by Tiffany Sala
Aileen scoffed. “It’s a phase. It’ll pass.”
Cowen turned on her like he was outraged her mouth had opened and it wasn’t to take his dick. Aileen stood firm. “Look, I have two little stepbrothers, and I know what my stepmum’s like about them. Yeah, she wants an excuse to ignore them some of the time, but she also feels terrible about that, like if she had something she could do with them that was easy, didn’t require her to go back to university to know how to use it, and let her dip in and out as convenient… she’s be all over that.”
Cowen still looked mad, but he was clearly having trouble completely dismissing good ideas, even when they came out of a cute little package like that. And I was suddenly certain that wherever Aileen was going with this, there was a good idea at the end of it. “With kids around the house, I guess you’ve got your finger on the pulse of that market.”
I knew she didn’t have those kids around the house all the time now, and I saw the way her lips dipped just a little. But she just said, “Haven’t found the right woman yet huh, Mr. Cowen?” and then went straight into listing some of the products her brothers had enjoyed over the past twelve months, closing that subject without letting him get a response in. And he was fucking smiling a little. This little brat knew how to make people like her.
“Here’s what I think the appeal of Axel’s product is.” Aileen had taken on a posture I didn’t see often with girls: she was standing tall, hands on hips, highlighting everything that was good about her in a womanly way as well as how confident she was in what she had to say. Most of the girls I spent my time around had plenty of the one but not necessarily the other. “Any claims of educational value? At best, minimal… at worst it’s unethical to advertise that way. But as a talking point, something parent and child can discuss without necessarily needing to understand? Why did it go that way? I was expecting it to do this and it did that… Brilliant!”
She was definitely onto something. My mind was already going. “A coffee table toy,” I blurted out, with somewhat less than my usual smoothness. “This is a product that will appeal to the sort of parent who has a coffee table and coffee table books. Something to add to the display that they can pick up alongside their child and all of them can feel a bit smart playing with it.”
“That would play really well with many of my customers,” Cowen remarked. “All the sorts of wankers who have coffee table books they never read and expect their kids to be little intellectuals.”
“I just have one design for the Coffee Table Companion in the pipeline at the moment,” I said, smooth like this had been the plan all along, down to the product name. “But if I obtain sufficient interest from this initial offering, there are many different directions I can take it in. It’s a line that can grow as much as necessary.”
Cowen glanced at Aileen, who gave him a look that would have said to me, “Frankly, I think you’re an arsehole.” And I could tell he loved it.
“I can see why Lucas directed you to me,” he said. “I think you’ve got a lot of potential.”
Something hit me then, a reality that had been in effect for days now, but one I’d been able to successfully ignore until now. Maybe it was Aileen’s presence making all the difference now. She had those no-bullshit eyes on, and I got caught too.
“I’ll order fifty to begin with, on the understanding that I’ll take more if they sell,” Cowen said, which softened it a bit, but not entirely. The reason Lucas had made me meet with this guy on my own instead of brokering it himself was because he didn’t really believe in me. He thought maybe I had enough potential that he was willing to put me in touch with his contacts, get a few dollars out of the deal if they materialised, but he wasn’t here endorsing me himself.
And as it turned out, he was justified, because I would never have gotten to this point without goddamn Aileen’s interference. I couldn’t believe how she was able to make that pig like her—and believe in her. She really had that entrepreneurial charm that you were supposed to possess to succeed in this business.
Maybe I’d just learned I didn’t have that in the necessary quantities.
Well I wasn’t going to think about that right now. We went out to see Cowen off. He tried to kiss Aileen on the cheek in parting, but she raised her eyebrow at him and said, “You going to try that on Axel as well?” and he behaved. Seriously, fucking incredible.
I wanted this woman who couldn’t be had by just any man. I also wanted to get her the hell away from me where I would never have to see her again, because she was trouble for sure. Any woman who felt that good to be around, who so smoothly moved into being a team with you, was a whole lot of trouble. I was meant to be a solo operator, not part of a team.
Maybe she could go fucking hang out with Matt, since she liked him so much.
I stared over at his house as Cowen’s car disappeared around a corner, then turned back to Aileen to see her watching me with a knowing little look.
“Are you thinking you might drag me over there and spank me in front of him just to put both of us in our place?” She rolled her eyes like she wouldn’t be an absolute wreck if I did that. “Because Matt never really did anything, he was just unlucky enough to agree to hang out with me when I asked.”
“He never did do anything, did he,” I muttered. Was it inevitable that she found a way to remind me?
“What was that?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. Come inside for a moment, Aileen. I promise I’m not going to spank your arse this time… unless you ask.”
I could see the way that was affecting her, too. It was in the way she walked, the way she wrapped her arms around herself in that flimsy little dress like she didn’t feel like it was any protection at all. The way she’d showed up in that thing at all.
She followed me right into my damn bedroom without much hesitation, too. It put me on edge.
