The Other Man (Rose Gold Book 1)

by Nicole French

  Nina blinked, her eyes bright despite the shadows we stood under. “Y-yes. I’ll see you soon.”

  Neither of us moved. I didn’t even bother to hide my smile. Nina liked looking at me. Well, I was pretty fond of looking at her too.

  “I like you like this,” I said, tugging on one crooked strand of hair.

  Nina picked it up distastefully. “I look like a beggar.”

  “You look like an angel.”

  Her eyes glowed. “Matthew…”

  I let the strand go with one last tug. “You, ah, going to go?” I asked with a smirk.

  Nina grinned. “I—yes. Okay. Goodbye, Matthew.”

  And like she was physically tearing herself off the sidewalk, she finally managed to cross the street, looking back over her shoulder every few steps, like she was making sure I was still there. It wasn’t until she finally disappeared into her building that I started to walk.

  But when I got to the end of the block, I turned right. Then right again. Then right again until I was right back under the scaffolding, staring at the revolving brass doors of Nina’s building for another solid hour despite the fact that I had plenty else to do.

  I just had the feeling that this was where I needed to be.

  Sunday turned to Monday. Monday turned to Tuesday. Then Wednesday, Thursday. And at least once a day, I made my way to the Upper East Side, to that spot under the scaffolding, and watched the front of Nina’s building like it was going to tell me something.

  Tuesdays and Thursdays she met with her trainer, who came to the apartment. Most afternoons she had some sort of charity board meeting—I caught her once on her way to that. We texted back and forth a few more times, but she continued to put me off about dinner, lunch, whatever else I proposed. She was feeling cagey after the weekend. I started to think that maybe I had gone a little too far.

  I was pathetic. I knew it.

  But like any junkie, I couldn’t stop.

  On Friday, I walked out of the NYPD headquarters feeling pretty good about myself. My boss and I had had an excellent meeting with the Chief of Department, and she was on board for the operation at the Met in less than a month. The trap was set. There was no going back now. With a lot of luck (and a leak-proof team), John Carson would take the bait.

  I was starting to think we might actually pull this thing off.

  My job now was to work with Derek and his team to fulfill the burden of proof so we could indict upon arrest. I needed to get back to Brooklyn, continue going through the mountain of records I’d pulled from Jude Letour’s company, and send Derek back to The Hole to watch that safe house until the raid on Roscoe’s apartment Monday.

  Instead, I caught the 6 train in the opposite direction, then hailed a cab right after getting off on East Eighty-Sixth Street.

  “Ninety-Second and Lex,” I instructed the cabbie.

  The cab driver, a big Slavic guy named Alexei, frowned at me through the rearview mirror. “It’s six blocks,” he said in a thick Russian accent. “You want to walk?”

  Outside, the late afternoon sun was still shining. It would be a killer day for a walk…except I didn’t want to be seen.

  I leveled my gaze at him through the plexiglass. “Go up Park, hook a right on Ninety-Third, then go down Lex and pull over on the east side of the street.”

  The driver snuffed, but drove as ordered.

  In my pocket, my phone buzzed with a message from Nina. It was a meme of a man sleeping in bed with a giant foot.

  Doll: How’s your fetish now?

  I chuckled. She really couldn’t let that one go. I wouldn’t get another dinner out of her, but foot memes? Every single day.

  Me: Insatiable. You really started a problem for me here.

  Doll: I’m so sorry to hear that. Anything I can do to help?

  Me: Maybe I should have invited you for pedicures instead of lunch today.

  I waited a while, but there was no answer. I frowned at my phone. Not even an ellipsis. Those fucking dots were the worst things ever invented, but at least they told me Nina was responding.

  Nothing. Niente.

  Me: On your way to class?

  Fridays, she had told me, were SinCycle days. Some crazy form of rich-lady exercise where Nina paid something like forty dollars a class to sit on stationary bikes in the dark in a room with fifty other women while they listened to techno and the instructor wore glow-in-the-dark Spandex. At least, that was the impression I got based on her description.

