by Vi Keeland
I lifted up onto one elbow. “What is all that?”
“Went to the drugstore to pick you up some supplies.”
“Supplies?”
“For your shiner.” He held up a bottle of Motrin and a bottle of Vitamin C before placing both on the nightstand next to my bed. “Motrin for the headache you probably have this morning. Vitamin C to strengthen the blood vessels and speed up the healing of a black eye.” Reaching in the bag he pulled out a plastic container of…are those pineapples?
“Pineapples have enzymes that reduce inflammation and accelerate healing,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yep.” He pulled the last item out of the plastic bag. It looked like a piece of blue terry cloth material with something stuffed inside. “Warm compresses on day two and three. This gets microwaved until it’s warm. Not hot.”
“Okay.” I laughed. “How do you know so much about this stuff?”
“Got into my share of fights growing up.”
“Oh.”
He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Gotta get going. You’re off today, right?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Get some rest. I have to head into the City.”
“For what?”
“Some stupid board meeting for a company I own part of. My grandfather left me a shit load of shares with voting rights. I could do an absentee ballot, or not vote at all, but it upsets my dear old dad and brother when I attend. So, I make it my business to show up to every fucking one.”
I laughed. “I’d like to be a fly on that wall.”
“Take it easy today.” Rush tapped the tip of my nose with his pointer and turned to leave. He’d stayed the entire night, yet I still didn’t want him to go.
“Wait!” I pulled the covers back.
“Your board meeting is in Manhattan, right?”
“Yes.”
“Whereabouts?”
“My father’s office is on Madison Avenue.”
“Oh that’s funny. That’s where my literary agent is. Are you taking the train, or driving?”
“Driving. It’s a pain in the ass, but the meeting isn’t until one, so I’ll wait until after the morning rush hour passes.”
“Can I hitch a ride with you?”
His brows drew down. “To the City? You want to come to the board meeting?”
“No. My dad works there. I haven’t seen him in a while, so it would be fun to surprise him and take him out to lunch.”
Rush shrugged. “Sure. As long as you don’t touch my radio or bitch about my smoking.”
I leapt out of bed, forgetting all about my headache and achy eye. “What time should I be ready?”
“Ten. I’m going to run some errands before I go home and shower. I’ll swing by and get you before I hop on the road.”
“Okay!”
“Did you bring something to change into?” I glanced over my shoulder into the backseat of Rush’s car. There wasn’t a garment bag or any suit hanging.
“You don’t like what I’m wearing?”
If I was being honest, I loved what he had on. Ripped jeans, black, high-laced, military-style boots, a white T-shirt and a leather jacket. It was as if James Dean came back to life, only hotter and tatted. “I like the style. But it’s not exactly appropriate for a board meeting, is it?”
A mischievous smile spread across Rush’s face. “Nope. Not at all.”
“Will your father say something to you? Make a scene because of the way you’re dressed?”
“I’d respect him more if he did. He’s only ever judged me for who he thinks I am. Never bothered to get to know me.”
“Well, then, it’s his loss. Because I, for one, happen to know that underneath that rebel exterior is a man who won’t let his brand-new employee walk home, even if she did screw up half the drinks she’d made for customers and pissed him off.”
“Thanks. But I think you see the best in people. And because of that, sometimes you miss part of the equation.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You think I drove you home because I’m a good person. I’m not so sure that’s the case. If I’m being honest, I think what you look like probably had something to do with my being a decent guy and offering you a ride.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute. I think you’d offer any employee a ride home. You just don’t want people to know that about you. Besides, you barely even noticed what I looked like the night we met and you drove me home.”
Rush lit a cigarette and sucked in a long drag of smoke. Blowing it out the window, he turned to me. “White T-shirt with a V-neck that laced up, black bra underneath. Denim jeans with a rip in one knee. The left, to be specific. Hair down, loose and wavy. Glasses.”
My mouth dropped open. He’d just perfectly described what I wore the night we met, down to the bra I hadn’t even realized was visible under my shirt.
Rush glanced over and caught the surprise on my face. “Glasses were sexy as shit, by the way. You should wear them more often.”
I laughed. “I think you have a really good memory, and your motives were more altruistic than you want me to believe.”
He puffed his cigarette. “Suit yourself. But I’m showing you a wolf and yet you still want to see me as the sheep.”
Rush’s cell rang. Glancing at the name flashing, he said it was a liquor distributor he’d been trying to reach and he had to take it. Of course, he broke the rules of the road and spoke holding the cell to his ear instead of on hands-free. I looked out the window while he argued with someone over how many cases of vodka were delivered.
We’d just merged onto the Long Island Expressway and had another two hours of drive time in front of us. When I’d asked Rush this morning if I could hop a ride with him to the city, it was mostly a ploy to spend more time with him. But now that it was getting closer to surprising my dad for lunch, I was really excited about it. It had been at least two months since I’d seen him. We talked on the phone every few days, but we normally didn’t go this long without spending time together.
