Part of the Family

by Cristina Grenier

Ev let his words sink in. He knew that they were harsh, cruel, even, but he was suddenly out of patience with her and with himself. He needed to make a clean break, to start over, again, to make things right for his son. This wasn’t about him and his randy desires. It was about raising Danny to be a healthy, happy boy, well-adjusted, well-cared for, and well loved.

  “Are you firing me?” She had the nerve to sound scandalized.

  “Sounds like I just did,” he said, turning away from her. “I’ll expect you in my study by nine in the morning to collect your severance package. Be ready to leave then.”

  He began to walk away when she said, “Wait a minute! You can’t just fire me! What the hell did I do? You slept with me. You made it seem like we could…”

  By the time she got to the last hesitant word, he had turned all the way back around and was looking at her without expression. She didn’t finish her sentence, but the anger and humiliation she was clearly feeling flushed her cheeks. Somewhere in the depths of his mind, Ev felt a remote kind of sympathy for her, but in the moment, he was fully enraged.

  “What time did you come to my study a week ago, Cindy?” No response. He waited, but she didn’t answer. He continued. “What were you wearing?” Still no answer. “What did I ask you before we fucked?”

  He used the crude word deliberately, because he wanted her to know that what they had done was nothing emotional, and nothing that suggested he had any intention of repeating it. He didn’t want her to pretend even to herself that she was upset because they had had something building. He had been horny, she had been available, he had fucked her. End of story. So yes, he was a jerk and a man whore, but he wasn’t going to let her lay the blame for her misconceptions and presumptions on him. They each had their own share of blame to bear.

  “Apparently you’ve forgotten. Should I refresh your memory?”

  He was being an asshole, and he knew it, but she had pushed a button he had kept hidden for a very long time, and she would have to bear the pain of his rejection.

  “No? Okay. Then let’s be clear now, as well. I have no interest in you. I fucked you because I needed a release, and you offered it to me. If you hadn’t come to my office, I would have gone without, as I had done often before you arrived in this house, and as I will continue to do when you leave. You may choose to spin whatever story you want to about me when you leave here. As long as you understand that what goes around comes around.”

  He let that sink in. He was fucking tired of always being the good guy, the one who took the fall, who bore the blame, when every woman he slept with knew the score before they hit the hay. Cindy wasn’t a virginal college student, deflowered by the big bad corporate businessman. She wasn’t stupid. She knew exactly what she had wanted when she had stopped by his study, and she had gone after it. And tonight she had wanted some more. So she made sure his son was too tired to stay awake, and then expected him to be okay with her enticing him again because she needed her itch scratched. For her to be irate that he wasn’t putting out was ridiculous, and he was pissed. He needed her to understand that he would not be threatened by her, no matter how she spun things when she left. As long as she was gone by nine thirty in the morning, he didn’t care what she did.

  He watched her draw herself up to her full height. The shorts she was wearing barely covered her ass, and he could see that her top was one of those wide-necked ones that slouched to bare one shoulder. And it was clear that she wasn’t wearing a bra. What kind of nanny dressed like that with a toddler in the house? Had she always dressed like that? And had he just not noticed before because he didn’t care, but now he did because he was angry? Had he encouraged her by his inattention to her appearance?

  He had been a fucking failure as a father yet again, and his rage threatened to choke him.

  “I’ll let you get on with packing now,” he said, dismissing her again. “I’ll look after Danny tonight. You’re relieved of all responsibility for him from now until you leave in the morning. Good night.”

  He left her standing in the kitchen, his mind already working on his new priority…finding another nanny for his son. He’d have to find this one on his own. There was no way he was asking Del to help him again, especially as she would want to know what had gone wrong with this one. He wasn’t about to broadcast his stupidity, not even to his trusted friend.

  Chapter 2: An Unfortunate Meeting

  You should have hired the extra intern, Max.

  The little voice in Maxine Cousins’ head jeered at her as she roamed the store. Her hesitation about spending more money on another person to help her run Hope For All, the city’s largest philanthropic organization was coming back to bite her in the butt just hours after she had rejected the last applicant for the position. Now her organizer for the biggest fundraiser of the year was expecting her to find a suitable gift to present to their biggest donor, EM Media, that was in keeping with the motto of Hope For All and that was within their budget.

  The oversight was extraordinary and upsetting. Although they had a caterer for the event, and everything had already been arranged, somehow they had managed to overlook the one thing that Max wanted to become her signature gesture to their donors…a gift that showed the connection between Hope For All and the donor being given the gift. How had they managed to miss EM Media in their shopping? They had spent a whole month fine-tuning the gifts they wished to give, shopping online, comparing prices, discarding ideas as too sappy or silly or fake. Finally, they had chosen the tokens and had ordered them. And they had all arrived, except for the one for EM Media, which had never even been ordered.

  Cursing silently, she stepped past a woman pushing a baby carriage and rounded the corner of the electronics store, bumping into a large wall of hard muscle. The man kept moving, as though he hadn’t felt her body against his, almost mowing her down. Already irate, Max lost her temper.

  “Excuse me, asshole, how about you back up and watch where the hell you’re going?”

