: Chapter 31

His name is Greg, not Garrett…

After ending the call, I quickly type out a text, deleting it before I hit send. Why is she doing this? That she can’t even remember the arsehole’s name means she’s not going out with him. She’s probably not going out with anyone. Or is that just wishful thinking?

“Fuck!” Slamming my phone down on the table, I spin away from it because I want to smash it off the wall, and I’m not that arsehole. I mean, I am. I can be bad tempered and surly, but I’m not the kind of prick who’d smash a perfectly good phone and then insist someone lower down the food chain pop to the Apple store to pick me up a new one.

Even if I really do want to.

I should’ve known it wasn’t going to be as cut and dried as I’d told myself. I would’ve been better off letting her run wild through London and learning for herself how fucking brutal it is out there. But then, that would’ve required some kind of mental fortitude, not to mention lots of keeping my hands to myself. And where Amelia Valente is concerned, it seems I just can’t help myself.

Why am I twisting myself in knots over a woman who has no intention of hanging around longer than a few months? I should be elated, shouldn’t I? Not looking for reasons she wants to keep things casual between us.

But as I’d held her under me last night, her pulse wild against my thumb and the air between our lips, swirling and somehow elemental, I’d experienced some inexplicable shift. I didn’t mean or expect it to happen, but I suddenly knew without a doubt that I’d drifted out from a safe harbor without realizing, beyond the breakers that buffer my ordinary life. I wasn’t looking outward, and I wasn’t looking back. I was looking down, and Amelia seemed so soft-eyed and compliant, yet I asked myself how I’d ever missed the depths of her. My fathomless need of her.

“Fuck!” I slide my phone from the table, stare at it, then hurl it at the wall as hard as I can. The back ricochets off, the screen cracking like ice on a pond.

Worse, it doesn’t make me feel one fucking iota better.

But it does encourage a slow, sarcastic round of applause from behind me.

“Well done,” Beckett murmurs in that annoyingly modulate tone Englishmen of a certain age and station seem to have perfected. “I’m assuming it had offended you in some way?” His expression bland, he glances behind me at the wall. “Or perhaps it was the bearer of bad news.”

“Nothing like that,” I mutter as I trudge across the conference room to retrieve the pieces like a naughty schoolboy. “I’m just a bad-tempered arsehole today.”

By the time I turn, Beckett has pulled out a seat at the contemporary conference table. He loosens the button on his bespoke suit jacket before lowering himself to seat at the head of the table. “Only today?”

“What?”

“You’re bad tempered only today?”

“Yeah?” I feel myself frown.

“It seems to me that you’ve been out of sorts since your very capable PA left to give birth. Joanne, I think?”

“Jody.” Beckett is a stickler for details but only when they pertain to him.

“And the new girl?” He pulls a of small case from the inside pocket of his Savile Row suit, opens it, then begins to clean the lenses of a pair of rimless spectacles I know he has no intention of wearing. They’re new, according to Olivia, his wife. Also, according to her, he’s far too vain and stubborn to wear them. “What’s her name again?”

“Mimi.”

He tsks and lowers the specs to the table. “No.”

“No?”

“Mimi is the name of a Pekinese or something equally as fluffy and yappy.”

“Amelia. Her name is Amelia,” I say, dropping the broken bits of my phone to the table.

“She’s a friend of the family, I think.”

I’ve no idea how he knows. Or why he even cares. “Yeah. I was friends with her brother. He died a few years ago. What’s this about, Beckett?”

“It just strikes me that you’ve been a little distracted since she arrived.”

“Bullshit. How am I distracted? I’m here, playing good cop to your bad one. We’ve raised the capital and support we needed today, haven’t we?”

“Yes,” he agrees, “we have.”

“And I was there with leading counsel last week when we had that sit-down with the FCA.”

“You mean when we were handed our metaphoric arses by the Financial Conduct Authority?”

“Teething problems,” I insist. He waves my words away.

“Yes, that’s all fine,” he says as though I’m boring him. “But this person stood in front of me? Do sit down. I detest being looked down upon.”

With a snort, I pull out the chair to his right. “Better?” I mutter pointedly.

“Much. Thank you.”

As I lean back in my chair, I wonder how he makes that sound like get fucked. “You could be lying on your back in the gutter, and you’d still find a way to look down your nose imperiously at people.”

