“That’s Wilma, over by the flower arrangement, and that’s not Paris.”
She adjusted the scarf she’d tied at her neck. “There could be two of them.”
“Alex lost a humiliating amount of money recently. They could’ve split up already.” He nudged her with his shoulder, once, twice till she moved, finding he’d backed her against a pillar. He put a hand to the wall over her shoulder. She brought her knee up as much as her skirt allowed, put her foot against the wall, and shoved her cigar in her mouth to stop him trying to kiss her.
“Oh honey, that’s just mean.”
She had to revert to Marilyn because there was no Bonnie and Clyde quote that fit, and she’d watched the Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway movie twice, once with Cal and once on her own. “If I’d observed all the rules, I’d never have got anywhere.”
Cal used a finger to tip his hat back. He’d let his stubble grow in, and smiling the way he did, he looked like he could rob you of everything you owned including your sanity. “One of the things I love most about you, Finley Cartwright.”
It wasn’t so easy to grin and suck on a cigar at the same time. He plucked it out of her mouth, lifted her chin, and kissed her, while snaking a hand around her hip and palming her ass.
What’s a gangster girl to do but hold on to her bad man’s shoulders and give it back to him as good as she got. When they broke apart, Cal said, “How about we hit it and quit it, and go home so I can see you in that garter belt?”
“What garter belt?”
With quick fingers, he twanged the elastic over her thigh, before dragging the back of his hand up her body to cup her breast. She wore a pushup, padded bra, so he got more than the usual handful.
“There’s someone in a Cat Woman bodysuit down there, and I saw a schoolgirl Britney Spears and a half-naked Tinkerbell. You’re dressed all prim and proper, neck to knee, and you’re the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“That’s so getting your getaway car ridden hard tonight, slugger.”
He kissed her forehead and held her cigar so she could clamp it in her teeth. “You are my getaway car. I’ve got the world at my feet with you by my side.”
She almost bit the end of the cigar off. “That’s so corny.” She pushed him away, but he snatched her hand and dragged her close.
“I love you. That’s not a costume I can take off. I’m stuck with it, and so are you.”
She kissed him so boisterously his hat fell off.
It was a damn shame they had to work. They made a circuit of the room together, and then Cal left her to go talk up his newest investment deal. She was at ease in situations like this now. She could strike up a conversation, ask for a small favor, and talk about D4D without it feeling like she was adlibbing herself into a corner. She didn’t need Cal’s support but tonight she felt his absence. She moved about the room, with one eye to where he was, until she stopped trying to circulate alone and stilled to wait for him to be free.
When his eyes found hers, she pulled on her earlobe to ask him if he was okay.
He detached himself from the group he was with and made prayer hands, signaling he needed to be rescued.
They both moved making their way to each other through the crowd. Fin got stuck behind a Yellow M&M, Cal was blocked by a Johnny Cash hand in hand with his June Carter. She skirted a Harry Potter and a Kim Kardashian with her Kanye West, and a man bellowing, “A Lannister always pays his debts,” moved aside, but she lost Cal. She turned in a circle, unaccountably disappointed. It wasn’t as if they weren’t about to go home to his place, race up the stairs to his huge bed, and fall into each other.
A hand to the back of her neck. Cal’s lips in her hair. The trail of his fingers down her spine, I love you. “I want you,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I have something for you.”
He wouldn’t tell her what it was, so she guessed at ridiculous things: a diamond-studded collar for Scungy, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a baby grand piano, her own private jet, a burger named in her honor.
In the sitting room off his bedroom, he made her wait. Not long, he was back, without his hat and coat. He put a small red velvet box on the side table and sat beside her on the loveseat.
Her heart took up residence in her ears. “Is that what I think it is?” He nodded. She pointed to the floor in front of her.
He laughed and palmed her cheek. “I will. I’ll get down on my knee. I’ll ask the question. But I owe you some answers first because there can’t be secrets between us.”
Uh-oh.
“You need to know I’m fatally in love with you. I never want to hurt you. I will never put you in danger or lie to you unless it’s for your physical safety.”
Her safety? What was he talking about? “Are you saying you have lied to me?”
“One or two white lies.”
He’d fudged the truth about setting her up to be Marilyn. “Everyone tells lies. You taught me that.”
“But I haven’t told you the entire truth, either, and you need to know it.”
“I can live with whatever is in your wild and reckless past.” Whatever it was had given her Cal as she loved him today.
“You typecast me as Clyde Barrow. But I should’ve been Robin Hood.”
She plucked the strap of his braces and let it go. It made a slap sound as it hit his chest. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m Caleb Sherwood, and I rob rich bastards to give to worthy causes.”
She took his hand and interlaced their fingers. “You told me startups fail all the time, that most of them fail. If Everlasting fails, that’s not robbing a bank.”
“There never was an Everlasting, and there isn’t a Brainstorm.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m a con man.” He closed his eyes a moment, bracing himself, and that worried her more than anything he’d said. “The whole of Sherwood is a con. Has been for generations. My great-granddad chose the name Sherwood when he aligned with three other crime families with the idea that wealth needed to be redistributed from the rich to people who needed it more.”
