by Moriah Jovan
“Probably as much as I want.”
“The SEC’s keeping me on a leash and if it weren’t for Kevin beating Fen’s ass in the polls and Oth and company backing off, I’d’ve been called to Washington by now. I’m not going to try to get away with buying any of her stock. You wouldn’t happen to know if Knox and the judge signed off on the receivership yet, would you?”
Bryce started. “Oh, right. Yes.” He reached into his back pocket and handed Sebastian an envelope. “Knox drew it up and had it signed after Fen started buying shares at the IPO.”
Sebastian opened it and read it, then nodded and handed it to Eilis.
“But,” Bryce added, “don’t worry about HRP. I’ll take care of it.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Sebastian muttered absently, his gaze on the ceiling. “I need to think a while. He’s not going to let this go no matter how many ways we put him in check.”
“Other than Bryce buying up HRP shares,” Eilis said, “I can’t see why anybody needs to do anything now but wait. Business as usual.”
Sebastian looked at her speculatively, then said, “Except for making ourselves a general pain in his ass, that’s true. Next OKH board meeting is a week from Wednesday, nine o’clock.”
“Got it.”
“I can’t wait to see his face when all three of us walk in,” Eilis growled, feeling her Inner Bitch come back, and now, perhaps, she would stay.
“Okay, then. Time for us to get going,” Giselle said and pulled away from her husband’s grasp, wiping her strawberry-sticky fingers on her jeans as she turned. Eilis’s eyes widened when, for the first time, she noticed a gun sticking out of her waistband.
“She never leaves home without it,” Bryce told her when he noticed the look on her face. “Especially now that she’s laid a hand on Trudy.”
“Fen’ll forgive anything but besmirching Trudy in any way,” Sebastian observed.
Giselle looked down and away, her arms crossed over her chest, and Eilis could see the muscle working in her jaw. Eilis studied Giselle, beginning to understand what Sebastian had told her. Ares and the Warrior Queen.
Their power overwhelmed her.
“What happened?” Sebastian asked Bryce quietly.
Bryce shrugged. “Lilly made the announcement and all hell broke loose.”
“She had to know that would send Giselle up the tree.”
“Well, there’s a reason for that,” Bryce murmured. “Lilly needed to set something right with Giselle, too.”
Eilis looked at Sebastian, who seemed as confused as she.
Giselle sniffled and, at a loving nudge from Bryce, reluctantly began to explain her relationship with Trudy, her cheeks flaming.
Three children. Eilis thought she could never hate one woman so much, nor be so ashamed that that woman had given her birth. Her time in foster care suddenly didn’t seem so bad by comparison.
When she finished, Sebastian whispered, “You never told me that.”
“I thought you’d tell me to suck it up,” she muttered, and Eilis felt Sebastian flinch.
“What did your mother have to do with that?” Eilis asked.
“After Étienne’s party, my mom told me— I didn’t know—” Giselle gulped and dashed tears away with her fingertips. “When Knox brought me home that day, my mom didn’t know what to do. Fen helped her for years after my father died. Trudy didn’t know that he helped us at all, much less how much, and Mom knew she couldn’t support us on what she made. So she never confronted Trudy. Fen didn’t know how cruel Trudy was to me and Mom didn’t want to tell him. Mom springing that on me—the tribe—the way she did, knowing what I’d do, was as much her apology to me as it was to punish them for Eilis.”
Silence.
The tension, the sadness.
“What was everybody else doing?” Sebastian finally asked.
“Watching,” Bryce said, clipped, hard. “Listening. They needed a little dose of reality, in my estimation.”
There was a long silence and Eilis snuggled into Sebastian’s arms.
“I’m sorry, Eilis,” Giselle whispered suddenly without looking at her, her gaze still away and down. Eilis felt her throat clog with sorrow. Bryce wrapped his arms around Giselle and laid his cheek on her head, rocking her gently. “I didn’t know how Fen felt about me until about a year ago.”
“Giselle,” Eilis whispered, “please don’t. It’s weird for me, too. You can’t help how he sees you any more than I can help how he sees me.”
She took a deep breath and she looked over at Eilis, and Eilis didn’t know how she could have resented this woman for even one second. The pleading and hope in her face was plain, and it wasn’t her fault. No, Giselle wasn’t her sister.
She was the Virgin, Eilis’s mother.
* * * * *
68: UN BEL DI
Eilis went back to work the next morning, two weeks later than intended, dreading what she’d find. It had occurred to her in the depths of that dark velvet bed, when Sebastian had one of his rare naps, that she’d just gone through receivership and an IPO successfully, only to let her company go to pot the minute it was done.
On the other hand, she thought with a dreamy smile, it would have been worth every single second spent with Sebastian, being coddled and pampered, laved and loved, seduced over and over again. She had never known that that existed, that people really did that, that sex wasn’t a series of nameless, meaningless fucks.
That there were men who gave instead of took.
Eilis . . . I love you. I’ll take you any way I can get you.
Oh, yes. That was making love.
