He slumped on the couch, momentarily defeated by Fin’s indignation and his own ruthless determination to defend an indefensible position. He wanted to be more than her friend, he wanted skin on skin, to watch her come apart underneath him, but the complications that came from being with her were explosive. Whether his mother liked her or not. Sherwoods didn’t play it straight with outsiders, and he couldn’t bring Fin inside.
Her shoes came into view, killer heels, attached to her sensational legs. “Fuck you, Cal Sherwood.” He should’ve looked at her face, and he would, when he’d finished looking at the rest of her, the flare of her hips, narrow waist, the swell of her ribs. Standing so close her foot was between both of his. “You want me. I know you do.” It didn’t help convince her otherwise that he couldn’t stop staring at her breasts. “I’ve been nice about your boundaries”—he met her eyes—“but seriously, game on.”
“Meaning?”
“I went shopping per the brief, on your dime. You think I look good in these pants, you’re going to have to unzip yours to ease the pain when you see me in the rest of my outfits.”
He’d like to unzip now. Unpeel her from the goddamn pants that got to hug her. He’d like to do a lot of things that weren’t suitable for work, weren’t suitable for a One Night Wife when the One Night Wife was Fin.
He stood, surprised and outrageously delighted when she didn’t step back. “This weekend is important to me.”
He took a lock of hair and tucked it behind her ear and was gratified to see the pulse point at the base of her throat flutter. The game was most definitely on. Fin didn’t know he played games for a living, and the rules were stacked against her.
“And you know it will be lucrative for you.” He put his hand on her shoulder, an approved touch, and then skimmed it down her arm, another approved touch if you stretched the rules to allow that open palm dragging on her bare skin. “Much as I want to see you outside your clothes, it’s not going to happen.”
“Beginning to wonder if I got you all wrong.” Her chin was up, but her breathing was wrecked, and her pupils had blown wide.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“If maybe you don’t like women.”
Now that was silly. He put his hand to her ass and yanked her forward, so she could feel exactly by how much she’d lost that point.
She didn’t pull away.
He had all the chips stacked on his side of the table and all the hands would play his way because he controlled the dealer, he controlled the whole casino, but still Fin was a threat because she could read his tells—they were like a dozen kids on out-of-control skateboards, a hundred corseted Frank N. Furter, a thousand noisy burger bars. His tells were in his hands and his eyes and his voice, palpable and inevitable, and loud as a one-eyed demon cat.
“It’s never going to happen, much as we both might want it to. You don’t always get what you want when you’re a grown-up.” He let her go and stepped away to steady himself. He put the desk between them, insulated himself from her devious softness with steel and glass.
“What are you scared of, Cal?”
He sat heavily. “Isn’t it obvious?”
She planted her hands on the other side of the desk and looked down on him. “Not to me.”
He could talk circles around multi-billionaires, get them to dump a fortune in his lap without ever asking for a cent. He could break the law over and over and never fear getting caught. He was young, fit, fearless, at the top of his profession, about to secure his family’s investment pipeline and rebuild his personal fortune; more fuck-off money than he could spend if he lived till he was one hundred that he’d use to fund his own private charitable interests.
She was short, underweight, all glossy brown hair and big doe eyes, snarky as hell, and a self-confessed flake, and no one had ever made him question his own judgment more.
“I’m scared of you, Finley Cartwright. I’m shit-scared of you.”
Chapter Seventeen
Fin couldn’t get enough of the view. Meadow Lane sounded like the kind of street where you’d find a row of cute wooden houses with white picket fences and neatly kept gardens. There’d be a blue bike with a basket up front dropped on the path and a swing seat on the porch. A snoozing dog would thump his tail on the boards when you walked by. The mailman would whistle a tune. Neighbors would borrow a cup of sugar, support Little League, buy Girl Scout cookies, and no one would ever walk into you, shout disturbing things out of an open window, tempt you into thinking you could win a shell game, or honk a horn in anger.
