“You all right there, beautiful?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes, I—I just thought…”
I cocked my head. “You thought what?”
She blinked, looking a bit embarrassed. “I thought you were going to kiss me.”
I knew it.
I shrugged. “I thought about it. But I figured I’d be a gentleman and wait until you asked.”
At that, amusement danced over her glossy features. “A gentleman from the Bronx,” she murmured.
Her. It was always her.
But Nina Astor was a damn mirage, to the point where I wondered if she had been real at all.
Two months after the night that changed my life, I was searching for a ghost.
It was time to accept it.
Nina Astor didn’t exist.
The rain was really starting to rap on the brim of my hat by the time I reached Jane and Eric’s brownstone on West Seventy-Sixth Street. I pressed the buzzer and faced the security camera. It took a few minutes—Eric and Jane had a team set up downstairs to vet any visitors. A few minutes later, the door buzzed open.
“Hey, Tony.”
The security head nodded at me as I jogged up to the fourth floor. The whole place was a giant construction mess. Eric had recently bought out the building and was having it restored to a regular house for the two of them. I sniffed. Some house. It made my little brick place in Red Hook look like a fuckin’ storage shed.
Two minutes later, Eric opened the door, clearly just off work himself in the remains of another impeccably tailored suit. Takes one to know one, I suppose. Just because I was a civil servant didn’t mean I had to look like one. But there was a big difference. I bought my Armani threads from my sister’s secondhand shop uptown. Eric probably had his made custom, brand fuckin’ new.
Still, he wasn’t flashy the way you’d expect someone worth several billion dollars to be. As far as I knew, he had worked hard to hide the fact for a long time. I’d heard the stories, of course, of how Eric de Vries had walked away from his birthright. Gone to law school, like me. Started his own firm in Boston, only to be lured back to New York to save his family’s fortune. But I could have saved the guy a decade and told him he wasn’t ever going to be anything other than the head of a powerful family. Money has a funny way of weaving into people’s DNA. You can’t hide that kind of breeding.
“Hey,” I said as I followed Eric inside. “I was on my way uptown and thought I would drop in. I, uh, have some news.”
“That so?” Eric shook my hand. “Need a glass of wine to tell it?”
“It is after five o’clock.” I nodded toward the couch where Jane was sitting. “Hey, Jane.”
Eric went to get us all drinks in the kitchen without another word. I’d been here enough to where my unannounced visits weren’t much of a surprise anymore. For the same reason that Leona and I usually spoke in veiled terms, I made these updates in person.
Jane got up from the couch to greet me after I took off my trench coat and hung it with my hat.
“Hey, you,” she said. “Been a minute.”
“You’re looking good,” I told her honestly.
And it was true. When Eric had brought Jane home from Korea, she’d been completely traumatized, much too thin and ghostly. Now the color in her cheeks had returned, along with her trademark cat-eye glasses and penchant for needling her husband. We had the latter in common. I didn’t linger as she gave me a kiss on the cheek—as much fun as it was to rile Eric, I knew all too well how protective he could be over his wife’s affections. It was only last Thanksgiving that he had tried to clock me over the turkey for offering her a hug.
That, thankfully, seemed to be firmly in the past as Eric joined Jane and me by the flickering fire, delivering us both red wine while he stayed with vodka.
“Damn.” I wasn’t well-versed in French wines, generally preferring Italian, but I knew Eric only bought the best. “This is why I really come here. What is this, a Margaux?”
Eric nodded, though Jane shrugged.
I chuckled. “You don’t know?” I asked her.
“This one has the fancy tastes. I’d probably just bring home Three-Buck Chuck every night, but Eric thinks he’s allergic to it.”
I grimaced at the idea. I didn’t have the cash to drink one of the best wines in the world like house grog, but I was with Eric on this one. I appreciated the life people like the de Vrieses led. The perfectly tailored clothes. The spacious, yet comfortable home. The best food. The best wine. The best of everything.
