The girl nodded, though her cheeks pinked with excitement. “Hot guy in a blue suit. Got it.”
“I need you to find him and tell him to meet me by the Greek statues downstairs. Tell him we need to leave immediately.”
“Got it. Okay.”
The girl hurried off in the direction of the ballroom. I spotted Jane and Eric near one of the exhibits in the new hall, canoodling openly without a care for their potential audience, and decided that would be a better way to distract my errant husband.
“Eric! Jane!” I called out, waving so they would see me. I hated to interrupt such a heated moment, but this was important. Lord, I really should have told them everything.
“Oh my God,” Jane said as I approached. “Nina, you look amazing. And so tall!”
“Hey!” I looked down at myself and then back up. As a member of the planning committee, Jane had elected to get ready here much earlier, and so while she had seen my dress, of course, she had not seen the full effect of my stylist’s work. My strappy silver heels were a bit taller than the ones I usually wore, I supposed, lending to the more statuesque look.
“Thank you,” I started to say, but my other announcement was ruined when both Jane and Eric’s faces dropped at what could only be one thing.
Calvin.
“Nina!” he barked at me, huffing as he shoved aside several people, ignoring the others who followed the commotion. “We weren’t done. I want to know who the hell has been texting you, and I want to know now.”
I turned around, straightening to my full height. In these shoes, I had at least six inches over the man, and for the first time, I truly didn’t care. For years he had put me in kitten heels, even flats whenever we took part in social engagements together, balancing our height difference with preposterous lifts in his own shoes. Now I wanted nothing more than to intimidate him as he had done to me for so long.
“Calvin, don’t,” I said sharply. “This is not the time nor the place. I beg of you, just let it go. It’s only a friend. I promise.”
He clearly didn’t believe me—and neither did Jane and Eric, if their raised brows were any indication.
“Just a friend,” Calvin sneered. “It’s that Italian who showed up at the house, isn’t it? What was his name? Mark? Michael?”
“Matthew. His name was Matthew,” I said before I could stop myself.
Then I felt like my breath was caught in my ribs. Matthew had been going to the house? Or was he talking about last year, when I would occasionally see him lurking around the corner, checking on me? Did Calvin know about that too?
Oh God, I hoped the girl had found him in time and convinced him to leave. My voice was so quiet I could barely hear it, but the intensity—almost longing?—ingrained in each syllable of Zola’s given name sent a shiver up my spine.
Beside us, Jane and Eric exchanged puzzled glances.
“You think you’re going to get away with this,” Calvin growled. “Well, you’re not. I’ll—”
“Calvin.” Eric’s voice finally piped up when I somehow couldn’t. “Let it go.” He glanced at me as if to ask if I was all right.
Calvin was barely able to hide a sneer. Eric didn’t look away, and I watched with some amount of awe, as they engaged in a stare-off that seemed to last a full five minutes.
And then, finally, Calvin turned away.
I sighed to Jane, like I was merely irritated with Calvin’s presence. “I need a cocktail.”
Calvin scowled. “Now, just wait a minute.”
“No,” I snapped and took off through the crowd, though behind me, I could hear Eric telling Jane he was coming with to make sure Calvin didn’t cause a scene.
Do not get them involved, I told myself. This was Jane’s big night. Her debut as a designer. I didn’t need to ruin that with my ongoing marital crises. I darted around a few tables, eager to lose both my soon-to-be ex-husband and my cousin. Where was security when I needed it?
“Nina,” Calvin chased after me. “I’m not going to leave until you talk to me!”
I glanced into the ballroom. Matthew was nowhere to be seen. From the other side of the room, the girl with the clipboard gave me a thumbs-up. I breathed with relief and hurried inside.
“Senator Wick,” I said, running into a familiar face in front of whom I knew Calvin wouldn’t make a scene. “How lovely to see you again.”
And so it went—me frantically trying to escape Calvin’s grasp, latching myself on to various donors and people he wouldn’t want to lose face in front of, and Calvin tailing me in and out of the party for more than thirty minutes.
