“I’m sorry. What?”
Alyssa huffed out a frustrated breath and plopped down in an empty chair across the room. “This is a complete waste of time. This isn’t about love. To you this is about winning and losing.”
Quentin frowned, but before he could ask Alyssa what the hell she meant by that, Dr. Turner cleared her throat. “I said that trying to understand love is a tall order. Many people spend their entire lives trying to figure it out, nurture it and even control it.”
“I’ll take control for two hundred, Alex,” Alyssa said, mimicking a Jeopardy! contestant.
“Humph.” A half smile curled Q’s lips.
“I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t add those who try to run away from love,” she said.
Once again, they had hit his category and the room fell silent.
“Have you given any more thought to calling your brother Sterling?”
I think about it all the time. “No.”
“Do you think that you’ll never be able to forgive him for the wrong you feel that he has done to you?” Dr. Turner asked.
Quentin held Alyssa’s gaze from across the room. “I’m not sure.”
“That’s different from the flat no last week,” the therapist gently reminded him.
He stopped and weighed his words carefully. “Trust…is still an issue.” He shifted in his chair and ignored the way his beautiful mirage frowned at him. “No matter what has happened in my life, the constant power struggle between me and my father or the insane messes I found myself in, I always thought that I could trust my brothers. Sterling…Jonas. We’re each different. Granted, they are megasuccessful and now happily married with children, and probably a dog and even a white-picket fence. I never questioned their loyalty or intentions. I believed that my brothers, more than anyone, always had my best interest at heart.”
Q shook his head. “How do you learn to trust someone again after they’ve poured gasoline on that bridge and blown it up?”
“Perhaps by reaching out?” Dr. Turner suggested.
“So it’s all on me?” The idea repulsed him. “I wasn’t the one with the gasoline.”
The statement hung in the air as Q struggled to swallow the huge boulder in his throat. He even blinked back a few tears. “It’s not that I don’t miss Sterling. I do. I just don’t know how to go about forgiving him. But then when I think about my cousin Xavier—”
“Xavier King?”
Quentin nodded. “I told you about him and his brothers the last time.”
“Yes, your coveted boys’ club.”
“I believe that boys’ club is your terminology—not mine.”
“But they were who you ran to as a substitute for your real brothers since Sterling and Jonas were no longer available bachelors for you to hang out with.”
“I never said that my cousins were substitutes.”
“Weren’t they?”
Quentin shifted in the chaise at the provocative question. “No, not consciously.”
Dr. Turner removed her black-rimmed glasses from her perky nose. “Do you mind if I disclose some observations that I’ve made about you?”
Quentin turned his tall frame onto his side to meet his doctor’s soft, steady, brown-eyed gaze. “You mean that I actually get to hear a little of what you spend hours jotting down on your little yellow notepad?”
She smiled reflexively as she crossed her arms over her lap. “You’re a creature of habit. You have a hard time adjusting to change. And when things don’t turn out like you expect them to—as eventually happens—you seek out those things that will give you a sense of familiarity.”
“Please.” He gave her a dismissive shake of his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? When your father cut you off financially, didn’t you rely on women to support you in a fashion that you were accustomed to instead of getting out there and making your own way?”
“Wait. I’m a successful businessman in my own right.”
“Now, but not then. And when your brothers were no longer available to pal around with, you sought out the next best thing, which is a family of cousins whose dynamic was much like your own.”
Alyssa waved her finger. “Ooooh. She really is good.”
“You’ve said that before,” Q reminded her.
“It’s still true.”
“I don’t remember us discussing this before,” Dr. Turner said.
“Sorry. Not you. I was talking to someone else,” he said before thinking.
“I see.”
He winced and waited for her to ask the obvious question again, but she surprised him and let the comment go. However, Dr. Turner’s pen went back to scribbling. Great. At this rate, I’ll be in a mental hospital by the end of summer.
“Xavier,” Dr. Turner suddenly said. “You were about to tell me something about your cousin?”
Quentin allowed himself to relax a little. “Um, yeah. I was saying that my cousin Xavier had sort of a similar situation with trust when love came knocking on his door.”
“Ah. Another player bites the dust?”
“Exactly.” Quentin laughed, but continued to nod his head. “Of all the players I thought would ride this bachelorhood thing until the wheels fell off, it was him. I mean, I can tell you some stories that would make your hair stand on end.”
“You two are best friends?”
“Absolutely,” Q said, nodding, but then his smile slowly started to fade. “Of course, after his older brother Eamon married Victoria, I should have seen the handwriting on the wall.”
“Oh? How so?”
“Bad things usually happen in pairs.”
“I always heard they happened in threes,” she corrected thoughtfully.
“That explains a lot,” he grumbled with a roll of his eyes, and then stared back up at the ceiling. “Like I was saying, Xavier had to overcome some major trust issues. But then again, maybe all it takes is for the right woman to come along….”
Chapter 1
“Welcome to The Dollhouse Atlanta,” Xavier King exclaimed, sweeping his huge, muscular biceps toward the newly renovated club. The enormous white stone building looked more like a high-end shopping mall than a gentlemen’s club smack dab in the middle of downtown Atlanta. “So what do you think?”
This latest renovation of the Atlanta club started off as a small-scale repair project, much of which resulted from the damage done by an old-fashioned bar fight involving a patron who had tried his best to permanently rearrange his cousin Q’s face. But once Xavier got started, the project got bigger and bigger, to the point that the once modest-size club now rivaled the infamous Cheetah Lounge in square footage.
A little-known fact was that Atlanta was the strip-club capital of America. So Xavier took the attitude that The Dollhouse needed to go big or go home. He went big. Really big.
Quentin Hinton, Xavier’s best friend and cousin, stepped out of his black Mercedes and cocked his head so that he could get a better view of the exterior. “Hmm.”
Climbing out of the backseat of the car, Xavier’s younger brother Jeremy