Halsey wouldn’t call it fun, not now, but there’d been moments of rampant joy where he felt his whole life had been transformed. “I fucked up with Lenny. Didn’t end well.”
“Do you love her?”
“It’s got nothing to do with that.”
“It’s got everything to do with that.”
Halsey took his reading glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “This can’t possibly be love.” It was. It had to be. And it sucked the life out of him. “It feels like I died, and I’m walking around in my ghost form.”
“Ah. That’s the version where you think you’ve broken your world so badly the rest of your life is going to be wondering how you can still hear and see and think and breathe.”
Jesus. That’s exactly how he felt. As if he’d spied a priceless object that was his best chance for future happiness and had been too cheap to pay enough for it. Only to find it was one of a kind, he’d lost it forever, and the only emotion he’d ever feel was a fathomless, aching loss and remorse.
“I’m toxic for Lenny.” They were always going to end, and he’d always known it. His ineptitude at the gala was in part knowing with a savage certainty that he needed to force her to walk away or risk wrecking her life by holding on to her till the end of time.
And he’d wrecked it anyway.
He needed to move on because there was no going back.
“Lenny had a problem with toxicity before you ever met her.”
He frowned at Cal. “That’s not fair.” But it was true. Lenny was compromised. It was the whole reason he’d been able to be honest with her from the beginning.
“Her chances of starting over in this city with her name were a million to one, and that was before her brother overdosed on stupid. She told Fin she’s thinking about abandoning D4D, changing her name, and moving to Florida with her mom and sister.”
Who knew it was possible for a ghost to feel pain and for that pain to be excruciating?
He needed Cal to leave so he could do something about it. He picked up his letter opener and ran his thumb over the figure embossed on it. He couldn’t hurt more if he stabbed his vital organs repeatedly with its pointy end.
“No one sells the idea of taking a risk like you do.” Cal quirked a brow. “Except me. Lenny can change her name and move away and start her life over. And you can put all this heartache behind you and settle at your desk and be comfortable.”
That was likely the best option for Lenny, as much as it hurt to hear it.
Cal gave him a wry grin. “It’s not enough.”
“If you think I’d interfere in Lenny’s life again, you’ve had too much sun.”
“You went hunting for a despot together and bagged him. I’d call that a triumph.”
“I knew Easton Bradshaw was a problem, and I did nothing about it. I could’ve saved Lenny that pain.”
Cal rocked back in his chair. Halsey knew he’d scored a hit. He’d never wanted to be so wrong in his life.
“We go after the wealthy who scam and disadvantage others. We don’t try to change their behavior. We just put their money to better use. We’re cons not therapists. Easton would never have been on our radar, and you can’t have known what he’d become. But I’d feel the same way if I’d left Fin unprotected. You’re in love with Lenny, and that’s not something sitting behind your desk will help you deal with.”
No point fencing around with this. “I love her too much to hurt her again.”
“The life Lenny knew is over. You’re hurting her now by not giving her another choice.” Cal stood. He pulled Amelia’s drawing off the cork board and put it on the desk. “Breathe fire, Halsey. A comfort zone is aiming too low. Take a risk. Lenny might just agree to take it with you.”
Breathe fire, be tamed by the woman he loved. Lenny was the chance of a lifetime. Rarer than an alicorn. The one collectable he couldn’t afford to not pull out all the stops for and would cherish for the rest of his life.
When he looked up, Cal was gone, and it was time to acknowledge the only comfort zone he wanted was the one where he conned Lenny into giving them another chance.
Going to her in a fever wasn’t going to help this time. This was no spontaneous act. This was his future, and he needed a plan.
It was the end of the work day by the time he arrived at D4D. He had to hope it wasn’t too late for everything he intended to risk.
Last time he’d stood outside this office door, he’d been filled with reluctance, resentful he had to clean up after Cal and Fin, bothered by the argument he could hear, and looking for any excuse to escape.
He’d changed. He knew himself better, because he’d come to know Lenny. He wasn’t ready to give up how being with her lit up his life, or the idea he could give her another way to see her dreams come true.
The clack of a keyboard told him she was at her desk when he walked in. “I told you already I’m not in the market for discount office supplies,” she called.
Her voice stopped him—the sharp tone, the weary undertone.
“Hey, you out there. Did you hear me? Not buying.”
“You haven’t heard what I’m selling yet.”
The clacking stopped, and she appeared in the doorway. He hadn’t seen her in 744 hours, 44,640 minutes, and 2.7 seconds. How was that enough time to have forgotten how lovely she was? How it made him feel just to be close to her, like he could scale mountains and jump out of planes, take down bigger crooks than he was, and still want to make snacks for her every morning at 3:00 a.m.
She seemed surprised to see him. He was too tense to know if that was good or bad. “I’m not in the market for a Warhol,” she said. “You got any fake da Vinci’s?”
She was barefoot and had shorter hair. It flicked around her face, but it would still be long enough for him to tuck behind her ear. “What I’m selling is more valuable.”
