Losing Control (Kerr Chronicles #1)

by Jen Frederick

  He leads us to a corner booth that is big enough to seat several people. I slide in, stopping at the center, and Ian follows, settling right next to me. His arm stretches across the back of the banquette.

  “I’m Donatello, and I’m the assistant manager. We were so excited when we received your reservation. The chef has prepared a special degustation for you tonight, and we have an assortment of wines to serve so that you can sample the extensive cellar we keep. Our sommelier will be here shortly to describe the sensory journey we will take you on—”

  Ian holds up his hand and Donatello stops talking immediately. “The degustation is fine but, please, no other special treatment tonight. As I said, I want to see how this place runs.”

  Donatello squeezes his hands together, and his cheeriness seems a little forced. “Of course. Of course.”

  I want to lean forward and reassure Donatello that Ian’s always this high-handed, but all I can do is offer the manager a sincere smile and thank-you.

  “He’s afraid. Be nice,” I warn when the manager wanders off.

  Ian looks taken aback. “I didn’t realize you wanted a thirty-minute dissertation on the bouquets of wines and their interplay with each little course we’ll be served.” He raises his hand to bring Donatello back, but I drag it down.

  “No, just be nicer. He’s trying to impress you.”

  He sighs, but the next time the manager returns, Ian smiles and says he’s doing a nice job. Donatello floats away. “Not so hard, is it?” I tease.

  Ian tugs at my ponytail and runs a hand down the ridges of my spine. “I’m already impressed. Let’s go home now.”

  “No way, I put on makeup. Besides, this place is amazing.”

  I have lived in the city my whole life and I have seen every street and alley, but tonight the whole of fashionable New York is on display. And I can’t stop looking. Everyone looks amazing. Perhaps it is the dim light or the reflections of the copper plating on the wall, but there are people looking fabulous in tight suits and even tighter pants and that is just the men. A thin, tall brunette with hair down to her butt is wearing a ball gown skirt and a tube top. Two tables down, a man is wearing a leather vest and a collar.

  “I wish you could see yourself right now. Your eyes are so big,” he whispers into my ear, and the sound travels all the way to my belly.

  “Tiny,” he says, and I can sense that he wants me to look at him. His hand reaches out, strokes my jaw, and then turns my face so that we’re looking at each other. We’re so close on this banquette that I could lean forward and be kissing him. The thought makes me lick my lips, and Ian’s gaze drops from my eyes to my lips. When he flicks his gaze back upward, it’s filled with lust and tenderness. If it wasn’t for the waiter, who coughs to get our attention, I would have grabbed Ian’s head and dragged him under the table with me.

  I try to interject some distance between us and gather some decorum. The waiter, in a white-buttoned coat and gray pants, sets down two porcelain soupspoons filled with tuna carpaccio, a sliver of potato, and a shitake mushroom.

  “I don’t even know your middle name,” I blurt out.

  “Ian Kincaid Kerr.” A hand curls around the back of my neck while his other hand raises the spoon to my mouth. I swallow it down and try to hold back the moan of delight. “That good, eh?” He swallows his own bite and winks at me.

  “Sounds really Scottish,” I say faintly. Another dish comes by and Ian feeds that to me as well.

  “Ach, dinnae ken, my wee lassie, by my accent?”

  I giggle. “That’s pretty terrible.”

  “Well, now you know I’m bad at accents. How about you?”

  “I’ve never tried speaking in an accent, so let’s assume I’m terrible too.” His hand is so warm that I want to rub my face against his wrist. The way that his body is canted protectively around me makes me feel like we are in a private room, all alone. The whole of my body is liquefied by the way he’s feeding me each bite of food, his hand never moving from behind my neck. Despite the crowded restaurant and the incessant chatter of the patrons, we are in a bubble of leather, delicious food, and heady wine. It’s intoxicating.

  “So I should have invited you to dinner rather than drinks.”

