by Moriah Jovan
As they cleaned up their mess and left the restaurant into the relative heat of an early October day in Missouri, Sebastian thought he’d push his luck, so he found Eilis’s hand and laced his fingers through hers. He smiled and watched her out of the corner of his eye as she started, looking at him in shock. He didn’t say anything and she didn’t pull away.
“Mr. Taight! Mr. Taight!”
Sebastian and Eilis stopped then and turned to see a woman and two men jogging toward him and he sighed. There went his day, right down the tubes.
“Mr. Taight, I have some questions for you if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Yes, I do mind.” He turned his back on her and continued to walk, Eilis in hand.
“Mr. Taight, wait!” The woman ran around him and spoke into a recorder. “Is it true that Kevin Oakley’s bid for the Senate seat was initiated and is being funded by you and Bryce Kenard?” She stuck the recorder in his face.
“No comment.”
“Mr. Taight, how do you feel about your growing reputation as the second incarnation of Boss Tom Pendergast?”
The questions all began to run together and Sebastian only wanted to get away from this pack of rabid hyenas.
“Mr. Taight, do you know why Senator Oth is backing off his anti-Taight rhetoric?”
“Mr. Taight, is your defense counsel your cousin, Chouteau County prosecutor Knox Hilliard?”
“I know who all my cousins are, thanks,” he snarled and refused to say anything else. They’d spoiled the mood and now Eilis wasn’t amused anymore. The reporter kept after him even as he handed Eilis into his wreck of a pickup and then went around to his side to climb in and start it. It was at that point that cameras began to flash and Sebastian let out the clutch and nearly hit some of the reporters in front of him—and he would’ve been okay with that had it happened.
He was furious and he wasn’t even fit company for himself.
“I’m sorry, Eilis,” he said before they got back on the highway and wouldn’t be able to hear each other at all given the open windows and the loud engine.
“Is it like that all the time for you?”
“If any reporters are around, yes. I should’ve known better than to say my name out loud where someone could call one to the spot.”
“Boss Tom?” She snickered, but tried to hide it when he slid her a look.
While he was happy she was still amused . . . “Yeah, I’m not thrilled about the comparison. It was funny the first sixty-two times. Now, not so much.”
Then they were on the highway, and Sebastian only knew one way to salvage everything. He passed Eilis’s exit, the engine’s roar making it possible for him to ignore her yell that he’d gone too far. He took the next exit and pulled into the drive-through of a frozen custard stand behind three cars.
“Okay, Eilis, what’s it gonna be? Chocolate, cherry, strawberry, banana, or what? ’Cause I’m going to hold you hostage until you eat whatever I choose for you if you don’t make a decision.”
She stared at him like he was nuts. “Okay, look. You made me eat half a brisket sandwich, but I am not eating any ice cream.”
“You are too.”
“No, I am not!” she repeated heatedly.
At that point, he leaned toward her until his nose touched hers, looked in her eyes and said, very quietly, very deliberately, “If you don’t eat at least half a small concrete, I’ll take you home and strip you naked. I’ll smear ice cream into every nook and cranny in your body and lick it all up. Then I’ll put you in a shower and soap you down myself—and possibly lick that off, too, if it smells as good as you do.”
Her eyes widened and she pulled away from him.
“Was that a ‘Yes, Sebastian, I’ll have some ice cream’ or a ‘No, Sebastian, please lick ice cream out of my nooks and crannies’?”
“I’ll have some ice cream,” she whispered.
He smiled and sat up. “Very good. Pick a flavor.”
“You’re a bully, you know that?” Eilis said finally once they’d settled at a wrought iron table on her back patio, eating ice cream and enjoying the garden she’d built that Sebastian loved.
“That’s what the Journal tells me,” he replied smoothly, very, very pleased with himself for having a nice date and not making a fool of himself, for amusing his date instead of pissing her off or scaring her half to death.
Except for that ice-cream-licking thing.
“Did you have any big rebellion like most kids do?”
He smiled. “Oh, sure. A couple of them, actually, but they weren’t like normal rebellions so I wouldn’t actually classify them as that.”
She waited a beat or two. “Well?”
“Oh, you wanted me to tell you what they were.”
She rolled her eyes and he laughed.
“The first one was the oddsmaking, but my mom never found out about that. The second was art. I wanted to study art and she thought that was an extremely unproductive thing to do. She doesn’t like that I speculate in art, either, even though I make money at it. She doesn’t understand that I need the art as much as I need the game of money.”
“How did you get to Paris in the first place? Did you run away?”
He drew in a deep breath and wondered how much he wanted to tell her. “I was a missionary for my church and that’s where they sent me.”
Eilis looked up at him sharply. “You’re Mormon?”
“No,” he said, hoping she’d take the hint and not push, but she didn’t.
“Okay. Were you Mormon then?”
He grunted. “Yes.”
“And? What happened?”
“Not quite sure,” he finally said. “Several things went wrong and then I just got tired of the politics of the mission. So I left after almost a year.”
