Valdman closes the file and picks up his scotch glass. “I’m listening.”
I take a seat in the creaky leather armchair next to his. “We need to find them a new shelter. Bigger and better and at no extra cost. I don’t know if we can make it happen fast enough to get in front of the story, but it will still do a lot toward repairing the image of the firm.”
My boss nods. “And you’ve already talked with them about this?”
“No, sir. I wanted to run it by you first. But the space they are using now is cramped and shabby. If we can find them someplace bigger, nicer, someplace that photographs well and will look good on the news, then we’ll be able to salvage this.”
“I like it,” Valdman says. “So long as it doesn’t cost us any money.”
“We might need to make a small donation to grease the wheels, but I’m hoping we can find an existing property that’s suited to their needs and comes at no cost to us. I’m sure we can find a client of ours who needs the tax break and who already has a property that would work.”
“Okay, fine,” he says. “Make it happen.”
I pause. This is the tricky part. “So, sir, I was wondering if it would be possible for someone else to take point on this project. At least when it comes to interfacing with the nuns.”
Valdman looks at me. And doesn’t answer.
“I’ll still do everything else—scout the new property and liaise with Keegan and Ealey and all that. But I don’t think I’m the right person to work with the nuns themselves.”
My boss continues to study me, and I resist the urge to shift in my seat. Don’t show any weakness, I remind myself. Look confident. Look like you’re ready for another victory lap.
“You know, this is the first time in ten years that you’ve ever asked to be taken off a job,” Valdman says. “You’ve handled senators, athletes, and international beer conglomerates for me, but all of a sudden you’re losing your nerve? You’re too soft to handle a bunch of nuns?”
“I’m not too soft,” I say defensively.
“Then what is it?”
I decide on a slice of the truth that doesn’t involve Zenny. “My sister killed herself because of a predatory priest. I’m sorry, but I’ve got too much baggage with the Church to handle the sisters directly. I’d be better off behind the scenes.”
Valdman takes a drink and smacks his lips. “Well, I can’t say that I’m not a little disappointed—I still think you’re the best man to be in the middle of it—but I can’t deny that’s a damn good reason to want to avoid the nuns.”
“So you’ll find someone else to work with them?”
“Yes.”
Thank fuck. “Thank you, sir. I promise I’ll do all I can to get this taken care of from my end.”
Valdman waves a hand. “I know you will. You’re a good employee, Sean, and I have total faith you’ll get this fixed.”
I’m glad someone does, I think.
That night, after checking on Mom at the hospital, I go to the club to let off some steam and to finish the victory lap I never got to take last night. I know strip clubs are generally considered seamy places, and there’s probably something so inherently dirty about transactional nudity that no amount of money can fix it, but this place comes close, because there’s a lot of money here. It’s exclusive, invitation-only, only open to members (yes, men and women) that clear a million a year. And besides, I like that it’s inherently dirty.
I’m inherently dirty and I have no plans to change that any time soon.
I get myself some Macallan and wander out of the bar area. The club is on the top floor of a downtown skyscraper, and while the lounge and dance areas are walled off from the windows, there’s a wide corridor along the perimeter of the club for members to take phone calls or simply look out over the city, which is what I do now. I cradle my glass in my hands and pick out the sharp lines of my own building a few blocks away. The lights are on in my penthouse, and I check my home app on my phone to see who the fuck is inside my penthouse, because the cleaning company should be long done for the day.
I pull up the kitchen camera feed and see the unmistakable lines of Aiden’s muscled, shirtless back as he digs through my fridge. Even in the slightly grainy feed of the camera, I see sweat gleaming on his skin.
I call him and he answers with a grunt.
“Stop dripping sweat all over my clean floor,” I say irritably.
“It’s not like you clean it yourself,” Aiden says. I hear the fridge door shutting and the clatter of a plate on the counter.
“And stop eating my food,” I tell him. “It’s fucking annoying to get home and have my fridge emptied out by a Neanderthal.”
