by Edie Danford
Out on the sidewalk, I fasten his parka closed with the velcro strips on the zipper-guard, not bothering with complicated shit like hood strings and zippers. I give him a hug, but I’m not sure he can feel it. I retrieve his gloves from his pockets and hand them over with the command, “Put them on.”
He obeys like an automaton. His brain is working hard, digesting what I’ve said, plugging the new information into Mar-formulas, likely manufacturing Mar-solutions, taking up every bit of his energy, his concentration. But he doesn’t have all the data. I haven’t told him everything yet.
After fastening my own coat, I take his hand. “We’ll go to the lake.”
We head down the sidewalk hand in hand. “Are you listening?” I ask gently when we have to stop at a light. “I’m sorry I dropped that on you like that. I suck. I need to explain everything, but I don’t want to try to explain more if you can’t hear what I say. I mean hear, as in, understand.”
“I hear,” he says. “I understand. Let’s get to the park. Where we can sit.”
I don’t think he does understand, but I have to trust that he’ll try.
When we get out to Promontory Point, I pick a bench that’s relatively out of the wind. Marek’s cheeks are already pink, chapped-looking. But that condition could’ve been caused by me and not the bracing, forty-degree breeze coming off the lake.
I settle close to him on the bench, still holding his hand.
“I’m ready,” he says, not sounding ready in the slightest.
I want to kiss his brave face. Instead, I dive in without taking a breath. “When I signed on to take your account at Domesticated, your uncle gave me a big bonus if I agreed to take the job. And, after I work for you for twelve months, I’m due to get more.”
He raises his brows. This isn’t what he was expecting.
“As soon as the cash hit my account,” I say, “I used it to pay off some of my scary credit-card debt.”
“Good.” He nods slowly. “I’m glad. I have always felt you must be worth at least five times what you’re paid.”
I look out at the lake. Frothy whitecaps erupt from ginormous, churning swells of gray. No hints of blue. Ominous is the word for the water today.
I clear my throat and say, “Your uncle was willing to be very generous. And I was very needy.”
His eyebrows draw together. “Are you in trouble with money? Do you need more? It would be a matter of seconds to write you a check, whatever you need—”
“No. No, I’m not asking for money.” I have to shut down that kind of thinking. Fast. “I need to explain to you…tell you about this contract I signed. There were two riders attached to the standard employment contract.”
“Riders?” His brows smash downward
“Attachments. Addendums. Um, ‘da.’ Addenda?”
“Da?”
I laugh helplessly. Oh God. The language barrier is strong today. My fault entirely. “I think the plural of addendum is addenda?”
His brows stay smashed. “Latin. I will look this up.” He begins scrounging around in his pocket for his phone.
God, I love his brain. And his everything else.
“No, let’s wait.” I put my hand on his arm. “We’ll figure out grammar shit later, okay?”
He nods but the furrow stays. “What were these…riders?”
“The first one said that if or when the contract is terminated—” I take a breath. I don’t want to scare him into making that horrible sound again. If he does, I might go running over the Point’s rocky edge and into the angry-looking lake. Hurting Marek—it sucks brutally. “Do you know what a nondisclosure agreement is?” I ask.
“Yes. You cannot disclose information you learn while working for someone, or being with someone.”
“That’s right. This contract had one of those. By signing, I promised that when the contract was terminated—either by you or by me or however else my employment might end—that I’d never contact you again.”
He stared at me. “Like, never…see me? Ever?”
“Right. I was supposed to pretend I’d never worked for you. Never met you, I guess.”
“That—” He inhales sharply. “We— But we are friends.” The words start slowly and then they spew. “Of course we would be friends if we live together. Even if we hadn’t fallen in love. If you had this job to care for me, then we would be friends. No matter what a contract said. This sort of thinking—it is bullshit.”
“I know, right?” I laugh because I so totally understand his incredulousness.
