“You really want to know how much I'd pay for a night with you?”
He let her back from him, sore and tender between her thighs, and she turned just in time to see him lick her from fingers the way he'd sucked the icing from his lip.
Jay fumbled for her blouse, holding it closed. “Yes.”
“I'll knock five million dollars of your debt if you come to my room before that mark on your throat fades.” It throbbed, as if in response to his words. “That gives you about a week to decide, Jay, because this time, there are conditions. You have to come to me wearing the clothes I got for you. I want to fuck you with the lights on so we can both watch me take them off of you while you tell Daddy how sorry you are for trying to screw him before you fuck him.”
▪▫▪▫▪▫▪
Nicholas left to take care of himself after that, leaving her leaning against the counter. The image of her, undone and completely at his mercy, would get him through many nights to come, he thought. That cry she made whenever she was losing her mind—there was nothing like it.
When he came back into the room, Jay had refastened her blouse to her throat and tucked it into her skirt, and she looked just as buttoned-up and untouchable as she always did, only her face was now suffused with color and her hair was tangled where he'd grabbed it.
One day, he was going to take her out in a tight little dress. Something cut low enough to make other people wish it was lower still. She wouldn't want to wear it but he thought he could probably persuade her into it. The thought of having her on his arm at a club, a little tipsy, a little loose, made him hard. It would be worth waiting for her to sober up before fucking her.
“You covered it up.” Nicholas plucked at her collar. “I wanted to look at it.”
“Get used to disappointment.”
The lines of her body seemed to grow more pronounced as he turned towards her, which sent something twisting in his gut that had little to do with arousal at all. He put an arm around her, pressing her to him in a light embrace that was very different from the way he'd held her before.
“You never disappoint me.”
Jay glanced up at him distrustfully.
“Thank you for the cake. I liked the soup, too.”
“Is this your way of asking me to cook for you?”
“No.” He blinked, surprised. “I wouldn't ask you to cook for me. You're not—” Here for that, he nearly said, which had the same implications he was trying to avoid.
“A servant?” Jay supplied for him, somewhat ironically.
“I wasn't going to say that.” He released her, slinging on his coat. “But thank you for reminding me. This place is a mess. I need to put out an ad for a new housekeeper.”
“A new one? What happened to Carmela?”
“I fired her,” said Nicholas. “Ready to leave?”
Jay clutched her bag. “Why did you fire her? I thought you liked her.”
“It's about the job. She overstepped.” Nicholas drew a finger down his cheek in thought. “I'd prefer to go with someone a little more open-minded.”
The color fled from her face. “You fired her because of me?”
“Such a bleeding heart. Would it bother you, if I had? That was part of it—I have no use for someone who is unable to keep their thoughts about my house guests to themselves.”
“Oh,” said Jay, looking down at her hands.
Once he had dropped her off at the Starbucks, the whole day seemed to go downhill. Annica was a drudge who did what he told her to, but nothing more. Nicholas had the feeling that she resented any extra work he gave her, though she was careful never to express this to him.
He didn't particularly relish her company. Their meetings were usually silent, unless he was talking, and then she took notes. In emails, she was brief as possible, and as soon as her shift was over, she was already racing out the door. It felt . . . vaguely dismissive. Malicious compliance.
Jon and Renata gave him constant updates about the case. The lawyers were parsing through his documents, scouring his phone records and his emails for any traces of inappropriate conduct with his former assistant. It made him angry, which made him feel tired—he wanted all of this to be over, and even though he knew it would be, right now, he could see no end in sight.
The stress of his father's lawsuits were what had ultimately led to his father's fatal heart attack and while there was nothing wrong with his, Nicholas could sometimes feel the looming specter of his own dread as if it were a physical presence gripping him by the throat.
He had so much more to lose than his father did.
Jon was painfully blunt about his circumstances. Statistically speaking, he said, accusations of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct were rarely fake, and the defense would have to be constructed carefully and in such a way that it didn't demean or trivialize the very real pain of men and women who suffered at the hands of their abusers every day.
“In other words,” he said bluntly, “it's going to be hard to call her a liar.”
Nicholas pressed a hand to his head. “What am I supposed to call her then? Her name?”
“Quite frankly, unless something shows up to miraculously exonerate you, she has you by the balls,” Jon confided to him. “It doesn't help that you're white and privileged and in a position of power. You're precisely the type of person that people feel comfortable hating, and pitting you against a crying woman who is only 5'4” and maybe one-twenty pounds soaking wet isn't exactly going to inspire feelings of sympathy from a jury.”
“Who said anything about a jury?” Nicholas asked. “I didn't think this was going to trial.”
“I'm just telling you, you should mentally prepare yourself for the worst possible outcome, whether you did it or not,” he added, anticipating his usual protest. “If you fight this, you might very well wish you had decided to settle instead, because I can guarantee you that there will almost certainly be tears and they're going to make you look like a cold-blooded abuser.”
“If I settle, I look guilty,” said Nicholas, “and the company looks negligent.”
