When I slid over her at last, when I couldn’t wait another moment, when I finally pushed inside her and felt all the tightness and the heat of her, the drug I needed more than anybody had ever needed anything, she still didn’t hold me. She lay there, pliant, melting in my arms, and let me make her come some more. And I felt like the most powerful man in the world.
She didn’t say anything for long minutes afterwards, and she didn’t move. Finally, though, she stirred herself, left the bed, and went back into the bathroom to clean up, and I blew out the candle. She came back in the dark, climbed into bed again, and snuggled up against me without bothering to find her undies, all modesty forgotten, her oil-smoothed skin soft under my hands.
I pulled her in, spoon fashion, against my body, and put a gentle hand on her belly, there where I couldn’t soothe the hurt enough, but where I still wanted to try. I could feel the way I’d loosened her stiffness, though, how I’d eased the ache, and I loved knowing it.
She said, her voice barely audible in the darkness, “You are the best lover in the world.”
I had to smile, and I may have had to kiss her hair, too. “You may not be the world’s biggest expert, eh.”
“I don’t have to be,” she said. “I know for sure. Nobody could be better than that. Nobody could love me like you do. Nobody could be more generous, and nobody could ever be sweeter.”
“Shh,” I said, rubbing her belly a bit more. “Ruin my reputation, won’t you. Hard first day, then, there at the office?”
“Yes. No.” She sighed. “I don’t know. How about you?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s better now.” And it was true.
Hope
Hemi Te Mana may not have been perfect, but he sure had his redeeming qualities.
The morning after he’d knocked my socks off yet again, I woke when he did, at the ungodly hour of five-thirty, and bundled the sheets off the bed while he laughed at me. “That’s why I pay Inez, you know,” he said. “All you have to do is leave it unmade, and she’ll know they need changing.”
I hid my face in white cotton of such a high thread count, I couldn’t feel the weave. “I’d die of embarrassment, though. They smell like almond oil. They’ve got almond oil all over them.” Not to mention a few spots of blood that I was going to have to wash out with cold water before putting the sheet in the laundry basket, because there was no way I was leaving that for somebody else.
Hemi came over to me, dressed only in some very attractive black briefs, tipped my face up, and kissed me. “Hate to tell you,” he whispered in my ear, “but I think she’s guessed we’re having sex. We’re engaged. It’s allowed.”
I took advantage of the opening. “How’s that going? With Anika?” Casually, as if it had just occurred to me.
He didn’t seem too convinced by my acting job. “Fine,” he said, dropping his hand from my face and heading back into the bathroom, which put an end to that particular tender moment.
I considered pushing it, but decided to drop it. What was I going to do, run after him and badger him? Whatever he gave to his wife, it really was none of my business. What he brought to the marriage, whether it turned out to be less or not, belonged to him alone.
I was trying to be reasonable, you see. And I’d figured out that I could marry a man who told me everything, or I could marry Hemi. I wasn’t going to get both, so I’d better pick my battles and save my energies.
For work, for example. Because over the next couple weeks, even as I became accustomed with frightening ease to having my meals fixed for me, my laundry done for me, and my surroundings perpetually and magically cleaned, I found myself completely unable to adjust to my new position at the office.
It wasn’t that being ignored was anything new. When I’d been a photographer’s assistant, I’d been all but invisible unless Vincent had needed somebody to yell at. But at least some of the models had been friendly. Now…I felt like a ghost. I did my assignments for Simon, but he didn’t critique them, even when I asked. He gave me such small projects, too, that as often as not, I found myself with nothing to work on, instead resorting to studying the Te Mana website or the retailers’ online stores in a desperate attempt to have something—anything—to bring to the party. Which was interesting for me, but nobody was exactly begging me for my insights.
Because nobody talked to me. Maggie, my brunette non-friend, had a double cube next to mine, even though she was higher up the food chain. In fact, I should probably have been reporting to her. At least I’d been spared that. But I’d been right—my space was much too desirable for an assistant. And you can bet her head never once popped over the top of my cube. Her pals stopped by often enough, but they didn’t exactly pause for a cozy chat with me, and they didn’t stick around, either. Instead, Maggie would head off somewhere else with them, as if I actually were a spy.