  We both look up to see Richard Howe standing there with a woman on his arm—an older woman. Her age is indeterminate. She’s in that New York socialite age range between mid-30s and late 50s. Plastic surgery can create a façade of youth that masks one’s true age for many years. However old she is, the woman is beautiful. She has a delicate, fragile air.

  Her body is thin, and she wears a delicate lace sheath that emphasizes her fine bone structure. Around her face, expertly coiffed golden hair falls in soft waves. But the translucency of her hands reminds me of my mother and, ultimately, it is those that give her away. There are age spots, which she’s tried to disguise with a multitude of rings, and the backs of her hands show prominent veins, thin skin, and dots of pigmentation.

  Under my awkward gaze, her hands curl and she ducks them underneath the table. I give her a tentative smile, but my untoward attention to her hands has immediately marked me as the enemy.

  “Wife.” Ian mutters in my ear. Tossing his cloth napkin on the table, he half rises to shake Richard’s hand and then his companion’s.

  I hide my disgruntlement at the interruption behind a big—but fake—smile for Richard and his wife.

  Richard leans over the table. “It’s hell getting a table here, isn’t it? You don’t mind if we join you?”

  It’s not a question because he’s already sitting down, drawing his wife with him.

  “Cecilia Montgomery Howe of the shipping Montgomerys.” Richard introduces us, and he sounds very smug when he rattles off her familial business as if he is personally responsible for her family’s success.

  “Nice to meet you,” I say and shake the limp hand that she extends toward me in greeting as if I’m supposed to kiss it.

  Ian’s body is stiff behind mine, but his response is all ease and smiles. “Hello, Cecilia.” Apparently everyone knows everyone else. Except for me, of course. I’m the new element in the old-time social scene. I shift awkwardly. Ian settles back, drawing me with him and putting space between Richard and me. “Did your reservation fall through?”

  Richard shakes his head mournfully. “Cecilia and I were going to have dinner at Prospero, but I heard the executive chef has been ill for a month so we thought we’d head down here and try something new.”

  “No reservation,” Cecilia gripes spitefully.

  At this complaint, Richard hangs his head. “I know. Stupid of me.”

  “My god, how can I even eat with that looking at me.” Cecilia’s whine of protest causes all of us to swivel toward a gorgeous woman whose ass is so fine in her spandex bandage dress that I’m envious. “It looks like she’s stuffed cotton in her cheeks. Poor girl. Can you imagine sleeping with someone like that? You’d never be able to shut your eyes. It would be like having a horror show under your sheets.”

  “She’s got an amazing body,” I counter, but when I get the attention of the two I regret speaking up immediately.

  “It’s a hard body,” Richard agrees, and Cecilia glares at him.

  The rest of the evening is spent eating small bites of food brought to our table every ten minutes or so while Ian and I are treated to an unending critique of nearly everyone in the restaurant from Cecilia, who clearly thought that Richard would join her.

  The foreign language–speaking table is too loud, she complains.

  “Internationals, what can you do?” Richard grins at me as if we’re sharing a secret laugh. Cecilia scowls again and then quickly rearranges her face as if emotions cause aging.

  Cecilia remarks that the boobs on the model wearing the tank top are much too large. “She must be a prostitute,” Cecilia says. “No runway is going
to let her walk.”

  After a while even the delicious food loses its appeal under this wearying critique. Each time she makes a comment, she looks at Richard for support. He only gives her a pained smile and then, when he thinks she isn’t looking, he shrugs at me as if to say he doesn’t have any control over her attitude.

  When she isn’t talking and he isn’t sneaking looks at me, his eyes are everywhere. On the stark expanse of skin that the model shows every time she stands up to adjust her tube top. On the nearly naked bottom of another patron who is wearing hot pants and high heels.

  “Is the food not to your liking?” Ian eats his dishes and mine because my appetite is gone.

  “Too rich,” I say, but I see understanding in his eyes.

  Finally, when the last item is served and coffee is being distributed to Ian and me, with two after-dinner port wines for Sissy—that’s what they call her—and Richard, Ian asks Richard what he’s doing at Catch. “It seems like such a coincidence.”