She leaned against the doorjamb. “Let’s hear it. But you should know I’m stubborn. I don’t like to give up. I have a problem with trust, and I’m not good at taking advice.”
Being stubborn took guts. Tenacity was a gift. Only fools trusted lightly. Advice was often overrated.
He walked across to the big central table where she’d once beaten up a notepad. He was riding on a high-octane mix of hope and daring, as he put his parcels down and arranged them.
She watched but didn’t come any closer. Her breathing was unsteady, the nonchalant lean was an act.
He laid down the flowers and the Lic-Lac chocolates. He set out his three red Dixie cups and the box of four drinking glasses, and then he gestured for her to come closer.
She looked at her feet. “I sold my apartment to pay Easton’s legal fees and set Mom and Mallory up. I’m thinking of moving to Florida. I’m guessing you know that.”
“I want to talk to you about the other part of that plan.”
She looked up. “Changing my name? I haven’t decided.” She shook her head. “I haven’t decided about anything.”
The relief of hearing that put space between his ribs, and he could inhale a little easier. “I could help you decide.” But only if she could accept that sometimes you could do the most good when you were strategically a little bad.
“You don’t need to pitch me.”
“You’re stubborn. You have a problem with trust, and my advice wasn’t always as good as it could’ve been.”
He needed to make the pitch of his life. No PowerPoint deck or Excel spreadsheet, no sexy little pivot chart or 3D pie graph was going to help. Lenny was half a room away hugging her unhappiness.
He waggled his fingers to get her to come closer, and this time she did. He made sure to keep the table between them because what he most wanted was to touch her, and he hadn’t earned the permission for that.
When he did, he was never letting her go.
He pointed at the tulips. “I should’ve bought you flowers more often, even though you didn’t want them the first time I did. These flowers are to apologize for being a lousy
fake boyfriend.”
She frowned. “You weren’t.”
“If I’d been a decent fake boyfriend, I wouldn’t have let you get hurt, and I’d have kept tabs on Easton. You’d have known he was cruising for a fall.”
For that, he got a deepening of her frown plus a headshake that fluffed her hair. “That’s not what fake boyfriends do,” she said.
“I’m not your average fake.” Though for a while, he’d been too busy faking to understand what he’d found in Lenny, and too reluctant to press for more for fear of being wrong for her. He didn’t think that way anymore. They could be good together. So very good. “I fucked up. I let Cookie Jar hurt you, and then I hurt you. I never meant for that to happen. I never wanted to lose you.”
Her indecision was in the slump of her shoulders and the way she turned her face away. His offer might not be good enough. He still wasn’t 100 percent certain he was good enough. But nothing added up if he didn’t try to bluff it out. Slowly, carefully. Giving her everything she needed to trust him.
“I want the chance to find out what your favorite flowers are and bring them for you often. If that would be okay with you.”
She lifted her head and met his eyes. It wasn’t quite an answer; still, he hadn’t lost her.
He tapped the chocolates. “You like these, even when you pretend not to. I want to be able to spoil you with the things you like. This was the biggest box they make.”
The worried expression she wore stayed put.
He pointed at the glasses. “You might feel the need to throw things. It can help. I want you to have enough ammunition. I might not always do exactly right by you, but I’ll always take responsibility for cleaning up the mess.”
Her first smile. Not all the way to her eyes, but it was a start.
He put his hands on the Dixie cups and moved them around. “Pick a cup.”
She folded her arms. “I accept your apology. I accepted it the moment I heard your voice. Easton wasn’t your responsibility. He wasn’t mine, either. And if I’d have listened to you about him, about other things, I could’ve saved myself some heartache.”
This was progress, but it might still be a false start. It was a big thing he was about to ask. It had to be positioned just right if it had any chance of succeeding. “Pick a cup, please.”
Reluctantly, she lifted the middle one. Under it was a tiny data stick. “Pick another one.”
“That’s not how this is meant to work.”
He had no idea how this was supposed to work, but he loved her, and he’d do anything to get another chance to prove it. “I’m improvising. I didn’t know I had that in me until I met you.”
That made her laugh softly. She lifted the cup on his left. Under it was a key. He lifted the last cup, and under it was a tiny light globe.
She shook her head, flicked a hand in an I-have-no-idea-what-this-is-about gesture.
He pointed to the key. “This kicks over a sweet Mercedes Coup.” Then the data stick. “The ownership papers are on there. You’re now the proud owner of an amazing vintage car. The globe is our invitation from Baiba to visit Ossovia and watch them strike ground on the new electricity grid.”
She looked from the table to his face in surprise. “You can’t give me a car.”
“It either sits in an impound for years unclaimed, or it goes to work for you through D4D.”
A hesitant nod, the hint of a smile. “Okay. I can live with that.” She picked up the globe. “You want to visit Ossovia with me?”
He wanted arguments and slow dancing and getting her off in the Jacuzzi. He wanted long conversations about her ambitions and middle-of-the-night post-sex snacks. He wanted to collect all the clever goodness of her up and reflect it back to her, so she was never in doubt of her value. He wanted to love her honesty, truthfully, and be confident she loved him, too.