That wasn’t quite fair, though. Everybody was civil to me, even Maggie. I guessed they thought they had to be. Gabrielle, the social media manager who’d talked to me over bagels, was downright friendly if I ran into her in the break room or the ladies’ room. But the one time I’d asked her, as casually as I could manage, “So hey…I was going to go out and grab lunch today. Want to come?” she’d answered with a laugh, “I don’t think I’ll be going out to lunch for about three months. Is this launch a killer or what?” And I’d laughed myself and said, “Yeah, stupid question. Never mind.”
I told myself that at some point, Simon and everybody else would get the message, and I’d become part of the team. And if they didn’t, I’d…well. I’d do something. This was getting embarrassing.
On the plus side, I saw more of Karen, and I knew she had adult supervision during the day to an extent I’d never been able to provide. Plus her popcorn-dispensing job on the weekends, to which Charles did drive her, making the whole endeavor a major net loss, economically speaking.
On the minus side, I didn’t see nearly as much of Hemi as I might have expected. He still took me out to dinner on Saturday nights, but gone were the summonses to his office and our midweek dates. Those three weeks in New Zealand had to be paid for, it seemed. He was flat-out, not coming home until eight most nights and working most of the day on the weekends, too. He left the apartment an hour before me in the mornings, sending Charles back to drive me to the office in a routine I’d surrendered to, as I’d accepted the rest of the conditions of my new life. They weren’t exactly hard to take, except when they were.
When Hemi did come home, he spent the first hour working out. I’d continued to join him for his sessions with Eugene, which never did get easier, instead leaving me shaky with an exhaustion I tried my best to conceal. After his workouts, I, and sometimes Karen, too, sat with Hemi while he ate a very late dinner at the sarcophagus and we didn’t talk about our workdays, because I didn’t want to whine and he didn’t want to share.
Not to say we didn’t talk at all. My swimming lessons were a particular source of amusement. Karen had taken to joining me for them, getting in some more of her own practice. As a result, she’d far outstripped me, which she loved.
“No, wait,” she said on our second Thursday night in the apartment, jumping up from her stool as Hemi ate his way through a plate of pork tamales wrapped in banana leaves. “Here’s Hope letting go of the side and swimming.” She bugged out her eyes, puffed out her cheeks, and scrabbled furiously at the air in a frantic dog-paddle, then dropped her hands and said, “She’s never going to make it onto the desert island. I’m going to have to tow her.”
Hemi smiled, and I said, trying for dignity, “But I did it, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” Karen said gleefully, “and you almost made it ten feet across the pool, too.”
“Using the breaststroke,” I informed Hemi, “not the dog-paddle, whatever Karen tells you. Which is the second stroke I’ve learned.”
“Yeah, right,” Karen said. “You can call it that. Except that if you were teaching a dog to do the breaststroke, that would tot
ally be the demonstration.”
Hemi actually laughed, then looked at me, cleared his throat, and said, “Sorry, sweetheart. I’m sure your breaststroke is very, ah, human.”
“And it wasn’t ten feet, either,” I said. “The pool is ten yards wide, for your information.”
“Well,” Karen said, relenting, “you breathed and everything.”
“Breathing’s good,” Hemi agreed solemnly. “How are you going yourself, Karen?”
“Just swam across the Y pool a few times, that’s all,” she said airily. “And I’ve started to learn to dive. But I’ve had more lessons. Plus, you know, I’m braver than Hope.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Hemi said. “I think Hope’s got a fair bit of courage. Surprised me a time or two, hasn’t she. Have you met the heir to the throne yet?”