  He laughs. “Not at all. I heard you were interested in investing in Sean Price’s new food venture and that you were down checking out his business. I guess eating at Le Cirque every night gets tiresome?”

  Ian shrugs. “I live down here. I haven’t eaten at Le Cirque for months. Too far uptown for me.”

  Richard makes a tsking sound. “Still in that warehouse. That seems so déclassé. But maybe you’ve always had a little of the commoner in you.”

  “Always,” Ian replies dryly, but beside me he is vibrating like a speaker box turned too loud. His hand has a vise grip on my thigh. “Some would blame it on my mother. She wasn’t even from the city.”

  Richard’s eyes dart toward me and then Ian and back again. He laughs and wipes his mouth twice. Obviously nervous, he taps his fingers against the side of his bottle. “I didn’t know your mother well. Most of my dealings were with your father.”

  Cecilia scrunches up her nose at Ian. “This type of conversation is very low class. Perhaps we could move on.”

  “Of course, Sissy,” Ian says smoothly. Underneath the table, his fingers are almost bruising me. Whatever wrong Richard Howe has inflicted upon Ian, it is serious and powerful enough to cause him to lose his vaunted self-control, both at the Aquarium and then here. We’re able to finish dinner together, but it might be the longest meal I’ve ever sat through. Despite the chef’s culinary wizardry, I ate almost nothing.

  CHAPTER 28

  “That was unpleasant,” I say when we get back to Central Towers. As expected, Mom is asleep. She can’t make it past eight in the evening most nights. “I don’t understand how he can make a play for me one night and then show up with his wife another.”

  “He’s testing you. He wants to know if having a wife is going to be a problem. I bet in a couple of days, you’ll get more texts.”

  He drums his fingers on the side of the sofa as he has a glass of wine to unwind. That was my suggestion. He’s agitated, and I’m afraid he’s not going to be able to sleep tonight.

  “At least it’s just texts.”

  “For now,” he says sourly, his hand gripping tightly around the stem of the glass. A vision of him throwing the tumbler against the wall at the Aquarium flits through my mind. He catches me eying the glass and downs the contents in one swallow. Standing up, he pulls me to my feet.

  “Let’s table this for now. It’s been far too long since I’ve had a taste of you.”

  He makes love to me as if the devil is riding him. His hands are rough and possessive. He’s in the grip of some madness, but the need in his eyes is obvious and unmistakable. Whatever he needs, I want to give him.

  “I want you,” he growls.

  “You have me,” I say, “in whatever way you need me.”

  In the aftermath of the storm, with the sheets tossed on the floor and the pillow wet from stifling my cries of completion, we lie entangled with each other. The tension that started building from the minute Howe showed up still hasn’t left him, even after the sex.

  “Won’t you tell me?” I ask, stroking the sweat-soaked skin of his back. “I want to understand. If this,” I gesture between us, “is truly something that matters to you, then you can’t leave me in the dark.”

  He’s silent for so long that I believe he’s fallen asleep. But his sex-roughened voice interrupts the quiet.

  “Four old-moneyed families sent their sons to Harvard. My father was one of them. Richard’s father, Edward Howe, was another. The two others aren’t important for this story. They are friends, business partners. When Papa Howe’s son Richard needs a job, he asks my dad for a favor. But Richard’s expensive lifestyle—and I don’t know if it was drugs, gambling, shitty investment decisions, prostitutes, or what—leads him to embezzle money.

  “My father covers it up, but then the market crashes and he’s leveraged to shit. The embezzlement is discovered and the blame is pinned on Dad. Howe won’t come forward. My dad has a heart attack and dies which results in us losing all of our possessions from foreclosure and bankruptcy. My mom is unable to hold her head up, and even if she could, she didn’t have the money to play. She takes us to New Jersey, where she hooks up with a gambler. He gets her addicted and soon . . .” His voice trails off.

  “Like Malcolm’s mother,” I say softly.

  “You know, then?”

