by Mimi Strong
Tori's mother had a sweet disposition, but the woman did have red hair, like Brynn, and he suspected her daughter would as well. Could he have some young, attractive redhead type for him?
He considered using dictation software, or even taping the book and sending it out for typing, but he felt like an idiot, talking into a microphone with nobody in the room. He needed an audience, or nothing was real.
When Tori came busting in through the door the first day, panting about some crazed killer zombie moose that had pursued her in the Vermont woods, he felt two things at once: elation and terror.
Their first session working together, with her typing, had gone well enough, considering he'd been thinking about Tori's body most of the time. After they'd finished up, he'd put in a call to the agency, asking they send someone else as soon as possible. His contact person said it would take a few days, including the medical tests they always ordered as an additional precaution for their extremely wealthy clients. Smith told them to put a rush on it, and he'd make it worth their time.
He planned to tell Tori in the morning that he was letting her go, with full payment, of course.
Then she'd shown up in his doorway, looking like a strawberry sundae on a hot summer day.
He'd taken her roughly, more against his will than hers, and she seemed to love it more and more, the rougher he got.
After he'd evicted her back downstairs to her own room so he could clear his head, he called the agency and canceled his previous order.
Over the next few days, she didn't know it, but the redhead typist had complete, total control over the billionaire novelist. She could have asked him to stick a jar of jam up his ass, and he would have, for her. At every meal, she toyed with him, gazing at him through her pale blond-red eyelashes, a button or two of her blouse “accidentally” unfastened.
They were playing house together, playing at being grown-ups, and he loved it. He didn't know a girl could be so much fun.
When she flirted with the boy from town, Callum, Smith had pretended to be merely pouty and jealous, but inside he was a pool of hot lava. The idea of another man touching Tori made him so crazy, that it wasn't until he was pounding into her sweet pussy in an alley that he was able to finally think straight again. Fireworks banged overhead, and he wanted to tell her he loved her, but it would have sounded so stupid. They barely knew each other. He'd be the old fool, spilling his heart and guts along with his seed.
He took her to Montreal, because he was fearful of being alone with her, and what he might say in the cabin full of memories. Brynn had spent very little time there in Vermont, but he still caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye, complaining that the cabin had no central air conditioning, or saying that she hated the antlers on the chandelier.
Tori, by comparison, loved everything. She thought the charter plane, which was nothing fancy, was the “cutest thing ever,” and she talked to the pilot for nearly an hour, asking question after question.
She had a fascination with how things worked, and what other people were thinking. Smith would simply stare at strangers, trying to guess at their personalities by their behavior, but Tori would just come right out and ask.
“Do you love being a pilot?” she asked the man.
He grinned and said he did, which surprised Smith, but not Tori.
On the plane, he'd noticed how the lighting made his face look sallow and old, but Tori looked luminous. He decided he wasn't good enough for her, and then she complained of nausea from the flight, and the ghost of Brynn had appeared once more.
Would his ex-wife ever be gone from his mind?
The first night in Montreal, after Tori had staged her little one-woman show in the restaurant (Smith had enjoyed her performance, but he knew not to laugh and encourage such a thing—the same as not snickering when a baby swears, lest you want to positively reinforce such behavior) he'd walked the city streets, alone with his thoughts.
Before the sun came up again, he'd changed his mind a hundred times. Tori was perfect for him. A perfect storm. A gorgeous disaster.
He tried to push her away, tried to tarnish her in his mind. The whole business with bringing her ex-boyfriend in for group sex had been a tactic he'd learned from his women reader fans on Facebook.
The Garbage Icing tactic.
The trick was to take something you really craved, such as a cupcake, and imagine that the chocolate sprinkles on top were dirt, and that the pastry had been rolled around in the garbage.
He thought seeing another man having sex with Tori would help him break the habit, but the outcome was the exact opposite. She made eye contact with Smith while everything was happening, and he felt her looking into his soul. The other man in the room could have been an inanimate object. She wanted him, and he wanted her just as badly.
He changed his mind for the six-hundredth time.
He bought her a necklace, but chickened out of giving it to her.
On the final day of the contract, he was going to tell Tori everything she wanted to know about what had happened with his ex-wife. As the details came out, though, she seemed less and less keen to know. He cut out the part about Brynn pulling a gun on him and chucking it at the back of the head, because who would believe such a thing?
When the story came out, it sounded much worse than he'd expected, the words hanging in the air like a chemical burn. Tori's face grew more pale, her body language rigid.
Smith disappeared down a wormhole where time was no longer linear, and he was experiencing moments out of time, with Brynn. The memory became visceral, the back of his head stinging from where the gun had hit him. He saw the door of Brynn's new apartment opening, and her and that long-haired asshole. He wanted to hit the man in his bearded face, but he'd struck the lamp instead.
He couldn't blame Tori for leaving. Not one bit.
She was young and smart, and she could do so much better than him.