But Southhampton’s Meadow Lane was full of castles and mansions and estates with their own pools, bowling alleys, cinemas and ballrooms, worth billions and billions of dollars, all fronting the beach.
The house Cal pulled into was part of a compound that included three other mansions. Estimated to be worth forty-two million dollars. It was owned by Conrad Astor, who’d made so much money from mortgage brokering, he could afford his own postcode.
The brief said Conrad laundered his profits through a complicated arrangement of banks in places like the Bahamas and the Cook Islands. He didn’t believe in paying his taxes. And he ran a side business helping other billionaires do the same. The brief also said he had wandering hands, and Fin was never to be alone with him or his son, Alex, or any of Alex’s friends who were named. It was a long list and meant she would have to be on guard and keep Cal in sight the whole weekend.
No hardship—she’d been sneaking looks at him for the last hour in the car, and they’d be sharing a room for two nights to celebrate Alex’s engagement to a woman called Paris Prosper.
Hoh boy, wasn’t that a name you read twice to be sure it was real. Paris was her main target this weekend because she was the heiress to the Prosper Dog Food empire and a big charity supporter, though mostly animal charities, and that was the leverage point. Fin had to convince Paris to spend some of her inheritance on people.
All Cal’s whales were expected to be here as guests as well. Cal was going to be busy.
Once he got out of the car.
“How much of the weekend are we going to spend sitting here?” she asked, when they’d been parked for a while, and he’d made no attempt to move. “I like this car, but I’d like to see inside the castle.”
He pointed at the building they were parked in front of. It was a Norman French manse according to Google, bordered by the beach on one side, the bay on the other. “Everything about this place is beautiful, stylish, the absolute best quality, except half the people who will be here are trash. They’ll look good, sound good, have impressive resumes, but they have the morals of seagulls and the wiles of foxes. It’s more fun standing on the sidewalk outside your place making you mad at me and going home to a sleepless night than it will be in there.”
God baking cookies. That almost topped him saying he was scared of her.
“We don’t have to go.” D4D would get by. If she’d known how little Cal wanted to do this, she’d never have agreed to come. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
He unlatched his door. “Because grown-ups do stuff they don’t want to do all the time.”
Well hell, he didn’t have to be such a martyr. She put her hand over his. “Don’t do this for me.”
He flipped his hand to grasp hers and gave her a rueful smile. “It’s stage fright. Once I’m in there, I’ll be fine.” Up went his brows. He was sorry for the grown-up crack, and she was sorry he hated this part of his job. “It might even be fun.”
Paulette Astor met them in the airy foyer and explained they’d be sleeping in the pool house with the young people, meaning the rest of Alex and Paris’s friends.
In Fin’s version of a pool house there were a couple of rusty sun lounges, a stack of blow-up tires, and assorted bright colored floats. The whole place would smell of rubber, tanning lotion, chlorine, and ill-fated sexual dalliances. But what would she know? She’d never been in a pool house. She’d only rarely visited
the beach as a child, so the pool house, which was a whole mansion as big as the one they’d driven over from in a golf cart, blew her tiny mind.
There was more mind-expanding awesomeness when she saw their bedroom. “It’s bigger than my apartment.” It had its own deck looking out toward the beach, and its own sitting room and a Jacuzzi that made her shriek with excitement. It also had one bed that Cal sat on while she explored.
“What if we stay in here all weekend?” she said. “We could sneak out in the dead of night and raid the kitchen for food.”
“We’re supposed to be raiding the billionaires for cash.”
“True, and I have some fabulous clothes to wear while we do it.”
“Wouldn’t want them to go to waste.”
Unless she could miraculously persuade him to become a pool-house-bedroom shut-in, then she’d happily spend the weekend naked.
The first event that night was a cocktail party. It required Fin to don a slinky, champagne-colored, sequined mini dress held up by dental-floss-thin straps, and to-die-for gold sandals and to do her hair in that half-up, half-tumble-down style that required a lot of fiddling to get right. A big part of her would have enjoyed walking on the beach more than going to a party.
