Brother's Keeper

by Nan Comargue

  Both men shook their heads in convincing unison. “No copies,” said the older guard. “We’re still old school here, except for the damn computers.”

  The younger man was staring at the bills. “But computers get bugs, don’t they, Jim? Or they crash. You’re always complaining about it yourself.”

  The older man gave his colleague a sour look.

  “Two thousand. One grand apiece.”

  Suddenly the sour face sweetened. The younger guy was practically jiggling in his chair.

  “Hell, for that price, I’ll give you the whole computer,” the older guard said. “Come with me. You seem like the kind who probably wants to see me do it.”

  Nik’s cold tone was still very evident. “I do prefer to see what I’m purchasing. Darling”—this was to Alexa—“would you mind getting us a table?”

  “Are we still eating?” she stammered. She wanted nothing more than to sprint from the building and away from the guards’ awful knowledge.

  He looked down at her, his blue eyes mild. “Of course. I’m starving.”

  Amazingly, she was too—or at least she was by the time Nik joined her at the table ten minutes later.

  “I’m getting the salmon,” she babbled, not quite meeting his gaze. “And asparagus with hollandaise for my side. Do you want to share another side too? Maybe the garlic mashed potatoes?”

  “Lexy.” He put his hand over hers. “The footage was awful quality, in the best tradition of such videos. Due to the height of the Rover and the poor camera angle, you couldn’t even see our faces. Just a couple of sex-crazed lunatics having uncomfortable but highly satisfying sex in the front seat of a car.”

  She lifted her eyes high enough to make out his smiling lips. “Really?”

  “Really,” he said. “I have the hard drive in the car. We can watch it later. Relive the experience. Although I’d rather re-enact it.”

  “Nikky!”

  His answering laugh was a low rumble and when he sat back, he appeared mightily pleased with himself.

  “This is better, isn’t it?”

  Better than what? Alexa wanted to ask, but she thought she already knew. Better than the constant squabbling that had been their childhood. Better than the icy wall she’d built up between them after they reached adulthood. Better than their past.

  It was just dinner. She tried not to build it up to be more in her mind.

  Nikky, Nikky, don’t you know how vulnerable I am? How much I want to believe you when you talk about the future?

  His devil-may-care attitude stood between them. Even when he seemed serious, she tended to disbelieve him. Perhaps she really was no more than a convenient conquest to him, one that carried a dark tinge of taboo to make the entire situation more exciting.

  He was twenty-five. She could forgive him if this thing between them was no more lasting than a holiday weekend in his mind—neither of them had spoken of love—but she would never be able to forgive herself if she let her defenses down and opened herself up to be hurt. At all costs, she must protect herself against that.

  Their escapade in the car had made them both hungry, so little was said as they ordered and consumed Caesar salads, salmon and chocolate tortes, all washed down with very good white wine. The menu at the Inn was traditional but well done, the kind of food that had largely given way to California casual and chain restaurants, yet was still appreciated by the older generation who frequented the hotel—people like her father.

  People with money. People with the kind of money it took to bribe two security guards to risk their jobs.

  But Nik didn’t have that kind of money. Hell, she didn’t even know if it would be him or his mother de facto paying for dinner tonight.

  “You look serious all of a sudden.”

  Alexa looked at Nik over the edge of her wineglass, hesitant to give him an answer.

  Nik reached across to grasp her hand in a warm strong grip. “What is it?”

  “I was just thinking,” she said, purposely vague.

  His smile matched his grip. “About what?”

  “A case I’m working on,” she quickly invented.

  A frown appeared between his sandy brows. “I thought you did research for other lawyers.”

  He didn’t say it in an insulting way but she immediately bristled. As far as the legal world was concerned, her job was on the very margins of practicing law—no clients, no firm, no prestige.

  “I do,” she said, pulling her hand away, “but they do share the facts of their cases with me to assist in tailoring the research.”

  “I see.”