Just to make sure this didn’t get out of hand, I did a casual circle around the edge of my room and switched on an old mp3 player I’d gotten from my dad ages ago, that I now used to record any interaction I thought might give me something I could use. Legal? Not in the slightest, but that wasn’t a problem for me. When I got something really good, something I could leverage, that always overlapped with the subject being way too awkward about the whole deal to risk taking it to the police. Exhibit A: Matt being a fucking furry.
I didn’t need to be thinking of Matt right now, though. Aileen and her piercing eyes were going to have me feeling bad over that, when I was not the reason he’d ended up in the firing line there. Fuck that. Fuck him.
I turned my attention to Aileen, standing with her back against my door, hesitating to come any further. She was a smart girl. And I was the dumb one, letting her just walk in like this. I could feel it now: I was about to end up in the fight of my life to keep her in her place.
And as much as the reality pissed me off, I thought there was a very strong chance I would lose.
I just couldn’t let her find out if I lost. My own secrets might be the closest thing I had to protection right now.
Chapter Fourteen
“I’m sorry I interfered with your meeting,” I blurted out when Axel just stared at me silently for a while, like I was undressed in front of him again. He didn’t deserve my unconditional apology, so I hardened it a little. “Unlike you, I actually try not to unnecessarily screw with other people’s lives. I was just trying to have a little bit of fun at your expense, the way you’ve been at mine.”
“Is that what you think I’ve been doing?” My bare back brushed against his door as he took a step towards me. “Having fun?”
“I hope not,” I admitted. “Not with all the really nasty things, at least.”
That threw me into a spiral of confusion. Was I trying to suggest I hoped he had enjoyed the times when we’d… just let the battle between us get a little too out of hand?
He didn’t seem to have noticed that possibility. “I don’t have fun,” he told me, keeping his voice lo
w. “It’s just what I have to do.”
“You have to? You had to do all those terrible things to me… because, what, my dad’s patent was such a threat to you?”
“Maybe not.” The way he was grinning thinking about my dad pissed me off. Who was he to act like he was just some joke?
He was exactly right was the answer, but I still hated him for going there. I wanted to snap at him, to really dig into him for it… but then I started thinking about how we’d been such a team before with that creep Mal Cowen, how he’d seemed to pick up where I left off exactly right.
“Hey Aileen.” His eyes were sparkling in a different way to how they’d been only seconds earlier. It was like he knew how to act in concert with my feelings too. “You were actually kind of something back there. I can’t be mad when you had such a big part in closing the deal. Where did you get all that shit from? I thought you really did know nothing about your dad’s work.”
Unlike the creep, he didn’t seem to assume that had to be the case. “I don’t know a whole lot, but I’ve been around the sort of stuff you’re wanting to get into all my life. It’s sort of embedded into my psyche, I guess.” I debated whether I should tell him the rest, and decided against it.
Axel was nodding, thoughtful. “It’s more than the domain knowledge, though. You’ve just got a certain charm. You’d be a good entrepreneur yourself: you don’t have to be involved with the inventing side of it, just show up and talk until they give you money. Not everyone’s got that in them but it just seems to come naturally to you.”
“Well thank you.” I felt there was a chance he might be blowing smoke up my arse, and I shouldn’t let him get any more involved with my arse than he already had, but I felt like I wanted to give him something. The last few times I’d volunteered things he had or hadn’t wanted from me had gone so badly it couldn’t possibly all go wrong again… right? “Actually, I’ve sort of thought, for a long time, that I could make an okay lawyer. I guess that’s not the same as what you’re talking about really, but… there is a strong element of standing up and talking, right?”
I started at how close Axel was to me all of a sudden. He must have been moving so smoothly I hadn’t registered it. “Hmm.” He nudged my chin up with his fingertip so he could look right into my eyes. “I can see it, you know. I totally believe you’d kick arse at it, and you’d be cute as in a courtroom. All those annoying men in the profession wouldn’t bother you one bit either, would they?” Having him so close to me, touching me even, made me nervous. I could barely form the smile my lips insisted on. “You should talk to Ashleigh about it. She’s been on the law path for years now, so she’s thought out all the possibilities.”
I was barely able to hide a grimace. I tried to give everyone a chance, but with Ashleigh, it was hard.
Axel wasn’t fooled, either. “I know she’s got her reputation. But everyone’s a bit not nice in some ways. We’re all nasty if you dig a little deeper.”
I didn’t want to spend this time talking about Ashleigh. “You certainly seem to think it of me.”
He leaned in a little closer. If I didn’t know better I’d think he was intending to kiss me, but I realised he was aiming for a much closer connection. He was studying me… trying to work out if he could trust me?
Finally he sighed, and he slung an arm around my waist that made me flinch—but then he just started to stroll me around his room, which was actually big enough that you could get some decent exercise in. “I’m going to tell you a story, Aileen, because you seem to have this cute way of not really understanding your own power. I’m going to tell you a story of Jennifer Ehrlich.”
“Matt’s mother?”
Axel turned his face away and tried to make it look casual, but he couldn’t hide his shudder. “Jennifer Ehrlich,” he continued, “once Jennifer Bennett, before that Jennifer Eastley.”
“Your…” I couldn’t say it, but he turned to me, tucked under his arm, and squeezed me tighter as he nodded.