  “Want me to get you some molly for class?” I joked when she told me about it earlier that week. “Derek could nick some from the evidence locker.”

  “Darling, if I wanted that, do you really think I would need you?” she had replied sweetly. “Don’t you know anything about the rich? We love our contraband.”

  Both of us ignored the little pet name. Or, you know, tried to.

  I peered at my phone, then back at the doors. This was odd. Usually she went to her class in the mornings, not the afternoons. And I happened to know she didn’t have any meetings scheduled today.

  “Are we going?” asked the driver, itching to move.

  I scowled. I didn’t know what his problem was—I was paying for him to just sit here. He didn’t even have to maneuver through traffic.

  “Just a bit longer,” I said, still watching the door.

  And then, finally, like I had willed her into being, she appeared.

  She was as immaculate as ever in a pair of white pants that made her legs look impossibly long, a thin white sweater that hugged every slender curve, and a tawny leather jacket the color of honey. She pushed on a pair of oversized sunglasses, looking exactly like the socialite she was. With a slash of red across her lips—her rebellion. Like she was doing it for me, even when I wasn’t there.

  Except I was.

  I couldn’t help it. I had to say something.

  Me: Mirror, mirror, on the wall…

  I watched as she looked at her phone. A whisper of a smile played over her face, and her reply was instantaneous.

  Doll: Doing some fairy-tale reading?

  Me: Courtesy of Sofia. She’s been asking the mirror in the bathroom all day, but it only tells her one thing. I’ll give you three guesses who.

  The smile widened. My chest ached. Would she think I was crazy if I got out of the car now and shouted her name? I wanted to keep teasing her until that smile turned into a laugh. I wanted to hear it when it happened.

  I really was going crazy.

  Me: Seriously, though. Dinner tonight? An Affair to Remember is playing at the Film Forum. I have a deposition in midtown, so I’ll be in the neighborhood…

  Lies. Total fuckin’ lies. My work here was done for the day.

  Hey. I told you I wasn’t a good guy.

  I watched as Nina checked her phone again. She smiled briefly, then typed a message. A moment later, my phone buzzed.

  Doll: I wish I could, but I have plans.

  Fuck. Plans. I was really starting to hate that word. But just when I was about to ask her what could be more important than Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in a movie that could not be more picture fucking perfect for Nina and me to see together, another person emerged from the brick building to stand beside Nina.

  A man.

  Approximately three inches shorter than the blonde goddess I was following.

  Shaped roughly like a wheel of gouda.

  Her husband. Calvin fucking Gardner.

  I pressed the button of my window, but it didn’t move. I slammed my hand on it.

  “Yo!” I snapped at the cabbie. “Lower the window, will you?”

  “You won’t hear nothing,” he argued back, but eventually did what I said.

  He was right, of course. I couldn’t completely hear the conversation taking place across the street. But as the traffic ebbed and flowed down Lexington, which wasn’t the busiest of streets in the area, bits and pieces floated into earshot. I pulled down the brim of my hat while I watched and listened. />
  “I’m sorry, Nina. I just—”

  “You can’t be serious. Calvin, we are Tier 1 sponsors—”

  “—business, not pleasure. I don’t have time for—”

  “If we don’t show…terrible.”

  Another drove of cars crossed in front of us, to the point where I could only see the tops of their heads as they argued there on the street. Well, as much as people like Nina ever argued. When the cars passed, I flared as Calvin grabbed her wrist and pulled her close, and I watched curiously as she turned her head to the side. Was that a struggle I imagined? Or was she accepting it? I was honestly too far away to tell.

  He smashed his mouth onto hers. Nina barely moved. It was wrong. So fuckin’ unnatural. Kissing her husband should have been routine, but she was about as responsive as one of the columns behind her. So different than the responsive, pliant woman I had intimate knowledge of myself.