  I nod. “Yeah, for a while. I mean, that’s why he deals, and I guess it’s why he’s in with the other stuff. He’s always bailing her out, but the addiction is too strong.”

  “My mother was never meant to have to support herself. Addictions use you up fast. She was doing . . . stuff . . . to get money. Anything.” His voice is strained. “I was ashamed of her. Pretended I didn’t know her. Then I hated her. Finally . . . I felt relief, and that was the most guilt-inducing emotion of all.”

  Curling my body around him, I stroke every inch of his body I can reach, as if to protect him from his memories.

  He burrows his forehead into the side of my neck. His voice is muffled, but his words are clear. “She got arrested for solicitation when I was fifteen. By that time, I was working, hustling on the boardwalk, and then taking every cent I had and playing poker in the casinos. I easily passed for twenty-one because of my size, my scruff. I was earning money, not as fast as I would have liked and not in as big amounts as I had wanted, but I’d had to lie low, not draw attention to myself.

  “I was saving money, socking it away, thinking that I’d buy us a nice beach house and send my mom to an expensive clinic and it’d all be good. But it was too late. She didn’t last more than a night on the inside. She asked me to bring her something, a Hermès scarf my dad had given her on their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Like a dumb shit, I brought it. She kissed me and then I left. Later, I learned she’d bribed a guard with sex to let her bring the scarf into her cell.”

  He doesn’t have to finish.

  “I’m so, so sorry.” I choke back the tears, knowing he won’t welcome them.

  “Yeah, me too,” he sighs heavily and then, to my surprise, he turns into my embrace and allows me to give him comfort.

  CHAPTER 29

  Seeing me with Ian again only renews Richard’s pursuit. He sends me text messages that I have voice transcribed or Ian reads to me. Afterward, the muscle in his jaw always clicks. And invariably, he feels the need to touch me, usually someplace very intimate.

  But other than this texting game I’m playing with Richard, which hasn’t progressed beyond mild flirtation, nothing truly scandalous, my life is pretty good.

  Mom is doing really well these last couple of weeks, but her doctor has advised against going out too frequently. Her immune system is very low and he says that even a cold could be dangerous. Tonight Ian orders dinner from Le Cirque to be delivered to Central Towers in lieu of going out.

  “Tiny says your parents have passed.”

  “Yes. My father d
ied of a heart attack when I was thirteen, and my mother passed away when I was fifteen.”

  “I’m so sorry. You were required to assume responsibility far too early.”

  “It’s what made me,” Ian replies, shrugging as if having to spend the latter part of his teen years on his own was normal and easy.

  “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I’d like to give you a bit of advice. Not about Tiny, of course. I wouldn’t presume to go there. But life advice.”

  “Sure,” he squeezes my hand to let me know that the inquisition and the advice don’t bother him.

  “Life is fleeting, ephemeral almost. Don’t waste a minute, even a second, on anything that’s not important. And if you do have something important, do everything to hang on to it. Don’t assume that tomorrow will bring you something better. Treasure the now.”

  “I will, Sophie. Thank you for caring enough to share with me.”

  She flushes with pleasure at the compliment, and I glow inside at how he understands that it is because she loves me—and perhaps because she is beginning to care for him—that she is brave enough to voice her concerns.

  On the Sunday before her chemo day, I take her to the Frick Museum. She says she wants to spend time with me. It is our favorite museum, and not because they have a policy of “paying what you wish” for admission on Sundays. Today, I drop in a fifty to cover all the other visits when we paid nothing. The Frick is a treasure chest of a museum, only two floors with everything from Fragonard—my mother’s favorite—to Whistler. We walk around the museum, arms clasped around each other, and end our tour in the atrium.

  The fountain is working, the water quietly gurgling over the stone bowls and into the pool below. The foliage helps to soften the stone walls and the tall pillars. The atmosphere and the glass ceiling are so calming that the stone benches actually feel comfortable despite their hard surfaces.

  “It’s hard to believe someone lived in this place. Can you even imagine having a reflecting pool in your living room?”