The Financier (Hudson Kings Book 2)

by Liz Maverick

  “Hi,” he said, not referencing his appearance. “Just checking on the kids. They look happy. The pH is balanced. Nice job.”

  So, we’re not going to mention that you got the shit kicked out of you? Again. That you’re two hours late? That you just walked in on me? Jane hesitated, and then said pointedly, “I didn’t hear the doorbell or a knock.”

  Mr. Dawes ignored the pointedness. “I didn’t come through the front door.”

  “Oh,” Jane said, biting her lip. “That’s weird.”

  “What are you wearing?” he asked, seeming to perk up somewhat.

  Okay, he was definitely not himself. Even though she was sitting down, he could see very well she was wearing shorts. Silky, lacy pajama shorts. “I was wearing sweatpants too, but I got hot. Whatever.” Jane tipped her head, staring at him, her annoyance and confusion dissipating with every second that she came closer to the conclusion that he was really not okay. “You’re two hours late. I figured you weren’t coming, so I took my sweats off.”

  “I said I was coming. I would have let you know if I wasn’t. Something came up.”

  She slid off the barstool and walked over to assess the damage. “Clearly. Do you . . . do you need help?”

  “This is my house.”

  “Yes, of course it is, Mr. Dawes. But you seem pretty out of it. I’d like to help you. May I?” Jane didn’t wait for an answer, and he certainly didn’t protest. He stood there in open fascination watching her move toward him.

  She gripped him around his arms to keep him still and examined his bruises. “Do you want me to call the police? Do you want to make a report?”

  He stared at her and then grinned. “Mercs don’t generally file police reports.”

  Beneath her grip on the suit fabric, his body was muscular and fit; he was definitely not one to sit at his desk all day. Probably would be better if he did, given what went down when he went for a walk. “Investment bankers do. You get that you were mugged, right? You might have a concussion.”

  Mr. Dawes stared at her blankly. “I like the way you look in my house,” he said. “You’ve got these little glasses here, a little pair of reading glasses stuck up in your hair; you’ll probably find them there tomorrow . . .”

  He’s hit his head, Jane thought. Hard. “What about one of your friends. One of the Hudson Kings.” She reached into his coat pocket, found nothing, checked the other side, and pulled out his phone. “Who do you think is available right now?”

  “Dunno,” he said with a shrug, clearly uninterested in this line of conversation. “Chase?”

  Jane held Mr. Dawes’s phone out to him. “Unlock your phone and find Chase for me.”

  He stared at her and then did as she asked. Jane called “Chase,” and when he picked up and said, “Chase, here,” she said, “This is Mr. Dawes’s new fish sitter, Jane. Mr. Dawes got a little, uh, roughed up, and he won’t call the police or go to the hospital, but I’m a little worried he might have a concussion.”

  There was a pause. “You have a very sexy voice,” Chase said.

  Jane pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at it, unsure whether disgust or appreciation was in order. Mr. Dawes noticed this. “What did he say?”

  “He said I have a very sexy voice.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, you do. Tell Chase there’s a sock on the door.”

  Jane narrowed her eyes. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  She put the phone up to her face. “He said to tell you there’s a . . . sock on the door,” she said a little grumpily.

  Chase chucked. “Yeah. I got it. So, we can hang up now.”

  “You’re not coming to get him, are you?” Jane said.

  “Nope. You sound like you’ll be a much better nurse than I would. You know how to watch over a concussion?”

  “Yeah, but, maybe you should just come over and—”

  “There’s a sock on the door. Can’t come in.”

  “Why did I even call you?” Jane asked, totally exasperated.

  “Good question. He definitely does not want me to come over. So, take good care of our boy tonight, and I’ll see him tomorrow,” Chase said. He cut off his own rollicking laughter by hanging up on her in rather the same manner as Mr. Dawes did.

  Jane walked over to where her boss had wandered off and stuck his phone back in his pocket.

