Detained

by Ainslie Paton

  “When’s the last time you hit someone?”

  He had to think. He hadn’t hit anything in anger bigger than a squash ball in a very long time. “That’s not the point.”

  “You truly think you might hurt me and that’s why you hold back.”

  He nodded

  “Truth?”

  “Not a nice one.”

  “Liar.”

  She might have spat it at him, but she was laughing. Something shuddered loose in his chest. She was dangerous. And he wanted her so badly he was beginning not to care about playing nice. “You think you’re strong enough for me?”

  She smiled. Her hands were at her waist, fingers on the knot of the robe. She got it undone and it slithered to the ground at her feet. Jesus Christ she was beautiful. Soft, luscious curves and creamy skin, so unlike his angular Chinese princesses. That dry ragged sound in the room was coming from him. He couldn’t breathe.

  “Sit.”

  He couldn’t move. But she did. Two strides towards him. She palmed him in the chest, he stepped back, the underside of his knees met the edge of the sofa, and he sat down. He’d give her the fun. Let her think she’d won. Her hands were warm and soft. Her lips on his ribs, floating lower, tracing his hipbone made him twitch. Then the light in his head went out when she closed a hand around the base of him and brought her mouth down on him. He saw shooting stars. His skin melted. His muscles burned. He didn’t understand this reaction. He never felt like this. He fisted her hair, to pull her away, to hold her there, he couldn’t decide. He couldn’t think. He felt a kind of panic. He pressed his feet into the carpet to stand, to grip onto the world as it spun too fast. She made a deep-throated groan and his stomach bottomed out like on a roller-coaster.

  He pulled her hair, pulled her up. “Enough.”

  She looked confused and he regretted the sharpness of his command immediately. She held up a hand and he took it in his, threaded their fingers together.

  “This is for me,” she said.

  He looked deep in her eyes and knew he’d give her anything, even if it meant giving himself up and he was lost and found and lost again.

  When he came back to the world, they were on the floor. This suite had a custom-made bed and they were flopped on the carpet. He was bathed in sweat and she was sprawled across him. Her hair was wet, one hand was curled around his neck, the other held his arm. He had no idea how long they’d been there. He felt drunk, but he’d hardly had anything to drink. He felt clean, though he knew the next stop was going to be the bath.

  He’d let her take control in a way he never had as an adult. Not with Jiao, not with the women before her. The fear was blinding, almost shutting him down, but she burned it away with her sure touch, her soft whispering, her innate responsiveness.

  She was no courtesan. It wasn’t a practiced performance with a predictable, bankable outcome. She knocked his teeth, she bit too hard. She crashed against him and he loved it. The rawness of it, the power of it. She gave him her body and her heart, and she made him feel new.

  This was a big problem.

  11. Froth

  “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated” — Confucius

  “Where’d you get to Saturday night? I thought you were coming to the game.” Pete poured milk into the frother and set it on its electric plate. Pete was going to need that coffee. Might be better if it was black. “If May Ling asked about you once Will, it was a hundred times. Pisses me off you left me with that.”

  “Ah hah.” Pete already slightly pissed wasn’t a good start, given where this had to go.

  “No ‘ah hah’. For God’s sake, stop leading her on. Anyway we could’ve used your ticket.”

  Will put his mug under the coffee maker’s spout, put another pod in its slot and pulled the handle. Inside the machine hot water started to flow, and the smell of coffee caught in his nose. It was the smell of Monday morning. Though not a Monday morning he was looking forward to with his normal relish.

  “I’m not leading her on. May Ling is relentless. I’ve been totally up-front with her. She bloody well knows it’s not on with me. Anyway, I thought you were using the corporate box?”

  “You gave it to the Chery auto folk. So we had to slum it, remember?”

  “Ah, that’s right.”

  Pete’s milk was frothed. He added it to his coffee cup. “You okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “What did you do? Sleep the whole weekend? You look five years younger. Did you pick one?”