“Nice work if you can get it,” as they say. And if you can, why the fuck not?
“I just don’t see the point of drinking garbage,” Eric was saying while he played with his wife’s dark hair.
“Why, my dear Rockefeller,” Jane teased. “What a charmingly privileged thing to say. Leave the swill to the slums, is that right?”
In a split second, Eric’s expression went from casually opaque to completely transparent. I’d seen it before. It was their ongoing act—Jane would say things that would purposefully get under Eric’s skin until his implacable facade broke. And when it did, she obviously relished the consequences.
The hand in Jane’s hair tightened, and the atmosphere in the room crackled. Eric growled something in his wife’s ear that made her turn just a few shades lighter red than the wine in her glass. He looked just as fierce as ever, but it was clear by her expression that whatever threat he’d just made was something Jane was more than happy to receive.
I shifted in my seat. Fuck, maybe I’d blown Caitlyn off too early. I could call her now. Meet up at a hotel on the East Side. Anything to scratch that goddamn itch.
And yet, I also knew that whatever charge had just passed between them wasn’t just about sex. I knew it because for one night, I had felt it too. Something happens when two souls join the same way bodies do. Nina Astor and I had given each other everything we had that night. For the first and only time in my life, I’d been completely naked with a woman and allowed her to do the same to me.
I’d been cut open. And so fucking deep.
Do you believe in love at first sight?
Not until I saw you.
There was no going back after that. Unfortunately, it also meant nothing else could replace it once it was lost.
I shook my head. I’d already been down that rabbit hole too many times today alone. Right now, I needed to focus on the two very real people in this room who needed my help.
“So, what’s up?” Eric pulled me out of my daydream. “What’s the news?”
And into something worse.
“Well, I’m afraid it’s not very good. I got a call from my friend at the CIA. They, um, are declining to prosecute. They won’t be sending anything to the DOJ.”
“What?”
Eric exploded off the couch, nearly tossing Jane to the floor. She barely saved her wineglass, but looked too crestfallen to reply.
“What the fuck happened?” Eric demanded. “We practically gift-wrapped that indictment for them!”
I waited while he continued to spout. Jane’s normal air of mischief had completely shuttered while she toyed with her wedding rings, still loose around her fingers.
“Look,” I said once Eric had calmed down. “We’ve talked about this. You know as well as I do that the current administration is basically in Carson’s pockets. A pardon was always a possibility. Now it’s just…a reality, I guess. Unless he’s prosecuted here. At the state level.”
“We should take it to the press,” Eric said. “I’ll give an interview to the Times. Try his ass in the court of public opinion. Isn’t that how they got that campaign manager indicted in 2017? Where’s the fucking accountability?”
“I’d wait on that for a minute,” I said. “There’s another way to go. One that won’t give away your hand.”
“Like murder?” Eric muttered.
Jane elbowed him in the ribs.
To be honest, I couldn’t really blame Eric fo
r the joke. If it had been the love of my life targeted in this way (Nina’s face again appeared in the back of my mind), I’d have probably taken my Marine-issued Beretta to the streets a long time ago.
“Kidding,” Eric said with a long drink of his vodka. “Sort of.”
“Look, maybe the feds aren’t prosecuting, but the Brooklyn DA sure as hell is,” I continued.
I proceeded to outline—vaguely—how my boss intended to pick off the people surrounding John Carson, mafia-style. The Brooklyn DA’s office had been going after New York’s worst gangsters for over a hundred years. We had a process. You go after the small fish first. You cut off the whale’s food supply. And then, when he comes down to find out where his chow went, you swoop in with the net.
Maybe Carson could buy off the feds, but he didn’t have any leverage with my boss or me. We just needed the right crime. The right confession. The right jurisdiction.
I didn’t mention the file that Tiana had sent this afternoon. I wasn’t really supposed to be discussing the details with them anyway; I only wanted to give them a little peace of mind when I could. They deserved at least that much.
