“Shit,” I said under my breath.
Penina and I would have to sleep in the same building tonight.
I asked Kirk to let me out in front of the Popeye’s chicken place on Canal Street. The sun was down, but the night was still as muggy as hell as I walked up the avenue. It was late, but a lot of rabble-rousers were still out, stumbling out of the French Quarter, intoxicated and searching for their next bit of excitement.
Sweat rolled down my back and covered my skin when I made it to the boarding hold. Even though air conditioning would’ve been nice, I had to stand out in the humidity a while longer to make sure the coast was clear. I kept out of sight under an awning of Barba’s Salon across the street.
My attention kept veering toward Penina’s apartment on the third floor. The one Si had given me the keys to was on the opposite side of the building and a floor up. The distance between our apartments would help me battle my craving for her, but still, it would be hard getting through the night without knocking on her door. I doubted I would be able to do it.
“Jake, is that you?” a woman with an English accent asked.
I flinched and turned to see a pretty raven-haired woman who very much resembled one of my surgical mentees jogging in my direction.
“Zara? Are you out jogging at this hour?”
“Yeah,” she said as if my concern didn’t faze her.
“It’s pretty late for that, don’t you think?”
She pressed her hands onto her hips then bent over to catch her breath. “I’m running because I needed the exercise to clear my head.” She made a high-pitched sound when she sighed. “Although it’s as humid as hell out here. What the hell was I thinking?”
“Are you okay? Do you need water?”
She raised a hand as she dragged herself up to stand tall. “I’ll be fine. But what are you doing standing in the dark? Are you spying on Pen?”
“No, but you’re aware of how dangerous it is for a woman to be out this late jogging alone, don’t you?”
She pressed her hand onto the brick wall next to me and hiked up one of her legs to stretch it. “Okay, Mr. Money Bags, you’re not my father or my man, so cool the concern.” Her eyebrows fluttered upward twice. “I’m also self-defense certified.”
“You’re right. I’ll cool the concern, especially since you’re self-defense certified.”
She stretched her other leg. “That’s right, and you never answered my question. Are you stalking Penina?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing out here in the dark?”
“I live here.”
“The fuck you do.”
“Yes, I do. But don’t tell anybody.”
“Why not?” she countered. “You have secrets up to here, Jake Sparrow. And you have my friend keeping them for you. It’s driving her bonkers, but I’m not keeping your secrets.”
I wanted to laugh at her. I could see why she and Penina were so close. They both had bold and honest traits about them.
“I understand. Listen, I’ll tell you what she knows about me if you don’t rat me out.”
She shook her head as if my words stung her. “Rat you out to who exactly?”
“The whole fucking world?”
“Ha,” she scoffed as she transitioned to extend one arm across her body and reached over to grab her shoulder. “Is your ego really that large?”
I took a step closer and made sure we had good eye contact and said, “My name is Asher Christmas. You know, the Christmas family.”
Her arms fell to her sides as she gasped and leaned back so fast that I thought she would tip over. “No fucking way. You’re the missing one. The one they say murdered his father.”
I rolled my eyes as I shook my head emphatically. Who the fuck started that rumor, anyway? “I didn’t murder my father.”
She folded her arms. “That’s not what they say. They say they have proof. And the fact that you’ve gone frolicking through the world, pretending to be Jake Sparrow, doesn’t make you look innocent. Nice fake name, though.”
I opened my mouth to set her mind at ease about me being a murderer and reveal what only my family members, Gina, and Penina knew, but she said, “So, Penina is shagging a Christmas? Talk about jackpot. She’s rich.”
I couldn’t help but toss my head back and laugh.
“All hell’s about to break loose, isn’t it?” she asked.
I took a deep breath and nodded. “But hey, could you do me a favor? Could you check on her and make sure she made it to her apartment safely? I dropped her off after we left the party.”
“And you didn’t stay with her?”
I shook my head, gazing up at the window. Her warm and soft body was probably between her sheets. She often slept nude. I recalled how her round ass felt against my dick.
“Then you are stalking her,” Zara said as if she had caught me in a lie.
I ripped my gaze away from her window. “I’m not stalking Penina. I told you—I live here. I’m going up in a few. The press knows I’m in town. I want to make sure no one’s hiding out, waiting to pounce.”
She regarded me shrewdly. “Well, I’m not telling.”
I sighed with relief. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
Zara smirked. “You’re welcome, Dr. Christmas, and to really put your mind at ease, I’ll turn her light on and off when I’m inside her flat.” She winked.
I figured it was time to reveal something else to her. “Thank you, Zara. You’re a good friend to a beautiful woman whom I love.”
I saw that my words had the intended effect when her lips formed an O as her eyes grew wide. “Oh, in love, are we? You haven’t known each other more than a month.” Then she raised a hand. “Forget what I said. It’s Penina. If I were a man or a lesbian, I’d, as you Americans say, book her ass too.”