When Rush hung up, I was still thinking about my father. I said, “When I was a kid, my dad and I used to take a road trip every summer.”
He tossed his cell on the dashboard. “Oh yeah? Where’d you go?”
I shrugged. “Nowhere fancy. We didn’t have a lot of money, but Dad always made sure we got a vacation in. Sometimes it was Pennsylvania, sometimes Maine. A few times we even drove down to Florida. We used to play car games the entire trip. I’m not even sure if they were real games, or if Dad made them up.”
“What? Like the license plate game where you have to find all the states.”
“No. They were always games where we had to make up stories and stuff. My favorite was fortunately-unfortunately.”
Rush glanced over at me and back to the road. “Never heard of it.”
“One person would say something fortunate that starts with Fortunately and then the next person would have to make up something unfortunate about the previous situation. If you stumble giving the unfortunate story to go with the fortunate story, you get a strike. Three strikes and the other person wins.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Like this…” I tapped my finger to my lip and stared out the window as we drove until I thought of something. “Fortunately, Rush was going into the City today, and I could hitch a ride. Now you have to come up with the next part, relating to my part, and your sentence has to start with Unfortunately. Go ahead. Give it a try. I’ll say mine again. Fortunately, Rush was going into the City today, and I could hitch a ride.”
Rush grinned as he continued to keep his eyes on the road. “Unfortunately, Gia remembered this stupid fucking game and ruined the ride into the City.”
“That’s it! That’s how it goes. Except you’re a jerk.”
Rush chuckled.
“I’m starting over now that you got the hang of it.” I smiled. “Fortunately, Rush missed his date last night, wh
ich meant he was spared a hideous case of the crabs.”
He shook his head. “Unfortunately, he now had blue balls and will be needing to borrow the icepack that Gia used after her barroom brawl last night.”
I kept it going. “Fortunately, Rush has a strong right hand and can take care of that problem easier than clearing up an STD.”
“Unfortunately, Rush’s dick knows the difference between beating off and being inside a woman.”
I laughed. “You’re really good at this! In a twisted sort of way.”
“Oh yeah? Just wait. On the way home I’m going to start all the stories. And I’ve got nothing better to do than sit in my board meeting all day and think of warped shit for you to have to answer later.”
Why was I sort of looking forward to that?
As we continued to drive, it dawned on me that I’d been spending all of this time with Rush and didn’t even know his last name.
I turned to him. “Hey…I never asked, what’s your last name?”
His jaw tensed. “That’s kind of a random question…”
“Yeah, well, I just realized it’s a little weird that I don’t know.”
He let out a harsh breath. “You don’t need to know my last name.”
“You slept in my bed last night. I think the least you could do is tell me your last name. Besides, it’s not like I couldn’t just ask someone at work what it is.”
“Actually, the only one who knows is Oak. And he’s been given strict instructions not to give it out to anyone—that includes you, Gia Mirabelli.”
“Oh my God. That’s so shady.” I laughed. “Why?”
“Because people don’t need to know my fucking business.”
“It’s your name! That’s hardly private information.”
“It is to me.”
I leaned in a little. My voice was low and sexy. “Come on. Tell me.”
“No,” he spewed.
“Why?”
Silence.
More silence.
He wasn’t even answering me anymore. I was becoming more and more curious by the second. I devised a plan that I hoped would work.
When I started to wave at the driver of a big rig next to us, he yelled, “What the hell are you doing?”
“If you don’t tell me your name, I’m gonna flash that trucker.”
The driver honked at me and smiled. I really wasn’t going to go through with it, but Rush had no way of knowing that.
His Mustang swerved a little. “You wouldn’t do that…”
My eyes widened. “Oh yeah? Watch me.”
A vein in his neck popped as I began to lift my shirt. Either he was going to tell me his last name, or he was going to crash the car. Just as the material was almost all the way up, Rush blurted it out.
“My name is Heathcliff Rushmore!” He expended a breath and grumbled, “Fuck.”
Heathcliff Rushmore?
Heathcliff?
Rushmore?
I covered my mouth. “Oh my…that’s interesting.”
He looked so angry at himself. “Happy now?”
I beamed. “Yes, actually, I am.” I repeated to myself, “Heathcliff Rushmore…Heath…Heath Rushmore…hmm.”
“I was named after my grandfather.”
I snapped my finger. “So, that’s why you go by Rush…”
He feigned surprise. “Wow…you’re really smart.”
“Shut up.” I laughed then said, “Thank you for telling me.”
He flashed a hesitant smile. “You didn’t give me much of a choice, brat.”
“Heathcliff. It’s good to see you, son.” My father patted my back, interrupting the conversation I was in the middle of with Gerald Horvath, my grandfather’s attorney and always the only friendly face in the room toward me.
“Edward.” I nodded.
My father and brother hated my existence, but appearances were important to them. Disdain hid under a masked smile when anyone was around. Especially when that anyone had voting power, as Gerald did.