  The minute she spoke the words she had been thinking, Max felt her face heat with color. She had a quick temper, but she had learned through long experience never to speak in anger. And yet here she was losing it in spectacular fashion with some random stranger in a store at the mall. She chalked it up to her stress levels, which were at an all-time high. She was new to being the director of Hope For All, and having begun her tenure at the busiest time of the year, she felt somewhat overwhelmed. None of which was an excuse for her rudeness to the man who was even now staring down at her as though she had two heads.

  “I beg your pardon?” His tone was scandalized.

  The part of Max’s brain that was detached from the situation smiled at his obvious consternation and shock at her words. He had every right to be shocked…who lost their temper like that over an accidental bump in a crowded store? No one ever except, apparently, Maxine Cousins, probably soon-to-be-fired new director of an organization that preached tolerance and patience, if word ever got out about this little fracas. Still, he had kept walking without even so much as an apology, so she had a right to be at least irritated.

  “You just kept walking as though you hadn’t bumped into me once already. An apology would have been nice.”

  Max, what the hell are you doing? You should shut it before you are ejected from the store.

  “Maybe I would have offered one, if I hadn’t bumped into a shrew with the manners of a fish wife,” the man said, his gray eyes darkening with anger. “Now if you don’t mind, I’ll be on my way.”

  He stepped past her, and that was when she saw the child he was holding by the hand. Shame washed over her as he strode away. Hopefully the little boy hadn’t noticed her, but that she could so completely have lost her mind as to accost a parent in the presence of his child was cringe-worthy even on her worst bad day. She stayed where he’d left her, stunned by his succinct summary of her character and charms. A shrew and a fish wife…she felt like a slug. Anger welled inside her, not just at the arrogant man wh
o had so easily decided she wasn’t worth his time, but also at herself for precipitating the whole ugly episode. When would she learn to rein in her temper?

  She had to focus to remember why she had been in the store to begin with, but after another fifteen minutes of fruitless searching, during which she tried to find an appropriate token for their biggest supporter, she gave up and left in disgust. She’d have to come up with something innovative to reward whoever showed up to represent the media giant. She hadn’t really paid attention to who had accepted the invitations that had gone out two months earlier, passing all of them on to her secretary, who managed the business side of things. Her secretary Jen had offered to help her find the token, but Max couldn’t let the poor young woman stay late another evening. She had already caused Jen to miss two dates with her soon-to-be-husband, and they had planned a weekend away to make up for it. She wasn’t about to get in the way of that. It was the least she could do.

  The fundraiser was two nights away, and she was at a loss as to what to give as a token of the organization’s esteem and respect. Maybe she needed to do a bit of research, find out something about the person who ran EM Media. If she could see how he ran his company, maybe that would give her some idea of what to get. She hurried out of the store, intent on doing some Google searches of a more personal nature. She didn’t even know what the CEO of EM Media looked like. It would be nice if she recognized him on Sunday night, instead of having to fumble her way. God forbid she should start off on the wrong foot with her charity’s best benefactor.

  Her two cats greeted her, twin looks of disapproval marking their unblinking glares as she finally walked in the front door of her condo. She would normally have fed them an hour ago, and it was clear they were not best pleased with her. Kicking off her heels, Max hurried to the kitchen to retrieve the dry cat food that she fed them in the evenings, added water to their bowls, and suffered Harriet’s punishing nip at her finger. She deserved it, she knew, and Harriet was, after all, an ancient female. At fifteen, she had long passed her sell-by date, but she was as opinionated and snooty as she had been the day Max had gotten her as a kitten.

  “I know, and I’m sorry, Harriet. I’ll do better from now on.”

  She reached over to scratch the cat’s head, and was rewarded with a head bump and a purr before she turned her back on Max and got down to eating. Ozzie, her twin brother, was too busy scarfing down the food to pay Max any mind. She chuckled and scratched him under his chin, before washing her hands and pulling one of the glass bowls with food from the fridge. Popping it in the microwave, she fetched a dinner plate, put the last of the green salad she had bought the day before onto it, and then placed the hot food next to it. Going to the kitchen table, she set it down, and went to get a fork, salad dressing, and a bottle of water. Finally, she fetched her tablet and settled down to eat and Google.

  She had to begin with a general search, since she didn’t know the CEO’s name. She put ‘CEO of EM Media’ in the search box and a long list of entries popped up. She clicked on the first one. It was a newspaper article about Everett Morgan — so that was his name — on the anniversary of his wife’s death. Max’s heart wrenched. So he was a widower. She couldn’t imagine losing a significant other. Her parents had been divorced by the time she was a preteen, and her mother had died from ovarian cancer when she was a junior in high school. She rarely saw her father anymore, though lately that had been her fault not his.

  Shaking off the unhappy trend of her thoughts, she went back to the Google search, and read a few more articles about the work his company did, as well as the artists and authors that they represented, she was impressed by the apparent social conscience of the man and his organization. Hope For All wasn’t just a tax write-off to him, it seemed, but something close to his heart. She searched for videos, and stopped on one that was fifteen minutes long, on the nightly television series that often interviewed big time media moguls. Finishing her meal, which she had eaten without noticing what she ate or how it tasted, she swallowed some water and pushed the plate away, setting the tablet squarely in front of her…and froze when she saw the man who appeared on the screen.