Eventually, and partly because I knew that Matthew would come looking for me soon, I ducked out of the ballroom and into a stairwell, where we were still close to the party, but wouldn’t be overheard.
“What?” I demanded when I turned around to find Calvin lumbering after me. “What is it that you want that the lawyers can’t deal with? If the final agreement isn’t to your liking, we can look at it again.”
“Lawyers?” he hissed. “You have ruined me, do you know that?”
“I rather think we ruined each other.” I bristled. “You weren’t the one who ended up spending two weeks in prison, Calvin.”
He cackled lightly to himself.
I squinted. “You’re drunk. Go home. The penthouse is yours. You have everything you want.”
“I will not be embarrassed by you, you fucking bitch!”
I tried to brush past. “I’m getting security.”
“The hell you are,” he said, lunging for me again. “You don’t know what you’ve done. Millions. I owe millions and millions. Can’t you understand that? All I wanted was enough to start over.”
“All you wanted was everything I have!” I yelped as I scampered away. “Your bad investments are not my problem anymore. Honestly, it’s not my fault that you’re such an embarrassing failure!”
“I am not!”
“You’ve lost!” I snapped at him. “I don’t understand why you won’t accept it and let me go!”
“Because why the fuck should I?” he demanded. “I put ten years into this. I should walk away with more than a few lousy million. I should be right on par with you and your goddamn arrogant-as-fuck cousin!”
Suddenly, he grabbed me and shoved me hard against the wall.
“You think you can just walk away,” he sneered. “Did you forget, princess? Did you forget that there is a price to pay for making a fool out of me?”
“Get off me!” I shrieked, trying to escape his iron-tight grip.
But he wouldn’t let go. Faced with the choice of toppling down the stairs or staying in one piece, I followed him until we reached the empty bottom floor. Calvin threw me to the ground, then tripped on his own feet and fell on top of me.
“There’s those legs I remember,” he leered when my dress pooled around my hips. “A little long for my taste, if you want to know the truth, but everyone else always said you were a catch. Who was I to argue, huh?”
His erection pressed between my legs as he fumbled with his zipper. Every one of his stinking smells embraced me in a sickening hug. Alcohol, sweat, cheap men’s deodorant. Some kind of decay that only belonged to him.
“Do you like that, princess?” he asked. “I think you secretly want it just like you always did. Should I do it here? How about in the elevator again, huh?”
The effect was like tinder. Suddenly, the small fire that had been burning inside me all night—no, for the last eighteen months, really—burst into a massive pyre.
“NO!” I shrieked. “YOU WILL NOT DO THIS TO ME ANYMORE!”
I kicked and punched and beat with all my might, wishing I had done more than Pilates and spinning classes that would help me throw off this monster.
And suddenly, he was gone. It took me a second to realize it, but when I finally opened my eyes again, I sat up to find Calvin pinned squarely against the opposite wall, eyes bulging as he looked at his captor. My savior.
Ma
tthew.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Matthew
Calvin Gardner’s throat gave easily under my fingers, with the pasty color and texture of bread dough just after it was done rising, and with the same faint yeasty odor too, thanks to the amount of beer he had consumed. I barely noticed. It took every ounce of self-control I had right now not to strangle the man in his socks and leave him to melt all over the marble.
I’d been wandering back and forth between the ballroom and the Greco Roman exhibit since that twitchy assistant had approached me with Nina’s message. Everywhere I looked, she had just been, leading me on a merry chase around the event. The reason why only became apparent when I had decided to take another route to the bottom floor and heard Nina’s scream echo up the stairwell before it was swallowed by the live music at the party.
Now one word clanged through my ears like a fire alarm, blocking out the sound of Gardner’s frantic wheezing.
“‘Again’?” My voice shook from the effort it took not to crush the man’s windpipe. “Nina, what the fuck did he mean by ‘again’?”