  “God, no.” Gawd.

  “It’s officially true. Jiao spoiled you.”

  “Starting to look that way.” Pete was right about being spoiled, but he had the wrong culprit.

  “And your response to losing your long-term mistress isn’t to pick another, it’s to become a monk.”

  Will sipped his coffee. Black, the way he felt. Bitter, the way he liked it. “Who won?”

  “Rockets. Wang was off with an ankle injury. Fourth straight loss for the Sharks. Your sponsor dollars hard at work.” Pete circled a spoon in his froth but his attention wasn’t diverted. “I gather you’ve finished with this conversation.”

  “Yep.”

  Pete sighed. “So, the interview this morning, Aileen has updated the talking points. She wants you to stick to them. I want you to stick to them.”

  Will wished they were in his office so he could sit behind his desk. His body felt like it’d been smashed; muscles he couldn’t identify hurt. Ordinarily the effects of being ridden hard would’ve made him feel lighter. But this felt like guilt made physical. Because they were in Pete’s office, he parked his tail against Pete’s desk, stretched his legs out in front and held in the groan.

  “I need the interview cancelled.”

  Pete did a watch check. He had the Breitling on. Will had lost count of how many great watches Pete owned. He had a Breitling in a drawer somewhere as well. A present from Jiao bought with his credit card in her name. After he’d made her return the Dewitt. No one needed a one hundred and fifty thousand dollar watch. He preferred his old Tag, the first decent watch he’d ever bought himself.

  “Cancelled? The journalist is due here in an hour.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to change the time. I’m sure that’ll be fine.” Pete’s face said major pain, but it was only Monday, and he was only slightly pissed at this point.

  “I said cancel, not reschedule.”

  “Come on. We agreed we need to do this.”

  “You do it.”

  “Will—it has to be you. We agreed.” Pete’s voice bled exasperation.

  He fought the idea of simply issuing the order. He didn’t owe Pete an explanation. He could do whatever he wanted. “We have to cancel.”

  “No. We have a plan. It’s a good plan. What’s going on with you?”

  He felt hollowed out, that’s what was going on. “I’ve already met the journalist. She’s not suitable.” He put the coffee down. It wasn’t helping. It was the colour of despair, the taste of betrayal.

  “Whoa.” Pete clattered his cup on his saucer. “When did you meet her, and why isn’t she suitable?”

  “I met her at the airport.”

  “The airport? You picked her out amongst how many thousands, waltzed up and said, hey, I’m Will Parker. And with one look you could tell she wasn’t suitable.”

  “No.”

  “So, what then?”

  “I arranged to have her detained.”

  “You did what?”

  “Jiao’s brother-in-law works in immigration. I arranged to have the woman pulled out of the passport check line and detained.”

  “Oh my God! I can’t begin to speculate on how many laws you broke. How does this even help us?”

  “I got myself detained with her.”

  “Oh fuck me! So now she has a story about being detained by Chinese immigration with Will Parker.”

  “No, she doesn’t know who I am.”

  “
You’re fucking with me?”

  Pete stepped in front of him. Legs wide, the stance he used to make himself shorter, more in your face. He was waiting for a reprieve. He wasn’t going to get it.

  “You’re not fucking with me! God. Will, what possessed you to do something so dumb?”

  “That’s not the dumb part.”

  “You kissed her didn’t you?”

  Pete had a talent for wild logic leaps that were spot-on.

  “Look at me, Will.”

  He obliged. Better to get this over with.

  “Oh fuck. What did you do?”

  He pushed off the desk, went to the window, and looked out across Zhongshan Road. This early in the morning Lover’s Walk was loveless, no canoodling couples and only a smattering of tourists.

  “Nothing she didn’t want too, but she can’t do the interview now.”

  “Why not? Oh fuck. Don’t fucking tell me. Oh fuck. You slept with her. Will—I’m... Holy fuck.”