“Why would you sign this thing? How would it even be…enforced?”
“Those are good questions.” I squeeze his arm. “I guess the short answer to the first question is that I didn’t know you. I didn’t know your uncle. I thought it was your business—your family’s business—if you needed that kind of hyper-protection from an employee. I didn’t feel like I needed to know the reasons. And, because of bad shit I’d gone through in the past, I thought it might actually be a good thing for me to have some protection too, some guidelines.” I glance at him. His eyes are wide. A little bit watery in the cold. “Plus, I really needed the money. I didn’t want to ask my parents to bail me out again. I was embarrassed. The bonus and the benefits had a lot of appeal for me.”
“Yes. Okay.” He’s processing data. I’m very familiar with the look. “And what about this second addenda? What did it say?”
“It said that I could never tell you about the addendums. That all the details of the contract were strictly between Jakub Janos and me. And Domesticated, to an extent, since they’re the agency that matched us.”
His eyes narrow. The gears are churning in his mighty brain. Mightier than the wind and the water and the cold. “That addenda might be even more stupid than the first.”
“Yeah. Probably it is.”
He’s quiet for a few moments, more gear-churning. And then he hollers in a very un-Marek-like way. “It is my fucking life! Not something to be…decided with contracts. And lawyers. With agreements I don’t even know about!”
I nod, totally agreeing.
“Why wouldn’t I want to know what is going on in my own home? Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
“Because I signed those forms, Marek. I took that money. I needed a steady job where my references wouldn’t be scrutinized too closely. So I made promises to your uncle. I thought a contract was a thing I needed for professionalism. A safeguard. But none of that was gonna matter if I couldn’t keep my goddamn dick in my pants.”
“Your friendships and what you do with your dick should not be enforced by Jakub.” He spits out his uncle’s name. “He is a pig.”
“I won’t disagree.”
“I will tell him this.” He fumbles around for his phone again. “Tell him exactly what I think—”
“No. You can’t.”
“Why? God, this makes me so fucking angry. I am not a child. This contract, these addenda, they will end today, now. I am not an idiot to need these sorts of agreements—”
“I know, and I’m so sorry, Marek. But there are more people involved than you and me and your uncle.”
His brows rise. “Who?”
“My family. If there are lawsuits, the attorneys will zero in on money. My family is successful and would care deeply about shit like unwanted publicity, hits to their reputations. Your uncle—he’s a bright man. Hard-nosed.”
“His nose needs to stay out of my fucking business.”
I nod. I really wish he had thought along those lines a long time ago. But part of the responsibility rests with me. I should have told him about this shit a long time ago. I say, “It doesn’t seem likely, but he might go public with his grievances. He could take off the gloves and get pretty brutal. Make it hard for me to find another job, suck up all my time and money with lawsuits.”
He flexes his gloved fingers, considering this. “Gloves will stay on. He won’t get to decide one way or another. I will sue the shit out of him. Fo
r misrepresentation. For being…stupid.”
“That could work. I don’t know. You’d have to ask a lawyer. But in the meantime—”
He jumps up. He stares down at me, eyes drilling me with determination. “You’re not leaving me.”
“—in the meantime, you’re going to fire me.”
This has him sitting right back down on the bench. “Fire you?”
“Sack me. Give me the boot. The heave-ho.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“If you tell Cal and your uncle that I suck—” I take a quick breath. “Um, scratch that. If you tell them that I’m incompetent, a slacker, a horrible housekeeper and that you want someone new, then you will have broken the contract. For believable, boring, standard reasons. And your uncle would lose his power in this situation.”
He thinks about this for a moment, then says, “They won’t believe me. You are amazing. I have told them this—given them millions of examples why—many, many times.”
“Cal might not believe you, but your uncle will. We have to come up with a good story. Like… I don’t know. You found drugs in my room. Shitloads of empty booze bottles. I brought home guys to fuck.”