“But you have that shiny office and… No.” She shoulder-bumped him and pointed to the floor. “Nice try. Funny hah hah. On your knee, con man.”
He squeezed her hand. “We pay our rent. We pay taxes. But we also take money from people who can afford to lose it and are too arrogant to know they’re being conned, and we redistribute it to where it can do good.”
Cal wasn’t smiling. There wasn’t a hint of it in his eyes, not hiding in the tiny muscles there, not dancing around his flatlined lips or across his brow. He’d taught her how to read a liar. She went cold and pulled her hand from his grip. “You’re a thief?”
“We don’t steal. We’re not bank robbers. We convince people to give us money.”
“How? Was it only one time, because, I guess that—”
“Fin, it’s all the time. It’s my whole life. It’s everything we do and have done for generations.”
What was he saying? It didn’t make sense. “You’re a salesman. You talked people into giving you money for Everlasting. They didn’t have to do it. You didn’t hold them up at gunpoint or steal their credit cards.”
“That’s the art of the con.”
He was saying what she already knew about him—that he could get people to do what he wanted them to do without directly asking for it.
“None of what we do is real.”
She stood, hands to her head. “No. No. You’d get caught like Lenny’s dad.”
“We don’t get caught. We’re the best in the business. We have rules and procedures to keep ourselves honest, and we spend time and money taking down other cons who prey on disadvantaged people.”
That was pride she’d heard in Cal’s voice. She backed away, shaking her head. It was going to pop off her neck, hit the ceiling, and brain matter would splatter all over the room. “You’re telling me you’re a fraud, a scam artist, a criminal. You and Zeke and Ha
lsey, Sherin and Tresna.”
“And Rory and Mom and Dad, though he’s pretty much retired now.”
“Retired.” She laughed. Could a thief retire? “This isn’t normal.”
“It’s all too normal. Everyone lies, and everyone scams. So much of what we think of as truth is a distortion designed to push an idea.”
“You’re making it sound like you run a giant shell game, and it’s all harmless fun.”
“We are running a very large, very sophisticated shell game, and the only people harmed are those who can afford to pay or deserve to be taught a lesson.”
“This can’t be real.” For a moment she considered she was being pranked. Cal could pull it off. He was a better actor than she was.
“It’s a lot to take in,” he said. She didn’t want to take it in. “I’m going to show you something that will prove it.” He left the sitting room and returned with his laptop. He logged on and opened a couple of programs, typed in a bunch of long passwords, then turned the screen to face her.
“This is the family’s secret offshore bank account. We have shadow accounts for everything else. You’re looking at all the legitimate transactions for Everlasting, Brainstorm and the other work we’re doing.”
She sat beside him but turned her face away. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
“It’s only part of the story. Look, here’s the money coming in. But see where it’s going.”
She shouldn’t have looked. She should’ve run screaming from the house and called the cops. The numbers all blurred, too many zeroes. But the words didn’t. Money was going out to wildlife refuges and conservation groups, to green product manufacturers and medical research. There was funding for AIDS vaccinations and cataract operations and albatross rehoming. She still didn’t understand. It made what Cal was doing look like what she was doing with D4D, but on a massive scale.
A massive criminal scale.
“But you could ask for the money instead, like a normal charity or cause.”
“You stood on a barstool twice and asked for money and you hardly raised a cent.”
“But I didn’t have the right connections, and I wasn’t asking the right people.”
“Too many of the right people don’t believe they have a responsibility to do good in the world. The richest sixty-two people on the planet have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population. That’s more money, property, and resources than nearly four billion people. There are individuals who are richer than entire countries who don’t pay tax or give to charity. It’s obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few while inequality traps hundreds of millions in poverty.”
Okay, there was inequality, but this was, this was… “How do you get away with it?”
“Because the world is full of people like John Alington and Alex Astor who are greedy and opportunistic, who believe they deserve all the rewards and live above the rules. The easiest mark is a person who thinks they’re too clever to be conned.”
Cal put the laptop aside. He didn’t try to touch her, and she tried not to lash out at him. She burned to push him, hurt him for the lies, the filthy lies.
“You can con almost anyone, Fin. Lonely people are particularly susceptible, the elderly and anyone who has suffered misfortune. We only con the very rich, the very arrogant, and those who don’t pay their way either by doing dirty things to avoid what they owe or deliberately trampling on other people.”
“The briefs.” They always told her how much money a target had and listed all the other not so great things about them. But what kept bouncing around in her head was Cal saying you can con almost anyone.
“You conned me. You had me working for you when you were stealing. You made me help you scam other people. Oh my God. Tell me I’ve got that wrong.”
He shook his head. “You didn’t break any laws. You didn’t do anything bad, and you’re not in any trouble. I told you I would keep you safe, and that meant keeping you ignorant.”
But she wasn’t ignorant now. She was on fire with the truth. “What if I go to the cops or a lawyer or a newspaper? What if I turn you in?”
“You could try,” he said softly.
She stood and moved across the room. “Which means you’d make it so no one believed me, a failed actor, a flaky little wannabe who never finished anything and couldn’t keep her own charity alive.” Oh, he was diabolical. “I see.”