  I turned away as my stomach turned too.

  She had kissed me before. Slept in my arms only last week. And now she was kissing him. Her husband. As she should, I reminded myself.

  Fuck.

  My stomach felt like it had been punched through.

  Fuck this friendship.

  Fuck this nonsense.

  “Go,” I snapped at the driver. “Get going.”

  “Where?” he asked. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Anywhere but here.”

  Nina and Calvin broke apart at the sudden shriek of the wheels on the pavement. I leaned forward and put my head in my hands, begging the nausea to die down.

  “Where we going, chief?” asked the cabbie.

  I looked up. Fuck. Yeah, I wasn’t paying for an entire cab ride to Brooklyn. I’d already run enough on this guy’s meter sitting there like a fool. I needed to get back to my office. To my life.

  “Closest subway stop,” I said.

  He pulled over a few blocks later, and I got out, gulping the air that still seemed stale. I needed to get out of the Upper East Side. I needed to delete Nina’s number and pretend this broad never existed.

  But as I pulled out my phone to do just that, I found another message waiting for me.

  Doll: Plans fell through. I don’t suppose you would like to accompany me to the opera instead of dinner?

  I stared at the message for a long time, while two trains roared through the grate beneath my feet.

  I should say no.

  I should do what I had intended to do in the first place.

  Say goodbye to Nina Astor de Vries…Gardner.

  Go back to being a half-sane man again.

  Get on with my fucking life.

  Instead, I punched in a very different message.

  Matthew: Send me the time and place. I’ll see you there.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I hated bow ties. Absolutely fuckin’ over-the-top loathed the things. Regular ties, I could handle. I even knew a few different knots. But these things were made for people with fingers the size of pencils. They were impossible.

  “Fucking fuck!” I yanked at the black silk strip after screwing it up for the fourth time and scowled at myself in the mirror. I was never going to get this piece of shit right.

  “Zio!”

  I glared in the direction of Frankie’s and Sofia’s rooms. I should have closed my door as I finished getting ready for my date with Nina—I couldn’t think of it as anything else—but I was already running late.

  “On account!” I shouted. “I’ll stop at an ATM on my way back.”

  Frankie appeared in the door with a raised brow. “Dang, big brother. You clean up nice. And where are we going so fancified?”

  I took a deep breath and started folding the strips of silk around each other. “Opening night at the opera. Penguin suit required.”

  Her gaze landed on the top of my head as she crept in. “No hat?”

  Gingerly, I reached up to touch my uncovered hair, which I’d combed through with an extra bit of pomade to make it shine. “It’s not formal. No hat required. Can you fix this, though? My fingers are too fuckin’ big for these things.”

  Frankie came around to my front and started retying the bow tie with quick, efficient motions.

  “How’d you get so good at this?” I wondered.

  I never doubted that she could do it—these were the sorts of life skills that our grandparents would have passed on to us, despite the fact that I had only ever seen Nonno wear a tuxedo at a couple of weddings. But her proficiency went a little beyond what a thirteen-year-old girl might learn from her grandpa.

  “Xavier had me do it.” Frankie’s eyes didn’t stray from her work. “For his events.”

  I quieted. Frankie didn’t mention Sofia’s dad much. I had only met Xavier Parker once or twice when they were dating. He wasn’t local, just some rich British guy who did business in New York every so often, then disappeared entirely when Sofia showed up. Never met the family. Never even met his daughter. Scumbag, through and through.

  It was too bad, really. Frankie deserved better.

  She nodded with satisfaction as she tugged the sides of the bow out through the loop. “Perfect, even if you still look like a wise guy with that flower.”

  I glanced down at the rose I’d pinned to the lapel on a whim. “A classic’s a classic.”

  “Only if you’re about to order a hit.”

  “Maybe I am,” I joked, though I won’t lie. Calvin Gardner’s face did flash through my mind when I said it.

