by Nikki Sloane
“He won’t.” A part of me wanted to laugh. Right now, Royce didn’t need his father’s help turning me against him. He was doing just fine all by himself.
“Something you need to understand about my father is he doesn’t play a game unless he’s sure he’s going to win.”
I swung my gaze away. Royce’s office was so professional and impersonal, decorated for the persona he projected. Did he think other people would see it as a sign of weakness if he acted like a human? Was that how his father had taught him?
For being a family company, it was like he hid that part of himself.
“I wish you’d let me go with you last night,” he said.
“Yeah? Well, I wish you hadn’t sold me for one hundred thousand shares, Royce. You don’t always get what you want.”
“But I do.” His tone softened. “I wanted you, and now here we are.”
His statement rankled. “You don’t have me. You gave me away.”
He was abruptly right in front of me, wearing a determined look while heat warmed his eyes. It distracted me long enough for him to get his hands around my waist.
I squirmed in his hold. “No. We’re not allowed to—”
Everything from his expression to his voice was dark and aggressive. “Yeah, he told me all about how you agreed to his stupid ‘no contact’ deal. But I didn’t.”
It stole my breath the way he kissed me. He was a rollercoaster. Thrillingly dangerous even when there was no threat to my safety. I wasn’t going to die. All the danger was manufactured, but it didn’t feel any less real.
It was just a kiss, anyway. Breaking Macalister’s rule wasn’t going to cause the end of the world.
Was it?
Royce’s hands slid around my back as his tongue slipped into my mouth, and before he’d made the deal, I would have enjoyed this, but now all I could taste was his manipulation. I couldn’t trust him when his mouth was pressed to mine. And I couldn’t trust myself not to cave.
“No,” I said, stepping back.
My retreat left him adrift, but he recovered with lightning fast reflexes. His eyebrow arrowed up. “No?”
“You just take whatever you want and demand I trust you, but trust doesn’t work as a one-way street. Until you get that, I’m not sharing any part of me with you.”
Oh, he didn’t like that. His jaw set, and I was struck by how much he could look like his father when he was challenged. But he relented, one layer at a time, either returning to the man he was when we were alone . . . or shifting tactics.
He grabbed my hand and squeezed the engagement ring he’d given me. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we’re in this together. I can’t protect you if you shut me out.”
Fire ignited inside my belly. “Except you never let me in.” I pulled away. “And I don’t need your help, Royce.”
By the end of the week, I was second-guessing every choice I’d made.
Working as Royce’s assistant was a joke. He spent his days in meetings and conference calls and long lunches, all of which I wasn’t allowed to sit in on. There were no paper trails or clues in his immaculate office. No hushed conversations for me to overhear. His email wasn’t run by me, and I didn’t screen his calls.
I’d also been distracted with wedding planning. Alice was focused on the anniversary party and demanded I step in and oversee the coordinator she’d hired. My future step-mother-in-law was the CEO of my wedding. I was just middle management, executing her vision.
Every night, I lost the game of chess.
Last night, Macalister accused me of trying to lose too quickly. Subconsciously, perhaps I had. While I spent every free minute practicing on my phone, anxiety crept in as soon as I walked into the library and found his icy stare waiting for me.
I wanted it over as soon as possible.
On Friday, the stock market dipped and put Royce in a foul mood. After our silent car ride together this morning, he’d skulked into his office and shut the door without a word. He didn’t come out for lunch. At three o’clock, he emerged, and the somber expression he wore made suspicion coil in my belly.
“I’m heading out early.” His eyes met mine briefly then shifted away. “I’m not feeling well.”
HBHC stock was still falling since this morning, and it seemed like a really bad idea for anyone named Hale to leave early, but I didn’t say that to him. Instead, I stood and gathered my things. “I’ll go with you.”
I’d hoped for pushback. If he were up to something, he wouldn’t want me tagging along. But he gave a slight nod and waited dutifully for me to finish. He wasn’t sneaking off to some clandestine meeting.