“What do you think?” Gardner’s glossy eyes bugged as he spoke hoarsely between his teeth. “She was my wife. She still is. Not just some dirty wop’s whore.”
“Was I fuckin’ talking to you?” I slammed him into the wall again with a satisfying thwack.
“Matthew!” Nina cried out from where she was still crumpled on the floor, her dress torn up one thigh, makeup smeared across her beautiful face.
I had at least six inches on Gardner, and even if I didn’t outweigh him, I was definitely packing a bit more heat, muscle for muscle, pound for pound. But adrenaline does funny things. In Gardner’s case, it allowed him to stomp on my foot when Nina called my name, pushing me off guard long enough to wriggle out of my grasp. But not for long.
I whipped around and wrangled him just as quickly into a half-nelson, smashing him face-first into another one of the massive marble columns in the hall, just before I whipped out the switchblade I had in my breast pocket and pressed the steel edge into his wobbling jowls.
“There ain’t a DA in New York City who doesn’t walk around with some kind of protection, you slimy sack of shit,” I growled. “Now, you say one more word about her, and I will slit your turkey neck from ear to fuckin’ ear. You got that?”
“Matthew.”
I looked up and found Nina watching me with a curious expression. Some horror, yes, which was morphing quickly into shock. Some disgust. And maybe a little desire.
“Maybe I should give the knife to you, baby,” I told her. “You can stick him like the dirty fuckin’ pig he is, huh?” I pressed the blade deeper into Gardner’s neck, and the loose skin oozed over it.
“P-please,” Gardner wheezed. “Please, she’s—a—”
“She’s what, you rotting can of shit-eating worms?”
Gardner swallowed heavily, but mumbled low enough that I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
I shoved him against the column again. Hard. “What was that?”
“I said,” he croaked between harsh, labored gasps, “that she’s a whore. And this…just…proves it.”
I couldn’t help it. I dropped the knife, whipped Gardner around, and delivered a harsh right hook straight to hit jaw that had him dropping to the ground like a heavy sack of wheat.
His head echoed down the corridor as it smacked the marble floor. I squatted down and checked his pulse, wondering if I should feel guilty that I was even wondering if the man was dead. I did not. I felt nothing but rage.
Slow, but steady, Calvin Gardner’s heartbeat thumped under my fingers. But he was out. For now.
I retrieved my knife, then joined Nina on the ground. “Nina. What was he talking about?”
She was crumpled to the floor in her finery, shoulders shaking like we were in the middle of the damn arctic.
“Come here,” I said. God, I wanted to fuckin’ kill him for touching her like that. Instead, I pulled out my phone to call Derek.
“No, don’t,” Nina said, stopping me with a gentle hand on mine. “It will r-ruin the event.”
“Who cares if it ruins the event? This asshole just stalked you here and assaulted you. And I’m pretty fucking sure at this point it isn’t the first time, is it? He’s not going to stop, baby. He needs to be locked the fuck up!”
She bit her lip hard enough that it turned white around her tooth. “Please, Matthew. It’s Jane’s big night. I—I don’t want to be—”
“Be what?” I demanded, wanting to shake it out of her myself. “You don’t want to be what?”
“A burden!” she burst out, practically a scream that echoed down the hall and through my damn chest.
Three syllables, but it was enough to make her look like she’d run a marathon, red-cheeked, wild-eyed, and exhausted.
“That’s all I’ve ever been,” she said fiercely. “And what he did. What he’s done. I refuse to be defined by it, Matthew. I refuse!”
I swallowed, wanting to fight back. I wanted to protest, to tell her that she was being ridiculous. But her words struck a chord I understood better than I wanted to admit.
I knew what it was like to be treated like I was nothing by the people who were supposed to love me. For the first fourteen years of my life, I had two parents who chose the bottle over me and their five young daughters. I had a father who was more willing to punch his son in the face than admit when he was wrong, and a mother who would have rather hidden from her kids than face her shortcomings and be the mother they needed. If it hadn’t been for my grandparents, I would have been even more angry and bitter than I was as an adolescent, with a safe home, yes, but always with the knowledge that in a perfect world, I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. That my sisters and I, while still loved, were burdens as well.