She made me laugh again, and I liked it. I wondered what Sanjay would think to know his beautiful, foul-mouthed daughter who was brave enough to run in the city at night had dropped out of the residency program at the last minute. There was no way he was going to hear it from me, but he wouldn’t like what she had done. That was for sure. He’d mentioned his brilliant daughter at least twice in every conversation I ever had with him. As far as he was concerned, she was the only woman that should be cutting open a brain.
I watched Penina’s window until the light turned on then off.
“Well done, Zara,” I whispered then crossed the street.
The boarding-hold apartment wasn’t as dismal as I remembered it. The furniture was sleek and modern, and so were the appliances. All of it probably cost less than my shoes. I wasn’t bragging about that. Instead, I thought, maybe I should pay attention to how much I spend on shit. Truth be told, Jake Sparrow went through money just as fast as Asher Christmas had.
I was sitting on the edge of the sofa, not ready to get comfortable yet, when I received a text from Bryn. My body stiffened when I read, Ash, I’m in New Orleans and ready to see you. Where are you?
My gaze darted around the room. The air around me stood still, like the calm before a raging storm. My twin sister was a car ride away. I couldn’t wait to see her, but I also dreaded her arrival. But fuck, I needed her. She had taken Julia on before and won. Plus, Bryn never lost a skirmish. She was the sort of firepower I needed to put Julia away.
“Carter Valentine,” I whispered.
That was Julia’s brother. I wondered why I was suddenly thinking about him. A memory crept into my mind.
Carter and I are boys in a musty room that smells of cigars and perfume, the sweet kind young girls wear. The walls are red leather. His father, Arthur, stone-faced, red lines streaking through the whites of his eye, brows furrowed, as always, shoves Carter toward bare hips and pubic hair. That’s all I can remember about her—the girl’s genitals. Carter cowers against the wall, hugging his legs as he buries his face in his knees.
“No, Father. No!” he cries.
“I got no use for a fucking boy who
can’t fuck pussy. You understand? No use,” Arthur says from somewhere in the room. I can’t see him. I don’t want to see him.
“Get them out of here, pansies,” my father says.
I’m being pushed. My legs are trying to keep up with the force of the thrust. Then I’m out of the room.
That fucking memory had been buried somewhere deep inside me until then. No wonder Carter hated pussy, although I couldn’t say if he replaced his disdain for the female anatomy with a lust for his own. I always thought of him as asexual, preferring not to engage in the messy business of sexual intercourse. I came to that conclusion because when we were kids, he occasionally visited the mansion during the summers. He often joined Spencer and me when we went swimming in the sound. Spence and I would drop our trousers on the beach and change into our trunks. Carter would freeze, turn away from us, and beg us to let him know when we were covered “down there.” He had other quirks, too, like holding his piss until he almost urinated on himself because he didn’t like to whip his dick out and touch it.
But the memory … What would I have done if it were me being pushed toward the sexual organs of a pubescent girl? I wouldn’t have fucked her, that’s for sure. My father must’ve known that, which was why he was the one who’d put an end to the charade, saving himself from the same kind of embarrassment Valentine had suffered by his son’s reaction. Carter’s cowering had won me my escape. We weren’t the only ones traumatized by what happened either. The girl’s thighs, which looked like flagpoles, trembled like two reeds in the wind. Why had it taken so long for my father to die? If life was fair, he would’ve given up the ghost right then and there.
I rubbed the back of my neck as I shot to my feet, but then sat back down just as fast. I didn’t want to remember that. Fuck, I wished I hadn’t.
Julia was aware of Carter’s demons, bred by incidents like the ones I recalled, and how they haunted him all the way up until adulthood. He was as scared as hell of his father, Arthur Valentine. All she had to do was threaten to squeal on him, since Arthur reviled his son enough to always take her side, and Carter would do whatever she told him to do. She wanted to know more about my brothers and me, so she’d had him put cameras in our bedrooms.
Julia was more deceitful than intelligent. She wasn’t blessed with the capability to think things through. Since her cameras were wireless, their signals interfered with our surveillance systems, which were part of the daily monitoring of the estate. When Jasper found out, he pulled the recordings, which showed Carter putting the finishing touches on the cameras before tiptoeing out of the bedrooms.
As a child, Carter had been forced to hang with the boys, but when he got older, he preferred to keep Bryn company. That was why Jasper showed her the video first. Bryn swore that if Carter had done something like that, then Julia put him up to it. Regardless, Jasper banned him from the estate and threatened to take the incident to Father and Valentine.
Bryn asked if she could do something first—a plan to help Carter. After a lot of begging, Jasper acquiesced. Bryn was able to convince Carter to perform the impossible. In each bedroom, in front of every camera, the two of them crawled under the covers naked and pretended to fuck. He touched tits, rubbed thighs, and everything. Bryn told me that he puked his guts out after each session.
At first, the result worked in Carter’s favor. His father no longer questioned his sexuality, and he was still banned from the Christmas mansion, a place he hated. But a year before my father’s death, he and Valentine came up with a scheme to have Carter and Bryn marry each other. None of us knew it then, but that decision was the beginning of the end of the Christmases and the Valentines as we knew ourselves.
