by Vivi Paige
I nearly collapsed. If I hadn’t been sitting down, I’m certain I would have fallen. He wanted me to kill Peter, the man I felt such a strong connection with, the man who I had been falling in love with.
“It’s time the Mayhem Brothers learn they are not untouchable.” Hook swept toward the exit. “Get it done. Or I will call Ivanovich myself and tell him to deal with you as well.”
Then he was gone, and I was free to let the tears go at last.
Chapter Seventeen
When you grow up around the Mayne Brothers LLC firm, you tend to get a bit jaded. Your food is always gourmet, the settings always elegant, and a whole lot of folks defer to you just because of your last name and, of course, your wealth.
So, I used to scoff at those folks who spouted clichés about how great things were, bandying about poetic words that painted flowery graffiti over the cold, hard lameness of reality. I was never going to embarrass myself like that. Or so I thought.
But after my dinner date with Belle—and I do humbly posit the theory that it was the best dinner date in the history of the tradition—all that went through my head were those clichés.
It was a magical night. Everything just flowed like water. We had such good chemistry. That’s a word I would never have self-applied to any relationship. Ever. I had pretty much considered the mere concept of chemistry to be legendary—as in, you’ll hear about it but never actually witness it.
Let alone experience the miracle.
And yet… what else could I call it? There were so many differences between me and Belle, not the least of which was the fact that we belonged to rival criminal enterprises. But none of that seemed to matter when we were together.
I began to fantasize about wild circumstances that would separate Belle and me from the entire world, like being castaways on a desert island. I was surprised to realize I would leave my good friends the Boyz behind in a heartbeat if it meant I could be with Belle free of the consequence of our upbringing.
A grin spread over my face as I lounged about in my condo, recalling our date the previous evening—her face when she offered a blow job and I raised her a muffin munch. This of course lighted up my sensual memory of how she smelled, and more importantly, tasted…
Then we pulled a full-on Dangerous Liaisons and had sex a short distance from a gaggle of people. I’m an impulsive guy, don’t get me wrong, but I’m usually not that impulsive.
But the sex, the incredible, mind-blowing, life-changing sex, wasn’t even the best part for me. That had come when I’d admitted, and gotten Belle to admit, our mutual affection for each other. It may not have been a declaration of the “L-word”—something that at the time still paralyzed me with fear—but it was still exhilarating even the following day.
I should point out that the “L-word” didn’t scare me in and of itself, only relating to Belle. I didn’t want to imagine that strong of a connection when our future together was still up in the air.
If only I could fly. I could whisk Belle away from this whole mess and we could live in some fantasy Neverland.
Without consciously thinking about it, I dug out my phone and brought up my contacts list. When I realized what I had done, I slapped myself in the forehead.
I didn’t have Belle’s number. I’d eaten her snatch—twice—but I didn’t have her number. Checking the time, I found it to be early afternoon. Surely she would be at work at the Jolly Roger by then?
Fortunately, the Jolly Roger had a website with a link to their phone number. A press of my finger later, the line rang, and my heart pounded. Part of me hoped she wouldn’t answer because I was so wound up, but only a small part. I waited with bated breath for an answer, growing more anxious as the rings reached the double digits.
“Hello, it’s a beautiful day at the Jolly Roger. Wendy speaking, how can I help you?”
I winced. Wendy was the name of a hookup I’d had some years ago—terrible hookup at that—but it probably wasn’t the same person. Any fool with eyes could see I was a better match for Belle.
“Ah, yes, it is a beautiful day. I was hoping to speak with Belle. Is she in, please?”
“Belle?” I could feel the disdain dripping from the word. “Hang on, let me go check.”
The line switched to a terrible rendition of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy with Muzak “instruments.” Ugh. Thank goodness we have Toots doing a jazz solo on our hold line for Lost.
The seconds stretched into minutes as I sat impatiently waiting for her to pick up. My knee bounced crazily in a rapid tattoo as my anxiety grew and grew. After nearly twenty minutes had passed, I hung up and called back.
“It’s a beautiful day at the Jolly Roger. Wendy—”
“Save the beautiful day rap, lady,” I snapped. “You left me on hold for an hour and never got back to me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry about that,” she said in a civil, yet dismissive tone. “It was hardly more than fifteen minutes, I must point out.”
“Whatever. If felt like an hour. Is Belle there or what?”
“Hold on, let me go check.”
“Didn’t you check last time? Hello?” I cursed, ending the call and slapping my phone down on the desk with more force than was necessary. My fingers drummed on the hard table top as I considered my options.
I could try to call back again, but that damn Wendy was stonewalling me. I just knew it. But, the million-dollar question, was she stonewalling me because she was just being nasty, or was she doing so at Belle’s behest? Was the woman of my dreams ghosting me?
My despondence festered and swelled into an epidemic of anger. How could she ghost me? How dare she? I knew Belle felt the same connection I did. I just knew it.
A little voice in my mind told me I was violating the “rules” anyway. The rules that said you had to wait three days before calling a girl after a hookup if you wanted to get serious. I silenced that voice for two reasons…
One, I definitely wanted to get serious, and when I got serious, I took action immediately.