You live your live long enough that way…you come to believe it. You come to hate yourself for it.
But my girl had never even had a Nonno or a Nonna to give her the encouragement when she needed it. She had a heartless grandmother and a flighty mother. And then traded them for an unavailable professor, followed by an abusive husband. You could grow up with all the money in the world, but it couldn’t do shit to replace the core needs that every human deserves. Love. Pure. Unconditional. From at least one damn person.
Well. That could be me, couldn’t it?
We really were a pair. Which was why I knew that the only real way to save a person like that was to love them anyway. It’s what she had done with me. I could do the same for her. I always would.
“Fine,” I said as gently as I could manage. “I won’t call. Yet. But, Nina…you need to tell me exactly what happened in the elevator. Not because you’re a burden. You won’t be. But you deserve truth, baby. I will love you. No matter what. Do you understand that?”
She blinked, tears caught in the generous sweep of her eyelashes. “I—yes. I do.”
I pressed my forehead to hers. “Good. Now tell me the truth, Nina. What did he mean, ‘again’?”
Nina slumped into my shoulder. “Matthew, you don’t want to know.”
I tipped her chin up, forcing her to look at me once more. “I really do. And you really need to tell me. Nina, I love you, and you love me. I’m going to marry you, no matter what you say. I think I’ve earned your secrets. Haven’t I?”
Her eyes welled again, and her lower lip trembled. “Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, my love, yes, you have.”
“Then tell me, Nina. Tell me everything.”
Slowly, she pushed my hand off her chin, then leaned back against the wall. With a quick glance at Calvin, she took a deep breath, and started.
“It was my first time organizing the gala,” she said, speaking more toward her hands, now clasped in her lap. “Olivia was four. I was twenty-four. It was the first time I had anything resembling a job or anything close to it since she was born.” She shook her head. “Calvin…he didn’t like it.”
I stayed quiet, keep
ing my eye on the slumbering giant in question. Above us, the party raged out of sight, quieted by the heavy steel doors at the top of the stairs. We were still alone. For now.
“It happened about a month before the gala,” she said. “I was working late a lot, and he didn’t like it. It made me…unavailable. In those days, he liked having me around, you see. Sometimes he would bring people back to our apartment just to show me off. To men he was trying to impress. Business investors or people he was trying to start some business with. You can imagine.”
I could, yeah. Way too clearly. Nina, at twenty-four, tall and queenly, young and bright—relegated to being literal arm candy for a bunch of slobbering, middle-aged hacks.
I swallowed. Maybe I needed to pray again.
“One night, he was throwing an impromptu salon, you might call it. Several investors were there—I honestly don’t know who. But I couldn’t come, because we were busy here. And he was so embarrassed—you remember how he gets about being embarrassed. I don’t know, maybe something else happened that day…”
“Hey,” I said gently. “Don’t justify it. Whatever that motherfucker did is on him. I don’t even have to know what it is to know it’s inexcusable.”
Nina inhaled deeply, then exhaled again. “Perhaps.”
I hated that she could even doubt it.
“Then what happened?” I prodded.
She sighed. “He came here to find me and bring me home. He was waiting for me at the elevators when I came out of the institute. It was late, around eight, but we still weren’t finished. He said I had to come home. I said no. And when I was going up to the exhibit to go over some things, he followed me into the elevator. And just like that day with you, it got stuck. And I was trapped there. With him.”
She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself.
“Usually he would wait until he we were home,” she whispered. “Until we were behind closed doors. But that night...oh, God, Matthew, he was so angry.”
She leaned forward and buried her face in her knees, unable to say anything more. I could easily imagine what had happened, though I wasn’t sure it was entirely accurate.
The Honest Affair (Rose Gold Book 3) Page 29