  Again, his tone was flat, yet she read a wealth of judgment in it.

  “What do you see?” she demanded. “You didn’t even finish law school.”

  Nik shrugged. “I wasn’t in the top ten percent of my class. I probably wouldn’t have made it into one of those elite law firms like your father wanted. What was the point of finishing? I got everything I needed out of that year I put in.”

  Alexa narrowed her eyes at him. “What could you get out of one year?”

  He smiled. “An idea.”

  “An id—”

  “Nicholas!”

  The booming voice cut through Alexa’s words. She flinched as an equally heavy hand fell upon her shoulder.

  “And Alexandra! What a surprise. What are you two doing in town?”

  Alexa swiveled her head around to look up at the man who belonged to the voice. Thomas Maitland, one of her father’s favorite opponents in legal battles. He always got their names wrong.

  “We’re in town to celebrate Christmas with my mother,” Nik answered, rising to his feet to shake hands. At least that meant the man had to take his hand off of Alexa.

  “Christmas?” Thomas’ wrinkled forehead accordioned. “In January?”

  “Russian Orthodox Christmas is in January,” Alexa explained.

  “Of course!” Thomas held onto Nik’s hand, wringing it again. “How is your mother Valencia? She must be very proud of you. Congratulations on your company going public. Sharing the wealth, huh? You’ve done well by me with your stock, too. Smart lad, thinking ahead to alternative business structures and so on. Can’t say I understand all that newfangled nonsense. Do you, Sandy?”

  Alexa shook her head in a daze. A buzzing sound filled her ears.

  Thomas Maitland kept talking and Nik kept smiling and nodding but all the while he was sending searching looks down at her. Finally, Thomas wandered off back to his table and Nik sat down again.

  “What company?” Alexa wanted to know.

  Nik tried and failed to capture her hand as she pulled both of them off of the table and onto her lap.

  “I was just telling you about it when Maitland came over.”

  “The big idea you got in law school,” she guessed.

  Her voice didn’t sound right. It was all tight in her throat, and Nik seemed to agree, if his worried expression was any clue.

  Clue. Hell, she didn’t have a clue about who he was, what he did for a living, the fact that he’d been successful enough to grow a company large enough to go public on the stock market.

  Once again poor little Alexa was in the dark.

  “It’s a consulting company at its heart,” Nik began to explain. “It allows people who can’t afford a lawyer to purchase document drafting or one-time representation at a hearing piecemeal, without having to put down a full retainer. There’s more to it too. It lets lawyers set up remote offices and pool resources, even work together to handle a single case that might require too much of a time commitment from one of them. Some of my first partners were single parents and people at retirement age who couldn’t quite afford to retire completely. It allowed them to get a small income for part-time work, an option that really isn’t available to most legal practitioners. And—”

  Alexa held up her hand. “Stop. I get it. It’s the kind of work I’m doing except…well, more collaborative. More humane.”

  “The setup you
have with those firms you work with is exploitative,” Nik said hotly. “That’s part of the reason I wanted to do something different. I—”

  “I get it,” she repeated. “I think I’ve even heard of your company. I was worried it was going to take business away from me.”

  He fixed his eyes unwaveringly on her downcast face. “I’ve kept out of the Chicago market,” he told her. “I’ve waited.”

  She met his gaze. The buzzing was getting louder. “For what? So you could fuck me?”

  He flinched. “No, so you could find out the truth.”

  “About your company?”

  “About our relationship.” He emphasized, “Our true relationship.”

  “Which is what?” she made herself ask. “Payback? Convenient sex with the woman down the hallway? What?”

  The other diners were starting to turn and stare.

  Nik raised his hand to signal for the bill. And to think that she’d wondered how he could afford to pay for dinner. Tricky Nikky—and gullible Alexa.