Alone in the penthouse at the Hotel Le St. James, he wandered from room to room, calling her name softly, like a prayer. He lay on her bed, smelling her shampoo on the pillow, and her absence fell down around him like hail.
He pulled out his phone and made the call he'd been avoiding.
“I'm ready to come back,” he said.
The woman on the other line said, “It's about time.”
PART 7: PROOF
Tori
Summer turned to fall, and by October, I was working an administrative job at a notary office, which was slightly less glamorous than working for a billionaire. Day after day, I'd answer phone calls, send emails, file away papers, and nobody would slam me against a desk and slip their hands into my panties. Not once did anyone corner me in the supply room and ask for a blow job. There were no charter planes, no fancy penthouse suites, and no shopping trips to upscale department stores.
And I was just fine.
Some of my girlfriends stared at me with sad faces, as though I was a charity case—the girl who'd glimpsed luxury, but then had it cruelly snatched away.
I'd reconnected with some of my pre-college friends, and we slipped into a regular routine of partying on the weekend and texting each other all week about how broke and horny we were.
The necklace was hidden at the back of the freezer, under some frozen Lean Cuisine, because I had nowhere to wear it, and no idea how to trade it in for cash. The guy at our one pawn shop in town would probably have had a heart attack if I'd plopped that thing down on the counter.
Smith had promised something like a co-author credit to me, but I assumed that offer had evaporated when I'd run out like a coward while he went for a walk.
The second week of December, a package showed up at my home. I was living with my mother, having given up my little bit of independence back in August, when I'd done a little math and decided the shame of admitting I still lived with my mother was absolutely nothing compared to the money I'd be saving on rent. I was lucky the two of us got along so well, or so all my friends told me.
I gave her heck.
“It had my name on the address label!” she cried, and indeed it did.
I had to pry the contents out of her hands, because she'd already read a third of something that looked like a novel, but had all sorts of “Proof” and “Galley” stickers all over it.
I said, “This is the novel I typed the first draft of.” Holding a physical version of what Smith had created, with my help, gave me a chill.
While my mother squawked about wanting to finish the chapter before I took the galley copy hostage, I scanned through the opening pages. Smith had changed around a few of the sentences, but the book started off the way I remembered. As I got into the story, I fell into a sort of trance, the way one usually does when reading a book, but this time I could feel Smith's physical presence.
Had he handled the book? I sniffed it, searching for some trace of his scent, but I smelled only fresh paper and ink.
“No fair, you already read it,” my mother said.
“Yeah? How bad do you want it?” I giggled and ran up the stairs.
“Tori!” she wailed as she came running after me. “Let me at least read it over your shoulder!”
I stopped running and she slammed into me, both of us toppling to the hallway floor, giggling.
“Okay, you can read it!” I handed the book over. “You don't need to tackle me.”
“It was addressed to me,” she said.
“I know! See, that's just such a Smith thing to do. And of course he only sent one copy. What a buttplug.”
“You say he's a buttplug, and yet you're smiling. I haven't seen you light up this way in months.”
We helped each other up off the floor and stood in the hallway, near by bedroom. “It is winter,” I said, glancing through my room to the dark window. “Short days and all.”
“You miss him,” she said. “I know you've been waiting for him to call you, or to make some grand gesture, but men aren't like that. Maybe this is his way of reaching out to you.”
I snorted. “A single galley proof of a novel?”
“You didn't see the dedication page, did you?”
“Shit.” I grabbed the book from her and leafed back to the opening. I never read that crap at the beginning of books, because who cares about some author thanking a bunch of people I don't know.
The dedication read:
Thank you Tori, for breaking me.
I handed the book back to my mother. “What the fuck is that?”
“Tori! Watch your mouth.”
“Mom, that's the worst dedication in the entire history of books. Period. End of story. What a buttplug.” I wagged my finger at her. “Don't you dare tell anyone that's me.”
“I'm sure the ladies at book club will figure it out, but I won't tell anyone else, as long as you agree to something for me.”
“I'll stop leaving my clothes on the bathroom floor.”
She put one hand on her hip and sighed. “I'm not expecting any miracles. No, the thing I want is for you to go to Switzerland with me for Christmas break.”
“What? Did you win a trip?” I thought about how Smith had arranged for my ex-boyfriend to “win” a trip to Montreal, and I gripped my hands into fists. “Seriously, Mom. Did you win a contest you don't remember entering?”
“Just say yes. Don't be so difficult.”
“Fine, I'll go. But it's a trap.”
“It's not a trap,” she said. “Go back downstairs and have a look at the other stuff that came in the box. Smith Wittingham invited us to join him and his family in Switzerland for a vacation.”
I looked at her sideways. “Really?”
She was backing away from me, her eyes down on the open book in her hands.
I left her to her reading and ran downstairs.
Sure enough, there was a packet of information, including brochures about the resort. It was high on a rocky mountain, accessible only by cable car. That reminded me of the cabin in Vermont, accessible only by hiking or on motorbike. What the hell was it about Smith and inconvenient venues? Was he trying to trap me with him again? And if he was, then why invite my mother along?