  “You were having a snack,” he said, like he was cataloguing a crime scene or assembling details that he’d need for some mission impossible, or whatever mercenaries did. “And the stereo’s on; it’s very pleasant. But it’s really hot in here. Did you mean to build a blaze in the living room fireplace far beyond the requirements of a single person in the current season? No wonder you took off your pants.”

  “Mr. Dawes!”

  He blinked sleepily, like he was finally succumbing to the weariness that had basically rendered him useless from the moment he’d walked in. “Nice idea, though,” he mumbled. “Building a fire in the living room. I never think of it. And I’m impressed you know how to light a fire.”

  Jane rolled her eyes and then just completely took over. She moved behind him, easing off his coat. And then her hands were at his buttons, swiftly and competently opening his shirt. She did her best to ignore the intimacy, which had already sent a slight flush to her cheeks.

  “Do you want to go to the hospital, just to be safe?” she asked briskly, desperate to stay on the business side of their odd arrangement.

  “No,” he said.

  “I’m looking for bumps on your head, but I think it’s just the eye area,” she said. “Did you fall on the ground when you got hit?” Jane watched his face in the reflection of a spike-framed wall mirror, her heart thumping as Nick Dawes closed his eyes in unguarded ecstasy when she ran her fingers through his hair.

  “Ground or side of a building, not sure,” he answered.

  “Oh, there. Yeah, you have a nice goose egg on your head. You’re acting like you have a concussion, Mr. Dawes. Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”

  “I’m sure. Where’s my phone?” He started patting his pants pocket, but his phone was back in his suit coat. “I’ll call a car service.”

  Jane took him by the arm and led him to the living room couch—which faced what she had to admit was probably an excessively large fire—where she pushed on him gently to make him sit down, and then sat down next to him. “Mr. Dawes, you came here for something. Do you want me to get it for you?”

  He stared at Jane. “No.” He reached up and ran one finger across Jane’s cheek before his hand dropped. “What’s going on here?” he murmured.

  Jane placed a palm over the cheek that Nick Dawes had ignited from flush to fire. She swallowed and pulled herself together. Maybe there was pen on her face. Or cookie crumbs. “What do you mean?” she managed to ask.

  “Nothing.” He closed his eyes and leaned back on the sofa.

  After a brief silence, Jane said, “I know you don’t have frozen peas or a steak in the fridge, but maybe you’ve got an ice pack. I can’t remember. Hold on a sec.”

  When she got back with the ice pack (thank god!) Mr. Dawes was staring at the plate of sandwiches Jane had left on the coffee table. She had wrapped them with plastic, then forgotten about them when she thought he’d changed his mind about showing up.

  “Are those hors d’oeuvres?” he asked.

  Jane winced. Not exactly hors d’oeuvres but close enough to be embarrassing. She did not reveal she’d sprinted to the market for ingredients when he’d first said he was coming over. What was she thinking? “Yeah. Basically.”

  To Jane’s great relief, her boss did not overthink the presence of tiny sandwiches. “I’m starving,” he muttered. “Are you saving them?”

  “No! Please! By all means, have as many as you want.”

  He wanted many. He paused in the middle of inhaling his third of Nana’s recipe of watercress–goat cheese sandwiches on cinnamon-raisin bread to say, “Man, Jane,
you can cook.”

  “It’s an easy snack,” she said.

  He vaguely registered that her gaze was square on his mouth as he ate. Jane flushed—Again! Jane! All the blushing! What up?—and tore her gaze away. “Mr. Dawes, um, I’m worried you have a concussion. You’re a little out of it. More than a little, actually. You should lie down.”

  He shoved the last tea sandwich in his mouth, got up without ceremony, and started walking down the hall to his bedroom. “I won’t stay long. Just give me a second . . .” She followed him, but he closed the door in her face.

  She could hear him stumbling around a little. With her hand on the door she waited, and then it got silent, and then she got worried.

  So she knocked. “Mr. Dawes, sir, I’m coming in, in about ten seconds. You need to lie down, and it’s important that you have someone watching over you for a little while.”