“Left? Like left, how?”
“I mean, like I left the apartment I shared with my companion one day without a word. That was my third rebellion. I called my mom, told her I was done with it and why, that I was going to roam Europe and to wire the rest of my money into my European accounts.”
“And she actually sent you the money?”
“Of course she did. It was my money and my mother is nothing if not scrupulously honest. She was seriously pissed that I’d left, but she wasn’t going to withhold my own money from me. Well, I went and saw Europe and learned enough to know that not only did I find the whole process hypocritical, I wasn’t even sure what I really believed.”
“Then what?”
“I got done with the rest of Europe, though I spent a lot of time in Seville because I finally got seduced.” He laughed again. “Twenty years old. I guess better late than never. So anyway, I went back to Paris and pretty much ate, slept, and lived in the Louvre and at school.”
“Didn’t you stand out there, an American in Paris?” she asked, a quirk to her mouth.
He laughed. “You’d think so. The black Irish look doesn’t do well in Paris unless you can speak French like a Parisian, but I passed for a native because of my accent.”
“Did you do those little sidewalk chalk drawings?”
“Oh, yes. I wanted to see if I could actually earn money as an artist. Only I didn’t do the normal reproductions like they did. I picked odd things to rip off and did a little of my own work.”
“Did you make money?”
“Not enough to support myself in the style to which I wanted to become accustomed—” Eilis rolled her eyes and he chuckled. “—but enough to buy basic necessities. Didn’t need it because I had a bank account and money sitting in it collecting interest, but it was validating and I made an attempt to live on it. That wasn’t hard because I spent so much time out of my apartment I didn’t need anything to put in it except art supplies, good bread, good cheese, good wine, and absinthe. I made more money than the students who did the reproductions. I’d be damned if I was going to spend my entire time there drawing the Mona Lisa three times a day for ignorant tourists.”
“What did you draw
then?”
“Well,” Sebastian said, looking out at the garden Eilis had built, beginning to remember all he had done twenty years before. It’d been a long time since he’d talked about Paris and now, in talking about it, he missed it. “Have you ever seen Mary Poppins?”
“Of course.”
“I did the same chalk drawings that Bert did when they went riding the carousel horses through the animation—only much, much bigger and much, much better.”
He was gratified when she let out a little squeal of laughter and put her feet up on the edge of the wrought iron table, completely forgetting that she hadn’t wanted to eat the concrete and slurping happily along.
“Why didn’t you stay in Paris?”
“I was homesick.”
She looked at him and tilted her head as if she found that fascinating. “Really?”
“Really. I didn’t pay much attention to European politics, so it didn’t bother me until they began to mess with my investments. I took my ball and went home.”
She looked at him, an amused question all over her face, so he answered it. “My basic philosophy is Objectivist and maybe, if I’m having a particularly practical day, Libertarian.”
Sebastian could tell she still didn’t really understand because those labels weren’t common conversation fodder. “I know Libertarian,” she said. “I didn’t know there was anything beyond that.”
“Ayn Rand?”
“Oh, The Fountainhead. Yes, I understand now. Excellence, reason, enlightened self-interest, egoism.”
“Right. The concept is best explained in Anthem and the nitty gritty of it’s more understandable in Atlas Shrugged, but yes. It’s one of the reasons I’m starting to get pissed off about the Pendergast references.”
“The comparison’s unavoidable, Sebastian. No, you’re not a politician and no, you don’t have the entire police force as your thug patrol. But setting up a senatorial candidate . . . ?”
Sebastian snorted. “If Kevin hadn’t wanted to run, he’d have said no. He was recommended to me as someone who wanted to get on with the next phase of his career. He just happens to have politics that I can live with, if not thoroughly embrace. He’s not a puppet and he figured out the entire game plan the minute he was approached about running. My goal and his goal just happened to be mutually beneficial.”
“And your goal is to make Congress think twice about demanding your presence unless Fen is actually sitting in Congress.”
“Ooh, you’re kinda savvy that way, Eilis.”
She laughed delightedly and Sebastian thought he could watch her laugh forever. Her eyes sparkled like sapphires and emeralds, and her tear-track scar glimmered spectacularly in the sunlight. “When Knox assigned you to me as my trustee, I spent all night on the computer, googling and sifting for information; I had to build a flow chart to figure out what was fact and what was fiction. There were a lot of holes in the story I pieced together from that, but now you’ve filled them all in.”
Sebastian shook his head, then took another bite of his concrete—mint chocolate chip. “Not all of them, no.”
“I’m guessing murder’s a part of it.” He started and looked at her. She grimaced. “Do you know if Fen— I mean, Knox’s bride? Did Fen really—?”
“Yes,” he sighed, and explained. Then, “Fen really kicked my ass with his Senate bid. I didn’t know what to do.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Eilis,” he drawled, “I live in my own little world.” She snickered. “Practical politics don’t register. Ideals? Yes. Principles and concepts? Yes. The everyday nitty gritty bullshit? No. Which is why I came home from Europe.”