In reality, though, she could never expect that he wouldn’t have other women. She didn’t trust that what he said in the heat of the moment would be how he’d feel in a day, a week, a year from now. No man as sensual as that, who loved women that much—Ford—could really believe in or live things like fidelity, monogamy. She wasn’t going to presume that he’d even entertain the idea of marriage.
On the other hand . . . I want to make and raise children with you, Eilis. I want to bind you to me forever.
She really couldn’t think of anything that said “commitment” more than that.
Her heels clacking on the sidewalk, she walked into the building to find the usual hive of activity. She couldn’t tell any difference between the collective activity of the one hundred employees she had now versus the two hundred fifty she’d had before Sebastian had taken a chainsaw to it.
The floor was humming along so nicely, in fact, that she wasn’t noticed and that was a first. She looked up when something caught her eye. There were blinds covering the mezzanine’s glass walls—and they were drawn!
She climbed the stairs to her office and nodded to her assistant, who was on the phone. Louise gave her a thumbs-up, which surprised her. What really surprised her was the roundtable of six executives gathered in the middle of her office. Karen was giving an informal presentation and Eilis decided to take a seat and watch.
Why had she never noticed Karen’s genius, her leadership ability? Well, she amended, why had she not noticed the extent of it? Because I’d squelched her, that’s why.
Once given the authority to act on her responsibility, she’d blossomed like a hothouse orchid. Sebastian had known this about her. How? Because he talked to them. He got to know people. He gave them what they needed to succeed.
She knew where the blinds had come from now, and why. Karen had put them in place, to keep this roundtable together, short, on time. No distractions. It wasn’t for the benefit of the employees in Cubicleville. It was for the benefit of the executives.
Finally, Karen’s portion of the meeting was over and Sheila stepped up to the plate. Ditto Conrad Fessy. Then Michael! How had they gotten him to speak more than two words strung together and in front of people, yet? Eilis looked around her and realized that there was one superfluous person left in her company and it was her.
Somebody passed her the financial report going around the t
able. She’d caught the tail end of a comment about not making a bunch of copies for people when all they did was throw them away. Things got printed once, passed around the morning roundtable, initialed, then filed for future reference. The digital copies were always available on the server.
Conrad’s idea, she was quite sure. He hated waste.
Eilis glanced through it and gulped at the amount of money flowing like whitewater through this company. All of the ad campaigns Karen had launched were working like a dream.
The money coming in from the IPO shares was incredible.
She started when the chair beside her was pulled out and she looked up to see Sebastian there, sitting and leaning back to listen, just as she had. She initialed the report and passed it to him. He looked as somber as usual and a bit of her cheer dimmed when he looked straight at her without a change in expression.
Until he winked at her.
She couldn’t help the wave of desire that went through her. The chocolate and the absinthe. The oils and the music. The poetry and the blindfold. The silk stockings and stiletto heels. It had begun all over again after Giselle and Bryce had left last night.
He flipped through the pages, nodding approvingly, then initialed it—right-handed—and passed it on. Her staff never missed a beat. They didn’t acknowledge either of them in any way, though everyone was aware of their presence. They had too much work to do to interrupt the flow. Eilis realized that this was a daily routine that must have begun when she went to New York with Sebastian for the IPO.
Her employees were invested now and they acted like it.
The meeting broke up at nine on the dot and everyone scurried to their offices with rushed greetings to her and Sebastian as they scattered. In two minutes flat, the office where she’d spent the last twelve years basically alone was again empty, save her and Sebastian.
Neither spoke until she said, “I think I need to be laid off.”
“Eilis, you’re in a position most CEOs can only dream about. Enjoy it. Now. I need to talk to you in the conference room, please.”
Her heart stopped and her breath caught because she didn’t know if she was in trouble. She preceded him in and he locked the door behind him. His face took on a predatory look and she backed up against the table. When he got close enough to touch, she hoisted herself up onto the table. He grabbed the back of her head and brought them together for a hot, hard kiss.
Oh, yes, she was in trouble all right.
“I could fuck you right now,” he growled as he climbed up on the table.
“Please do,” she whispered, sliding herself back and lying down.
“What about Ford?” he asked once he was on his hands and knees over her.
“Who?”
That made him laugh and they spent an hour in the conference room. Nobody interrupted and Eilis wasn’t sure that their presence was even a tickle in anyone’s thought process.
“My house or yours?” he whispered to her much, much later after he’d shown Eilis how good hard and fast could actually be. Twice. “I need a bed; my back and my knees are killing me. I’m not getting any younger, you know.”
She laughed. “Yours. I love your dungeon.”
“My dungeon? You make me sound like I’m the Marquis de Sade.”
Eilis made a face. “Eww.”
“Yeah, my point exactly. Okay, then. Meet me there; here’s a code to the front door.”
“What are you going to do?”
He gave her a slow grin. “I have to pick up a few things.”
“A few things” meant more fruit. More exotic wines and champagnes. More ice cream. Different oils. Toys.
And a very wide emerald and sapphire choker set into platinum filigree.
She gasped when she opened the black velvet box he gave her once they’d made love hidden away in that incredible bed yet again. Her hand was on her mouth and tears began to well in her eyes as she picked up the exquisite piece with reverence.
