Executive Perks

by Angela Claire

  * * * * *

  The parking lot was hardly the deserted venue he’d pulled the Jag into half a lifetime ago. A coroner’s van, assorted police cars—of the black and white variety as well as unmarked, which he could spot from a mile away—strewed the cracked asphalt expanse.

  He steered Virginia to the passenger side of the Jag, surprised when she resisted as he held the door open for her.

  “I have my car here.”

  “Yeah, well, you can send somebody to pick it up later. I think we need the time to talk about what the hell is going on around here.”

  After a moment, she nodded and slid in. When he went around to his side and did the same, she looked at him expectantly. He started the motor. “Not here.”

  He’d had enough of cops for the night. They needed to get somewhere where they could talk in peace, unobserved.

  He pulled the jag out into the street. There wasn’t much traffic this time of night. It was night now, he suddenly realized, the street lights on in full force. He didn’t need the GPS to find his way back to the highway and into Manhattan, like he had on the way here. Things like that came easy to him. Like a lot of things.

  Not her, though. Who knew he’d finally fuck—no, make love—to Virginia Beckett and he’d be under interrogation by the cops shortly thereafter?

  “What the hell is going on?” he asked, once they were on the highway.

  She gazed out the window. “I wish I knew.”

  “You really didn’t know that girl?”

  Out of the periphery of his vision, he caught the sharp glance she sent his way. “No, I really didn’t know her. I’m not in the habit to lying to the police. Are you?”

  The good-girl tone that had crept back in her voice annoyed him. “When I have to,” he admitted.

  “Great. Nice to know. So did you have to back there? Who was she? Some poor bimbo you were sleeping with who followed you there and saw us?”

  The solidarity they’d experienced back at the funeral home didn’t last, it looked like.

  “Yeah and she bashed her brains out with a rock because she was so jealous. That’s an absurd theory, Virginia. I was with you the whole time, in case you forgot. I didn’t murder that girl and she didn’t murder herself. So there’s one big unknown out there.”

  “I guess.”

  Her begrudging tone wasn’t any more welcome than the good-girl one had been. Aaron’s foot just naturally pushed harder on the gas pedal in reaction. He always drove faster when he was pissed. It was a very bad trait, not to mention costly. He’d had more tickets with this Jag than he could count. Evidence he was mad a lot of the time, apparently. Of course, maybe not. He drove fast just for fun sometimes too, harkening back to the days when he occasionally stole a fancy car to take a road trip or fuck a girl in the back seat. He smiled at the thought. He always ditched the car unharmed so it could be returned to the rightful owners eventually and took the subway back to the home.

  “What are you smiling at? There’s not exactly anything funny about all this. And stop driving so fast. You don’t have a very good track record of safety as far as I’m concerned and I don’t want another bonk on the head, thank you.”

  His foot came down harder and he glanced in the rear view mirror to make sure there were no cops around. Her hands went to the dashboard. She already had her seatbelt on.

  “Look, you’re making me very uncomfortable here.”

  “And you’re reverting to type, Virginia. Stop getting so prissy.”

  “I will if you stop acting like you have any right to tell me what to do. Maybe the fact that we were so…close…so quickly has sort of distorted our relationship here.”

  “Quickly? You call that quickly? Fuck, I waited for you longer than I’ve waited for any woman.”

  It had so clearly been the wrong thing to say. Her audibly indrawn breath at the comment only confirmed it. He didn’t even have to glance over at her. He eased up on the gas pedal in partial recompense, though it probably wouldn’t help him now.

  He didn’t have much practice having a girlfriend, if that was what he was hoping she’d be. He’d had girlfriends, or rather girls he fucked for extended periods, from time to time. But what had she said to him at the charity thing that night? He treated his girlfriends like shit? Well, she was right about that. He desperately wanted to tell her he’d be different with her. He had told her that that night, hadn’t he?

  Wasn’t exactly proving it here.

  “I’m honored,” she said tightly. “I hope I was worth it.”

  He stayed silent, not wanting to blow it. Whatever else had happened this afternoon, he had, if nothing else, realized he very much wanted whatever relationship or closeness with Virginia Beckett they had managed to forge. He didn’t want to screw that up now, police interrogations and corpses aside.

  She wasn’t on the same page. “This has all been too much. Thanks for helping me over my fear of funeral homes, though I think I had a setback at the end there. You’re an incredible lay, though, which you undoubtedly know. I forgot all about where I was when we were screwing. But I bet all the girls say that.”

  “Virginia…”

  “Take whatever exit is first when we get into Manhattan. I’ll take a cab home.”

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

  She laughed shortly. “What? You think my feelings are hurt? You think I thought what we did back there was anything more than you using your incredible God-given talents for what they were meant to be used for? Entertainment. Distraction. It doesn’t change what I’ve said to you all along. I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  “Yeah, you keep saying that. You never quite seem to mean it, though.”

  “I didn’t call you to the funeral home. But I did use you to forget about it once we were locked in. I didn’t lie to you about that. What, are your feelings hurt?”

