didn’t tell her that we don’t talk about your family."

"Then maybe it’s time we start talking about it." Eli let out a small, bitter laugh. "Not like it’s that complicated. My father has a second family here, that’s all. Another wife that he married in a different state. He cared about this family more — or maybe he was needed here more, I didn’t know and didn’t want to know which way it was — so that was where he decided to live."

Harper’s hand flew to her mouth in a silent gasp.

"Before we moved to that house in your neighborhood, my mother and I lived on the west coast, whereas his other family lived — still lives — here." Saying it in present tense felt weird, as if the haunting past was still fresh in front of him. "He had businesses running in both cities and traveled frequently in between. Can you imagine that neither woman had ever found out about the other? All those years, when he was away for months at a time building his cross-country finance empire, we never knew what was really happening. My mother was proud of his success. I was proud of him, and we thought that mere distance never stopped him from loving us as much as he could."

"Eli ..." Harper said softly. The look in her eyes was sad, full of pity.

Eli didn’t want her pity, but it was hard to stop the bitter and angry thoughts overflowing his mind now. "He was careful with things," he continued. "Different phone numbers for each city, different assistants for each company, perfect planning that left no suspicious traces on either side. Joggling two lives like there were two of him. And it all worked out so flawlessly for over a decade ... Until my mother got a phone call one day from ’her daughter’s elementary school’ in Davenshire, telling her she needed to head to the hospital for an emergency. It took her a long conversation to confirm that the call wasn’t just a wrong number ... that her husband actually had another marriage somewhere else, with a daughter just a few years younger than her son."

He lowered his eyes then, not wanting to see the look Harper gave him when he finished the rest. "She was driving on the highway when that phone call came in. She shouldn’t have picked it up ... but she did, and she crashed. That was when I was sent to live with my supposedly single dad here on the east coast."