  Frankie snorted. “Turn around, capo. Your collar is crooked.”

  I turned toward the mirror so she could flip the stiff fabric over the bow tie.

  “There,” Frankie said once she was finished. “All better.”

  But her hands rested on my shoulders, and I found her examining my reflection in the mirror.

  “Spit it out, Frankie.”

  She rubbed her chin. “This is all for Nina?”

  “Her husband bailed on this big opening at Lincoln Center. They’re major donors, apparently, so she needed an escort last minute.” I shrugged. “It’s just a favor.”

  Frankie didn’t seem convinced. “Mattie, I…” She tapped her lip. “Don’t hate me. But I don’t think you should go.”

  I turned back around to face her. “It’s opera, Fran, not the prom.”

  “I don’t mean that. I just don’t think you should keep being ‘friends’ with this one. I see the look on your face. All week you’ve been gazing off into space. I know you’re thinking of her.”

  I frowned. “Frankie, how many times do I have to say it? Nina and I are just friends.”

  “Because friends go to the opera together.”

  “They could.”

  “And friends wear tuxedos and opera gowns when they hang out.”

  I shrugged. “If the occasion calls for it.”

  “Hey.” She tugged on my lapel. “I’m just saying it because I care. And because I’ve…” She glanced back toward Sofia’s closed door. “I’ve been there.”

  That I didn’t know. “Xavier was married?”

  “Engaged, actually. But still.”

  “That’s why he left?”

  She nodded sadly. “Being the other woman—well, in your case, the other man—it never ends well, Mattie. She’s going to break your heart. Just like he broke mine.”

  Anger flowered in my chest at the idea of any man treating my sister that way. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it now. Instead, I opened my mouth to say that I knew what I was doing. That things were totally innocent between me and Nina. That we really were purely platonic.

  But on the other side of the room, the edge of my Navy Cross gleamed. And I saw Nina sitting on my bed, me at her feet. Worshipping her. What little of herself she had offered.

  I couldn’t lie to my sister. Not when I couldn’t even manage to lie to myself.

  “It’s just one night out,” I said, turning back to the mirror. “A show and then home.”

  Frankie sighed. �
��Big brother, you are incorrigible, you know that?”

  I bared my teeth. “So I’ve been told.”

  By the time I found my way to the topside of Lincoln Center, it was less than ten minutes to curtain, and the place was crawling with New York’s elite. Every elite but Nina, who was nowhere to be seen.

  Meet me by the fountain, she had texted. One of the city’s universal meeting spots, home to a thousand movie kisses. Suddenly, I was a character right out of Moonstruck. Nicholas Cage begging Cher for just one night. I would have liked that movie more if both actors had actually been Italian. Cher might have won an Oscar, but I still thought she sounded like she was doing a bad De Niro impression. Still, I’d lost count how many times my sisters and I had watched the scene where she slaps her lover across the face. “Snap out of it!” they’d all cry in unison. Maybe someone needed to do that to me right now.

  “Matthew?”

  I turned to find Nina, the spray of the fountain arching behind her like halos. She was wrapped in the biggest fur coat I had ever seen, folds of white mink protecting her slim body against the chilly night. Her blonde hair was pulled back in an elegant twist that revealed her graceful neck and the row of tasteful diamonds at its base. Two others gleamed from her ears, but beyond the slash of red she wore on her mouth, there was no other glitz about her.

  She was cool and classic. An old-school beauty.

  “Wow,” I said. “Nina, you look incredible. As always.”

  She smiled shyly. “You look lovely too. I’m so sorry, I hadn’t thought to ask if you had a tux. I see you found one to rent?”

  “Ah, no. It’s mine.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to be offended at the assumption that I didn’t have my own tux. Honestly, I didn’t know many people who did. I had bought this one years ago for the mayor’s inauguration ball. Hadn’t worn it since, but still.