by Sheila Grace
“I can rescind it at any time?”
“You have my word as a bastard.”
She smirked.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she muttered.
I showed her how to create a digital signature and waited while she reviewed the terms.
“Who is Irving?”
“Matt Irving is my IT and logistics expert.”
“You have your own IT department?” she asked.
“Irving would argue that he’s better than any IT department, and he should be for what I pay him not to hack me and drain my assets.”
She paused before clicking on the final signature field.
“Do we have time to stop at the club so I can quit in person?” she asked hesitantly.
I laughed.
“I don’t think you want to do that.”
“Or maybe I do.”
Stubborn girl.
“As you wish,” I said.
Ignoring my sarcasm, she smiled and turned back to click on the last signature.
“You now control my entire life, Mr. McDevitt. Are you satisfied?”
I walked over to her and hooked my index and middle fingers into the shirt she was wearing and pulled her toward me.
“Not even close.”
Chapter 5: Cass
I exhaled and watched the rolling golden hills and farmland that prompted people to call this a cow town, Podunk, middle of nowhere, or Bumfuck. The scenery blurred by the window the same way the past forty-eight hours had. Tonight, I was supposed to be starting my shift at Fantasy Land, but now some guy named Matt Irving was apparently collecting my paycheck and moving all of my belongings from my apartment.
Less than twenty-four hours ago, I’d had at least the illusion of autonomy, even if my financial situation had left me with few options. Now, I was trapped in some sort of warped version of Cinderella, where Prince Charming would make all my problems disappear—for a price.
It was a bet on both our parts. I was betting that I could make it through the remainder of the summer with my self-respect and virginity intact. James McDevitt was apparently very confident that I would be willing to let him bend me over the nearest piece of furniture for a victory fuck.
Anyone would say it was a fool’s bet. All I had to do was not sleep with him—simple as that. Besides, some small part of me still clung to the idea of surviving this whole Alice in Wonderland-esque situation and meeting some nice, normal guy.
It wasn’t like I was obsessed with my virginity. What I had told James last night was true—I wasn’t waiting for marriage. But that didn’t mean I wanted to start things off by having sex with someone who didn’t give a fuck about me. Maybe I was being sentimental and uptight, but it was still my choice.
I looked over at him as he drove. I did have to admit that James McDevitt was beyond hot. Up until last night, I had sort of been hoping that he was hiding an epic beer gut under his clothes; although, that would have been quite a trick—or a damn good pair of Spanx for men.
Unfortunately, he was head-to-toe perfection. Broad shoulders and a cut physique that repeatedly conjured an image of him lifting me onto a counter and doing naughty things to me, which was so not a good place for me to go mentally. He was well-built in all the right places.
He was—what had he called me last night? Highly fuckable? That description definitely applied to him, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. I was twenty-three. I wanted certain things that didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility. I wanted a healthy reciprocated relationship with a somewhat normal guy.
Sure, I knew that everyone had fucked up baggage—but not every guy offered money for sex. Besides, I knew that James McDevitt was way more fucked up than the average guy. Because what he had told me was true—he wasn’t paying me for sex. He was playing a game. I had agreed to the terms, but I was starting to regret signing on for some deranged arrangement that was purely for the entertainment of an eccentric rich guy.
I looked over at him again. What if I just slept with him? Got it over with—now? Like if we just pulled off the freeway and I got it over with? Maybe he wouldn’t pay for graduate school, but at least I would be done with undergrad without the additional tens of thousands of dollars of debt tacked onto my mounting credit card debt.
“James?”
My skin prickled as I said his name. As silly as it sounded, it felt like I was invoking an evil spirit or speaking the given name of a fifteenth century vampire. When he looked over at me, my cheeks burned and I bit my lip. This whole thing was fucking surreal.
“What if—”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to say!” I fumed.
“I know exactly what you were going to say, and the answer is no.”
“Okay. Seeing as you have mind-reading powers, what the hell was I going to say?”
“You were going to ask, ‘If I just sleep with you now, are you going to be satisfied?’ The answer is no. What didn’t you understand about me not being a proponent of necrophilia or coercive sex?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. You’re not coercing me?”
“Have I compelled you by force, intimidation, or authority, while disregarding your individual desire or will?”
My eyes narrowed.
“You sound like a lawyer.”
“Juris doctorate? Yes. Did I bother taking the archaic bar exam? No.”
“You have a law degree,” I stated disbelievingly.
“Surprised?”
I thought about it for a second. Then I sighed.
“No.”
“Then answer my original question.”
“No, you’re not coercing me,” I muttered. “Do you always have to be right?”
“No, it just happens to occur that I am right more often than I’m not.”
I smirked.
“Got it.”
As we approached the exit to Fantasy Land, I regretted telling James I wanted to quit in person. I had my reasons, even if they mostly revolved around a guilt trip my mom had laid on me the summer after junior year of high school when a friend of hers had gotten me this nightmare job.
