by RJ Scott
I hugged my dad, my mom, and Moira and received high fives from both Anson and Mitchell. Although Mitchell’s was sloppy and he ended up sprawled on his back under the mistletoe.
Through it all Luke did his job, standing by my side, his hand in the small of my back, looking like a boyfriend.
He deserved a bonus. He’d impacted my life to the point that I felt as if there was a future for me at Henderson McCormack that wasn’t entirely based around how things used to be. Never mind if we carried on, he’d gone over and above what I’d hired him for.
And now Luke and I were back at his place, and I wanted to hug him, or maybe go upstairs and make love. Even just a kiss would’ve been good. But the contract had ended. As of the minute we left the event we were done and I needed that closure before we went any further with the real us.
“Thank you,” I said, wholeheartedly, and held out a hand to shake his. He took it and in the falling snow we stood for a while with our hands clasped.
“It’s been fun.” He released his hold. I thought maybe he would’ve said something else, but he didn’t, and that left a horribly awkward silence to be filled. Maybe he needed that same closure because he was waiting for me to say something. Maybe I was tired, maybe I was just relieved by how well the night had gone, who knew, but I ruined everything in the space of a few seconds.
“A lot of fun.”
“The Js cornered me, just thought you should know. They’re not happy, asked if I knew how much you were worth, and that was it my fault you were being such an idiot.” He delivered the words carefully, but I picked up on one thing that I had to address.
“How much I’m worth?” I asked, because, anyone with Google could’ve found out how much Henderson-McCormack was worth, I guess, and then maybe the houses, and the investments. Fuck, I didn’t even know how much I was worth, not really. Money was never an issue—that was all I knew.
“I guess you have a lot of money. I mean, you could afford to hire me.”
I wanted to tease that tone out of his voice. “Don’t worry, I’m sure I have enough to make sure the rest of the money is transferred in the morning now we’re done. Honestly.”
He didn’t immediately laugh at my teasing. He nodded and there was a brief flash of something in his expression. I think at that moment I wanted him to laugh with me and say how we were more than just a contract. But then, it wasn’t as if I was saying anything. We’d spoken about more dates; maybe I should mention them now? I felt hopelessly, ridiculously, confused.
Then he got all serious again. “What do you think your parents will think when you tell them about me?”
I wanted to joke, but he looked so serious. “We won’t tell them if it worries you.”
The frown wasn’t a good sign; I think I fucked that up big time.
“So, we’ll date,” Luke said, “and my name will be Marcus, and you won’t tell them that we were fake boyfriends.”
“Well no, yes, you know what I mean, we could tell them that Marcus was your middle name.” I stopped. “No, fuck that, I’ll tell them what I did, and explain what a good guy you are.”
“What about the Js?”
It took me a while to think who that was, then I saw an image of the three disapproving men in my head. “What do they have to do with it?”
“It’s not just them though, it’s your staff.”
“Luke—”
“No, seriously, we need to think about this. We’ve been carried away with proximity and this made-up world, and I’m not saying it hasn’t been good, but we should think about this before we go any further.”
“What do you mean?”
“How about we leave this until after Christmas? Give ourselves some time and space to see if there could actually be anything outside of this contract.”
“Of course there could,” I said.
“Just four more days or so, yeah? Get Christmas done, I’ll be busy at Halligans anyway, and we can see.”
“See what?”
“See if this thing we are feeling is actually any more real than the name Marcus.”
Days away from Luke were the last thing I wanted. I popped the collar of my coat to stop the suddenly biting wind from causing more of my exposed skin to freeze. He did the same thing, then pulled up his hood. I was envious that he could cover his head.
“Good night,” He tugged me in for a goodbye kiss. “I’ll talk to you after Christmas. Yes?”
That was it then?
“Yeah. Good. Thank you.”
“Night, Derek,” he said again. With a wave, he walked into his building, but there was nothing else.
Not another kiss, or a hug, or any more words.
I could’ve said something, called out to him, stopped him, explained that I didn’t want to wait until after the turkey and presents to talk to him, that I wanted to go to his place and make love. That he’d become part of my life, and that somehow, in the space of four weeks and a few dates, I’d fallen in love with him. Or had I’d been falling in love with the concept of loving him?
I didn’t do any of those things.
Instead I got into my car and drove home.
Feeling as if everything was wrong.
Luke
As soon as I got inside the bar and the memories that lived in every corner of it hit me I knew that somehow, in my rush to slow things down, I’d just fucked up. Sometimes, you didn’t have time to do things slowly. Sometimes, hell, you needed to grasp the moment and live for now.
What did it matter how we told our story, or how much money Derek had? There was something between us that was meaningful. The start of something bright, and a few days to cool down and think rationally was not what we needed.
“Luke, are you okay?” Sara asked me from the bar. Well, more like shouted over the noise of people talking.
“Fuck,” I cursed and sprinted back out of the door, but the taillights of Derek’s car were vanishing down the road and it would’ve been reckless to go running after him.