“Okay. I can see that. So you came home from Europe and went to Harvard. How’d you get into the MBA program with an art degree?”
“They thought it was very, ah, chic to admit a twenty-six-year-old self-made millionaire with an art degree from a European school.” He took another bite. “So, all right, Eilis. I’ve talked more about myself today than I have in, well, ever. Your turn.”
Her smile faltered infinitesimally, and her laugh was a bit stilted. “Not a lot of highlights. You know, your ordinary poor kid from the ghetto stuff.”
Secrets. Interesting. He wondered how far in he could get until she shut him out.
“What about your folks? I told you about mine.”
She hesitated. “You didn’t say much about your father. I’m guessing he wasn’t in the picture much?”
Very good, Eilis. Distract and redirect. I’ll go with it. For now. “My father died about ten years ago, but he was always around. Just very distracted.” Eilis chuckled. “ADD. He had the potential to be a great artist, but he couldn’t afford more than number two pencils and typing paper. And even if he had, he would’ve had no idea how to capitalize on his talent and further, I’m not sure he would’ve if he could’ve. It would’ve taken away the magic of the creative process.”
“Ah, so that’s where you got it and why your mother thinks art’s a waste of time.”
“Yep. He wasn’t any happier that I left the mission than my mother was, but he was happy I’d shown the good sense—in his opinion—to go to art school instead. It was one thing he and I could relate to because he certainly didn’t appreciate my bank account and how I grew it—especially after I offered him enough to retire early and comfortably, and to send him to the KC Art Institute with paint and canvas.”
Eilis’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t understand that. Money’s useful. More money is more useful.”
“Yes, my mother knew that. All he saw was the need around him. He didn’t know that I was making money hand over fist and, by extension, how much of that my mother got. She socked it away, played the market very well once she had enough to work with, hid it from him. But . . . the food got better and the cars got more reliable and the house had a few repairs it couldn’t have had before. He never noticed.
“I loved my dad, Eilis, don’t mistake me,” he said. “He was a hard worker, very wise in other ways, and generous, which I greatly admire. He loved and guided Giselle and Knox as much as he loved and guided me. He taught us all a lot about generosity of both money and time, but I wasn’t willing to work as hard as he did for as little money as he made. None of us were.”
“What did he do?”
“He worked for the KC parks department doing the crap jobs nobody else would do because they were disgusting or physically difficult, which was very typical for him. His philosophies weren’t well thought out nor were they in the least bit practical. If someone had asked my mother for water from a well, she would’ve let them have the water if they drew it themselves, but made them leave a deposit for twice the value of the bucket and kept back a little of that for a rental fee. My father would’ve drawn the water himself, given it to them, and told them not to worry about bringing the bucket back, leaving no way for us to draw our own water.”
“Did you resent that?”
“No. I didn’t understand it until I was older and had money. By then, it was irrelevant because I didn’t have to live that way. I talked to him about it a few times and he just couldn’t give up the idea that having a lot of money when other people had none was evil. Worse, he didn’t understand the concept of teaching a man to fish. I like to think I got a good mix of my mother’s basic business sense and my father’s philanthropic bent and artistic sensibilities.”
“That sounds like a great source of contention between your mother and father.”
“It was, but if nothing else, my dad had a strict moral code and a firm hand on the household, so my mother had to sneak. They each had the best interests of the family at heart, but they approached it from opposite points of view and they weren’t reconcilable.”
“And you don’t have any siblings?”
“I had two stillborn brothers.” He speared her with a glance. “Do you?”
She ran her tongue over her teeth, again hesitating. “I have a ha
lf brother.”
“Do you get along?”
“Well, yes, I suppose you could say that.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means,” she said slowly, “that when he and I have reason to interact, we get along very well. He’s always been very kind to me.”
“And you have little reason to interact.”
“Yes.”
“It sounds to me like you’d like to interact more.”
“Very much so, yes.”
“He’s not interested?”
She took a deep breath. “He, ah, doesn’t know he has a sister, much less that I’m it.”
Sebastian said nothing for a moment, thoroughly shocked, letting his mind run through all the implications of that. “So . . . your parents?”
“My biological parents don’t acknowledge me unless it’s expedient for them to do so.”
Holy shit. Sebastian could feel Eilis’s retreat from him the deeper he drew her down into her past, and that was the last thing he wanted. Plenty of time to delve into her history when she felt more comfortable with him. Changing directions, he said,
“How did you come up with the concept of an outsourcing human resources company? You were way ahead of the curve.”
She smiled a genuine smile and he could feel her coming back to him, even if only a little. “I was an administrative assistant in an HR department and everyone there was overworked, between managing the health insurance issues and the 401(k)s, plus hiring and such. I did a lot of work I wasn’t supposed to be doing and never got paid for. Nobody would let me implement my ideas because I was just an administrative assistant, so I decided—” She stopped, chuckled, and said, “I took my ball and went home.”
Sebastian laughed.
“I knew I could do a better job than they did and that I could become independently wealthy doing it.”