“But you also don’t do your own shopping,” Aiden points out.
“Don’t you have your own place? With your own food and your own floors that you can get dirty any time you’d like?”
“I like the gym here,” Aiden mumbles over the beep of a microwave. “Plus it’s closer to Mom and Dad’s and the hospital.”
I don’t answer, and I don’t have to. Any mention of Mom is automatic ceasefire, and anyway, he’s right—on one of his trademark Aiden impulses, he bought some giant old farmhouse out in the country, and it’s a decent drive from the city.
“Don’t know why you bought that place,” I say, walking to another window so I can see in the direction of the hospital. It’s impossible to pick out from here, but it makes me feel marginally better to look at it, as if I’m still keeping an eye on Mom. “It’s huge and it’s not like you need that much room.”
“I like it,” Aiden says. “It’s quiet out there. You can see the stars.”
“You mean you like it until you want a decent gym or until you’re hungry.”
“That too.”
“I’m at the club. Why don’t you shower and come over?”
Aiden hesitates. “I think I’m going to head home tonight. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”
I frown. Aiden hasn’t turned down a chance to visit the club since he got his own invite a few years back, and while I typically avoid noticing these things about my own brothers, it’d be impossible not to know that his physical appetites are as strong as mine.
“You sure?” I ask. “Might be nice to blow off some steam.”
“Another time,” Aiden says vaguely. “Have fun though.”
“Yeah. Will do.”
I hang up the phone and lean my head against the glass, deciding to put Aiden’s weird behavior in a box in my mind and close the lid. I simply do not have the time or the energy right now to deal with whatever’s got him acting strange. And it’s probably just Mom stuff anyway. All of us brothers are handling Mom’s cancer in various unhealthy ways, and I guess there are worse ways to cope than random acts of celibacy.
“Hey, Sean,” a low voice says from behind me. I turn to see Scarlett, a pale-skinned, befreckled dancer that I like very much. Her hair matches her name, by the way. Everywhere.
I give her a slow smile. “Hey yourself.”
She’s wearing a silk robe, but she lets the middle gape open as she walks toward me and presses her hands flat to my chest.
“How about a private dance for my big boy?” she purrs.
The city lights twinkling in from outside make her look quite pretty; even so, I can’t help the way my mind wanders to this morning, to Zenny in the sunlight, to Zenny perched on the edge of the counter. To Zenny’s lush mouth and copper-ringed eyes and tiny little nose piercing. To the intoxicating mix of boldness and shyness that Zenny betrays every time she speaks.
I can’t help the way my body follows my mind, my cock reminding me rather churlishly that it’s had no relief since my episode with Zenny this morning, that it’s had nothing but my own hand for the past two weeks.
“How about more than a private dance?” I say, taking Scarlett’s elbow and leading her back to the hallway that leads to the private rooms. “I need to relieve some tension.”
“It’s extra,” Scar
lett tells me, looking pleased. “But for you, I’ll throw in a discount.”
We go inside the private room, and Scarlett pushes me onto a small couch, crawling into my lap and tugging at my tie, and I breathe a sigh of relief that has nothing to do with the fact that my neglected cock will soon be getting the attention it needs. (Well, almost nothing to do with it.)
No, I’m relieved because things are back to normal now, after this crazy day. I’ve figured out a way to avoid Zenny, to keep Valdman happy, to keep my promise to Elijah, and now I’m exactly where I should be—relaxing with a glass of scotch and waiting for a warm mouth to make me feel better.
I’m a fixer. I fixed the problem, and now I’m done and I can stop thinking about it.
About her.
Chapter 7
Except I can’t stop thinking about her.
I can’t stop thinking about her as Scarlett kneels between my legs and makes me feel good. I can’t stop thinking about her as I go back to my penthouse and clean up the dishes Aiden left in my sink. I can’t stop thinking about her as I shower and fall asleep, and then the next day when I go into the office and after, when I help my mom get discharged from the hospital. And the day after that.