  There was a sound like a grunt, which didn’t sound as if he were objecting, so Jane pushed through and went into his bedroom, which was sort of her bedroom.

  He was lying on the bed, vaguely spread-eagled. He was slowly turning his head from one side to the other, trying to get a look at his room. “Our stuff is starting to get mixed up,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah, well, I really needed a little closet and bureau space. But I didn’t move much. Obviously, I wasn’t going to live out of a suitcase for weeks on end, and, well, frankly, I didn’t realize we’d see each other until the end, so . . .” Jane followed Mr. Dawes’s gaze to the open closet where her clothes hung next to his clothes.

  “Huh,” he said.

  “Huh, what?” she asked.

  He slowly shook his head. “I’m not sick of you yet.”

  “Thanks. I’m only a little sick of you.”

  He turned and she grinned, and after their eyes met, Mr. Dawes looked at the ceiling and said, “My head kind of hurts, Jane. I’m going to close my eyes for just a second.” He promptly fell asleep.

  Jane stood there, standing over Nick Dawes’s battered face. “Okay, um, so I’m going to wash your face while you rest, okay?”

  He didn’t answer, which she took as a yes, and then she went to the bathroom and got washcloths and soap and antiseptic, and cleaned up his face.

  And then when she’d finished cleaning him up, trying not to think about how weird and possibly dangerous it was that she felt so tender toward him, she put everything away and went to the bottom of the bed and removed his shoes.

  It was tempting to be thorough. Nobody liked to sleep in a belt. That was kind of a common human principle. Jane’s hands went to his belt buckle, which she unclasped and began to slide out by pulling on one end.

  Mr. Dawes’s eyes opened, and their gazes met. “Dream or reality?”

  “Reality. Is that the right answer?” Jane asked. Okay, do not flirt with a man with a concussion. That’s really bad form and not a little desperate. He didn’t answer, which made Jane nervous.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Nick Dawes. And yours is Jane MacGregor. I’m fine, Jane, really.” He turned his head and went back to sleep. Jane returned to the living room, where she’d left her phone, put out the fire, and came back to the bedroom. She crawled into bed—atop the covers, natch—next to her boss, excavated her reading glasses from her hair, and clicked on her book app, picking up where she’d been during milk and cookies. Every hour or so, she’d look over at Mr. Dawes, wake him up, and ask him some questions, and then let him fall back asleep. Every time, he’d smile that groggy smile and answer correctly.

  Jane kept the table lamp on for hours so she could see his face and make sure he was still okay. Once, in the middle of the night, Mr. Dawes awoke and sat up.

  Jane suddenly felt incredibly weird next to him in her satin shorties peeking out under the sweats she’d put back on, even though he was mostly under the covers, and she was definitely on top of them. Actually, maybe that was the problem. Where she followed his gaze, there were still curves, a lot of curves, and some substantial patches of bare skin where the fabric gaped, and the occasional tiny dusting of freckles.

  Nick Dawes was cataloguing her body. She knew this. She knew he knew she knew this. And he did not seem remotely apologetic, tentative, or even embarrassed to be openly . . . god, was he appreciating her body? What planet was she on?

  “Mars,” Jane whispered to herself as Mr. Dawes tilted his head, his gaze locked on her flesh, and reached out like a poet about to draft a masterpiece with a quill.

  “Venus,” he said, and then quoted, “‘Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs . . . you look like a world, lying in surrender.’” He ran his finger from the top of her thigh to the bottom of her foot and away.

  Jane nearly came off the bed.

  Nick Dawes looked her in the eyes, a sexy little smile on his face. And he said, so, so quietly: “You’re really something.”

  Jane stared at his face, her body in flames.

  After that, he fell back asleep easily.

  It took Jane hours.

  Nick woke up and, after shivering under a blanket for a while, tried to recall what he could have possibly explained to Jane after he’d turned up post–Krista Lawrence. The conversation was too fuzzy, but he distinctly remembered her taking care of him. He distinctly remembered her fingers on the buttons of his shirt, on the skin under his shirt, in his hair . . . his cock hardened just thinking about it.