Eric, though, had his own ideas. Stage a secret meeting of their so-called “society.” Lure the whale into the net instead of waiting for him to swim buy.
Jane wasn’t having it.
“No,” she snapped. “He’ll know what you’re doing. He’s thought one step ahead of you this whole time. Eric, he will know.”
Eric just stared at her, clearly getting his argument together. I wasn’t sure where I stood.
On the one hand, I was plenty interested in investigating the Janus society. From the outside, it sounded like a rich-boys’ club that also sounded an awful lot like the mafia. Its members met in defunct graveyards, smuggled booze and other goods, and in general took pleasure in fucking with regular people. If Eric wanted to give me the goods, I wouldn’t argue. Especially since getting a list of members wouldn’t just help the case—it would probably make my career.
On the other hand, I understood Jane’s trepidation. It wasn’t the safest plan when both she and Eric had already been abducted by these assholes.
Before he could answer, however, the buzzer announced another visitor.
“We’re not done,” Eric said on his way to the call button. “Yeah?”
“Mrs. Gardner is here.” Tony’s voice vibrated through the fuzzy speaker.
“Oh? Sure, send her up.” Eric unlocked the door. “This should only take a minute, Zola. It’s just my cousin. She’s been a huge help with all of this shit.”
I shrugged and took another sip of wine. “Fine by me.”
Heels soon clicked up the marble stairs. A second later the door swung open, and a bluster of white, blonde, and sparkle wrapped in a familiar gray coat whirled into the apartment with the force of the rainstorm outside.
“Hello, hello, I’m so sorry to interrupt your evening.” The visitor’s back was to us as she shook out her umbrella and set it by the door. “I’m a bit desperate, and I needed to see Jane immediately. I—oh!”
When she turned around, I could barely hold my glass. I couldn’t speak at all.
It was her.
The woman I’d been seeking for months.
The elegant work of art I’d been dreaming of every night since January.
She stood by the door, her large gray eyes locked with mine. She was a statue. I was a statue. Only the bit of pink at the tip of her nose and the crest of her cheekbones betrayed the fact that she was human. And that she was as surprised—or more—to see me too.
“Matthew.”
The word was so faint, it was barely audible. But hearing my name from those lips at last, I managed to find my own voice as well.
“Nina.”
Chapter Four
Nina.
Nina Astor.
Was here.
In this apartment.
Staring at me with the exact same expression she’d worn just before I kissed her for the first time. Lips partially open. Jaw dropped an inch or so. A dewy sheen over her plump bottom lip.
Kiss me, she seemed to say.
And I couldn’t. Fuckin’. Move.
“You two know each other?”
Eric’s voice knifed through the tension, and with regret, I watched Nina assume a mask I’d noticed her cousin take several times. Family trait, apparently. She smoothed her dress—a fitted white thing, conservative but for a tasteful slit above her knee—and turned to pick up a binder she had set on the entry table.
“We’ve met.” Her voice was calm as she crossed the room to stand by the couch. “Calvin made a donation to Juan Ramirez’s campaign last year. It was at the fundraiser, wasn’t it, Matthew?”
I couldn’t stop staring at her legs long enough to answer.
“Nina, wine?” Eric asked from the kitchen.
She nodded, though she didn’t look up. Not at him. And certainly not at me.
Finally, I managed to move enough muscles to swallow and clear my throat. It wasn’t easy. “Oh. Yeah, um, yes. Yes, that was probably it. Good to see you again, doll.”
I couldn’t help it. It slipped out. The seemingly harmless moniker had come as naturally with her as breathing. It was special, “doll.” The name my grandfather used for Nonna when he was still alive. The one that made her blush well into her seventies. The one that made her his.
