Her mind knew it was a good deal. But her heart…her heart just couldn’t take it.
“Gus…” she typed, realizing for the first time that she’d done something very stupid. Gone and fallen in love with a man she’d never actually seen.
Then she stopped, catching a glimpse of a postcard from the Santa Fe Opera. She smiled when she saw the image on front of it… her sister, dressed in a diaphanous robes of Persephone, the Greek goddess she would soon be playing on the main stage.
Dana hadn’t just thrived at the opera program, she’d flourished, going so far as to earn the title role in the full (if very short) opera the camp would be staging as a special season ticket holder event on Monday. Cera’s heart melted as she looked at the picture, the role that never would have happened if she hadn’t taken that money. The only thing she regretted was that she couldn’t be there, because it would take place the day after Gus returned from wherever he went when he went away for business. And it wasn’t like she was allowed to take the day off from being Gus’s mistress.
“Why aren’t you answering me?”
Gus’s question appeared on her screen. An irritated pinch, snapping her out of her thoughts about her sister.
“Sorry, I got caught up looking at the postcard for my sister’s opera. She’s the lead. Did I tell you that?”
No, of course she hadn’t. Because he’d already made it clear he didn’t love when she tried to talk with him about her sister.
“Great. Got to go. But let’s talk more about the garden house estate later. I’ll text tonight when I’m done with all these meetings.”
He wanted to help her figure out how to make a charter school for underprivileged autistic kids a reality. But he didn't want to talk with her about her autistic sister. He wanted her body, but he didn't want her to touch him, to the point that he bound her wrists with one hand above her head whenever he took her in missionary. He'd eat her out until she was screaming with pleasure, but he wouldn't let her give him so much as a hand job. He texted her all the time, but he never let her hear him speak. Or see his face. Yet when they were in bed together, he worshiped her body with his hands, touching and kissing her everywhere. And she did mean everywhere. She doubted there was one place on the outside of her body that hadn't been touched by Gus's lips.
But he wasn’t her boyfriend.
Cera let out a disgusted, sad sigh as she stared at his last message. As limited as her dating experience was, she was totally getting that Gus was sending her mixed messages.
And this time, she was the one who didn’t bother to answer his text.
LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, the bus dropped her off, just up the block from Gus’s high rise.
She swam through the hot sun, wondering if maybe she should have taken Gus up on his offer to use his car while he was out of town. He didn’t love that she was still using the Miami bus system as her main mode of transportation. But it was the last thing she was still in control of—at least until the end of July. So she’d turned him down and continued getting around courtesy of her EASY card
However, the second bus she had to take to return to Gus’s place was way more crowded on the way back to the beach. Part timers who wanted to spend the rest of their day at the ocean, judging from all the flip-flops and swimsuit bottoms doubling as shorts. Good for them. But it was one of the city’s older buses, and the puny air conditioning system just wasn’t up to the task of keeping everyone on the overstuffed vehicle cool.
Then came the two-block walk back to Gus’s place. Cera was thoroughly wilted by the time she finally drooped back into her lover’s fishbowl. And when she heard the noise of Hank moving around in the kitchen, she inwardly groaned.
He was supposed to have the weekends off, but sometimes he showed up to make her lunch anyway when Gus wasn’t in town. Especially if his boyfriend, Leo, had to work that day. And he’d been hinting about all three of them doing some furniture shopping before Gus got back. He still hadn’t gotten the go ahead to outfit the place, but if the furniture just showed up one day and she told “boss man” she bought it, Gus would be totally okay with that, Hank insisted.
Hank, to her surprise, seemed to have developed a rather romantic view of their relationship over the summer. Seeing it not as something completely messed up—as she often did, when she let herself think too hard about it—but as some kind of quirky love story with him playing the part of the gay best friend— one who refused to tell the heroine anything about the hero beyond what she already knew, or give her any sort of advice that didn’t involve either clothes, food, or furniture.
