Free Trophy by SE Chardou

coming here today was to ask me a favor about using the recording studio. You’re welcome to it. No one uses it much except friends of Richard. When are you planning on starting your work with Ella Jade? I can call and make arrangements—”
    “No need. I know all the artists and producers who use Richard’s studio and I’ve already cleared the time with them.” He pulled away as the palms of his hands replaced his face against her soft skin. “So, we’re on tonight for dinner, right?”
    “Well, since you put it that way, you make it pretty hard for a woman to refuse.” She smiled though there was still an unknown sparkle in her eyes. It was almost like she sensed everything happening was too good to be true.
    “I can’t wait to see you.” He kissed her lips quickly before he turned and left her suite, closing the door behind himself.
    Dorian would have gladly worn a smirk had he not walked past Matilda who glared at him like he was the devil himself. What the fuck was up with him and old broads anyway? It almost felt like they could sense his true intentions.
    Then again, it might have been his situation. It wasn’t ideal, and Richard was loyal to many people in his life though they weren’t always the most important. Unfortunately, the man had been obsessed with making money and breaking free from a tortured childhood. He could understand why the deceased producer acted the way he did but that certainly wasn’t condoning the behavior itself.
     

     
    Although Dorian had promised himself he wouldn’t try to pressure Alyssa to have sex with him, all thoughts of what he shouldn’t do left his mind as he began to prepare dinner. He didn’t keep much food in his home and shopped several times a week at Whole Foods or Gelson’s to ensure the foods he liked were fresh at all times.
    He had a choice of making a soup for dinner, which was a great idea because it wouldn’t weigh them down and he could still manage to get her drunk enough that she would end up back in his bed. Technically, they were taking it slow. He waited three weeks to call her and serenade her with enough flowers that had cost more money than most middle class families made in a week but it was worth it.
    In the end, he chose his favorite soup to make because it reminded him of his homeland of South Africa. True, he’d been born in the States but he still had a very beautiful piece of property in the land where he had matured from a boy to a man. He loved visiting but with his schedule, it was almost impossible to make it out to see his place more than once a year. The field hands and maids got more out of the place than he did.
    His front door opened and closed as he chopped up lobster tail and decided to add prawns to the recipe along with shallots, finely sliced onions, yams that had been peeled and chopped up along with heavy cream to the water and butter base of the soup. After adding a tablespoon of garlic to the soup base that slowly cooked on the stove in the pot, he added chopped up yams, onions and shallots to the soup pot as Ella walked into the kitchen.
    “Mmm, whatcha makin’?” she inquired in that little girl voice of hers that drove him crazy.
    Her fans might have thought it was cute she acted and sounded like a perpetual twelve-year-old desperately trying to emulate Taylor Swift. Or that her bodyguards carried her petite, one hundred and five pound frame to the limo after performances because her feet hurt from walking around in five- and six-inch heels but Dorian wasn’t amused at all.
    It was one of the major reasons why they’d broken up.
    At the age of seventeen, he was already a mercenary in South Africa, and had seen the worst of what human beings could and did do to one another over petty tribal differences, conflict diamonds or any of the other precious minerals that were raped from the continent he still considered his true home.
    Someone like Ella didn’t get him at all and never would. She didn’t have the