Not everyone grows up with that kind of model for a relationship. But I did. My parents were good for fuckin’ nothing, but the two people who raised me, staunchly Catholic Italians who took on five kids in the Bronx, had been in love with each other since they were teenagers and stayed in love until my grandfather’s last breath.
“Doll,” he called her even on his deathbed, like he was about to whisk Nonna off to see Frankie Valli at the Copa. And she squeezed his frail hand and blushed and chattered at him in Italian, like they were still kids.
Fools in love until the bitter end.
Maybe I should have been more careful. But the second I met her in that goddamn bar, Nina was “doll” to me. For better or for worse.
Nina focused on her binder, but the tinge of pink on her cheeks spread. Good, I thought. At least I wasn’t the only one feeling something here.
Eric returned with Nina’s wine, and we all watched awkwardly as she took a very long drink. When about half the glass was empty, she cleared her throat.
“Ah, yes. Yes, it’s nice to see you too, Matthew.”
She looked me over for a few seconds longer than necessary. I resisted the urge to drag her out of the apartment like a fuckin’ caveman.
Nina blinked, like she had just remembered where we were, and turned. “Actually, Jane, this isn’t purely a social visit. I have a dreadful favor to ask you.”
Much to Eric’s obvious irritation, Nina took his seat on the couch beside Jane. He sat in the other chair while I remained transfixed by the way Nina’s skirt rode up her thigh. You would think it had been three years since I’d gotten laid, not three damn days. You would have thought I’d never seen a woman’s legs before tonight. All I could think about was the way her skin felt under my hands—velvety and smooth, taut and responsive. I remembered sliding my palms up those limbs, memorizing the lean curves of muscle and bone as I went. Up, up, up to the promised land waiting between them.
As I sipped on my wine, I could barely even make out the conversation. Something about a gala. An event Nina desperately needed Jane’s help with. Fancy, rich-people shit.
It only reminded me that I was the odd man out here. Eric and Nina were old money, the sort that didn’t know anything different. Jane was from more middle-class stock like me, but if this apartment was any indication, she’d taken to extreme wealth like a fish to water, shitty taste in wine aside. Being a de Vries obviously had its benefits.
That was when it hit me. De Vries. Nina was a de Vries. Eric had mentioned his only “cousin” often enough, the daughter of his aunt, his deceased father’s sister.
Nina was the other grandchild of one of the oldest families in New York, a genuine heiress to a shipping dynasty.
In other words, from a completely different world.
“De Vries. Is that your last name?”
Was it my imagination, or did she recoil?
“No,” she said emphatically. “It is not.”
I frowned. “You sure?”
Something as sharp as a knife flashed in her eyes. They might be the color of cooing doves, but they turned hawkish in a second.
“Do you think I don’t know my own name, Mr. Zola?”
Oh, she was a sly little fox, wasn’t she? Bits and pieces of our actual conversation, wine-soaked as it was, were coming back to me. I’d known even then there was a connection between Nina and the de Vrieses. And she had lied, point-blank, even while cultivating my sympathy for her plight.
“Grandmother wasn’t particularly…soft. She cared for me, of course. Not as much as my cousin, who lived with her. But she did. And then they fell out, and I was the one who stayed behind when he ran off. I took care of her and visited when she was ill.”
So. Nina was an heiress.
“And when E—when my cousin returned after years away and got married, Grandmother left him everything. Our family’s entire business. Our properties. All of it.”
Was, then. That’s right, I remembered that too. Celeste de Vries had died last November and willed the company to Eric—his reward for getting married. Huh.
Her hands moved gracefully as she paged through the files she had brought. Every so often, though, she darted a look at me I couldn’t quite read. Suspicious, maybe. Fearful? Confused? Yeah, that made two of us.
I downed the remainder of my wine, then sat back in the armchair, brooding until Jane and Eric’s bickering pulled me out of my daze.
“Nina,” Eric was saying. “Look, I get that this is a big deal, but we were kind of in the middle—”
The Other Man (Rose Gold Book 1) Page 4