It required Cal to wear a suit she hadn’t seen him in, charcoal, with a crisp white shirt that he wore without a tie, the first couple of buttons undone. They’d carved out private space to get ready, Fin commandeering the enormous bathroom and Cal sticking to the bedroom.
She couldn’t be entirely sure she didn’t drool when she saw him. He gave her a sardonic grin. He knew he looked good, but the jerk was going to make her fish for compliments before they went out to noodle whales together. She desperately wanted to hear him tell her she was beautiful like he’d done many times already. It never got tired. “Well?”
He turned away. “I can hardly stand to look at you.”
Her breath snagged. She looked down at herself. “Oh my God. Did I get it wrong? Should I wear something else?”
“The problem is, I don’t want any other man here seeing you dressed like that,” he said, still with his back to her. “I don’t want them wondering how soft your skin is or how great you smell. I don’t know if it’s a lotion you use, but you smell like honeysuckle. I don’t want them wondering if you taste like it. I don’t want them looking at your legs or brushing against you or getting off fantasizing about you on your knees for them.” He sounded almost angry, and when he turned, his expression was fiercely possessive. “If anyone gropes you, they’ll lose a hand.” He stepped close, kissed her forehead gently. “You are fucking perfect.”
She had that might-need-to-cry tightness in her throat because she could almost die from the explosion of joy in her heart.
He took her by the shoulders and sat her on the bed, but his expression was all business now. “We have four joint targets.”
She remembered them as the Drug Lord, the Polluter, the Dirty Dean, and Room Service. They’d work these four together, with Fin playing the role of the favor, so Cal could move on them later with his investment proposition.
“And you have your own targets,” he said.
A list of five or six, all friends of Alex and Paris.
“Alex will hit on you.”
She nodded. It was a note in her brief.
“He’ll contrive to get you alone. He’ll make promises about D4D. And if you don’t take kindly to his dishonorable intentions, he’ll try to isolate you, overpower you, and assault you.”
That wasn’t in the brief. She stood, alarmed. “No, that won’t happen.”
“He’s a big guy. He’s a billionaire in his own right. He’ll inherit all of this. He is powerful in ways you can only imagine. He can hurt you and deny doing it, and no one will believe you didn’t throw yourself at him or falsely accuse him.”
Fin wasn’t naïve enough to doubt Cal in this. She’d seen it happen. Influential agents who wanted to sample before they’d represent. Slime bucket directors who wanted to screen test nude scenes that weren’t in the script. Co-stars who were convinced sex would give you better on-screen chemistry. Men in bars who pushed you against a wall and felt you up and were stronger and meaner and you couldn’t get away without causing a fuss. She’d had to cause a fuss before. She’d had to rescue Lenny, and Lenny’d had to rescue her.
“You can’t ever be alone with Alex.”
“I’ll stay away from him. I’ll keep you in sight.”
Some of the tension in Cal released. “Paris will hit on me.” She gasped. That wasn’t in the brief either. “She’ll even do it when Alex is watching. It’s a sick game between the two of them. They love the drama of indiscretion.”
“She can’t hit on you if I stick to you like glue.”
“If you were sitting on my dick, she’d still try it.” Cal shook his head. “I’m sorry to be crude, but I want you to know exactly what you’re getting into. Let’s go over our cues. We’re going to need them.”
He folded his arms, and she said, “Beware, stay away.” He made prayer hands. “That means help. Come here.” He pulled on his right earlobe. “You’re asking if I’m okay. And if I do this”—she mimicked putting hair behind her ear—“it means I’m fine.” He smoothed a finger over his eyebrow. “That means be alert. Listen.” He fingered a button on his shirt. “That means you’re doing fine.”