I stalked past a concerned-looking Sara, and finally reached my apartment and let myself in, immediately pulling out my cell. I fired off a text, a simple message. I was wrong, I don’t want to wait four days, call me. I debated on adding a kiss or something, but fuck, my head was a mess.
And I’d let him go, why?
I had no one else but myself to blame. The whole thing had started with Robert asking me about my career, and how I was feeling, and I admitted I wasn’t a firefighter any more. Simple as that, I explained how I had been invalided out of the service and now worked with my family at our bar. He’d hidden his surprise well, but then he’d smiled and excused his misunderstanding.
But he’d looked at me when someone had interrupted us and there was this expression on his face that could have been worry, or censure. Who the hell knew?
Then the Js had, more or less, accused me of wanting a piece of Derek’s money. In insinuating language, they’d begun by asking me questions about my family, and then in short sentences they’d spoken of Derek and his place in this world and how someone as rich as he was could get away with playing with people’s lives. I knew they were talking about moving the company but in my heart I could’ve applied that to me.
How stupid was that?
I knew Derek. Knew the heart of him.
Well, I knew enough—that he made me smile, and that we were good in bed, and that he made me laugh, and that he knew Halligans had a soul and wasn’t just a bar on a New York corner.
But still I’d focused on one thing; take away money from what Derek and I had, and we had nothing, not when Derek was paying for me.
So, I’d worked my way through that and then his Mom had happened. She’d stood next to me, leaned into me, and smiled up at me.
“I like you,” she said. “You’re good for Derek. I hope you’ll visit us over Christmas, I make a fabulous eggnog.”
She didn’t have to say anything else, she’d offered me a way into the family, and I wanted
to take it.
I needed to take it.
Because then I could claim Derek as mine, and maybe date, and maybe fall in love.
But it was a lie.
Tomorrow would be better; he would text me back, and we’d talk, and everything would be good.
I woke a little after six. There was a text.
No, I think you were right originally. Some space is likely needed. Then, when we see each other again, things will be clearer.
I loved that he wrote that whole thing with punctuation and everything.
I would call him, as soon as I’d showered.
Got dressed. Eaten breakfast. Opened my mail. Checked in with Sara.
After I’d finished my voluntary shift at Whiskers Cat Rescue.
I just needed to get my head straight about what I was going to say and how I was going to convince him that being careful wasn’t what we needed.
The twenty-second became the twenty-third. The money was in my account and we had enough to clear all the outstanding invoices, plus some more to put in a marketing budget.
“Maybe your lovely Derek would help us with that,” Mom suggested to me.
Guilt weighed heavy. He hadn't called. I hadn't called, and I still hadn't thought of that one single argument that made up for all that shit I’d spoken outside the bar in the freezing wind.
“Sit down. Mom. I have something to tell you,” I said abruptly, then called for Sara. She came to the kitchen wiping her hands on a towel.
“Where’s the fire?” she asked with a smile, which soon dropped when she saw Mom sitting on a chair and me probably looking like I’d had the worst news. “What?”
“I’m going to cut to the chase. I have something to tell you both.” I decided the best way was to just lay it all out there. “I was pretending to be Derek’s date, he hired me, paid me a lot of money to go to events with him, which cleared the rest of the debt from the rebuild, so yeah, there’s no bank loan to pay back. But somehow I fell for him, but of course I can’t tell people about him buying me, because what does that make me?”
I took a breath.
I was expecting surprise, shock, maybe even some anger. What I wasn’t expecting was a cuff around the back of the head from Mom and then she and Sara near wetting themselves laughing. Seemed that being hired as a boyfriend wasn’t as seriously non-PC as I thought, at least not with my family. Sara went back out to the bar. Only then did Mom pull me in for a hug and hold me.
“Oh, Luke, you sweet, caring, idiot son.”
I had volunteered at Whiskers for Christmas Eve, and New Year’s Day. Rescued cats in frozen alleys needed all the help they could get. It seemed so many cats and kittens were discarded around Christmas, or got lost.
Working there, where the people who ran it were fine with a limping ex-firefighter spending way too much time cuddling the cats, soothed the confusing ache inside me.
“Hey baby,” I crooned to a calico that was surrounded by five kittens. I’d already named them in my head as Buttons, Socks, Miffy, Petal and Spider. Even if none of them looked like the cats Derek had drawn, and yes, I still had the notebook.
Momma-cat purred up at me, then let out a plaintive meow, batting at the smallest kitten, Socks, who was up around her nose. I helped her out and held the tiny yawning bundle of fluff in my hand. “So Socks, you and your brothers and sisters need a home.”
“We have room for them,” a voice spoke behind me. A voice I recognized and, for a moment, I contemplated not turning around, but how freaking stupid was that?
So, after carefully placing a sleeping Socks with her siblings and momma I turned to face the mother of the man who had stolen my heart.
“Hello, Mrs. Henderson.” I wasn’t ready to call her Belinda, because she hadn't given that permission to Luke Devers, only to Marcus.
“I said you should call me Belinda,” she said, and then with a soft smile she added another word. “Luke.”