  She clenched her hands in her lap as she stared at him across the table. How calm he looked! How controlled. Yet she recognized the lines of strain around his mouth. He was holding on to his temper. For what purpose, she wondered? Was it that he didn’t want to hurt her or he simply wanted to avoid the complications of a falling out?

  Her thoughts spiraled along a reckless path that led back to her own worst fears. How stupid she was to think she could protect herself from this kind of pain. How foolish to think she could love his body without loving him.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Want?” He gave a short bark of laughter. “Isn’t it obvious yet?”

  It was to her. Now. “Sex.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “That’s a start.”

  He seemed unaware of the fact that his fingers were drumming an impatient beat on the table.

  “What else then?”

  Nik turned away, giving her a partial profile that was chilling in its perfection. She was wrong. He wasn’t fighting anger. He was already supremely angry. “You tell me,” he invited.

  But she didn’t know and was too afraid to guess.

  She and Nik. The combination had always been volatile. Incendiary. Now more than ever.

  There was no future for them. He’d been toying with her. He hadn’t denied anything she’d ascribed to him. Why didn’t he deny it?

  “We’ve bonded,” she said slowly, her words jerky. “We’ve gotten closer. Closer than we’ve ever been.”

  One corner of his mouth quirked. “That wasn’t a high hurdle to overcome.”

  Alexa risked a glance at his shuttered face and quickly looked back down at her hands.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  A long silence fell over the table, broken only by the arrival of the bill and the usual fluttering involved in the transaction that followed.

  “Alexa?”

  Her thoughts, which had drifted far away, returned to him. Alexa. He never called her that.

  The buzzing in her ears disappeared. She waited for him to speak, to tell her that what she’d said about him was all wrong. It wasn’t all about sex or scoring off her. What they’d shared was beautiful because of something altogether deeper and more wonderful…

  Nik barely glanced at her as he got up from the table. “Ready to go?”

  He lied to her. How dare he be upset?

  But Nik did seem to be upset and he showed it in the worst possible way, by being implacably and coolly polite.

  He was extremely courteous with his answer when his mother asked them how the evening had gone, speaking in a voice so lacking his usual vigor that Val sent a shocked glance toward her stepdaughter.

  He sounded just as polite when he said goodnight to her a short time later. He wished them both good morning very civilly the next day.

  It was driving Alexa crazy.

  She called Jeanne and vented for more than an hour, mostly ignoring her friend’s patient sympathy and tentative advice to just talk it over. Did Jeanne think she hadn’t tried? Nik’s ears seemed to be blocked up with the same ice he’d armored himself in because he said yes to every suggestion she made, then avoided her whenever she got close.

  “Well,” said Jeanne, during their third conversation that day, “it’s not like you’re in love with him or anything. So what if you don’t talk? You live thousands of miles apart. Trust me. This will have no impact on your real life.”

  Alexa dropped the trinket she was turning over in her fingers, causing it to bounce off of her dresser and onto the floor where it chipped.

  ‘It’s not like you’re in love with him.’ Even Jeanne hadn’t guessed the truth.

  So soon? Alexa asked herself. A few wild sexual encounters and she was in love? But it wasn’t soon. She knew Nik almost as well as she knew herself. She knew his energy and his affection and his loyalty. Now she also knew his tenderness and his aggression…and his anger.

  How could she live without those things?

  ‘Her real life.’ Jeanne had said those words so simply, as if that life was anything without Nik.

  “Don’t worry,” Jeanne went on, unaware of the small accident she’d caused. “You leave in a couple of days. How bad can it be?”

  It was bad.

  Over a nearly silent lunch, Nik mentioned that he would be going out that evening.

  Val set up an immediate wail, which was unlike her, for she was hardly a clinging parent.

  “Oh, but you’re barely here at all,” she complained. “Two nights in a row. What about your— What about Alexa? Is she supposed to spend the evening cooped up with a boring old woman?”

  Alexa was embarrassed to realize that her stepmother was protesting on her behalf.