“And if you lose, you go to jail and you still look guilty and you won't have a job.”
Nicholas grabbed his coat and punched his arms into the sleeves. “I didn't realize I was paying you four hundred dollars an hour to make me feel like shit.”
He left without saying goodbye, seething the whole walk back to the office.
A few days later, a meeting popped up that Annica had scheduled with Renata, which made him wonder if he'd been fired as a client. Maybe Jon had gotten tired of putting up with him.
He did wonder what Annica was making of all of this and if she suspected anything was wrong with all of his recent meetings with legal. He supposed he should be grateful for her taciturn nature. Even if she wasn't friendly, at least she wouldn't be tempted to gossip.
Nicholas walked to Renata's office and felt Jay's eyes on him. It had been several days since he'd fingered her in his kitchen and she still hadn't come to his bed. He had hoped the promise of freedom might be motivation enough but it seemed as if she was so put off by him that not even the princely sum of five million dollars could make her willing. If she had any inkling of his current situation, she'd never want anything to do with him again.
He still remembered her desperate words—let me go.
He closed the lawyer's door behind him. By this time, the smell of stale coffee and pungent markers was getting too familiar for comfort. “Yes?” he said, already braced for the worst.
Renata had a stack of papers on her desk and a sour look on her face. They looked like the script of a play: lots of colons, all of it printed out in what looked like old typewriter font. Some of the lines were highlighted. She stabbed at one of them with a manicured nail.
“I found something troubling during discovery,” she said, without greeting. “It's not exactly relevant, but could prove problematic down the road. These are from your phone records. Read the transcripts, starting
with Come down to the pool.”
Nicholas pushed the file away, feeling his face heat. He couldn't remember the last time anyone had made him blush—not since he was a teenager, probably. “I know what it says. I was there. Why is this relevant? That isn't Crystal's number.”
Renata slid the papers back at him. “No. It's the phone number of another employee we have on the roster here. Who was also your assistant.” She glanced at him, her eyes flashing under the lights. She thinks this is sick, he realized, recognizing that look on her face for what it was. “If the prosecution finds out about this . . . they will skewer you.”
“HR already transferred her,” he heard himself say calmly. “She no longer reports to me.”
“According to these timestamps, you were seeing her while you had a reporting relationship.” He noticed that she didn't even say Jay's name, almost as if she couldn't bring herself to. “Let me tell you something, Nicholas. This looks really, really bad—for you, and for us. And worse, it establishes a pattern of behavior and not just a one-off.” She folded her arms. “I suggest you show this to the lawyer I assume you have and construct a solid defense for yourself because if this takes off the ground, we're going to be so busy doing damage control that you may find yourself being forced to resign.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
2017
▪▫▪▫▪▫▪
Forced to resign.
The words had the finality of a death knell—which they were, essentially. The death of his career.
It wasn't as if he really needed the money. His father had left him everything, and there was even more tied up in assets. Everything that's left, he corrected himself, because some of those assets, like the Rolexes and the scotch, had been destroyed. But there was still plenty left to sell.
Yes, if he wanted to, he could have flipped Beaucroft Assets the middle finger, sold the house and the company to one of a dozen prominently enterprising developers in the area, and fucked off to the Bahamas, retiring at the ripe old age of twenty-seven. He'd thought about it but didn't really want to do that. Once he had started, he found out that he actually enjoyed working. It made him feel as if he had some intrinsic value beyond the numbers in his accounts.
He emailed Jon when he got back to his desk requesting another meeting. Jon and Renata had been working together on this case so it was highly likely that he knew about these damning transcripts and had some thoughts on them already. Jon would probably advise him, again, to settle. He had been doing that more and more, lately, giving the impression that he didn't think Nicholas had a chance. “It would be highly detrimental to your case to have you on the stand,” he'd told him at the last meeting. “You're intimidating and unlikable.”
So what the fuck was he supposed to do then? Just give up and let his reputation be ruined?
On the car ride home, he found himself looking over at Jay, sitting beside him in the car. Sedate. Thoughtful. Likable. Everything he wasn't. If she were on the stand, she could win over any jury, but Nicholas had a hard time imagining that she'd ever done a bad thing in her life. What he had leveraged against her seemed unfathomably petty in comparison to his own alleged crimes and the irony of being in a similar set of circumstances to those he had put her in eight years ago wasn't lost on him: now he, too, would have to choose between pride and reputation.
Sometimes, he found himself replaying that moment over and over, remembering the pleasure he had derived from Jay's horror. She had been ready to cry and it had gotten him hard, because he had been so fucking furious that she wouldn't love him the way that he wanted to be loved that her humiliation, and her embarrassment, had brought him instant gratification. He had wanted to hurt her and so he had, because he was good at hurting people and she was very easy to hurt, because she had always worn that ragged little heart of hers on her sleeve.
This time, there was no excuse for what he had done, except selfishness: he had wanted to see her again and knowing that she would never come to him willingly, he had resorted to the same blend of intimidation and trickery to make her return to Hollybrook—and his bed.