Grandfather’s attorney had just given me the dirty details of the purpose of today’s meeting. Vanderhaus owned commercial real estate all over Manhattan, and today’s vote was to approve a large property sale without disclosing certain things to the buyer. The board was at odds. My brother, Elliott, and father held forty-nine percent of the company’s voting power and were always a united front. I held twenty-five percent, something I’m sure Grandfather had decided on strategically. Individually, my brother and father each held twenty-four-and-a-half percent, so my vote outweighed theirs. But united, they could bulldoze their way through many votes since they only needed to snag one percent to have a majority. Apparently, the vote today was David vs. Goliath, and they hadn’t been able to secure anyone’s commitment to vote with them yet.
“Your brother and I would love to catch up, if I could steal you away from Gerald for a few minutes.”
Gerald knew the blood between the three of us ran thin, but bowed out graciously as always. “Sure. No problem. I see a cheese danish calling my name over there before we start anyway.”
Once Gerald was out of earshot, my loving father’s mask slipped down just as Elliott joined us. “How much will it take for you to vote with us?”
My father had always assumed me and my mother were all about money. It was incomprehensible to him that someone without any would put their morals and self-respect ahead of making a quick buck.
I sipped a bottled water. “Let me get this straight. You bought a flailing nursing home that the community very much needed.” I pointed to my brother. “I’m guessing you’re the one who negotiated the purchase by promising the seller that you had every intention of keeping the facility open, but somehow that promise didn’t make its way into the contract. Then you demolished the place, along with a few other houses you bought surrounding it. All to make room for an eight-story mall that you could fill with a bunch of overpriced chain stores.”
My brother looked me up and down. He must’ve sucked on a lemon that left his face like that right before he walked over to our lovely chat. “I’ll tell you what…” he said, “…you swing your vote our way, and I’ll make sure we rent space to a decent, moderately priced, men’s suit chain and see to it that you get a twenty-five percent discount.”
I smiled and continued, not bothering to trade personal jabs with my arrogant half-brother. “I wasn’t quite finished with my story. Then you find out that the soil underneath the building you just tore down is contaminated with lead and a whole list of other toxins. That it will cost you upwards of a million bucks to clean it up, not to mention building delays and dealing with the DEP. Now that the mall is out of the question, you want to sell the property to another nursing home company that is interested in building a new facility on the site, and you have no plans to disclose what you’ve found to the buyer.”
“Don’t be naïve,” my father scolded. “This is the business world we’re in. Not some tattoo parlor where you decide not to mar the skin on a drunken girl’s ass because she isn’t in the right frame of mind to have that rose she’s always wanted tattooed on her left cheek. It’s caveat emptor—buyer beware—we have no legal obligation to coddle a buyer.”
“No legal obligation. What about an ethical one?”
“You’re being ridiculous. Do you know how much money we all stand to lose if we are forced to keep this land and go through with this cleanup?”
“It was the company’s mistake in buying the land without testing the soil. It’s the company that should pay for it. From what I heard, the nursing home that sold you the property had an environmental study done before they built the place sixty years ago. They’d have no way of knowing what seeped into the soil from the surrounding gas stations over the years. And if you would’ve kept the property a nursing home—like you told the community you’d planned to—the issue wouldn’t have reared its ugly head either.”
My brother buttoned his jacket and looked at our father. “I told
you it was a waste of time to try to make him understand business. You can take the tattooed boy out of the hood, but you’ll never take the hood out of the boy.” He turned to me. “With this type of loss, and the way I’m sure you’ll run the other businesses Grandfather left you into the ground, you’ll be back to tattooing criminals in no time.”
I winked at my brother. “Not the drunk ones. Remember, I’m the upstanding brother who believes in not tattooing roses on their asses.”
Luckily for me, the secretary called the board meeting to order. For the next two hours we all sat around listening to my father and brother bullshit everyone. I had to hand it to them. They spun such a good tale, for a minute, I almost believed that voting with them to endorse the sale without disclosing the property contamination was in the best interest of the community.
We broke for a break before the formal vote, and I went outside to have a cigarette. Oddly, it was easier to breathe with nicotine-laced, thick smoke filling my lungs than it was in that fancy boardroom.
On the way back to the meeting, I found my brother down a quiet hall with a woman. I almost didn’t notice it was him, seeing as his entire face was buried in the woman’s neck—a woman who wasn’t his wife. Such a piece of shit.
He strolled into the meeting at the last minute chatting with a board member and wearing his usual smug smile. I’d seen the board member a few times. I remembered she was the heir to some fortune her dead husband had left and had a British accent—Maribel something was her name. They both took their seats, diagonally across from each other, and the meeting resumed. Not having gotten a good look at the woman from the hall, I really hoped it wasn’t her, and he wasn’t screwing a board member.
“Alright, let’s get this over with,” my father said. “This is a public vote. The secretary here has everyone’s voting power on his laptop, so all we need to do is hear a yay or a nay on the sale. He’ll tally up the results when we’re done.”
The secretary then proceeded to call off names and people voted.
“No.”
“No.”
“No.”