  “Alexa and I spent time together yesterday,” Nik pointed out, his eyes barely touching on her averted face. “Tonight I’m going out with some friends.”

  Val looked suspicious. “What friends?” she asked, as if Nik had never had any friends at all, when in fact he had been extremely popular. It was Alexa who’d been the social outcast.

  Nik answered with the same easy grace he’d displayed all along, though with that new touch of ice. “Deb, Carly, Jace, Sloan. Some more people, probably.”

  Carly was his ex-girlfriend, Alexa recalled. Pretty and bright, with the figure of a ballerina. She’d adored Nik.

  Val compressed her lips. “What are your plans?”

  “I don’t know. Just hanging out.”

  “Hanging out where?”

  Nik abandoned his formerly sprawling position and pushed his empty plate away. “What is this, an inquisition? I’m not a teenager, Mom. I’m sorry if you’ll be lonely, but you’ll be here with Alexa.”

  Alexa again. Every time he said her full name, she cringed.

  “I’m thinking about Alexa!” Val burst out. “I thought the two of you would try to mend your relationship. I thought—”

  “We tried,” Nik cut her off. “We failed. Alexa’s already made up her mind about me. Haven’t you, sweetheart?”

  Finding herself on the other end of that frozen stare made sweat break out on Alexa’s palms.

  He hated her.

  He’d lied to her and he hated her.

  He’d—

  No, she suddenly knew what it was. She hadn’t trusted him.

  Her eyes widened as she remembered. She’d accused him of trying to get revenge on her for her treatment of him all those years. She’d accused him of wanting convenient sex—as if she hadn’t known how complicated their being together would make both of their lives.

  No, there was nothing convenient or vengeful about what they’d had. It was pure and beautiful and…and she’d ruined it.

  Now he hated her and with good reason.

  “Nikky…”

  But this time her plea didn’t work. He gave her a look of such contempt that she flinched from it.

  He was going out. He was going to be with his ex-girlfriend.

>   Alexa knew what he was doing. He was trying to forget her.

  * * * *

  At nine, Nik came downstairs dressed for clubbing, not ‘hanging out’. He looked devastating in black, the severe color highlighting his rugged fairness.

  He sketched his mother a rough salute and wished her a good evening. He didn’t even spare a glance for Alexa.

  As soon as she heard the door slam behind him, Alexa burst into tears all over her startled, bewildered stepmother.

  Chapter Six

  Alexa dug her spoon into her pint of ice cream, highlighted a sentence on the page in front of her and pressed her cell phone more tightly between her shoulder and her ear.

  It was called multi-tasking, the boon and scourge of every modern woman’s life, and she excelled at it.

  Staying busy was the key to forgetting, at least for small spaces of time.

  Except it was difficult to forget when the mother of the person you were trying to forget was constantly calling you on the phone.

  “I’m fine, Val. I really am,” Alexa assured the older woman for the third time that day. “Please don’t feel you have to visit me and leave sunny California for cold, cold Chicago.”

  By which Alexa meant that she didn’t want Val underfoot but, short of being rude enough to say it in so many words, she was forced to point out the weather change. Her stepmother wasn’t so young anymore.

  “In spring, then,” Val insisted. “The weather will be good then. We can shop together and have a good, long visit.”

  ‘A good, long visit’ sounded ominous. “Sounds great, Val.”

  For a few moments, the minutes ticked upward while Alexa filled her mouth with another delicious bite of pecan praline cream and found another sentence in the case she was reading that might be useful. She penciled a question mark beside it to check later.

  A long shuddering sigh on the line made her shiver.

  “Have you heard from Nikolai?” Val asked.

  The question was worse than the sigh.

  For two months, she’d fielded calls from her stepmother with never a mention of Nik—and now, finally, it was being brought out into the open. In a way, it was a relief. Sometimes Alexa was almost convinced that her time with Nik was a particularly vivid dream. When she did dream of him, she didn’t want to wake up.