He wanted it endlessly.
“There has to be an us for that,” she said.
He took off his coat and rolled up his sleeve. This was the moment his strategy might all fall apart. The last time he’d thought on his feet to protect Lenny, he’d fucked it up badly enough to see her hurt and to almost jeopardize the con. This time, he wasn’t acting out of fear but from the surety of love.
“I think there could be an us.”
On his forearm, Amelia had drawn a copy of her fire-breathing horse dragon, and she’d also drawn another figure. This one was a dolphin whale butterfly that sprayed water from a hole in the middle of its back. He pointed to the horse dragon. “This is me.”
“Obviously.”
Her amusement was a shot of pure courage. It got mixed up in his desire for her and flooded through his body like adrenaline on speed. “This is you. Or rather, this is how Amelia saw us in fantasy animal form. Neither of us are what you’d call ordinary. We don’t really fit with all the other animals. But we might fit together.”
“Did you use this kind of sophisticated selling technique on Cookie Jar?”
He laughed. “He was easier to con.”
Lenny’s delight fell away as quickly as it had come, and his confidence wobbled on the narrow ledge it walked. “Are you conning me?” she asked.
“No, but I am trying to win you.”
She flapped a hand. “Are you saying there’s a way for us to be together? Because I don’t like my current choices. My life backfired. It’s time to face facts, grow up. I’m not a trust-fund society princess anymore. I can’t be Lenore Bradshaw who uses her status and skills to do good in the world. All I can do is reinvent myself as someone else and start over.”
“What matters more to you, the status or doing good?”
She threw both arms out in frustration. “If it was the status, I wouldn’t be here in this rat trap office building that lets in office supply hawkers. I wouldn’t have accepted the dirty money Fin laundered through D4D you had to check was accounted for properly. I wouldn’t have needed to throw glassware or agreed to go vigilante on Cookie Jar with you, and I certainly wouldn’t be thinking about abandoning my dream because I’m a liability.”
You won big when you risked big. He’d always known it, but it’d never been so personal. “You don’t have to give up your dream. You just need to accept some bad influences and creative accounting. You could choose me.”
She took a step back from the table, and that distancing was a puncture in his lung, making it hard to get the next words out. “I’m in love with you, Lenny. You’re the best adventure I’ve ever had. You’re my last great collectable, the one thing I don’t want to live without. I’ve never felt more me than when I was helping you get what you wanted.”
She put a hand over her mouth and he rushed on. “If you want to pass D4D on to Fin and move to Florida, expect me to visit often. Hell, I’ll open a Sherwood Florida branch. And if you want to change your name, and you’re willing to accept some considered advice, I think you should wait a while and see if there’s any possibility you’d change it to Sherwood.”
She started in shock. “Did you just ask me to marry you?”
“No. I asked you to give us a chance to see if we can be scandalously good together. When I ask you to be my partner in crime forever, you won’t be confused about it. You’ll be happy with the way you reinvented your life. I’ll have a famous Ossovia green emerald in my pocket, and I’ll be on my knee with my heart in my hands hoping you’ll take it in yours.”
“Stop. Just stop.” She came around the table and grabbed the front of his shirt. “I’ve been wanting to touch you since you walked in. I can’t believe you’re really here, you had all those packages, and I didn’t trust myself not to lose all pride and beg you to fool me forever.”
Her eyes were bright. She stood on her toes and held on to his clothes with both hands.
He slipped his arms tentatively around her. It was like handling electricity, the hazard unpredictable. Anticipation burned through his veins, setting his senses alight, but everything he wanted could still blow up.
“You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time. I fell in love with you even when I knew it wasn’t smart. I got hurt because I didn’t want us to end, and I was too afraid to trust you.”
He put a hand to the back of her head and tightened his grip on her, afraid there was some twist he didn’t see coming that would turn him into the fool.
“You never lied. You kept our deal. And you always put me first. I don’t want my life derailed by other people’s mistakes. I don’t want to run and hide. And I don’t like my choices when they’re without you.”
It was too much to hope that between them they had a balanced ledger. “I’m always going to be a bad guy, Lenny. The kind of bad you’ve been trying to avoid.”
“We have the same ambition. We just came at it from opposite sides of the moral equation. I had trouble telling the difference between your kind of bad and the kind that put my dad and brother in prison. But I don’t anymore. Your kind of bad spits in the face of injustice and inequality. You do it for the right reasons and that’s—”
His whole future hung on the end of that suspended sentence, while Lenny let go his shirt and reached around his neck.
“Everything I want.”
That was it for his legs. His knees gave, and he staggered, pulling Lenny with him till he could sit on the edge of the table.
There was nothing of a bluff about the kiss they shared. A soft blush of relief that warmed and blossomed into the deepest lust. Present longing and future heat, today’s new beginning and tomorrow’s vision. He didn’t know if the trembling or the water on his cheeks was him or her, or both of them. It felt momentous. An earthquake to shake the foundations of their lives, to clear the ground so they could build afresh around each other.
Fool Me Forever (Confidence Game) Page 25