So yeah, Hank could be weird. And he apparently didn’t feel Gus was sending her any kind of mixed messages. Also, she suspected it was part of his strange babysitting duties to keep tabs on her. Which was why she wasn’t surprised he’d shown up while Gus was out of town.
“Hey Hank!” she called out, making a beeline for the master bedroom. “Don’t bother with lunch. All I want right now is a cold shower and a tub of ice cream. And only then will I consider going back out in that heat.”
“I can help you with one of those,” a smooth voice answered.
Cera stopped short, her heart freezing inside her chest. What the…?
She slowly turned around to see not Hank, but a completely gorgeous man standing in the kitchen. Tall and lean, he looked to be in his thirties, and he sported a full head of dark hair, styled to look like he’d just fallen out of bed that morning with a perfectly tousled do. What he was wearing could technically be called a suit, but paired with a V-neck and sky-blue loafers, the outfit didn’t put her in mind of a businessman. More like he’d just walked out of an advertisement for a destination only extremely rich people could afford. Which would maybe kind of explain why he was so freaking attractive. Like, insanely so.
However upon seeing her, his striking green eyes narrowed with a shrewdness that made her think he might be smarter than he looked at first glance. More than just a pretty face.
Her breath caught and she opened her mouth to ask if he was Gus. Was it actually him—?
But then she remembered her hand being guided over the ridge of Gus’s nose, which had been a perfectly smooth, skin-covered valley. This guy’s nose, upon closer look, was crooked, though. Like it had been broken in at least two places without a proper reset.
No, this wasn’t Gus. Just an extremely good-looking stranger. Standing in Gus’s kitchen.
“Hello,” she said carefully. Very carefully.
He tilted his head, studying her with a wicked gleam in his eyes. “And you are?”
“Cera,” she answered, even more slowly than she’d said hello.
“Hi, Cera. I’m Max.”
Her confusion must have been clear on her face, because he said, “Gus didn’t tell you about me?”
“I don’t think so?” she answered. Half question, half apology. Then she more than half grumbled, “There’s a lot I don’t know about Gus.”
“Apparently,” he said, looking her up and down. “Okay, wow…I can’t do this. You really do look a lot like her.” He held up a finger. “Give me a moment, sweetheart.”
“Sure,” she said, not quite knowing how else to answer as she watched the beautiful man in Gus’s kitchen pull out his phone.
“Yeah, hey, Cole, it’s Max,” he said a few moments later. “I just realized I need to give you a long overdue apology. Because when I married Pru, someone who used to look almost exactly like your wife when they both had extensions, that had to be kind of weird for you, right? I’m just now getting that, because I’m standing here with this girl Little Bro has been refusing to let me meet, and she looks almost exactly like Pru. Same big eyes, same height, same long legs, same rack. Dude, they’ve even got the same hairstyle! I seriously can’t tell you how creeped out I am right now.”
Okay, well, that solved a huge mystery, Cera thought to herself. Why her? Apparently because she looked like this man’s wife. His brother’s wife. Shame curdled her ent
ire stomach as she listened to Max chuckle at something Cole was saying on the other side of the line.
“No, I haven’t done a background check yet. But Gus is there with you, right? Okay, when he gets out of the bathroom, ask him if he made sure to get Pru 2: Miami Boogaloo checked out before he started banging her.”
Cera didn’t stick around long enough to hear the answer to that question. Face burning, she ran blindly for the elevator. Not knowing where she was going, just knowing she had to escape. She frantically punched the call button on the elevator. Luckily it was still there from her trip up. The doors slid open and she flung herself inside. Desperate to get away from the shark still laughing behind her.
“Sorry, Little Bro, you’re too late. Looks like I scared her away.”
That was the last thing she heard before the doors slid closed on Gus’s fishbowl of an apartment.
15
“I’ve got Cole on the phone, asking if you made sure to run a background check on this new girlfriend of yours,” Cole said with a laugh when Gus came out of the bathroom.