Maybe it wasn’t a lie that he was unwell.
As we sat on the leather seats and the town car whisked us away from Boston, Royce ignored the phone he had clasped in a hand and resting on his knee. He chose to stare blankly out the window.
Gone was the confident, cocky man I’d worked with all week. He didn’t act or even look like himself. A troubled Royce made me worried, and even though I didn’t want to care about him, it was impossible not to. Concern stole into my voice. “Are you okay?”
“Today was a bad day.”
That was all he said the entire fifty-three-minute ride back to the house.
He vanished into his room, and as I did the same, unease grew ten-fold inside me.
Royce owned a massive amount of stock in his family’s company. The drop today had likely cost him a million or more, so it was understandable to be upset, but . . . it was temporary. I’d bet my great-grandmother’s necklace that one of Macalister’s first lessons to his sons had been that the markets fluctuate. You couldn’t be reactive. It might take a few weeks for HBHC’s price to bounce back, but it would.
The stock market was a marathon, not a sprint.
My fingers paused on the book I’d pulled from my nightstand.
Perhaps that was causing Royce’s dramatic mood shift—not the loss in money, but the loss of time. Maybe the drop in the market had thrown a wrench into his plans.
If that was true and his master plan was disrupted, why didn’t I feel better? I clenched my teeth and simmered with self-irritation.
I snatched up my latest book on Greek mythology—this one a collection of essays—made my way to the back of the house, and down the stone steps toward the hedge maze. I’d always been drawn to it, and I’d found reading to be much easier when I put distance between me and Royce.
He was a distracting puzzle of a man I couldn’t figure out.
The puzzle of evergreen trees was easier. It hadn’t rained since the night I’d gotten lost, and, refusing to be conquered, I’d used the last three days to learn every passage in the maze. I could quickly find my way to the center now and on to the exit on the other side. I’d learned all its secrets, but not its magic. It still lingered amongst the leaves and statues.
As I’d done yesterday, I sat beneath the tiered fountain, moving over on the circular bench every ten minutes or so to stay in the shadow its cascading tower cast on me. The afternoon sun was as merciless as the July humidity.
The final essay in the book was about Hera. She’d been beautiful, and Zeus wanted her, and when she wouldn’t submit to his advances, he tricked her. Knowing she loved all creatures, he changed into a cuckoo bird stranded out in the cold. Once she rescued him and took him inside her warm room, he changed back into his true form and raped her.
The shame of it would have been too much, and she was forced to marry Zeus to keep it a secret.
Queen of the gods, she was also the goddess of birth and marriage, which was ironic. Zeus was the worst husband. Every time she had her back turned, he’d run off to take another mortal lover, even though she stayed constant and faithful.
But her jealousy grew until she was only beautiful on the outside. Her wrath twisted her into an ugly goddess, full of vengeance and fire.
She’d never been my favorite in mythology, but I felt for her.
When I closed the
book, my stomach growled, and reluctantly I wound my way back through the walls of evergreen, seeking the kitchen. There was a full-time chef on staff at the Hale house, but I didn’t bother her for dinner. I pulled together some leftovers from earlier in the week and ate alone at the large table, my gaze out on the side garden.
Alice was there, pruning the white roses that bloomed along a trellis. She could have had one of the landscapers do it, but she enjoyed gardening. Her blonde hair gleamed in the golden sunlight, and as she paused to wipe sweat from her forehead, her eyes locked onto me. She waved, but didn’t smile, and went back to work.
Did she know about the deal her husband had made with Royce? How Macalister had bought me for one hundred thousand shares? Macalister was Zeus, but she wasn’t Hera. At least, not in jealousy or fidelity—I’d seen her and Vance together, after all.
I stared down at the wood grain running through the table and tried not to think about it.