When I had quit and taken another job, my mom had railed for weeks about how I had burned my bridges. Now, any time I quit anything, she said the same thing—that I was burning my bridges. While I didn’t think I would ever work for the manager of Fantasy Land again, I did feel a twinge of mother-induced guilt for giving no notice.
By the time we reached the parking lot of the club, I was having serious second thoughts about letting something my mom had said while I was in high school continue to screw with my head. If I backed down now, though, James would think he was the one who had gotten me to change my mind. Taking a deep breath, I opened the car door and stepped out. When James got out, I stared incredulously at him.
“What are you doing?”
“Do you really think I’m letting you go in there alone after last night?”
“I’ll just be five minutes. I’ll tell Bob, and then I’ll leave.”
He leaned against the driver’s-side door.
“Two minutes, and then I’m coming in and getting you.”
I nodded and then turned and started walking toward the club, which somehow looked even creepier in the daytime. What building—apart from a strip club or a CIA black site—didn’t have windows? Quitting Fantasy Land was definitely not something I would regret about my deal with James McDevitt. Even though I had never been mostly naked in the club like the dancers, I had always felt raw and exposed.
As soon as I opened the door and walked into the stuffy darkness, a bouncer I had never liked—not Big Mike—grabbed me by the arm.
“Boss wants to talk to you,” he said as he dragged me toward the office.
I glanced around. Just a few really sketchy-looking guys drinking before noon and staring up at the stage as an older woman I had never seen before gyrated to American Woman. Jerry wasn’t behind the bar; it was some other guy I had
never seen before. Apparently daytime was the B-team.
When we reached the back office, the bouncer swung open the door, giving me a view of Bob sitting at his cluttered desk, where my purse was sitting—not in my locker, where I had left it. Bob looked up and his red-rimmed, beady eyes narrowed even further when he saw me.
“What the fuck is this? I get a call from some Irving prick saying he’s handling your fucking affairs and to send your last check. Oh, and a fucking courier would be by to pick up your belongings.”
The bouncer shoved me from behind into the office and slammed the door behind me. Asshole! I thought, even though I was too afraid to say it to his face.
“Look, Bob. I’m sorry. I meant to—”
“Shut the fuck up, you stupid little college girl.”
I rocked back on my heels for a second. Bob was a perv and an asshole, but I had not been expecting this level of bullshit. I shook my head.
“Whatever. I’ll just take my purse and—”
“You know, sugar. I’ve been getting a lot of requests to put you up on stage. I coulda made you a lot of money—tax-free on the side, too. But not you. You think you’re too good for this place. Now here you go fucking me over—and nobody fucks Bob over. You owe me, you little bitch.”
Now I was pissed.
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“Oh, you’re wrong about that.”
When I made a move toward my purse, he stood up from his desk, and my palms began to sweat. He was an out-of-shape slob, but he was at least three times my weight. I stepped backwards and groped for the door handle, which didn’t budge. My breathing was shallow as I stepped to the side and tried to think if I could make it to the emergency exit behind him without being grabbed. Before I could move, the office door swung open, and I watched apprehensively as the bouncer from earlier stepped inside.
“What the fuck is it?” Bob barked. “I told you not to—”
My jaw dropped when the bouncer took another step forward, revealing the gun pressed to the back of his head.
“Cass?” James said. “Take your bag, tell your former employer to go fuck himself, and let’s be off.”
“Who the fuck is this asshole?” Bob snapped.
“Someone you don’t want to fuck with,” James said evenly. “Now, I suggest you forget all about this girl and this little moment in time, or you’ll find your bank accounts emptied and your club raided for drugs and prostitution.”
I walked around Bob to the desk and snatched my purse. When Bob took a step toward me, I heard James make a clucking noise.
“Unwise.”
I looked back at Bob, who had frozen in place, and then back at James, who was pointing the gun at him. The bouncer suddenly turned and tried grabbing the gun. I screamed, and in a lightning-fast movement, James knocked him upside the head before kicking him behind the knee, sending him crashing to the ground.
Without a second thought, I ran toward James. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me from the office into the club. Crazy Bitch was blaring in the background as we made our way toward the door. When another bouncer I had never seen stepped in front of us, James leveled the gun at him and shook his head.
A few seconds later, we were outside in the sweltering heat. I squinted and shook my head in the blinding sunlight. The last ten minutes felt like a figment of my imagination. As soon as we reached the car, James opened my door and lowered me into the seat. Seconds later, he was behind the wheel and we were silently speeding out of the parking lot. I shook my head again.
“I have no problem saying it: you were right. Oh my god. I thought he was going to kill me.”
James looked over at me.
“Now can you see why I didn’t want you working there?”
I nodded ruefully as he got on the freeway headed west.
“Yeah, but wow. I did not see Bob turning into that much of a psycho.”
“You never really know people until you’ve made them angry.”
I shivered at his statement and opened my purse. My phone was still there—but it was dead, of course. My school ID and driver’s license were untouched, but the twenty-dollar bill I had kept for emergencies—gone. Asshole. I glanced at James.