“What?” Gus asked, stopping in the middle of the hallway.
This had to be a joke. Except he’d never known Cole Benton to joke.
Also, Max had excused himself from this meeting with a Belgian corporation hoping to co-fund a possible Sorley in Bruges.
Both Gus and Cole had assumed he’d bowed out because Max was pretty much allergic to any activity that could be filed under boring. One of the many good reasons why he and Gus worked so well together. Max was a whiz at choosing the right investments, and Gus was really good at paying attention during business proceedings.
However, as Cole regarded him with a slightly bemused look, Gus began to see he might have miscalculated Max’s reasons for skipping this day of meetings. Miscalculated as in, Max knew Gus would be in New Orleans while the girl he’d refused to bring with him when he visited Max and Pru for the Fourth of July would still be in Miami.
“Give me the damn phone!” Gus growled at Cole.
A few of the Belgian businessmen, who’d been milling around outside the Sorley’s conference room during what was supposed to be a quick ten minute break, looked up.
Usually Gus never let others see him sweat. Especially where business was concerned. He hadn’t climbed nearly all the way up the Benton corporate ladder before the age of thirty-one by letting his emotions get the best of him.
But this was different. This was Max overstepping his bounds, and possibly ruining what he’d managed to build with Cera over the last eight weeks.
And though he respected the hell out of Max’s paternal half-brother, Cole, that didn’t stop Gus from snatching the phone right out of his hand in front of their potential investing partners.
“Put her on,” he demanded.
Yes, there was a chance she’d recognize his voice, but he had to talk to her, give her some kind of explanation—
“Sorry, Little Bro, you’re too late,” Max said on the other side of the line. “Looks like I scared her away…”
Fuck! He could just imagine Cera running out of the apartment, scared and confused.
“What did you say to her?”
“Only the truth,” Max answered with a bemused chuckle. “I was so shocked you were hiding my wife’s doppelgänger here in Miami that I had to call Cole and apologize for doing the same thing to him. Though, at least Pru didn’t have the exact same hairstyle as Sunny when I started banging her. Seriously, Little Bro, this is all sorts of creepy.”
“No, it’s not,” Gus answered, gripping the phone hard and wishing it was his brother’s neck. “She’s from New Orleans. Just like me. I knew her when I was living in the Lower Ninth Ward. Years before I ever met Pru.”
“Oh,” Max answered, his voice suddenly much smaller than it had been a few seconds ago as Gus’s words sank in.
“Yeah, ‘oh,’” Gus confirmed. “If anything, I went after Pru because she looked like her.”
A long, digesting silence. Then: “I gotta ask, does she know that? Because the way she ran out of here, I’m pretty sure she didn’t. In fact she told me there was a lot she didn’t know about you, which frankly was hard for me to believe, knowing your usual M.O.”
True, Max and he had partied a few times with Pru in New Orleans. And both Max and his wife liked to tease him about his quick pick-up formula. What Pru called “dropping the NCCD Bomb.” Basically dropping his name, then grenade flashing a prospect with Cash, Charm, and Dimples, until she agreed to come home with him.
But…
“She’s not like that, Max,” Gus said, rubbing his temple.
Understatement of the year. All the usual things he did to impress girls, the sports cars, the best hotel rooms wherever he went, the name dropping and the endless self-promoting that came with being associated with a major hotel brand—that would have turned Cera off.
“Are you ready to get off the phone and come back in to this meeting?” Cole asked, holding out his hand for the phone Gus still had a death grip on.
Fuck, he still had to finish the meeting. But all he wanted to do was talk to Cera and try to make her understand.
Yeah, he wished this could be solved with his usual M.O. A piece of jewelry and a trip to a five-star restaurant. Because he’d get her the sparkliest necklace and take her to the best eatery in Miami. Hell, he’d rent out the whole damn place if that’s what she wanted.