“Ha.” She plopped back down onto the stool beside me, picked up the spoon I’d abandoned, and started to eat the rest of my flan, another product of her lessons with Inez. It was safe to say that Karen’s cooking apprenticeship was going better than my marketing one. “No hot guys in the next lane at all. Some old guy who’s like, forty, that’s about the best I ever get.” The corner of Hemi’s mouth curled up, he glanced at me, and I made a face at him as Karen went on. “I was right, too. The oldest other person in the class is fourteen. He has a crush on me, too. So awkward.” She sighed, then asked me, “Don’t you like the flan? It took me ages to caramelize the sugar. I messed up the first time, and Inez made me throw it out and start over. It’s super creamy, though, don’t you think?”
“It was great,” I said. “It’s just a little late to be eating.”
Hemi took my hand, which had been resting on the black marble, and squeezed it. “Tummy wonky again, eh.”
“I’m fine.” My stomach hadn’t quite settled down since arriving back from New Zealand, which was just as well, given the quality of Inez’s cooking and the fact that when you weighed a hundred pounds, a couple extra ones made themselves known fast. “Besides, there’s that Appearance clause in our contract.”
Karen, of course, looked as curious as a monkey. “What?” she asked, finishing off the last of the flan and licking her spoon. “You guys have a contract? Like a prenup?”
Hemi frowned. “What do you know about prenups?”
“Excuse me?” she said. “I go to private school?”
“Well, we don’t have one,” Hemi said. “And we’re not going to be getting one.”
He shut up after that, his face at its most forbidding, so I said, “You know…Karen’s sixteen. You and I are teaching her how to have a relationship, right? Role models. And…open communication. It’s a thing.”
He still didn’t look thrilled, and I said softly, squeezing his hand now, “Hey. It couldn’t work any worse than the examples we had, right?”
His expression eased some, and he said, “You may have a point.”
“You mean I’m right?” I asked, widening my eyes at him, and he smiled, said, “Later,” and reached for his own dish of flan.
“Hemi and I worked out an agreement,” I told Karen, “on how we’d…deal with various things. Which included that he can’t grow a beard, for one thing.”
As a sidetracking tactic, it worked. “Beards are hot,” Karen said. “They’re in. Like, sexy lumberjack. Wolverine.”
I said, “Not to me,” and Hemi smiled again and kept eating.
“So is your agreement about, what, money and housework and kids and sex?” Karen asked. “Besides appearance. I’ve never heard of having that in your prenup. But that’s what couples fight about, you know. Money, chores, kids, and sex. We learned about it in Family Life last year.”
“Ah…” I said, “what’s family life?”
“Excuse me?” she said again. “You signed the permission slip. Putting condoms on bananas.” Hemi made a choking sound, and Karen went on, “I think it’s a cool idea to have an agreement about that stuff. Probably make you fight less. Did you decide how many kids you’d have, and what their names would be, and all that? You wouldn’t believe all the girls in my class who’ve already picked out their kids’ names and their wedding themes. It’s like their hobby. At least you never did that, Hope.”
“No.” I got up and took my flan dish and Hemi’s plate to the dishwasher.
“So how many?” Karen asked.
Hemi, of course, just sat there. He could outwait anybody, as I’d learned long ago. Finally, I said, “We haven’t discussed that one yet.”
“Really?” Karen asked. “Huh. See, I’d think that would be in your agreement. I’m pretty sure I’d put it in my agreement. It’s not like Hemi’s going to become a househusband. Although every rich person I know has nannies, so…”
I grabbed a sponge and was wiping counters, and now, I was the one who wasn’t talking.
You’re wondering why Hemi and I hadn’t talked about that. It was a fairly glaring omission. Because Hemi hadn’t brought it up, and I’d figured I knew what that meant. That he wasn’t sure yet whether he wanted kids. And maybe because I’d wanted them too much, but I wanted a life, too, and if he didn’t even want them…
It had all seemed too complicated, too risky, and too soon, so when he hadn’t gone there, I’d stayed away, too. There’d be time for that later, when we’d gotten the rest of it down.
Open communication. It might be a thing, but Hemi and I still had a ways to go to get there.