“Thank you … again.” I paused before continuing. “So, if we’re going to be driving for a while—you wanna tell me why you carry a gun?”
“The short version is: because my father is a psychopath and megalomaniacal asshole. To him, the more money and power he has, the more of a man he is.”
“Oh. Well, that explains everything.”
“Let me put it another way. As the CEO of an enormous health insurance empire, he has spent his entire life accumulating money and connections to people in government and on the other side of the law to expand his reach. He’s a dangerous man to cross, and there are plenty of people who would like to see him dead.”
When James raised his left hand, I stared, transfixed, at his little finger. The tip was missing. I bit my lip. How had I missed that?
“Typically those who want to see the father dead wouldn’t mind seeing the son dead as well.”
“What happened?” I asked softly.
“Spring break. I was nineteen, stumbling my way back to my hotel, very proud of myself for evading my father’s hired bodyguards. Someone hit me over the head, and the next thing I knew, I was in the trunk of a car … then strapped to a chair for three days while my father negotiated ransom. I was lucky. I could have been dumped on the side of the road dead or missing an arm and left to bleed out. Instead, all I lost was the tip of my finger.”
My eyes pricked with tears.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Another of life’s lessons.”
I tried to imagine what it would have been like to go through something so terrifying. I glanced out the window. Thinking of the tattoos I had seen all over his torso and arms, I wondered if they had anything to do with what had happened to him when he was just a few years younger than I was now.
I felt around in my waistband for the folded piece of paper. Last night, I had tried writing down some of the words I had seen etched on his skin. I closed my fingers around the sheet of paper, and when I took out my phone and charger, James pointed to a USB port beneath the center console.
I plugged in the phone and waited a few minutes before unfolding the paper. James looked over at me as I began entering words into the search bar, but he didn’t ask. I was ninety-nine percent sure the script I had seen was Latin.
Patris est filius—He is his father’s son.
Palmam qui meruit ferat—Let him who has earned it bear the reward.
Pecuniate obediunt omnia—All things obey money.
There were more; I just hadn’t been able to remember them all. Part of me wanted to tell him to pull over and take off his shirt so I could study the writing inked all over him. Well, it was partly scholarly interest. I did want to know what else he had scrawled all over his torso and arms.
The other reason was simple—I wanted to see him again. Sure, I had seen shirtless guys before, but generally not ones who looked like him. The guys I had run cross country with back in high school had been kind of scrawny; the guys in my residence hall who had thought they were ripped had just looked beefy to me.
James McDevitt looked like a man. A man who knew how to handle himself—judging from the way he had taken down the bouncer at Fantasy Land. Even I had to admit that it had been hot.
Still, basic physical attraction to him or any other guy did not mean I was in a hurry to fuck him. Now that he had, in no uncertain terms, told me that he wasn’t letting me out of our deal if I just went through with it and had sex with him, it reaffirmed my original plan, which was to grit my teeth and play his game until the end of summer.
I had lasted through high school, three years of college, and two years of minimum-wage work without giving it up to the weirdoes and stalkers I attracted. Which meant I could easily make it through anoth
er summer without sex. Piece of cake. After that, James McDevitt could chalk me up as his one failure, the one conquest who had been able to resist his charms.
I looked over at him again and then at the dash, suppressing a scream when I saw the rate of speed at which we were traveling. Before I could ask him if he was insane, the number began to fall. The car slowed further, and soon we were crossing over a toll bridge—to San Francisco. I had been to the city exactly two times since I had come from Southern California for school. Neither time had ended well.
By the time he pulled up in front of a hotel with perfect views of the San Francisco Bay, I scrambled to unplug my phone and shoved it and the charger into my purse. James parked in the valet alcove, and a valet immediately opened my door. Suddenly remembering my outfit, I felt a pang of self-consciousness. Of course. The one time I got to go inside a fancy hotel, I just so happened to be dressed like a prostitute—and not a high-class one at that.
James, on the other hand, looked like he belonged here. This was his world; it was easy to tell. He tipped the valet, who couldn’t stop himself from grinning, which only made me wonder how much James had given him. A second later, James took my arm and began propelling me toward the door, which the doorman opened for us.
“It’s good to see you again, Mr. McDevitt.”
I blinked and looked back at James as he tipped the doorman.
“It’s good to be back, Sam.”
I stopped walking and gawked as soon as we got inside. The lobby was modern and gorgeous. Neutral tones, stone floors, natural wood, and what looked like limestone brick. Again, I felt insanely out of place. The man behind the check-in desk smiled at James, and I stood there awkwardly until James pointed toward a sitting area with multiple sofas and expansive upholstered chairs.
I didn’t hesitate. I walked quickly until I reached one of the chairs. Then I sat and tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible, apart from nervously tapping my foot on the floor and wishing I had been wearing something else. When someone’s hands came down on my shoulders, I stifled a yelp. James walked around to the front of my chair and offered his hand.