And then what? The voice of reason sneered at him. Ask her to put on another blindfold?
“Listen, Little Bro, I’m sorry,” Max was saying on the other side of the line now. “I let my curiosity get the best of me, and I’ve obviously fucked this up for you. Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll fix it.”
Gus just hung up on him.
“Is everything okay?” Cole asked him.
No. No, it wasn’t. It definitely wasn’t okay.
16
“WHERE ARE YOU?”
The message woke her up early Monday morning, just a few hours after she’d finally fallen asleep on the grad student lounge couch.
Gus had been texting her variations of “we need to talk” and “give me a chance to explain” since Saturday, but the texting had come to an abrupt stop on Sunday night. She’d hoped that meant he’d given up and had set the phone to vibrate just in case he hadn’t.
Big mistake. The phone loudly vibrating against the lounge’s coffee table not only woke her out of a tortured sleep, but the buzz that accompanied his latest message made it seem angrier than any of the ones that had come before.
Squinting in the dim morning light, she picked up the phone with a plan to set it on “Do Not Disturb,” but then a new message came through.
“Seriously, you need to answer me. Hank says you’re not at your apartment, and he hasn’t been able to find you. Let me know something or I’m going to start calling hospitals.”
God, how pitiful was this situation? She’d spent the last five years knowing she could die in a ditch without anyone realizing she was gone for weeks on end. And the first person to say he’d actually call the hospital to look for her was the guy who’d kept her blindfolded in his apartment all summer. Even worse, her heart had given a sad little lurch at the prospect of him even caring that much.
Wow, could I be anymore messed up? she wondered as she typed back with trembling thumbs: “I know I still owe you for the last week of July. And I’ll figure out how to serve out that week eventually. I promise. But not now. My mind is just not in a place to finish this now.”
Angry pause. Then: “Where are you? Are you safe?”
Again with that weird pang. Why did he have to do that? Make her feel like he actually cared?
“I’m fine,” she typed back with more cheer than she actually felt. “Totally safe. No worries.”
Which was true. While her back wouldn’t be sending her any thank you cards after a second night on the hard, second-hand couch, the grad student lounge in the School of Education building was defi
nitely safe. And almost private. Most of her fellow grad students had either moved on to jobs or internships for the summer. The lounge had remained mostly empty all weekend, and only a few students teaching summer classes would be coming in for coffee that morning.
“I’m sorry about what happened with Max. But believe me, I didn’t make this arrangement because you look like his wife. He was wrong about that. Wrong to let you believe that. I picked you for YOU. Because I want you. Only you.”
God, she wanted to believe him. So bad. But that was part of the problem wasn’t it?
“Please don’t do this to me. I understand you want me. But I want things you can’t give me, and I have to figure out how to not want those things before I serve out my last week. I know I owe you for all the money you gave me, so I’ll do it. Just please give me some time to wrap my head around all of this.”
His answer came back immediately: “I don’t give a fuck about the money. I want you back in my bed. For the rest of July and August, too.”
She shook her head at the phone, wanting what he wanted. But not nearly in the same way.
“I can’t come back yet. I’m sorry.”
A long pause. Then: “I hate manipulating you. But it always seems to come down to that with us.”
She looked at the words, confused and a little scared. What did he think he could possibly use to sway her to come back before she was ready, when she wouldn’t even take a cool two million dollars from him?
“Your sister’s going on stage at 6pm tonight. It’s a sold out performance and there are no non-stop flights from Miami to Santa Fe today. So even if you left now, you wouldn’t get there on time.”
Her heart stopped beating.
And another bubble of text appeared on her phone’s screen. “I have a private jet gassed up and ready to go. There’s a Front Orchestra ticket waiting for you at the venue, the best seat in the house. And I’ve reserved a hotel room for us nearby. One night. It’s all yours for one more night.”
His for the Summer: 50 Loving States, Florida Page 8