  “Yes, that about sums it up, Pete.” If this wasn’t a bloody awkward moment it would be amusing to see Pete so thrown.

  “At the airport?”

  “More or less, and a suite at the Pen.”

  Pete was beside him at the window. “You had her pulled out of the immigration line-up and falsely detained, then got yourself falsely detained with her, and did God knows what with her, for how long?”

  “Five hours.”

  “Five hours! Then you got her a suite at the Peninsula and fucked her.”

  Will took a breath, about to cut off Pete’s reaction and get down to business.

  Pete said, “Don’t speak,” giving him a stop sign hand gesture. “And you did all this without giving her your name.”

  “Yep.”

  “Too fucking right the interview is off. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Wait till you meet her. She’s the kind of woman could make any man forget anything.”

  “You’ve done some crazy stuff but this is right up there with certifiable. She’s a journalist. What happens if she writes about it?”

  “She can’t ever know. Besides, she’s not a ‘my steamy night with’ kind of journalist.”

  “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. You don’t reckon when she comes across a photo of you and some media baron opens his chequebook, she might think differently and talk, or have friends who are that kind of journalist.”

  “What photos, Pete? You’re the guy in the photos.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I fucked up. Okay, I know. It shouldn’t have happened. I could’ve cancelled the stuffing interview once we knew Gerry Ives wasn’t on the plane. I don’t need an excuse.”

  “But we need the interview—if not this one, then with another paper. We need to influence the shareholders of Avalon to sell down to us.”

  “I know. We’ll go with the Financial Record. Find a journalist there we can work with.”

  Pete went for his desk phone. “We need to get Aileen in here.”

  “Aileen doesn’t have to know the details. And I want you to meet Darcy Campbell when she gets here, not Aileen.”

  Pete pressed the phone’s speaker button, “Aileen, can you come in?”

  Her voice came back, “Is Will with you? Has he seen the talking points?”

  “He’s here. Come and we’ll fill you in.”

  Aileen said, “Why do I not like the sound of that?” and the phone went dead.

  This wasn’t done with yet and already Will had a headache. He sat in Pete’s chair at Pete’s desk and earned himself another hard stare and a head shake, and Pete went back to the coffee machine.

  When Aileen arrived she said, “Boys,” and took a seat opposite Will. “I gather we have a problem.”

  Aileen had worked as Will’s head of corporate affairs for five years. Pete was convinced she’d prostitute herself for Will despite being happily married to a Yankee merchant banker. Will kept it strictly professional with her, just in case Pete was right, and since Pete was not so secretly madly in love with her, it was an interesting tangle that worked surprisingly well.

  “Will has done something incredibly stupid so we need to cancel on Darcy Campbell this morning,” said Pete.

  Aileen took that with a narrowing of her dark eyes. “Will?”

  “What he said, Aileen.”

  “Will, what did you do?”

  ”I fucked up. That’s all you need to know.”

  “I’ll be the judge of what I need to know,” she said.

  Will gave her a hard look. “That’s all you’re going to know.”

  Aileen sighed. “It took months to convince you of the value of lifting your personal profile, and now you want me to revert to protecting it, making sure you fly under the radar all over again.”

  “We’re just cancelling this particular interview, Aileen,” said Pete. “He’s still with the program, right Will?”

  “Right. Just cancel the Campbell interview.”

  “This won’t make us any friends at the Sydney Herald. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Will nodded. He’d known going ahead with the interview was a bust from the moment he’d started trading truths with Darcy and had chosen not to lie. Omit, hell yeah, but outright lie, no. He’d told the truth. It was something about pretending to be a stranger, about being in that artificial detention. And then, later in the suite, he hadn’t been able to help it but talk to her, really talk to her. He’d told her things he’d never told anyone. Things only Pete knew. Worse, he’d let her see parts of himself he kept walled off from the world, parts that could still wake him in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.