And I especially can’t stop thinking about her as I sit in my mother’s infusion room, reading aloud the most recent Wakefield Saga novel, In the Arms of the Disgraced Duke.
“‘And what about my dowry?’” I read. “‘I suppose that means nothing to you?’”
“‘It’s meant nothing since the day I first laid eyes on you,’” I continue, adopting the disgraced duke’s deep baritone. Or at least the deep baritone I presume a disgraced duke would have.
“‘Which day would that be, my grace?’” I say in the young Eleanor Wakefield’s voice. “‘The day I was born and my father promised me to you in order to satisfy his debts with your family? Or the night you first saw me as a grown woman at my coming out?’”
“‘I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you both?’” I read as the duke.
“He’s lying,” the oncology nurse says. “He didn’t think of her as anything but a cash cow until the party at Almack’s.”
“No, no,” Emmett says from the recliner next to Mom. He adjusts the blanket around his legs and sticks up a pale, knobby finger to emphasize his raspy words. “His feelings about her were always complicated, because here was this girl he was betrothed to, but she was too young to do anything but ignore for so many years. But then he lost everything and saw her again in the same week—”
“I think he always felt like he could love her, money aside,” my mom interrupts, waving her bottle of Mountain Dew, “but he didn’t want to fuck her until the party.”
“Mom.”
“What? It’s true.”
“I know it’s true, but—” I make a gesture around the infusion room, where the ten or so people inside are all my mom’s age or older. “We’re in public. And you know…” I lower my voice to a discreet whisper “…the aged.”
“Son, I fought in Vietnam,” Emmett rumbled. “You think I haven’t heard the word fuck before?”
“It’s in the book,” the nurse adds. “I think the duke even says something along the lines of, ‘I want to fuck her right here on the balcony, dowry be damned.’”
“Sean, look at me,” my mother says, and I look at Carolyn Bell. At her slightly-too-wide mouth and her dimples—just like all of my brothers and I have. At the smooth, barely wrinkled lines of her face, rendered unearthly and strange by her lack of eyebrows and eyelashes. At the silk scarf wrapped around what used to be thick chestnut hair and now is nothing but scalp.
“Yes, Mom?”
She tilts her head and very deliberately pronounces, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—”
I put both hands over my face and mumble into my palms. “Oh my Godddddd.”
“Keep reading, son, I haven’t got all day,” Emmett says, and Rosalie on the other side of Mom grunts her agreement, even though I know for a fact she usually naps through most of Sean Bell Story Time.
For the last three months, the Thursday morning infusion crew has been listening to me work my way through the last two Wakefield Saga books. Mom and I have been buddy-reading romance novels since she caught me sneaking In the Bed of the Pirate back to college with me after Lizzy’s funeral, and instead of teasing me, she loaded me up with the next two paperbacks in the series. Ever since then, we’ve been devouring books together in our little Bells-only book club, and while we like some romance novels set in the here and now, we really prefer our books with rogues and roués and castles and shit. And when Mom was diagnosed with cancer, we both knew we needed some mental comfort food, so back to the Wakefield Saga we went, to the very books that founded the informal Bells-only Book Club.
Plus it makes the chemotherapy sessions go by faster.
I wonder if Zenny knows what she started with that pirate book all those years ago.
I keep reading, ignoring the protests from literally every patient in the room and the nurse when I skip over the sex scene.
“Oh come on,” Rosalie groans, her eyes still closed. “We’ve been waiting weeks for this.”
“Guys,” I sputter. “I can’t read this in front of my mom.”
“Pretend I can’t hear you,” Mom says. “You were really good at pretending I couldn’t hear you when you were a teenager sneaking girls into your room.”
“I’m going to leave. I swear to all that’s holy, I’ll do it. I’ll leave you here to watch Ellen all day.”
“If you leave, make sure you leave the book,” Mom says crisply, my threats as useless as they were when I was a boy. “And then I’ll read the sex scene out loud.”