A very dark thought popped into my head, nearly making me barf.
Was he going to try to seduce my mother?
Okay, Tori, that's ridiculous, I told myself, and I started to laugh. Still… he was kind of a weird dude.
I started making a mental list of who my mother might bring with her to Switzerland, because there was absolutely no way I was going.
No way.
Two hours later, my mother came into my room, sobbing.
I'd been reclining on a bunch of pillows on my bed, stalking people on Facebook on my tablet. I sat up in alarm. “Mom, what's wrong?”
She held up the book. “You have to read the end.”
“Yeah, I'll read it. Just toss it on my nightstand.”
She climbed onto the bed next to me and held the book open in front of me, pointing at one passage.
It read:
Smith Dunham pulled Sheri close to him as the hot air balloon lifted from the—
“Hey!” I said, looking over at my mother and her tear-soaked cheeks. “There wasn't any hot air balloon in the first draft.”
“Just read,” she said.
Smith Dunham pulled Sheri close to him as the hot air balloon lifted from the ground.
“Soon they'll release the tether,” he said to her angelic, lightly-freckled face. “Then nothing will hold us down.”
“You say that, but next week you'll be off on a new case, chasing some other girl. I know I'm nothing more than the flavor of the month to you.”
“I do love your particular flavor, but you're so much more than that, Sheri,” he said.
She turned away, facing the sunset.
He seized his opportunity and got down on one knee. The tether had been released, and the balloon soared higher and higher.
“Sheri, you broke me,” he said. “Which was exactly what I needed. My whole life has been about reacting, or provoking others when they get too close to me. Deep down, I feared I'd never be good enough to deserve someone's love. I may never be deserving of your love, Sheri, but I'd sure like to try. I'll die trying, if I have to.”
With a shaking hand, he took the antique ring from his jacket pocket. Still on bended knee, he took her cream-pale hand in his. “Will you marry me?”
Sheri was speechless, which made Smith worry about her vocal chords, because Sheri had never—
I pushed the book away.
“Barf,” I said to my mother.
“Barf?”
“Ugh, corny endings. I can't even finish it.”
She frowned at me. “Well, you didn't read the whole thing. Of course if you just look at the ending, you don't have the full perspective of everything they went through to get there.”
“I think I have a pretty good idea.”
“You can ask him to explain more about the dedication page when we see him in Switzerland.” She patted my leg and got off my bed.
“Uh…” I willed myself to tell her I wouldn't be going, but, like Sheri, I was speechless. Dammit if Smith's corny words hadn't shaken something loose in that filing cabinet where I kept all my feelings about the man.
“Sure,” I finished.
She set the book on my nightstand. “I don't know if it's his best one yet, but it's good.”
As she left my room, I frowned at my mother's back. What did she mean it wasn't his best one yet? Of course it was.
Mürren
Bernese Oberland, Switzerland
Mom and I arrived at the mountain village a few days before Christmas. She was cranky from traveling, which forced me to be in a good mood, because you can't have two redheads cranky at the same time.
The seats on the plane had been First Class, and the trip itself had been smooth enough, but neither of us were experienced travelers, so navigating the airports
was stressful. Words were said, but hugs were given, and the latter paved over the former.
The village of Mürren had no public road service, so we finished our journey on board the Luftseilbahn Stechelberg-Mürren-Schilthorn, which is a cable car that hangs in the air. I could only imagine how breathtaking the Swiss mountains could be in the summer, and they were certainly spectacular covered in snow.
The sky was bright blue that day, not a cloud in sight, and the snow sparkled so brightly, we had to put on sunglasses.
In the village, our guide came to meet us, and took us, by foot, to the hotel we were staying at.
My mother, still cranky, turned to me and said, “The least Smith could have done was come and meet us himself, not send a guide.”
“Take it up with Smith when you see him. I already told you he can be a real asshole sometimes.”
The guide said, with his French accent, “Ah, yes, you are 'ere for zee Wittingham event.”
Mom and I cracked up, because we both get the giggles over French accents.
“What iz wrong?” he asked. “What iz zee matter?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just travel fatigue.”
We checked into the hotel and went up to our rooms to freshen up. The itinerary we'd been sent had a time for dinner at the hotel, but nothing listed after that night. My mother had made most of the travel arrangements, mainly just confirming we were coming, with Smith's office. Neither she nor I had spoken to Smith, though surely he knew we were coming.
As we opened the doors to our rooms, on the top floor of the hotel, I tried to hide my disappointment that he hadn't met us already. In my mind, I had several fantasy scenarios planned. In one of them, I told him off, real good, and spent the trip learning how to ski and ignoring him. All of the other scenarios involved sex, but still ended with me telling him off real good.
I mean really, would it have killed the guy to make a phone call? To send a postcard? It was just six months of nothing, and then suddenly a trip to Switzerland? He was all brakes and all gas, nothing in between.