So Bryn had an expert’s aptitude for scheming, and that was why I wanted to seek her advice about how to get rid of Julia for good.
Are you being followed? I replied.
I don’t think so. Why?
Julia alerted the media to my whereabouts and possibly more.
After several minutes, she wrote back, Come see me here, and she added an address.
Chapter Ten
Asher Christmas
I took a cab to a modest house in Metairie next to a cemetery. When the car exited the offramp, I asked the driver how long we had before arrival.
“Not long, a matter of minutes,” he said in his lyrical New Orleans accent.
I called Bryn and told her I was close. When I arrived, she stood from sitting in a swinging bench on the porch and held up a bottle of bourbon and two whisky glasses. We stood smirking at each other, as we usually did when we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Bryn and I had a way of conveying emotions to each other, a connection shared by those who escaped the womb on the same day and around the same time.
“Is that a cemetery behind the house?”
She sniffed. “Really? With all the demons haunting the place we grew up in, you’re scared of a horde of pissed-off Southern ghosts?”
I chortled as I made my approach. “Not in the least.”
“Plus, no one’s going to be looking for you out here.”
She had already set the bourbon and glasses down on a small round table, which freed her up to jump on me when I was close enough.
“Oh my God, Ash, don’t ever do that again!”
She kissed me multiple times on my cheek before releasing me.
“I won’t,” I said then gave her an up close once-over. She had on a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a white tank top. I was used to seeing her bones poke at her skin, but she had put on an attractive layer of weight. “You look good, Bryn—healthy.”
Her smile grew bigger and her eyes more excited. “I know. I’ve been happy, Ash,” she said, nodding. “Really happy.”
“You look it.”
She looked me up and down. “And you look good, too, and snazzy. Did you have a date tonight?”
“I went to a party.”
Her eyebrows flitted up and stayed there. “Oh, was it fun?”
I could feel myself inside Penina while we were in the back of the limousine, and I thought of her soft, warm body, then I licked my bottom lip, remembering the taste of her tongue. “Up until a point.”
“Was your night ruined by Julia?”
I pressed my lips together, nodding.
We stared at each other, grinning. The fact that she was right there in front of me felt incredible. God, I missed the hell out of her.
“Well, come, have a seat. Let’s start with some butterscotch bourbon.”
“Ha,” I scoffed. “I see you haven’t changed in that department.” She couldn’t just drink straight-up liquor without there being an added flavor. I appreciated remembering that minor detail about my sister. It made me feel close to her again.
“A lot has changed about me, but not being able to drink bourbon straight hasn’t.”
We laughed as we settled on the bench. She poured two glasses of liquor, handed me one, then kept one for herself.
“So, Ash, why did you run away?” she asked.
I drew in a deep breath through my nose. “You’re not wasting any time, are you?”
She shook her head. “I have no time to waste. You’re going to have to get back to the city pretty soon and handle Julia.”
I leaned away from her, frowning. “What are you saying?”
Bryn patted me on the thigh then circled two fingers in front of me. “Your energy is neurotic, and you’re trembling. I’m guessing your state of mind has a lot to do with Julia because she knows how to get to you.” She tilted her head to study my perplexed expression. “You know you’re very much like Carter. And that’s why she knows how to push your buttons, and that’s why you want to run away from her.”
I sniffed and took a drink of bourbon as she kept her narrowed eyes on me. There was no use in defending myself against her likening me to Carter. I was nothing like that guy as far as I was concerned, but she certainly had the right to her belief.
“You really look good, too, though,
” she said finally. “Tired and weird with the dark hair but still very handsome and healthy.”
I ran a hand through my hair as I took another swig of my drink then set it on the table. “So you’re not going to help me with Julia?”
She smiled graciously as she shook her head. “No. You’re going to have to deal with her yourself. I’m not getting involved.” She patted me on the back. “But you can handle the likes of Julia. You’re smarter than she is, and you have more integrity. You can battle her and win.”
That generous smile was on her face again.
“Why are you looking at me that way?” she asked.
I rubbed my mouth to scrub away the frown. “What happened to you? Why have you changed so much?”
She tilted her head curiously. “Disappointed?”
“No. Not at all.”
Bryn held her glass to her lips. “It’s a long story.” She took a drink then squeezed her eyes shut, as she always did when she drank liquor.
“Well, I’ve got nothing but time.”
“No, you don’t.” She winked. “And it’s a story that, instead of repeating, bears forgetting.”
“I doubt that,” I said, smiling at her.
She took another drink and the strength of the liquor made her cough. “You’re not sleeping, are you?” Her voice was strained.
“How’d you know?”
“We’re triplets. I know every phase of your face.”
I grunted. “Triplets. I’ve been trying to forget that. How is she, anyway?”
She patted my thigh again as her eyes danced. “You know what’s so funny?”
“What?” I didn’t sound amused or as happy as she was. I figured whatever she had to say had to do with our real mother and the extra sister we’d discovered we had.
Embrace: The Secret Billionaire Asher Christmas Duet, Two (The Dark Christmases Book 9) Page 9