Sebastian’s gaze was upon her as she studied it, and she turned it over and over, taking in every detail. It called to her; it was familiar. She got out of bed and walked around the room with it, looking at all the canvases that were wet, half finished, fully finished, and then she came to the enormous canvas of her garden and she realized what it was.
The platinum filigree that held the gems was the layout of her garden and the sapphires and emeralds were her flower beds. The clasps were her stone bridge.
She heard him chuckle and say, “I knew you’d figure that out pretty fast.”
“You’re a genius, Sebastian,” she murmured.
“I know. Come back to bed so I can lick you.”
* * * * *
They’d finally decided to eat a real meal at a table in an actual dining room and were across from each other at the conference table. Eilis, now an expert in the preparation of the perfect rare steak, exquisitely spiced, cooked while Sebastian went to his office for some documents, which he piled on the table beside his plate.
Once they’d settled in to eat, Eilis took a deep breath and blurted, “I’m not going to tell you about my past, so don’t ask.”
Then she saw the flinch, the slight twitch of his muscles, the slight glance to the side before he closed his eyes for a microsecond. She sucked in a breath and could say nothing.
He knew. Somehow— No, she knew how he knew and she began to feel a little sick.
“I— Um—” He swallowed. “I wanted you to tell me, but . . . ” He trailed off. “I had hoped you would trust me with it.”
“It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to know,” she said with a shrug. “Exactly. It was that I didn’t want to tell you myself. How much do you know?”
He sighed heavily. “Your foster situations. Your pregnancies. Your poisoning. The abuse. I mean, I have no way to know what I don’t know. Eilis, I grew up in the ghetto, same as you, and I never saw anything like that. And that Fen and Trudy— Why they just didn’t hand you over to one of my aunts . . . I don’t understand. Do either of them know any of this?”
“No. I’ve never told anyone until I told Giselle. Everything. Every detail.”
Apparently he heard the slight bitterness she couldn’t keep out of her voice, because he said, “Now wait a minute. Giselle hasn’t said a word of it to me. She never betrays confidences.”
Eilis blinked and her nausea began to seep away. “Then . . . how—?”
“When you were so quick to jump on the IPO idea after I told you that Knox and I were at war with Fen, I knew you were hiding something from me. I asked Knox to see if he could find a link between OKH and HRP.”
“You didn’t find it.”
“No. But Knox brought over a carton of documents and made me read every last one of them. That’s the first time I’ve ever actually been afraid of him, the way most people who don’t know him are afraid of him.”
“Why did he do that?”
“He said I needed to know real pain, your pain, the way everybody else experiences it. He says I’ve never known pain or failure, and I have no mercy, no empathy.”
“Oh, Sebastian,” she breathed. “I would hope that you never feel pain the way other people feel it.”
His eyes widened a bit and his fair skin paled. “What do you mean by that?”
Eilis had no idea what was going on but there was a roiling whirlpool inside that big chest of his. She didn’t know if there was anything she could say that would fix it, but the only thing she could say was what she thought.
“You make people believe that pain and failure don’t exist because for you, it doesn’t. Because you haven’t known pain, it must not exist and so then the people you’re with believe that pain—their pain—doesn’t exist, either. You infuse people with your passion, your fire, your joy. You give people hope that no cause is ever lost if they look at it the right way. You make people believe in themselves and give people exactly what they need to succeed, without a sense of failure, without a sense of pain.”
/> He stared at her for a long time, then said, low, hoarse, “Knox and Giselle think I need to know pain. They think I did you a great wrong by bringing you here to Ford.”
Eilis pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t have known that I had fallen in love with you if that hadn’t happened,” she said quietly, watching him, wanting him to know it was important for both of them that she experience Ford the way Sebastian had made her experience him. “I wanted something that didn’t exist and that’s what little girls do.”
She reached across the table and laid her hand over his, white-knuckled around his fork. “When I’m with you, it doesn’t exist. None of it does.”
He swallowed. “Knox is mad at me. Giselle hadn’t spoken a nice word to me since the night you came to Ford.”
“Funny. Didn’t seem too mad to me.”
He said nothing for a long time, studying her, watching her face. She stared back at him, hoping he would understand that she felt free. “I guess they didn’t, did they?”
Eilis smiled at him. “Eat,” she murmured. “I have plans for you later.”
He burst out laughing then, and did as he was told.
“What’s that stack of papers there?”
“Oh!” Sebastian muttered around his bite. He swallowed and leaned across the table toward her. “Were you serious when you said you were bored with your company and wanted something different?”
“Yes. I told you this morning I thought I should be laid off.”
“I want you to leave HRP and take over OKH as CEO on Knox’s fortieth birthday.”
Eilis’s mouth opened and her eyes widened. There was a jumbled mess of emotion behind her sternum and she couldn’t think.
Joy
Apprehension
Elation
Fear
Sebastian apparently leaped to some conclusion about her feelings, and said quickly, “You don’t have to. I think it’s a win-win for everybody. You get to take what Fen has. Knox doesn’t have to take what he doesn’t want. Kenard and I don’t have to run what we’re not interested in. Knox turns his shares over to us because we’ve purchased so much of it and goes off and does his thing. You get out of HRP and into something more challenging.