Well, shit. She knows my real name? Derek was going to lose his shit that his carefully laid plans were shot to hell.
I thought on my feet of a million reasons why I was Luke and not Marcus.
“Mrs. He—Belinda—” I held up a hand, because I wanted to explain to her, to make her see I hadn't set out to…
To do what? I didn’t set out to do anything.
“I recognized you, at the restaurant the first time I saw you,” she said. “From the website that connects the animal rescue places in this area. Let me recall, I think it was all about some hero firefighter who saved a sack full of kittens from an icy river. Do you remember that article? I think it was the January issue two years ago.”
I remember that. I recall the 911, a kid, frantic with worry, and I remember wading in to the hip high water and hauling out the wriggling sack. No one would have known a thing, but for the kid capturing it all on his smart phone. Hell, look at YouTube and you’d see me there.
I remember it happened when I was still a firefighter.
“I do.” Then it hit me why she was here, and I didn’t want her to be disappointed with Derek when they were so close and come so far.
“Don’t blame Derek,” I pleaded a little desperately. “He just wanted to…”
What? What could I say about what had happened?
“Make us think he was happy? Make us stop worrying about him?” She smiled then, and crossed to the kittens, crouching down to see them and scratching momma cat between the ears. Momma-cat butted her hand and purred. “Thing is, however it started between you and Derek, you have to know that my idiot son has feelings for you.”
Amazing how she used the same word as my mom. Idiot sons both of us, evidently.
I crouched next to Belinda, and nudged one of the kittens back toward her siblings. Petal had rolled onto her back, four tiny jellybean paws in the air. She’d get chilled there, away from her family.
Somehow with the cats as a barrier I could talk.
“He does?”
“Do you?”
I was confused for a moment, was she answering my question with another question. Wait. Had she asked me how I feel?
“Your son, he’s…”
“Brilliant, stubborn.”
I had to say one thing. “Gorgeous.”
“Funny, and artistic,” she added.
“Smart, and much too worried about what people think about him.”
She looked right at me and I realized she was smiling as hard as I was.
“He did the presentation for the AbbaLister raisins account today, it went well.”
“I’m pleased, I know he was nervous.” I was happy for him, he deserved to have a good time with the account after the work he’d put into it.
“They’ve agreed to the concept, and the marketing machine starts in January ready for packaging and media.”
“Excellent.”
She hesitated and I wondered if maybe I should be saying something else.
“It’s Christmas Eve, Luke.”
“I know.”
“Come to dinner tonight.”
“I have to work—”
“Derek’s been walking around with his cell phone for two days, at work according to Moira, and at home with us. You know he hasn’t even gone back to his place, he’s all about being with us at the moment. So please come tonight, just for an hour, maybe, and see if what you think you might feel is right? Because, God knows, he doesn’t want to be the one to make your life difficult and the more he’s considering what he did, the more guilt is building inside him.”
“I’m sorry, but I really do have a shift at my bar,” I was regretful, and then I recalled the cuff around the head, and the laughter from my small family. I think my sister and my mom might have had something to say about me turning this down.
“That’s a shame. Anyway, I left the address on a notepad in reception. Seven if you can make it? I’ll set a place and hope to see you.”
“Belinda, is Derek…is he okay?”
She smiled at me t
hen, and nodded, “He’d be better if he saw you.”
She stood up and brushed at her pants, then after patting me on the arm, she gave me one last encouraging smile and left.
I turned off the engine and sat for the longest time at the end of the drive, out of sight of the Henderson house. Not because I was avoiding anything, not really, but because I was early. Way early. By half an hour. Even after stopping for wine, and some hastily purchased gifts, I was still there way too soon. Was it polite to wait, or should I show eagerness, what did you do when faced with a house like this? It was huge and, from the little I could see, it was decorated tastefully for Christmas.
Sara had taken the news of me deserting them on Christmas Eve well, in fact she was the one who dragged me upstairs to pull out one of the new suits I had and to choose me a shirt.
“Of course you have to go,” she muttered as she straightened my tie. “This is true love.”
“Sara—”
“Stop it, let me have my fantasy.”
I fired a quick text to her with just a heart, and she sent back a threatening ‘get in the damn house’.
Finally, when I had no reason to lurk outside, I parked on the curved driveway, and got my first glimpse of what money could buy.
Was this what Derek had meant when he’d said he sometimes wasn’t sure if he deserved what he had?
I walked up to the door of the large house. The door opened as I arrived and walked under the complicated twist of lights and green leaves. Belinda was there, dressed up, with diamonds sparkling at her ears and a delicate necklace at her throat. She didn’t hesitate to pull me into a hug and help me to hang up my coat. Maybe they didn’t have staff. When she guided me into a large kitchen I could see that it was Robert who was cooking, whistling to himself as he stirred something in a pot.
“Lasagna is a Henderson tradition on Christmas Eve,” Belinda said, and Robert turned.
He immediately grinned and held out a hand to shake. “Luke, welcome.”