“You’ve never met her, but everyone who does agrees she’s got the real trifecta: beauty, brains, balls.”
“So you take after her,” I said before thinking really hard about the implications. He broke away from me to look me up and down again, but he didn’t look entirely pleased.
“Stop sidetracking the story. She was more like you.”
“Because we’re both women? And you were doing such a good job until now of not being that kind of guy.”
His fingertip brushed across my lips silenced me. “It’s only funny when you go in on someone else. The comparison is fair. She was sharp, sharper than me, although I guess I was a lot younger when she was still around. My dad probably married her mostly because she was hot and she made him feel good about himself, but she got in on the business side of his life. They became partners.”
I was at least smart enough to see where this was going, and I didn’t want it to go there for some reason. “I’m guessing it wasn’t the most successful partnership ever, based on how defensive you are with me.”
“She got deep into a project Dad was working on that was supposed to be our big money-maker. Going to secure our future and all that. And then… she just walked. Straight into the arms of Matt’s fucking father, and then the two of them picked up where Dad had left off and made bucketloads. We had to fight her just to give us enough to get started again. At least Matt and his mother got their money without having to argue.”
At some point, I had decided I wasn’t going to let myself get caught up in relating to Axel’s situation. I wasn’t going to be able to keep that commitment to myself. “I’m really sorry, that’s just a terrible thing for anyone to do to their family.” My mind was racing through all the pieces I could now put into place. This had to be why Axel was so rough on Matt these days. Like he’d said before, Matt never did anything… but he’d benefited from that big project long before Axel. That was bound to be hard to forget.
And—I’d always assumed this dumb conflict over Dad’s patent was just about the patent. Everyone always acted like it was too absurd to be really about that and I’d figured they must just be under-informed about just how deranged Axel could get… but maybe it had really been about me all along. He’d seen a woman rising on the horizon as a threat to his own project, and maybe he couldn’t help trying to neutralise her.
I was back at that thing I’d decided earlier I didn’t want to tell him, with a different opinion now. “The funny thing is, that stupid patent may have been what ended my parents’ marriage. My mother left my dad before I was old enough to remember, and now that I’ve gotten to talk to her as an adult, I feel like it could have been a bit different if he hadn’t been so engrossed in these things that were essentially useless. Like she really needed help, and my dad couldn’t give it to her so she just snapped.”
I was trying not to visibly grimace, but I didn’t think it would ever be easy to think about what must have been going on at that time in my life. I didn’t really remember what it had been like to be totally in the care of my dad post-split, but it seemed like it must have changed me—and maybe not all in good ways. Dad had said once or twice he didn’t even know where either of us would be right now if not for some of his girlfriends at the time, who I suspected had showered love on his kid in an attempt to win him… until they realised there wasn’t so much of a prize there after all.
Axel’s stare made me a little uneasy. “So you know what it’s like for it all to turn to shit.”
“I don’t remember it all turning to shit, in my case. But I understand how it can happen… to anyone, at any time.”
Now I’d opened my heart just a crack, there was a whole lot more I was understanding. Axel’s house, occupied by just him and his dad, reminded me of how our house always got when Dad was between girlfriends. Clean enough, pleasant enough most of the time… but lacking in certain feminine touches. In her tenure, Marcia had focused on teaching me a few little tricks. Laying down a decorative tablecloth
between meals. Offering guests a beverage instead of simply dragging them off to my room.
Axel scowled at me. I realised I might have been smiling at him more than made sense, in the context of this conversation. “What I don’t get is why you’re so much softer. More open. You’ve never seemed to have any real defence against me.”
When had his hands ended up on me again? “I suppose I don’t,” I admitted, and then I didn’t say something else that was undoubtedly the truth: that he didn’t have any defence against me, either. “It’s not like that with other people, though. For some reason I let down my walls where you were concerned right from the start.”
“For some reason.” His hands were on my hips, but sliding around behind. Definitely an arse complex with this one. “And you have no idea what that reason might be.”
He was supporting my waist from behind as he pressed me backwards, then I felt his hand slip away as I sank into his bed. His mouth came down over the top of mine, his long fingers caressing the back of my neck and making me squirm. He was untying the flimsy strap that was the only thing keeping me decent… and I wanted this. How could I want him when he’d tried so hard to destroy me?
My mind raced ahead. No, I didn’t want everything that might be coming here. I wasn’t ready.
The only thing to do was renegotiate… and if Axel still thought he was getting everything he wanted, even better.
I tried not to get hopelessly distracted by his lips on my cheekbone, the brush of stubble. “Maybe… I think I’ve been a bad girl, Axel, I might need that spanking after all.”
I trailed off into a squeak. He had flipped me onto my stomach so quickly I had to scrabble to get my face into a breathable position. One hand was planted in the middle of my bare back, the other pushing up my skirt like he’d already rehearsed this in his head.
“You like…” I gasped, and squirmed some more, a little unnecessarily, because feeling his hand slip as he yanked down my underwear was a bit of a thrill, “you like to make your punishments count, don’t you?”