  The taunt should have bounced off him, but Christ she was right. What was it about this woman that reduced him to forgetting who he was? Did he honestly think the high-and-mighty Virginia Beckett would give him the time of day, no matter how good a fuck he was?

  His right foot floored the pedal at the realization, and the street lights on the highway whizzed by.

  “Juvenile,” he heard her mutter.

  “I haven’t even gotten started,” he said with a thin smile, not even caring if the cops were on his tail by now.

  She said nothing for the rest of the ride, but he didn’t take the first exit. Goddamn it, he’d at least drop her off at her office, since he still didn’t know where the hell she lived. When he pulled up to the deserted building, she got out without a word. He could see through the lit windows, the building primarily glass on the first floor as it was, when she nodded at the guard and proceeded to the elevators.

  He didn’t want to go up to his penthouse. He didn’t want to go to the office. He’d call Mrs. Fields and just check in. He knew where he was going.

  Then he peeled away.

  * * * * *

  Virginia gazed out the darkened window of her office. It was deserted this time of night. She should really call Brendan and fill him in with what happened, but she couldn’t summon the energy.

  She felt ridiculous, like a teenager who had just had a fight with her boyfriend. Aaron Winston was a jerk. She hated him. She closed her eyes and could almost feel him inside her, moving that slow, perfect way.

  Yep, just like a teenager. All hormones and no common sense.

  Of course, the sweet way he had joked with her before they had made love, trying to keep her from giving into her fear, came back to her now. The solid way he’d stood up to that detective and kept his head.

  She swiveled back to face her desk, though she couldn’t see much on it. She hadn’t turned the lights on, she realized. Just walked past the cleaning crew and sat at her desk. They hadn’t seemed surprised. She was always at the office at odd times of the night.

  Maybe because she didn’t have a life.


  She tried to focus on the obnoxious way Aaron had sped up when she objected to his driving so fast. She probably had sounded prissy, though, she admitted.

  That annoying comment about waiting for her. It made her sound as if she was a sandwich and he’d had to stand in line for her too long. Of course her remarks in response hadn’t been exactly tactful.

  Or true.

  Perhaps this was why she could never manage to sustain a relationship with a man. She was really, really bad at it.

  A psychiatrist she had once gone on a date with, one date, had volunteered at the end of it that in his professional opinion she needed to control everything around her and if she didn’t, she felt uncomfortable. He’d offered to cure her. She had thought he was soliciting her business, but it turned out he wanted to put a dog collar around her neck and teach her the joys of submissiveness.

  She had passed.

  But he did have a valid point. She did expect to control things and Aaron Winston had, from the moment he entered her life, pretty much shot that all to hell. She couldn’t control him.

  A sudden image of the wild way he made love to her seized her.

  She put her head on her desk. She should be focusing on what was going on in her seriously disturbed life. Somebody was setting fires to her house and causing car accidents and luring her to funeral homes. And maybe now even murdering girls who looked like her.

  What the hell was going on? It was a perfectly reasonable question for Aaron to ask. Where had the conversation gone so wrong after that?

  Yep, just like a teenager after her first fight with a boy.

  A boy she really, really liked.

  She picked up the phone, taking a chance maybe he was just as pathetic as she was and had gone back to his office.

  * * * * *

  Virginia flagged a cab and gave the driver the address Aaron’s secretary had given her. The cabbie shot a look back at her and repeated the address, only with a question mark at the end.

  “Yes,” she said, slamming the cab door.

  He pulled out into traffic. “That’s a rough area.”

  She didn’t comment. The scenery the farther they got into the ride confirmed the driver’s observation. She’d forgotten how rough parts of this city could be. A far cry from the glass skyscrapers and buzzing streets she was used to, her destination by comparison was flattened and deserted. Although it had been dark outside for some time now, there was thankfully a functioning street lamp on the corner where the cab stopped.

  “This is it.”

  She read the meter and handed over some bills.

  “You want me to wait, lady?” The size of the tip seemed to have prompted the question when she told him to keep the change.

  Half inclined by the burnt-out buildings and empty littered streets to take him up on it, the sight of the green Jaguar in what passed for a parking lot—just torn-up asphalt—prompted her to shake her head no. She got out of the cab and it sped away.

  This must be it. The institutional flavor of the building had a sixtyish aura about it, chipped puke-green paint and square contours. She walked around to the entrance closest to the Jag and found it open, a dim florescent light illuminating a long hallway once she stepped into the building. Tempted to call out for Aaron, she stopped herself and instead followed the sound she heard faintly down the corridor.

  A bouncing ball and the scrape of shoes as someone chased it.

  She saw him as soon as she stood in the doorway to the gym.

  Tie loosened, jacket discarded on the bleachers, shirt sleeves rolled up, Aaron was center court dribbling a basketball, his dark head bent to watch. She didn’t even know whether he saw her or not, until he called out, “How did you find me?”

  She approached over the sound of the ball bouncing against the wooden floor, again and again. “Your assistant. She was still at the office and you’d told her where you were going when you called in.”

  He took a shot, missing. “Remind me to fire Mrs. Fields when I get back to the office.”