Two, I was a Mayne. I didn’t follow the rules.
I made the damn rules. If Belle wanted to play that game, she was going to quickly learn I wasn’t above upending the game board and sending the pieces flying everywhere. Yeah, I know. Not the most mature of responses, but have you ever been in love, even when you refused to admit it to yourself? You don’t think all that clearly.
My resentment at Belle not answering my calls combined and mixed with what I’ll admit was my conceited streak. How dare she do this? How dare she deny what both of us so clearly felt?
But a Mayne was like any other man. We had our moments of shaken confidence, too. I worked myself into a frenzy. Maybe I was wrong about Belle’s feelings for me. Maybe she was just playing me when she admitted the attraction between us was mutual. Maybe, maybe, maybe… I was going crazy with the maybes.
I suddenly sat rigidly upright in the chair, like a meerkat peeking his bulbous eyes out of his prairie burrow. I knew what I had to do. If Belle wasn’t going to speak over the phone, it was time to visit her in the flesh.
It took me about twenty minutes to shave and get dressed in a hurry, as I was eager to speak with her again. My limbs shook as I prepared, no matter how hard I tried to remain steady. Belle had gotten under my skin, infected my thoughts, and curled up around my soul like a contented cat. I had to know if I was fooling myself or if our crazy dream, our crazy love, might be something real enough to build a future on.
At that point, I wasn’t thinking all that rationally. I wasn’t considering what was going to happen with our respective crime families. I was only concerned with getting her to admit, out loud and in the open, that we were falling crazy, madly, head over heels in love with each other.
The fact my new attitude was totally at odds with my former party boy lifestyle and demeanor was not lost on me. In fact, I felt an almost physical pain at the existential dread of that piece of me dying an agonizing but inexorable death. If I wasn’t Peter Mayne, the
quintessential perpetual playboy who refused to grow up, who was I?
I wasn’t sure I had an answer, but I knew who I wanted to be.
I wanted to be the man who woke up next to Belle in bed every single day for the rest of our lives.
When I got to Bloomsbury, I parked my car at Lost because it felt weird parking in front of her club. My step was light as I skipped across the street on legs trembling with fear and anticipation. I felt giddy and terrified all at once—triumphant and yet fearing the worst kind of defeat.
They say love makes you blind, but they never mention how it drives you ape shit crazy, too. Wait a minute, yes they do. I just never believed it.
Until I met my Belle.
It was early evening by that point, but the club wasn’t due to open its doors for a couple more hours. Naturally, this meant they were shut and locked tight with no doorman in evidence. I rapped with my knuckles on the metal door and waited.
And waited. And waited. I rapped again, much harder, and the face of a snide woman with Wendy’s voice appeared.
“I’m afraid we don’t open for several more hours, sir,” she said sweetly before moving to close the door.
“Whoa, hold up.” I shoved my foot into the door to keep it from closing. “I’m not here to patronize your fine establishment, my dear. I’m here to see Belle.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Barrie isn’t here at the moment,” she said in that annoyingly sweet, patronizing tone.
“Look, lady, I saw her damn car parked out back. Quit playing games and tell Belle I’m here.”
She tried to close the door, but of course my foot prevented it. At last she sighed in resignation. “Very well, but I must close this door for security reasons before I go and tell her.”
“I’m all the security you need, lady,” I said with a grin. “I’m a black belt.”
She rolled her eyes but disappeared from view. I stubbornly kept my shoe right where it was the entire time she was gone. When she reappeared, Wendy’s face was crossed with a smug half-smile, and I knew the answer was no. But I had to ask anyway.
“Is she coming?”
“No, she is not,” Wendy said, glaring at me through the thin crack in the door. “In fact, she never wants to see you again.”
“Bullshit,” I snapped.
“I’m just delivering her message, sir,” Wendy drawled sweetly.
“Bullshit. Belle?” I shouted through the crack in the door. “Belle, can you hear me?”
“She said you might try this, too.” Wendy flung the door open fully, and I looked up… and up… into the faces of the same gigantic goons who threw me out the other night.
I failed to mention before that their security guards dressed in a pirate motif. What’s more embarrassing than being thrown out of a club by bouncers? Being thrown out of a club by bouncers dressed like the Pirates of Penzance.
At least the second time I wasn’t wearing a new suit.
What the hell was Belle’s deal? Why wouldn’t she see me? I had to speak with her. I simply had to.
So, I shimmied up the drain pipe outside her office window on the and peered inside. Sure enough, there she was, sitting at the desk.
Belle did not look happy. She sat with her head in her hands, shoulders slumped as if she were trying to sink down into her chair.
Well, if it upset you so much to have me thrown out of your damn club—again—why did you do it?
I wasn’t sure what to do. Seeing her like that, I felt as if maybe I should respect her decision. But my own emotions wouldn’t let me. Even if she couldn’t admit how she felt, I knew I had to talk to her, or I’d never get any peace.
I started to climb back down, planning to come back to the front doors at opening time in disguise—like I said, I wasn’t thinking clearly that day—but I lost my grip and fell.
