While Nina worked on retrieving the pamphlet from a file, Lucian brushed his fingers over my arm to get my attention. “Are you okay with staying?”
“I think so.”
His eyes were warm with approval when his hand squeezed mine. “Nina will show you what to do. I’ll be in the far left corner of the common room, but I’ll be able to see you if you need me.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I give the girls legal advice.”
He tried to release my hand, but I hesitated. A nagging sense of uncertainty plagued me when I realized he would be talking to these girls about the intimate details of their lives. Girls like me… the broken ones. And I wasn’t sure, but I had a suspicion that was what Lucian liked. Suddenly, I didn’t want him to go.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing.” I bit my lip.
This was a dangerous situation, and I needed to extricate myself before I admitted something awful. These feelings I had toward him—this possessiveness, the jealousy—they weren’t normal. I had been with him twice, and it was as if I’d forgotten the reason we were even together. He was blackmailing me, and I was his captive. I couldn’t develop feelings for him, especially when I knew he could never return them. Lucian was soft with me. He was even gentle at times. But it didn’t mean anything to him, and I would do well to remember that.
“You should go,” I told him. “I’ll be fine.”
He hesitated briefly and then left. I turned my focus to Nina as she offered me the pamphlet.
“Here you go,” she said. “Just give it a quick read and let me know if this seems manageable.”
“Thanks for helping out,” Luna said. “Arts and crafts can get kind of crazy.”
I looked around the room, which was, in fact, a madhouse. “What do we do?”
“Amber runs the class and gives the littles instructions,” Luna explained. “We just need to walk around and keep an eye on them. Make sure nobody glues their fingers together or anything like that.”
I smiled. “Sounds easy enough.”
“You might need to stop and help them too. Some of them are fairly shy and don’t speak up when they need help.”
I scanned over the group of what I guessed to be about fifteen children. “Are any of them yours?”
Luna laughed. “No way. I love kids, but the best thing about these is you can return them to their mothers when they’re done.”
“Sounds about right,” I agreed.
I tried to focus on the kids, but between the chaos, my eyes found their way to Lucian more than a few times. He was sitting at a table in the corner, just as he said, and there was a separate female chaperone present for each of his meetings. It made me feel a little better to know that everything was strictly professional, but Luna must have noticed my distraction because when I glanced back at her, she was looking at him too.
“Is that your boyfriend?” she asked.
I didn’t know what to say, but I was wearing my wedding band, so I figured I should at least give her a half-truth. “Husband.”
Her brows furrowed. “He’s been coming in here for a long time. I had no idea he was even married.”
“It’s recent,” I told her.
She smirked. “The honeymoon phase, huh?”
My cheeks heated as I thought of Lucian inside me. “Something like that.”
“I could only dream of finding a guy like that someday,” Luna sighed.
I wanted to know more about her story, but I wasn’t quite sure how to approach it. “How long have you been here?”
“In Vegas?”