She wrapped her arms around her middle to try hold herself together when all the world was coming apart. It would be her word against the whole of Sherwood with its shiny office and its A-list access and pristine reputation. She’d come off like a grasping social climber or a disappointed lover. A nobody with a grudge.
And he’d picked her from the beginning for all those reasons.
“I have a responsibility to my family to keep them safe, too. The less you knew, the safer everyone was. But I was also prepared. The clothing I had for you at Beacon, it wasn’t Rory’s. It was put together for you. A go-bag. I have passports in fake names, money, credit cards to use in the very extreme case we ever had to run.”
She stifled a gasp with her hand. Run like they were fugitives. She pulled herself together to ask the obvious question. “Why tell me this now? Why tell me at all?”
“Because I love you and I want to get on my knee and ask you to marry me, and I can’t do that unless you know the truth.”
She turned her face away, a bitter taste flooding her mouth. “I like the lie better.”
“I understand.”
He moved to hug her, and she held him off. “Don’t.”
He wasn’t her Cal anymore. She didn’t know who he was.
Who she was.
He backed off, immediately. “Whatever you need.”
What she needed was to feel like a zombie, to move like one, brain dead, limbs operating on muscle memory. She left the room, went to the kitchen, made a pot of tea on autopilot. Tea was useful for thinking end of the world thoughts. It had better be, because this felt like the end of the world as she knew it.
Cal was nothing but a low down, dirty liar and a rotten thief hiding behind a social justice agenda, and he’d used her, paraded her around like a fancy fishing lure while he noodled his big fish and netted his whales. He’d even taught her his lie detection and manipulation skills, and she’d learned them well. Did that make her a con artist, too?
The tea didn’t give her any answers. It didn’t ease the pain in her chest. Cal had fooled her so easily from the moment she’d sat beside him at the Blarney. Here’s a gullible rube I can hook. I can use her. She’s too stupid to work it out.
How inconvenient that he fell in love with her.
If he did?
Because how could she believe that? She couldn’t believe anything he said or did—it was all an elaborate, fetid charade. He was an emotional cheat, a love vampire exactly like Win, and she’d learned nothing, been taken in again. Humiliation rushed through her like a fever.
How would she tell Lenny? It would devastate her. What about her parents? They’d been proud for the first time in forever.
Somewhere in this house was a go-bag filled with money, clothing, and passports in fake names. Maybe she should take it and run. Disappear and never have to deal with this. It was, after all, who she really was—a quitter, someone who never stuck at anything, who cut and ran when the going got tough.
It might’ve been an hour or a week later when Cal startled her, appearing at her side on the terrace. He put a blanket around her shoulders, and that’s when she realized she was freezing. She’d wandered out from the kitchen, hoping the night air would explain it all.
There was a scene in Bonnie and Clyde where Bonnie asked Clyde what he’d do if they could make a clean start, if no one was chasing them, if they could live ordinary lives. Clyde couldn’t even imagine what that would be like. Could Cal?
“You could stop. Just stop being a con. Raise money the way ordinary people do. You could c
harm the skin off a snake, so it’s not impossible. We could do it together.”
She was surprised to hear the “we” come out of her mouth. Apparently, she hadn’t quite given up on him yet, which proved she’d lost her mind.
“That’s not as easy as it sounds. I have commitments, and I believe in my heart in what we do.”
He was right. He was typecast. He was Clyde, and there was no hope for them. Because if she stayed with him, she was Bonnie, and it would all end in a hail of blood and bullets.
It was ending now.
He touched her arm through a layer of blanket, and she shied away. “If you’re asking me to give it up, I will.”
She jolted at that. “Like that. You’d go straight for me.” It was another trick from a man who didn’t know honesty, who fooled other people into thinking he was loyal and trustworthy.
“I’d resign. Zeke would step up. This has been my life. I don’t know what else I’d do, but I have money we can live on.”
Money that was stolen, not earned decently.
“Is that what you want?” She studied his face as best she could in the dark, with no hope of understanding what she saw.
“It’s what I’d do for you.”
What he’d done was made her an unwitting accomplice, his puppet, his fool. Made the money she’d raised feel like it was stolen, too.
Made her fall in love with him when she didn’t know anything about him.
He’d opened her heart, stretched it into a different shape, one he’d designed to suit him, and now she didn’t know if she could shrink it back the way it had been. If she could get it to beat without wanting it to beat alongside his.
He must’ve thought she was a big joke when they met and when she’d been desperate enough to sing that stupid song in the Marilyn get up on that bar top. And he’d swept her up, dressed her up, showed her off, taught her how to shill for him. And the clues were all there from the beginning, but she’d been too stupid to see them. He’d used his charisma on her like he did with everyone else. He hadn’t lied about her role as his One Night Wife. He’d even shown her how it all worked, and still, she’d been naïve. And the sex. All along he’d resisted. And she’d fallen for that trick, too, exactly like his whales did. Pressing when he retreated until he took everything she had.
One Night Wife (Confidence Game) Page 23