Not onto the ground ten feet below. That would have been embarrassing enough. No, I fell right through the damn window, shattering glass and landing on the carpet behind Belle’s chair. She yelped, leaped up from her seat and went white as a sheet until she realized it was me.
“Hey babe,” I spoke from my nest of broken glass and shag carpet. “How’s it going?”
Chapter Eighteen
Once the initial shock of seeing Peter lying amid a cascade of broken glass on my carpet wore off, I was overwhelmed by one thing in particular.
Not the fact that a handsome young man was so eager to see me he actually broke in through my window. Neither was I thinking of how much I’d missed him and wanted to speak to him again.
No, the only thing I could concentrate on when I saw that sheepish, dimpled smile staring upside down at me from the glass-strewn carpet was the fact that I—I, personally—had put a contract out on his life.
Yes, Crenshaw Hook had ordered me. Yes, he’d promised a painful death for me as well as Peter if I didn’t obey. But those caveats did little to alleviate my misery. As soon as I wound down from the surprise of his accidental break-in, I burst into tears.
“Oh shit.” Peter scrambled to his feet. Glass crunched beneath his shoes as he took me by the shoulders. “Belle, it’s all right. I’m sorry, I’ll pay for new glass—”
“Shut up.” I shoved him with one hand while hiding my face with the other. “Why did you come here? I didn’t want you to come here.” My words came out haltingly between sobs as I held him literally at arm’s length.
Peter tried to move in, but I stubbornly held him at bay. “Why didn’t you want me to come?” The hurt in his tone spurred me to cry even harder. “Why didn’t you want to see me?”
“Because I can’t…” I squeezed my eyes shut around a flood of tears. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
“Because of Hook? Did he tell you to stop seeing me?”
“Among other things,” I blurted in bitter misery. I looked at him at last, but I couldn’t stand to for long. All I could envision when I saw his face was how he would look inside of a casket. “Please, Peter, just go.”
“But what about the other night in the Garden?” he demanded, his eyes narrowing with resentful anger. “Didn’t we agree that… that this thing with us, whatever it is… didn’t we agree that it’s special?”
My heart broke just a little bit more, but I managed to stop crying and face him. “Yes, it was special.” I shook my head, face contorting into a mask of misery. “It was. Past tense. It’s over now, Peter. Please, just go.”
“I can’t leave, Belle.” His chest swelled. “I can’t because I—”
I never learned what he was about to say because Wendy busted in at that precise moment with three of our security staff. “I thought I heard something break,” Wendy said hotly. “Get his ass out of here—back the way he came.”
“Wait, just a damn minute,” Peter growled as they manhandled him into the air. “I need to talk to Belle, please.”
I almost told them to set him down, but at that point the bouncers hurled him out the open window. I leaped to my feet and stared down at the ground in horror, expecting to see his broken body, but he picked himself up quickly with apparently only his pride injured.
“Asshole,” Wendy shouted as she drew the curtains shut right in front of me. “But I guess he won’t be a problem for much longer. Will he?”
“Get out,” I snapped. “All of you. Get out.” Wendy opened her mouth to argue, but I shouted her down. “Now.”
They filed out of my office in short order, and I dropped my face into my hands. What a nightmare.
I kept wondering when the hit would come. Would they attack Peter at his home or in the club? How many innocent people would get caught in the crossfire when Crocodile had Peter in his crosshairs?
My sense of responsibility began to overwhelm my fear. But even more, I realized that if I let Peter be killed, I would also be dooming a part of myself to death as well. The part that could still love and be loved.
I stood suddenly and headed up to the top floor where the auction room resided. There I collected
Inky and Blinky, making sure they were loaded before jamming extra magazines into my pockets.
Then I went and stood in the window looking down on Club Lost. I waited. And waited. Hours passed, and I soon began to realize it could take days, or even weeks, for the Olaf Bratva to make a play for Peter.
But I didn’t leave my post. I simply dragged a chair over in front of the window, turned my phone onto a music streaming service, opened a bottle of wine and watched.
The night wore on, the line forming and growing outside of both of our respective clubs. Then there was the exodus after last call, and the greater exodus when the establishments finally closed.
Through it all, I kept vigil. My thoughts were keenly focused as I tried to remember the faces of each and every man I’d seen when I went to speak with Crocodile. If I spotted any of them coming within a block’s radius of Club Lost or Peter, I was going to shoot first and ask questions later.
But it got to be four in the morning, the last patrons long since departed, and still nothing. I headed off for a bathroom break, came back, and drank half a glass of wine before I realized how damn tired I was of waiting.
I reached the decision at that point to walk across the street and speak with Peter, telling him about the contract on his life. Even if we couldn’t be together, I found I could not stand the idea of him being hurt. Especially not because of me.
Just as I set the bottle down and started to unstrap my holsters—I didn’t want to roll up on a Mayne brothers property looking like I was there to start a war—a blue Lincoln Town Car rolled slowly past Club Lost.
It could have been just some drunkard looking to see if the place was still open. But something made me wary. The Lincoln was at least ten years old but highly maintained and boasted flashy rims of a modern design. Stereotypes are considered gospel only by the foolhardy, but… that was so a Russian mobster car.