At seven-thirty sharp, I peered up at the closed library door, and trepidation twisted in my core. The sensation was becoming familiar. Macalister was already in there because I could hear his heavy footsteps moving around. I filled my lungs with a deep breath, grasped the knob, and pushed the door open.
Awareness ghosted across my skin like a whisper. Something was . . . different. The room looked the same with its bookshelves full of colorful spines, and the smell of leather and oak was as I was accustomed to. The man who stood by the window wore one of his many impeccable suits, not a cufflink or a hair out of place.
But he didn’t have to say a word for me to know something was wrong. The nearly empty tumbler of amber liquid in his hand did.
I’d never seen Macalister Hale drink.
The night of the initiation, he’d toasted with a glass of champagne, but he’d only taken a single sip before handing it off to his wife. In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he’d merely pressed the glass to his mouth and faked the action of letting the alcohol past his lips.
He demanded precision in all aspects of his life. I assumed he didn’t drink because he wouldn’t want anything to impair his judgement or make him vulnerable. But there was a bottle of Macallan 1926 on the table that was half empty, and an unused glass rested beside it.
Macalister’s shoulders rolled back, and he straightened to his full, daunting height. His gaze pierced into me while accusation swamped his eyes. “What are you doing here?”
Was I early? I wanted to shrink back into the shadows, but there was nowhere to hide. I bit down on the inside of my cheek to muster the words. “It’s seven-thirty.”
His arm extended out before bending at ninety-degrees, pulling back his sleeve and making the Cartier watch on his wrist visible to him. He checked the time and frowned. “So it is.”
Rather than take a seat at the desk where the chessboard waited for us, he stayed at the window and finished his scotch. Not in savoring sips as it was supposed to be done, but in one huge swallow.
The whole day had been weird, but nothing set me more on edge than the way Macalister looked now. The only emotions I’d seen from him were the hard, shallow ones. Anger. Disappointment. Envy.
This man now was barely recognizable. He looked exhausted.
And utterly human.
I hadn’t taken my hand off the doorknob yet. Like a chess piece, I’d moved but was still considering before committing to it. “Do you want to postpone?”
“No.” He strode to the desk, put down his empty glass and refilled it, then poured a few sips-worth into the other glass. “You’ll join me in a drink while we play.”
It wasn’t a request, and his order made me squirm inside my skin. Sharing a drink with my future father-in-law should have been a nice gesture, and the scotch he’d poured wasn’t an ‘average day’ kind of whiskey—not even for one of the richest men in America. It was far too fine, too expensive.
I didn’t like how it made the evening seem like we were friends. We’d never be friends. He was more than twice my age, and the power dynamic between us was wider than the Atlantic.
“I’m, uh, not a scotch drinker,” I said.
He wasn’t fazed and held the glass out to me. “I don’t remember asking.”
My heart sank. I closed the door and went to him, mumbling a thank you as I took the scotch. At least he hadn’t poured heavy and was only wasting a few thousand dollars on me. Like a gentleman, he waited until I sat before he did. Two months ago, I wouldn’t have warranted this sign of respect from him. For years, he hadn’t noticed my existence.
Not until his son showed an interest.
Macalister’s steely eyes weren’t as focused as they normally were. While we played, his moves were still deliberate and cunning, but they were slower. Last night, he’d gone on the attack, and even the way he’d set his pieces down was sharp and aggressive. It had been a quick death.
Now, it was slow and agonizing. He slid the marble pieces across the black and white checkerboard like soap slicking across skin.
“You haven’t touched your scotch,” he said as his queen glided to a new spot close to my king. “Check.”
I’d learned that the game of chess was played in three phases. The opening, the middlegame, and the one we’d just entered—
The endgame.
I picked up the tumbler and sipped the scotch while pretending to consider my options. There weren’t any, really. I knew how it was going to end no matter what I did. Royce’s words echoed in my mind. He doesn’t play a game unless he’s sure he’s going to win.