“No. No, no, no.” He grabs my hand and holds it tight. I can feel the heat, the purpose, through the insulating layers of our gloves. “Absolutely not. I will not lie about this, Pete. I can’t even imagine saying horrible things about you and then kicking you out. I mean, God—where would you go? What would you do?”
“I would live in my new place. Help my mom with her business. We might actually have some success if I put some time and effort into it. Or, I guess I could find another job doing PA or housekeeping work. It’s a good gig for me as long as I’m working for someone I like.”
“You like working for me. Because you love me.” He says this full-out arrogant professor. Super know-it-all. I’m-a-genius-and-you’re-not.
And, oh fuck. I have to say it. “I don’t like working for you. I mean, I did. So much. But not anymore.”
His lofty eyebrows sink slowly. “You…” He takes a breath. “You are telling the truth?”
I nod. “I love you, Marek. And that—regardless of all the other crap going on—changes the contract I signed. The paycheck I get every month. The room and board that goes along with it. All of it seems wrong now.”
“Why?” His voice cracks. “Why is it wrong? If you love me, then everything is right! So fucking right.”
I stare at him. “You don’t see how it’s wrong to take money for taking care of you? I’d take care of you for free. I’d take care of you because I love you and want you to be happy.”
“Yes. I know. You already do this. I can feel it in everything you do.” His eyes get watery again. “The love. I felt it…almost from the beginning.”
“I felt it too. Although I resisted.”
“Yes.” His lips curve slightly. “You did.” He leans toward me, takes my chilled cheeks in his gloved hands. The kiss he gives me is crazy. Our lips are cold, but the connection—our tongues, our breath, our spit—are hot. And when we pull apart to breathe, the mist from our exhalations swirls around our heads like smoke.
“Here’s what we will do,” he says, all Professor Adorkable, his gaze narrowing at the lake.
I bite back a half-miserable, half-amused sigh as he ponders a plan. I’m curious about what he’ll come up with, because I am damn sure my idea is the only viable one. Until he figures out a way to get his uncle to incinerate that damn contract.
And, God, I’m having doubts about that ever happening. Being bad-ass with his uncle will involve lawyers and difficult conversations and negotiations and maybe courts—all things Marek had hated and felt devastated by when that asshole had taken him for everything in California. Things that had turned him into a hermit here in Chicago.
Also, all those things—being bad-ass with an employer, having to face litigation and nastiness—are exactly the kind of shit I’d run from when I’d left Hollywood.
The thought makes heat form behind my eyes.
Professor Adorkable is a genius. He has fabulous problem-solving skills. But this problem might be beyond even him. And the solutions will be way more trouble than I’m worth.
He smiles suddenly. When he looks at me, his eyes are a gorgeous, sparkly turquoise against the gray backdrop of the water, stones, and sky.
“We will get married,” he states.
Chapter 12
Marek
My big brain has been a burden many times in my life. Frequently it takes me places the rest of me isn’t ready to go. Graduating from secondary school at fourteen. Getting a bachelor’s degree at seventeen, my first PhD at twenty-one. Moving to cities I wasn’t quite comfortable in, living in situations where I forgot to take care of myself, or screwed up taking care of myself, or had to depend on undependable people to help me.
But today I am thoroughly, completely, utterly pleased with my brain.
Marrying Pete is the best—the absolute best—idea I’ve ever had.
The only disappointment is that I haven’t thought of it sooner. It would have saved us from having this horrible lunch date.
I stare into Pete’s red-rimmed eyes. The pale sky is bright but sunless. It makes the blue in his irises look as though it’s been dipped in silver.
I reach for his hand. “It’s what we must do,” I say firmly. “The perfect solution. You won’t need to move from the townhouse. You could find something else with Domesticated. Or not. I’m rich, so you could do whatever you’d like.”