He stepped behind her to do the touch signals, cupping her elbow. “You’re asking if I’m okay.” He touched her hip. “Asking me to make an excuse and walk away.” He flattened his hand between her shoulder blades. “You want me to stay.” He tapped her shoulder twice. This was her favorite. “You’re telling me I’m doing fine.” He grazed the back of his hand over her thigh. “Time to leave together.”
She walked around him and made the same gestures, elbow, hip, mid-back, tap, tap, thigh; okay, walk away, stay, time to leave. He stayed silent, closing his fingers around her wrist.
“I don’t know that one,” she said.
“New for tonight. It means I want you to come back here, lock the door, and don’t let anyone but me in.”
She turned to face him. He’d shifted from pensive in the car to possessive, and then mad when he talked about Alex, and now he was some other emotion she couldn’t name. “It’s a party, it’s not going to be terrible.”
“It’s a precaution, and it makes me feel better to have it.” She reached for his wrist and wrapped her hand around it. From her, the gesture didn’t mean anything, but touching Cal made her feel good.
They took a golf cart to the main house where a string quartet played and a waiter poured a champagne fountain. It was all extremely elegant and difficult to imagine the Astors were tax dodge masterminds. They moved among the party goers together, Cal’s hand hovering at the small of her back, reassuringly possessive.
John Alington talked at Cal while looking at Fin’s legs. Pat McGovern stared through her like she was glass, not someone he’d given half a million dollars to. They met the Drug Lord over canapes. He pounced on Cal.
“You still trying to flog that gene therapy start up?” He was a tall, stooped man with a sour expression. Fin wondered what he had to be disappointed about. It’s not like he was poor, disadvantaged, or addicted to his own drug.
“I’m still flogging it,” Cal answered.
“Load of bunkum. Reversing aging. The science isn’t there yet.”
The Drug Lord was insulting, but Cal was equally dismissive. “You’re certainly closer to the science than I am. I only know what I’m told.” And then, he was downright combative. “This is Finley Cartwright. She runs a microfinance charity that operates in countries where you flog your brain-addling drug.”
“Finley,” said the Drug Lord. “How did a nice girl like you meet this charlatan?”
She stifled a flinch at the insult. “I’m not a very nice girl.”
The Drug Lord made a preening gesture, straightening his already straight collar. “That can’t be true.”
She let her purse slither off her shoulder and drop to the floor at his feet. The Drug Lord immediately bent to pick it up. He might be morally bankrupt, but he had manners.
“Ah, thank you,” she said, and Cal put his hand to her mid-back and tapped twice. You’re doing fine. She was on a roll, and the Drug Lord was going to be her newest donor and eventually, despite his scorn, one of Cal’s investors.
They worked the same routine, complete with purse drop, on Room Service, the Dirty Dean, and the Polluter. Room Service was condescending with Cal but flirted with Fin. Cal flirted with the idea of circling her wrist and sending her to their room, but he held her hand instead, and Fin talked Room Service into a generous donation to D4D.
The Polluter was a nervous man with a host of uneasy twitches. He scratched, flared his nostrils, and smacked his lips together. He was difficult to talk to because his eye contact wasn’t steady. When she dropped her purse, he looked at it. She picked it up herself. He wasn’t like the others. “It’s the strap,” he said.
Turns out he was an engineer and a major mansplainer. He had ideas about how the strap of a woman’s purse should be made and explained it in great detail. Fin had her favor—it was letting him talk on about materials and tension and surface area. She didn’t have the heart to tell him it wasn’t a construction problem and walked away having made a new gold class donor.
Cal talked business in all of these encounters, but he talked to her as well in their private language of specific touches. His touch told her stay, she was doing fine. He constantly checked to see if she was okay, and when he wasn’t signaling by fingertip, he was touching her for the comfort of it, taking her hand, squeezing her shoulder, brushing against her.
When she was slightly dizzy from the easy money she was making, he steered them into a big sitting room populated by older guests who’d staked out the comfortable furniture. They kept to the edge of the room, taking a moment to be alone.
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