  He had the ball back soon enough, dribbling again in place.

  “Isn’t that violating a rule or something? Holding, I think they call it.”

  A corner of his mouth quirked up. “I violate a lot of rules, princess. That’s football anyway. Not basketball.”

  She looked around the gym. “What is this place?”

  “A basketball court.”

  “I can see that. I mean, the facility. There was no sign identifying it. Just the address. What is it? Why are you here?”

  Aaron took another shot, this time making it, and reclaimed the ball again. She was this close to kicking off her high-heeled shoes and running behind him in her bare feet to grab the ball away just so they could have a conversation. Her stockings, she realized, were still in the couch at the funeral home and in her brooding at the office she hadn’t bothered to replace them.

  “Didn’t Mrs. Fields tell you all about it?”

  “No. She just gave me the address.”

  “Hmm.” The bouncing stopped and he held the basketball in one arm against his side, giving her his full attention now. His blue eyes were bright. “This is my Bransport.”

  She took in the bleachers, the court, and thought of the deserted institutional hallway she’d roamed through to get here. “What do you mean?”

  “This,” he said, gesturing around him, “is the equivalent of my ancestral digs.”

  “You grew up here?”

  “As much as anywhere, I guess you’d say. This here is the Greater New York Home for Troubled Boys. It was my little vacation home after each time some foster parent kicked me out. Right back here.”

  “I see. So you—you feel nostalgic or something?”

  A snort accompanied her question. “Hardly. I hate the place. I’m going to tear it down. I’d do it with my own hands, brick by fucking brick, if I had the time.”

  The vehemence surprised her. She—her family, anyway—had always supported a multitude of good causes, boys’ homes somewhere there among them, she knew. But that just meant giving money. Not time. Not attention. She realized she had no clue as to what it was really like to live in one of them, to need her or someone else’s money.

  “So what brings the beautiful Miss Beckett down to my own personal memory lane? Not to mention such a shitty neighborhood at this time of night. You should start being more careful, princess.” He threw the ball into the bleachers where it landed with a thud, and faced her, hands on hips. “What do you want?”

  The aggressive stance, the slight sneer, this was more like the Aaron Winston she’d first met a month or so ago. It should have relieved her to have him fit so nicely back into his pre-packaged conception of him.

  It didn’t.

  “Don’t kids still live here?” she asked.

  “Not anymore. I bought the place and kicked them out.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said, realizing she didn’t.

  “Why not? Because we’ve become so…close.” The sneer wasn’t even slight at this point. He said the word like it was an obscenity. “So now I’m Prince Charming? Wake up, princess. I just wanted to get in that hot wet pussy of yours. Now that I have, I can get back to business.”

  “Where are the kids who lived in this place?” she persisted, surprised at how easily she could ignore his deliberate barb.

  “How should I know? Back on the streets where they belong, probably. What do I care?”

  “If I go back and ask Mrs. Fields, I bet she’ll tell me, won’t she?”

  “Tell you what? Listen, babe, I wanted you, I fucked you—quite a few times actually—and got you out of my system. That’s it. That’s all there is.”

  They were in the center of the court, and she moved toward him. He turned abruptly away, tossing over his shoulder, “I’m going to hit the showers.”

  She caught his arm. “You built them a new home, didn’t you?” She was sure of it. With every fiber of her being, she was sure of it.
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br />   “Now why would I do that?”

  Square in front of him now, she tugged on his loosened tie, as if to draw him to her, though he didn’t move a muscle. “Because you’re a nice guy.”

  “Fuck you, princess,” he spat out, as if she’d just insulted him in the worst way. And maybe in his world, she had. “I’m not nice. I don’t follow rules. I’m not good, unless you’re talking about in bed. So don’t try to fit me into that squeaky-clean idyllic world of yours.”

  She threw her arms around his neck. “Aaron,” she whispered as he stared down at her, eyes unreadable, but his posture rigid.

  “What? Are you slumming again? Scared of something and want a really hot fuck to distract you?”

  “I didn’t mean what I said back there.”

  He unwrapped her arms. “Of course you did. I couldn’t give a shit anyway. As I said, I got you out of my system, so it worked out well all around. And though normally I’d be disposed to fucking you again, since you were a pretty good lay yourself, and what the hell, I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass this time. You come with a little too much baggage. I think if I stay away from you, the dead bodies and fires and things might slow down.”

  “You’re determined to be a prick here, aren’t you?”

  “I am a prick. Remember?”

  With that and a smile, he sauntered away and disappeared into the locker room.

  She flipped out her cell phone and dialed. The cool-voiced secretary didn’t sound surprised to hear from her, and Virginia wasn’t surprised she was still in the office. Or else she’d switched her phone to be forwarded to her home. Virginia asked the woman the question and heard the answer she already really knew. Not in the details of it, but she knew.

  “Mr. Winston built an expanded facility in another location, out in the country actually in upstate New York. It has horses and swimming pools and, well, it’s quite an improvement over the previous facility. It can accommodate a lot more children as well, so the administrators can be choosier about what foster homes they place the children in eventually. It’s not some frantic revolving door.”