I squeeze his fingers. I wait for my favorite smile to show up. It doesn’t. Maybe his mouth is frozen. There are, of course, better places to have this discussion. But that he might even for one minute be considering the idea of leaving—it makes getting this settled immediately 100 percent necessary.
When he remains silent, I say, “My uncle wouldn’t sue my husband. We’ll do it today. Go to the government buildings. The court place. Get everything signed. You will have everything that is mine, and my uncle can go fuck himself.”
The silver in his eyes becomes shinier. Tears spill over his lashes.
Oh no. No.
“Pete?”
“God, Mar.” He shakes his head. “That is…” He makes a sound as though his words are tangling in his throat. “That is the worst idea ever. I can’t marry you.”
What? Have I… Have I heard him right?
He says quickly, “I mean, thank you for the offer. But, no. It would make everything worse.”
Yes, I’ve heard right. “What do you mean, worse?” How can he not see this idea’s brilliance? It’s a sunbeam shining over the whole of Lake Michigan, turning the January sky June bright. “Think about it, Pete. You have to see it is a brilliant—”
“No. You have to see how it would only make your uncle freak out more. He was trying to protect you from guys like that asshole in Palo Alto. That’s why he came up with that heinously strict contract and used all that money as leverage. You think if I marry you—in some ceremony where we sneak it under his radar—that it will make him back off? He’ll sic his lawyers on me the second he finds out. He won’t want some down-and-out twink housekeeper to get his hands on all your cash. He’ll go harder and meaner than he would have otherwise.”
This is nonsense. All of it. Especially the part where Pete thinks he’s my down-and-out twink housekeeper. He is the most important man in my life. The urge to protect him from this shit my uncle has stirred is overwhelming.
“We will talk to him. He will get to know you. And if we give him time, he will come to see why I love you. Why you are perfect for me.”
“Oh God.” He puts his head in his hands, his gloves smacking against his skin.
I pull one hand away. “Pete? If you give him a chance—”
“He thinks I’m a fucking whore, Marek! And the worst thing is that in lots of ways he’s right.”
“What? No! No. He doesn’t think that. No one would th
ink that about you.”
He makes another horrible sound. I try to put my arms around him, but he pushes me away. “Let me say this,” he chokes out. “Explain it to you. Please.”
I exhale slowly. “Okay. Okay, I will listen.”
“A few years ago, I’d have had the sex tapes, the pictures, the social-media evidence to prove I was a first-rate fuckboy. I fucked around for fun. I fucked around to get perks at my jobs. And I fucked around to prove to myself, and other people, that I was worthy of love, attention.” He drops his hands, looks at me with tear-filled eyes. “And your uncle knows it. He did a background check. Would’ve taken him two seconds to uncover a lot of that stuff.” He laughed miserably. “The internet doesn’t fucking forget.”
“I don’t care,” I told him.
He shakes his head. “You don’t know—”
I grab his hand again. “I do not care, do you hear me? Human beings are a mystery, Pete. The biggest mystery in the universe. They create. They change. They fuck up. Again and again. They do incredible things—some easy to understand, some unbelievable. I love you because of all the things you’ve been since I’ve known you. When I look at you, I see a hardworking, caring person who goes to battle with life’s messes. Life is messy, so messy that I prefer to study faraway stars.” I take a heaving breath. Why haven’t I told him any of this before? Why haven’t I realized he needs to hear it? “I admire you so much. I care about who you are right now. Here. Today.”
“Mar…”
He chokes on a sob, and I pull him toward me, pressing his head against my shoulder, pressing kisses to his frosty hair.
“I’ll get my own lawyer,” I tell him. “I’ll get one for you too. We will get married to protect you from all this worry and bullshit. The lawyers can do the fighting.” I press a kiss to his cheek. He doesn’t move, doesn’t pull away. He has finally frozen completely. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go home. It is too cold to think properly out here.”
He nods. “Yeah. We should get inside.”
His voice sounds thin, lifeless. Maybe it’s an effect from the waves and the wind.