“Geez,” Karen said, getting up from her stool, “you don’t have to draw me a picture or anything. Awkward. I’m going to watch TV.”
“Straighten up before you go to bed,” I told her. I’d seen Hemi picking up after her in the early mornings when I didn’t get to it first, as if he couldn’t stand to see her clutter even for the short time before he left for the office, and it always made me wince. I still felt like I was tiptoeing, somehow. I knew he wanted us, and yet…
Well. Another thing I hadn’t explored as well as I probably should have. Time enough. For now, we were feeling our way.
Karen sighed and said, “You’d think I was some kind of slob. I’m neat. You should see guys’ rooms.”
“What guys’ rooms?” Hemi asked before I could.
“I do know people,” she said. “I do have friends.”
Hemi said, “If you’re going to somebody’s house, you need to ask first. Especially if it’s a male somebody. But anybody.”
“OK,” Karen said. “I will. Geez. I take it back. You guys shouldn’t plan to have kids. It’s like you’re stuck in the fifties.”
She left the room, and I thought, Open communication. Yeah. We’ll work on that. I felt too tired to try. It was well past nine, and there was all that new exercise in my life, which was kicking my butt. And never mind that less than a year ago, I’d been coming home at eight myself, with a sleep debt that would have done justice to a small nation. It seemed, though, that all you had to do was get used to something better, and it became your new floor. Which was a very disturbing thought.
Hope
The next day was Friday, the end of my second week in Marketing. The point where you normally start feeling like you’re getting a clue in a new job, except that I didn’t, because there wasn’t much to get a clue about.
I dressed carefully, as usual having a full hour to do that after Hemi left and before Charles showed up to take me to the office. I dressed up not because I was expecting anyone to notice me at work, but because I was going out to dinner afterwards with Hemi—after I’d met Nathan for a drink, the first time we’d had to catch up since I’d been back from vacation.
I told myself, as I finished pulling on one fragile, barely-there stocking and clipped it to the garter belt, that lots of people thought of “life” as “what happens outside of work,” which made my situation exactly normal, and never mind that I’d hoped for more. Nobody got everything they wanted, and maybe nobody else would complain if they were in my situation.
On the other hand—so what? I wasn’t anybod
y else, and I was allowed to have an opinion, wasn’t I?
For now, I fastened the side tie on a full-skirted, sunny yellow cotton dress, then buckled on a pair of nude pumps in embossed leather that was so pearlized it was almost gold, with a delicate ankle strap and a three-inch heel Not over the top for the office, but pretty enough for that Friday-night drink and dinner, and glamorizing the casual dress very satisfactorily indeed.
And all right—maybe they whispered, “Do me hard against the door” like no footwear I’d ever seen. Or maybe that was just my unruly imagination, to say nothing of my insistent body, which seemed to think that I ought to be catching up on years of self-denial with one prolonged, breathless orgy of sexual experimentation. I wasn’t sure you could have an orgy with one man, but if you could, that man would be Hemi.
Josh had come through with the store cards within a day of Hemi asking him, because Josh was like that, and…well, that had been a lot of temptation, and I may have succumbed to a different kind of orgy. I might have gotten a little freaky with those cards over the past weekend, in fact, which had resulted in some sweaty palms and a pounding heart when I’d had to sign the receipts. But now…well…I wanted Hemi to see my new shoes.
Confession time. They were Jimmy Choo, they’d cost six hundred dollars, they represented about six months’ worth of clothing budget in my not-too-distant past, and we’ll just gloss over everything else I’d bought that day and what it had cost, except to say that I was wearing it.
The shoes were gorgeous, though, and Hemi was going to appreciate them. If my life were going to be about what happened after work, at least I’d be ready for that part of it. And if I ended up having to talk to him about my job status, I’d be dressed for battle. Deceptively innocent right up until the moment I sucker-punched him.
A few hours later, I wasn’t thinking about dinner, and I wasn’t thinking about Hemi. At least I wasn’t thinking happy thoughts about him.
Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) Page 21