Somehow that is much more mortifying to imagine, and after the patients threaten to revolt and physically take the book out of my hands, I relent and read aloud the scene of the disgraced duke finally claiming Eleanor’s maidenhead.
There is applause throughout the room as Eleanor climaxes and the duke finally unleashes his torrents of passion into Eleanor’s womb.
“‘It was everything I dreamed of,’” I read in Eleanor’s voice.
“‘But the duke winced at this,” I read, and my own conscience prickles uncomfortably as I speak the words. “‘He immediately felt the guilt of what he’d done, the terrible weight of it. He’d vowed once upon a time to protect this girl, and here he was tumbling her without the slightest hint of what she deserved from him. She deserved a wedding, a future, a promise of love. And all he’d given her were a few moments of pleasure and a lifetime of regret.’”
“Sean, my boy.”
I look up to see the one person that I would happily see castrated and then dragged behind a team of wild horses and then maybe castrated again for good measure. (Okay, maybe not, but I’d definitely draw a dick on his face if I ever found him passed out.)
“Don’t come in,” I tell the man standing in my doorway.
“I’ve got to say, you really know how to pick them,” Charles Northcutt says, coming in. He’s white, my age, possibly in better shape, although it could be that he just dresses to show it off more. He’s also a pompous dick and Valdman’s other favorite employee.
I hate him.
“Don’t sit down,” I say.
He sits down. “That nun, Zenobia, holy fuck, she’s something else. I bet the body she’s got under all those Jesus clothes is to die for.”
The cloud of red anger is instantaneous. I look down at where my hands rest on my laptop keyboard and they’re shaking. What the fuck is wrong with me? I hate Northcutt and I think he’s a dog, but I’ve never gotten so personally incensed at the stupid shit he says—although maybe I should have been getting personally incensed before.
“What do you want, Charles?” I ask in a flat voice that makes it clear that I don’t care. Except maybe I care a little bit if it’s about Zenny; I have to push away from my desk and cross my arms so that he doesn’t see how fucking furious I am to hear him talk
ing about her that way. Which is purely because she’s Elijah’s little sister. And I promised to keep her safe…and Northcutt is not safe.
Unfortunately, Northcutt is not fooled by my forced nonchalance, and a new glitter enters his eyes. “So why’d you hand this back over to Valdman, eh? The nun turn you down?”
“I keep my dick in my pants when I work,” I bite back, which is a lie, and we both know it. I’ve never crossed any kinds of lines with subordinates or coworkers, but I’m the king of the work party fuck, the convention hotel bar hookup, the entertainer of bored wives. And I’ve literally never cared, except right now I do care, because I don’t have any moral high ground on Charles, and that’s not a good feeling. I would like to think of myself as very different from him. I mean, I’m a white man myself, but the first white man to make another white man go oh God the privilege is real was Charles Northcutt.
“Well, whatever the reason you handed her over to me, I wanted to thank you. I think I’m going to have a lot of fun peeling the virginity off that one.”
Thwack.
I’m just as surprised as Northcutt when my hand comes slamming down on my desk, but I don’t stop to analyze what I’ve done. “You stay the hell away from her,” I growl.
“Or what?” Northcutt asks, his eyebrows raised in mild amusement. “You were the one who stepped back, Sean. What did you think Valdman was going to do when you asked him to find someone else? Trust your potentially firm-destroying mistake to an intern?”
I’m pissed because he’s right, and I should have known all this, planned for it and thought about it before I asked Valdman for permission to step away. But fuck. I was so messed up from Zenny and my promise to Elijah…and that broken-off kiss and my sleepless night with Mom at the hospital and—
Northcutt stands up, buttoning his jacket and giving me a smile so devoid of true human expression it could only be called sharklike. “See you around,” he says, turning to leave, and I hate that I’m playing right into his hands by calling him back, but I can’t help it, I’m too furious and also too scared. I don’t want this shark anywhere near Zenny.
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