And, just like before, this time it was him who had been caught.
And her, who had been devastated.
Jay turned her head, looking at him. “What is it?” she asked warily, tugging her skirt down her knees.
“I'm stopping somewhere for dinner. Do you have a preference?”
“Oh. How about Japanese?” she suggested. “I could go for pickled plum.”
“You can have whatever you want. Just remind me before I go in.”
“Aren't I coming with you?”
“I thought you didn't like coming in.”
“Yeah,” she said. “When I'm crying.”
“Okay,” he said impassively. “Then come in with me.”
It was late when they finally arrived home. The line had been long. Most of the patrons were kids from the public high school holding some kind of fundraising event. He'd casually looped an arm around Jay's waist when he noticed an older man sitting in the corner nearly breaking his neck trying to get a look at her, feeling satisfied when the man looked away.
At the table, Nicholas watched her break the wooden chopsticks and begin mashing up the wasabi paste into a packet of soy sauce with fidgety deliberation before dipping her rolls into the gloppy mess. “I know it's not traditional,” she said, catching his eye. “But I like it.”
She hadn't been able to decide between pickled plum, pickled daikon, or avocado and mango, so he'd gotten her all three, in spite of her protests. Sitting with that comically large pile of rolls in front of her, she looked like a grim-faced tactician sitting before a strategy board. Nicholas felt his mouth beginning to curl and turned his attention to his own mixed tempura.
“I'm not judging you.”
“That's something I don't get,” said Jay. “You have enough money that you could literally eat anywhere. Why do you only seem to go to small diners? Why not somewhere fancy?”
“My father's ex-colleagues move in those circles,” said Nicholas. “I don't care for it.”
“Are they mean to you?”
“Mean to me?” Nicholas repeated, with a laugh. “They can't wait to suck my cock.”
“Wow,” said Jay. “Homophobic.”
“Some of them are women. Cock-sucking is an equal opportunity undertaking. If you want me to take you out somewhere nice, I can send my dinner jacket out to be drycleaned.”
“I wasn't angling for an invitation,” said Jay. “Do you actually own a dinner jacket?”
“I do.” At the look on her face, he allowed himself a smile. “I look good in it.”
Jay shook her head. “I think I'd rather eat egg foo young out of a box than talk to your father's friends. That was the one thing I missed about L.A. while I was in San Francisco. Asian cuisine is so much better down here. Fancy sushi. Good Chinese food. Korean barbecue. Oh—and the Mexican food is so good. I love the Mission so, so much, but I love the food in L.A.”
“I'm glad you're enjoying yourself,” he said, which made her look at him strangely.
“Hollybrook needs improvement. It's still too white. Everything you have here still tastes like it was bought at a strip mall. People here think Italian food is exotic.”
“Spoken like someone who's never been to the wild forests of Rome.”
“Oh, and you have?”
“No.” He smiled. “There aren't any wild forests in Rome. I almost went there.”
“When?” she asked. “I don't remember that being on the table.”
“In college. But it seemed like too much effort to learn another tongue.”
“So you never made it to the French Riviera.”
“I've never been to France.”
Jay set down her roll. “You speak French.”
“Je suis en train d'oublier tout ce que j'ai appris.”
“Nager dans la chatte,” she said coolly.
If he were a different sort of man, he might ha
ve blushed. “No, actually.”
“Really,” she said skeptically. “Not at all?”
“Not much,” he amended. “But not abroad. Mostly in L.A.”
“Why L.A.?”
“Because it's anonymous and it was easy to find what I thought I wanted.”
Jay pulled a strip of radish out of one of the rolls with a chopstick. “Which was?”
“Control,” he said deliberately. “And someone willing to give it to me.”
“Any girlfriends?”
“I don't date.”
“Sounds lonely.”
Lonely. He watched her eat, and then his eyes drifted lower to the bites he'd left on her neck. She'd covered them at the office with a high-necked sweater, but now, with the sweater draped around her chair, he could see the faint bruising every time her hair drifted to one side. “Maybe a little,” he conceded. “Did you ever travel?”
“No,” she said, surprised, and a little defensive. “I couldn't afford to.”
“I should take you somewhere. Spread your wings a little.” Nicholas leaned back in his chair. “We could drive up to downtown L.A. or spend the whole day at a beach.”
“As part of the debt?”
“Because I enjoy your company.”
Jay stared at her rolls. “It feels like you're trying to bribe me. What do you really want?”
“A smile would be nice.”
Jay stiffened. “Why?”
“Because you're beautiful when you do,” Nicholas said, which made her fingers close tightly around her chopsticks. “And I'm tired of seeing you unhappy.”
“I'm so sorry my unhappiness is such an inconvenience to you.”
“What do you want?” he asked. “Do you want me to let you go? I'll put you on a plane right now. Wherever you want.” He picked up his phone. “Name the place.”
That gave her pause. “N-now? But I . . . I'm not packed. My job—the debt—you—”
Quid Pro Quo: A dark stepbrother romance Page 44