  But he got himself under control, feeling it would be just really poor form, really disrespectful to Jane if he jacked off in the shower, thinking about her gorgeous body before leaving. Instead, he mustered up some self-control and did a quick face wash, noting that he was already completely clean of the dirt he remembered being shoved in his face, except for a thin line of grime around his hairline.

  In the living room, he also noted that the fire was out and that Jane was gone. He wondered what an unemployed Jane MacGregor had to do on a Thursday morning, hoped it wasn’t an interview somewhere else, and tried to decide whether or not the odd feeling in his gut was relief, disappointment, or merely the physical aftermath of Krista Lawrence’s ire.

  He walked into the kitchen; the counters were spotless, but there was a note.

  Dear Sir,

  Gone running.

  Call me if you need anything.

  Sincerely,

  Jane MacGregor

  P.S. I already fed the fish.

  The formal note made him smile.

  Nick walked into his bedroom and forced himself not to look at any of Jane’s things while he rummaged in the back of the closet for the safe door. He retrieved his safety-deposit key. Then he exited down the service elevator.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jane had not slept well with Nick Dawes lying next to her. In fact, she’d barely clocked a handful of hours after falling into a fitful sleep. And still she woke up before him. It was the stuff of comedy: the cartoonish double take just before she considered and discarded the notion of taking off all his clothes and giving him an inappropriate sponge bath. Since that was out of the question, she opted to go for one of those high-velocity elbow-swinging power walks that were supposed to be so good for you. It was the first time she’d exercised in about three months, and it was not a coincidence. Jane wasn’t so sure Mr. Dawes would want to wake up next to her in bed; she wasn’t so sure she wanted to be there if he did.

  But she did leave a note, because not leaving a note seemed worse than leaving one.

  By the time she returned to the penthouse, he was already gone. Jane sat heavily down on the bed where he’d lain. Nick Dawes was pretty out of it, for sure, but you couldn’t fake the chemistry between them. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced. She was willing to bet they could win a Nobel Prize for the chemistry generated between them while having a conversation about watercress sandwiches.

  But he hadn’t yet called, and Jane had the sinking sensation it was either because he regretted the intimacy or he couldn’t remember it. From the other
side of the bed, Rochester gave her a woeful look. “I know,” Jane said, reaching over to rub the sides of his head. “You don’t have to say anything.” And as she lay there, sweating on Mr. Dawes’s side of the bed, willing herself not to be gross and smell his pillow, her cell phone rang.

  Her pulse instantly sped up, and she had to release a yoga breath just to pull herself together. “Hello, Mr. Dawes, sir. How may I help you?”

  “Just checking in,” he said casually.

  Pause. Jane didn’t quite know what to say. Was it inappropriate to reference that he had a romantic streak and the heart of a poet (which she knew after doing an Internet search on the Pablo Neruda line he’d uttered before falling asleep) or that getting bonked on the head made him handsier than he had any right to be, given that he was her boss . . . and that she liked all of that?

  “Any questions?” he asked into the silence.

  “No, sir, I . . . actually, sir, I do.”

  “Okay.” His voice was brighter.

  “I really hate to phrase this question in the way I’m about to phrase it, but do you remember last night?”

  Another silence. And then, “Well, I got jumped on the way over and then barreled into the house late and fairly out of it. I fell asleep at night, and I woke up in the morning. Does that match?”

  “Uh, yes.” Some of it. What about the crazy sexual tension?

  “Pretty straightforward then,” he added.

  Actually, not at all.

  “Obviously, I was pretty messed up. But the apartment is supposed to be your private space for the duration of the job, and I violated that implicit agreement. And for that I apologize.”

  He doesn’t remember. Or if he remembers, it’s not enough of a big deal to mention. Yeah, that does not feel good. When your big deal is someone else’s microscopic data point.

  “As private as a space can be that has video cameras in the majority of rooms,” Jane pointed out.