  Every hair on her body rose in horror. The man she had cursed at in the store not two hours ago was none other than Everett Morgan. The interview began, but Max did not see any of it. Instead, she was reliving the encounter earlier in which she had called him an asshole and he had called her a shrew and a fish wife. Shit! Whatever could go wrong just had…and if she still had a job on Monday morning, she’d consider herself more than lucky. What the hell was she to do now? She couldn’t unsay the things she had said, or correct the behavior that had had him trading insults with her.

  Trying to still her trembling hands, she replayed the video clip, and paid attention to everything he said. He had a son, a toddler it sounded like, his wife had died in childbirth, he was still currently single, and he had no plans to marry anyone, no matter what the tabloids said. That made her curious. What did the tabloids say? A search of those showed her a whole other side to this man. Apparently he was a mega playboy, if the long line of women he squired around from event to event was any indication. He’d been a recluse for a long while after his wife’s death, and then he’d come back into the limelight with a bang.

  Max checked out the women he escorted and they were all exceptionally beautiful, very talented, smart, sexy women. Trust him never to be seen with a plain Jane. A guy like him, who could have his pick of women, would never in a million years choose to be with someone who was less good-looking than he was. And Max had to admit, now that she was making herself look at him, that he was one handsome devil. ‘Devil’ being the operative word, she reminded herself. The tabloids might exaggerate outrageously, but where there was smoke, there was fire, even if it wasn’t the raging inferno the papers might want to make it appear to be. So he was clearly a playboy. What could she possibly offer, on behalf of Hope For All, to a playboy?

  Her head began to ache. This was a nightmare. She had some major ass-licking to do on Sunday night and she had to top it off with a gift he would appreciate. She leaned back, thinking about how he seemed to care for his son, and wondered if perhaps she could reach him best through a gift to his son. She checked the articles again. The little boy was three. What did three-year-olds like to do? She did some more searching and decided after about half an hour to buy the child a book about different kinds of families — because Hope For All represented a kind of family for the people who it served — and a color and pattern puzzle game. She made sure she’d be able to get both in the local bookstore, and finally felt relaxed enough to shower and go to bed.

  Next morning she was up bright and early, waiting at the bookstore for its doors to open so she could make her purchases. She had them gift wrapped together and added a card wishing Everett Morgan and his son a happy holiday. She was tempted to add in her apology, so she wouldn’t have to face him, but thought the better of it. She might be a lot of things, but she wasn’t a coward, and an apology on a card was tasteless at best. Satisfied that she had kept true to the spirit of gift-giving from Hope For All, she went to get her nails done, had her hair done, and then indulged in a facial before finally calling it a day and going back home to her cats.

  The dress she had chosen to wear was an emerald green and blue silk maxi dress. It was form fitting to her knees, and then flared out to the hem. Long sleeves touched her wrists, and the off-the shoulder neckline emphasized her neck and shoulders to advantage. She would wear her emerald jewelry set and high-heeled slippers to match the dress. She spent the rest of the evening binge watching “Grey’s Anatomy” and fell into bed after midnight.

  The first thing on Max’s mind when she woke up on Sunday morning was Everett Morgan, and the fact that later she would need to eat crow and suck up the humiliation of having to apologize to a man she hoped would not hold her irrational and rude actions against her and the organization she was supposed to be leading. She had a hearty
lunch, since she knew there’d be dinner at the event but she didn’t want to arrive with an empty stomach. Apologies were best made when there was little threat of throwing up. Already, she could feel the tension rising inside her as she waited for the time to get ready. She called the event organizer to inform her that she had found and gift-wrapped a suitable gift for the main contributor and that she would be bringing it with her. She called the caterer who assured her that the food was ready and already on site.

  Then she spent almost two hours trying to decide what to do with her hair. Although she had just had it washed and conditioned, and they had put in the bantu knots for her, she didn’t feel like wearing those to this occasion. Should she wear it down, and let the waves show or should she pin it up in an elegant chignon? Maybe a big bun on top? Maybe straighten it? None of them appealed. In the end, she did some twists and took a shower, letting the steam soak into the hair, to help the twists set. Before she did her makeup and dressed, she spritzed her hair with the setting spray and then held the blow dryer over it briefly. Finally, once everything else was in place, she loosened the twists and finger-combed them so that they fell to her shoulders in soft, shining waves. She liked the effect…no one would know she hadn’t spent hours perfecting the look. If only they knew!

  The sun had already almost disappeared from the sky when Max arrived at the venue. The valet took her keys and she pulled her faux fur coat securely around her as she walked up the steps into the lobby. People had already begun to mill about, and Max smiled and shook hands and gave air kisses to people she vaguely remembered or didn’t know at all. When Carrie, the event organizer, showed up at her elbow within a few minutes of her arrival, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Thank God you’re here!” Carrie exclaimed. “People have begun asking for you.”

  Max’s eyes widened. “Why? The party doesn’t start for another half hour.”