Macalister’s heavy gaze drank me in as the flavor of burnt rubber rolled across the tip of my tongue. I guarded my reaction carefully. He didn’t need to know I hated his expensive scotch or the way he looked at me. Chess wasn’t the only game we played every night. The stakes on the unspoken game were much higher.
I moved my bishop to block in a futile attempt, sacrificing it and only prolonging the inevitable.
His voice was unsteady, rather than gloating like he usually did. It was as if he were sad the game was over. “Checkmate.”
It was the longest game we’d played yet, but he wasn’t satisfied. As I rearranged the pieces into their starting positions, I tried to ignore the man who’d won and his strange behavior.
He said it quietly. “You’re improving.”
“Still a long way from beating you,” I grumbled, then sucked in a sharp breath. I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. I finished arranging the pieces into their starting positions and stood from my chair, relieved to escape—
Only to be frozen in place by his command.
“Stay.”
There was a hint of desperation in the word, so faint I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined it. I didn’t want to stay. This mortal version of Macalister was the scariest of all.
My voice went soft, not wanting to disturb the shadows in the room. “Is everything all right?”
His expression shuttered, like I’d uncovered a dark secret. “Why do you ask?”
“I’ve never seen you drink before.”
His gaze fell to his hand wrapped around the glass. “I do, once a year.”
He lifted the drink to his lips and fixed his stare on me while he drank. His Adam’s apple bobbed with each slow, deliberate swallow. It made me uncomfortable. He looked at me like he’d rather be savoring me than the liquor. When he finished, he set the glass down and ran his finger along the rim. It was an absentminded gesture, but it rang false. Everything he did was calculated and measured.
“Once a year?” I asked.
“Yes.” The pad of his finger curved another loop around the edge of the glass. “The day my wife died.”
SIX
MY HEART SLOWED TO A STOP. “That’s today?”
Macalister’s expression was vacant stone, matching the marble chess pieces. “Losing Julia was the second most difficult day of my life, so you’ll have to forgive the scotch. I’ve done it for the last fifteen years, and it has become a tradition of sor
ts.”
I sank back into my chair with breath clutched tightly in my chest, hoping that if I didn’t breathe, I couldn’t hurt for him.
Fifteen years ago today, the Hales had gathered in a hospital room for the last time as a full family. I’d only been six years old when she’d had the equestrian accident, but I’d heard the Hale men had been there when she’d passed. Royce had been ten.
Oh, God. Royce.
This was why he’d been so withdrawn today. It had nothing to do with the stock prices or money. The ache in my heart tore in two. One side hurt for the man who’d lost his mother, and the selfish other side was wounded he hadn’t shared the meaning of this day with me.
I snatched up my neglected glass of scotch and took another sip. Maybe Macalister would think my bleary eyes were caused by the whisky, rather than the bomb he’d dropped.
“I didn’t know,” I said, stumbling over my words. “I always liked her. She was so pretty and nice.”
I cringed, bracing for how he’d respond to my ridiculously childlike statement. He didn’t look irritated, though. Sadness swept into his stormy eyes and was quickly blinked away. He shifted in his chair, visibly uncomfortable with showing emotion.
“Yes,” he said finally. “She was quite beautiful.”
In my awkwardness, I couldn’t keep myself from babbling. “I thought Royce was upset about the hit to the stock market.”
Macalister’s eyebrow lifted with interest. “Royce was upset?”
“I . . . maybe upset isn’t the right word. He was quiet today, and it was obvious something was bothering him.”
“But he didn’t mention what it was?”
“No,” I said softly.
He poured himself another drink, then rolled the liquor around in the bottom of the glass as he considered my statement. “Hale men typically aren’t forthcoming, especially when it comes to emotion.”
“I’m learning that,” I said dryly. The glass was cold in my fingers, even as the burn from the whisky lingered in the back of my throat. “You should be sharing this drink with him.”