  And he’d loved every freaking minute of it. Even knowing it would come to this. To packing her off with her tail between her legs through no fault of her own. He pushed back in the chair. He wanted out of this room. Out of this morning. Out of this day. He was kidding about not lying to her. He’d promised he wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, but he was going to hurt her, possibly hurt what she cared most about; her career, her big break. Getting the first interview with the press-dodging Will Parker, and he was going to do it without a second thought.

  “Will?”

  “What?” he snapped at Aileen.

  “Pete said you wanted him to meet Darcy.”

  He looked around. Pete had decamped. “Yeah, as a courtesy. Is that okay with you? In fact I’d be happy if he’d just do the interview.”

  “Pete’s briefed. Of course he can do it, but it’s supposed to be you. By rights, she’ll refuse. It’ll depend on how hard-nosed she is. I’ll prep Pete.” Aileen stood to go. “I wish you’d tell me what’s going on.”

  “You’d hate me.”

  “I hate you some days anyway.”

  That made him smile. “Do you really?”

  She shrugged her slim shoulders in her designer suit. “Why not? Someone has to do it.”

  He groaned. “I think there’s a queue, you can join the end of it.”

  “Oh Will,” she laughed. “Who do you think started it?” At the door to Pete’s office she turned back. “I’ll set up something with the Financial Record. And you remember about tonight?”

  “Monkey suit.”

  “Yes, black tie and try to look happy about it. Are you bringing a date?”

  “No.”

  “Are you ever going to have a date again?”

  “Don’t I pay you to do more important things than worry about my love-life?”

  “You pay me to make sure your business is positioned well with stakeholders, here and internationally. You are the business, Will. Of course I worry about you.”

  “I might have to start paying you more then. Danger money.”

  Aileen laughed. “You already pay me a fortune, but go ahead, if it makes you feel better. Who am I to say no?”

  When the door clicked shut and Will was finally alone, he measured his options. He should go through the connecting door to his ow
n office. He had two engineer’s reports waiting and a full inbox of emails unanswered. He could just fuck the day off and hit the gym or go home and sleep, it was going to be another late night. He reached for Pete’s phone to call Bo. He’d have him drive him out to the plant, he could burn off some angst doing an inspection. He let the phone handset drop back into the cradle before Bo answered.

  There were a thousand ways to mask cowardice and they were all open to him. Each one was preferable to the further mess he’d make if he faced up to Darcy Campbell. He couldn’t afford to compound his mistake by seeing her again, even knowing she’d want to spit in his face and he’d deserve it. Neither Pete nor Aileen had earned the extra hassle either.

  He swung the chair around to face the windows, closed his eyes against the sun and saw her face, flushed from the heat of the bath where she’d sung a Green Day song mostly off-key, making him laugh till he got a cramp in his side. He felt her hands on his back, tracing the edge of the big tat, resting her cheek there when he told her what it meant to him.

  He’d had a weekend full of crystallised moments of pleasure, some so commonplace as to be unremarkable to anyone but him. It wasn’t unusual to find himself in bed or the bath with a beautiful woman, but none of them had tried to make him laugh by singing badly, or lay so tenderly in his arms to sleep. And none so hot, so challenging, so gut-wrenchingly pure; he knew it would be a long time until he forgot Darcy Campbell and forgave himself the sin of hurting her.

  12. Real World

  “If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.” — Confucius

  Darcy needed a long shower to get her act together. It was a good thing the interview wasn’t till 10am. Her whole body felt gloriously used. She’d known she’d wake up alone. Tara wasn’t a poignant goodbye type of guy. Still, she’d gone into the dining room with a sense of trepidation. Her Shangri-La fantasy would taste sour if he’d left a soppy note making promises they both knew wouldn’t be kept.

  No note. But a lovely breakfast spread—for one.

  She watched CNN and ate strawberries and yoghurt. She drank two big milky coffees and tried to review her notes one last time. But images from the weekend kept working their way into her head.