“Imperiously.” He mouths the word as though he’s never heard it before. I bet it’s mentioned somewhere on his birth certificate. “Obviously, I wouldn’t look that way at you.” Which is true, but only because I’ve made him a lot of money. “But the point I’m trying to make is you’re not the person you were a month ago. Even Olivia agrees.”

“I have a lot on my mind.”

“No more than usual, if you’re referring to work. This business has never been healthier. It has weathered storms and is now coming out on the other side. Your face should be wreathed in smiles, not full of dark looks.”

“Dark looks?” I scoff.

“Yes, I’m familiar with how that looks. I’ve seen the expression before.”

“On a hound?”

“In the bathroom mirror, actually.”

I start a little. My conversations with Beckett are always about business. We don’t share personal stuff. I don’t know what his angle is, which is why I say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Missing meetings—”

“One-half of a missed meeting last week.” The day I decided I’d rather watch my brother hit on Mimi than leave my office. Then Friday night, I was supposed to be on the other side of London, wining and dining investors. Instead, I blew the evening off consumed by the thought that Mimi might bang my brother. And here we are, a few days later, but instead of El or Brin, she’s going to go out on a string of dates with some of London’s finest fuckwits. And I have to be all right about it or pretend, at least. When what I want to do is carry her to my bedroom and tie her to my bed until she tells me what’s going on in her head. Until she tells me—

No, that’s ridiculous.

I don’t want her to say that she loves me.

Do I?

I’m losing the plot, I think as tension suddenly tightens my shoulders. It’s just jealousy talking. But the thing is, I don’t do jealousy. I don’t do monogamy, so how can I be jealous?

Because you want that from her. Because you’ve demanded it from her.

How did I not even realize?

“I have just the thing for that.”

“What?” I look up, suddenly self-conscious. Did I mutter some confessional?

“The thing with your shoulders.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my shoulders.”

“Nothing Kerry couldn’t work out, at any rate,” he says, reaching for a nearby newspaper. Le Figaro, a French morning paper. Slipping his hand inside his jacket, he pulls out a gold Montblanc, scribbling something in the outer margin before sliding the paper my way

“What’s this?” I stare down at the scrawled UK mobile number, glancing up. “Who’s Kerry?”

“The best you’ll ever have. One hour of absolute torture where you’ll feel like you’d sell your soul to the devil just to get those hands to stop, but by the end of the experience, you’ll feel like you can take on the world.”

“Does Olivia know you engage the services of a dominatrix?”

“Kerry is an Australian massage therapist. Not a she, but a he,” he replies witheringly. “And if I were to hire a dominatrix, Olivia would only want to watch. Actually, she’d probably supply implements.”

“Ever heard of TMI?”

“Knowing my wife, she’d probably buy some awful mediaeval torture device. Thigh-high boots, too. She’s nothing if not committed.”

I chuckle because the pair argue more than any couple I’ve ever known. But the way they look at each other is what Primrose would no doubt describe as #couplegoals

I make as though to pick up my phone to take down the number, just for the sake of politeness, when I remember what a tit I was a few minutes ago.

“Take the paper,” he says. “There’s a very interesting article in it about Sergei Asmalov’s new venture.”

“Right.” Le Figaro is a French newspaper. Beckett probably speaks fluent French. These posh public schoolboy types always do.

“But getting back to the matter in hand, I guarantee there will be more in your future.”

“Missed meetings? No there won’t. I haven’t come this far to piss it all away.”

“Shoulder problems. Tension. Bad moods. Idiotic conduct and destructive behaviors.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“The bank will be fine. It’ll weather any oncoming storms. You, on the other hand, look like a man who’s about to find out what ruin looks like.”

“I enjoy these little conversations, but I must be slow today because I literally have no idea what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying love is like an illness.”

“Love of money?” I qualify. I’m not driven by money especially, and I’m not sure I want to know what makes Beckett tick.

“Love of the heart,” he says as though speaking to an idiot. “You can only ignore the illness itself for so long. And there is only one cure.”

“Death?”

“The love of a good woman,” he enunciates. I open my mouth to protests when he cuts me off. “Or a bad one, though I recommend the former. It’s much easier on the heart and head. Though there are times when…” He seems to catch himself. “Well, never mind.”

I’m so confused. Beckett and I don’t have this sort of relationship. “Deny it all you like,” he continues. “I won’t be the one to suffer. Prolong the agony. Fight the tide, but the bastard will be waiting for you when your arms tire.”

“Swimming metaphors?”

“The best I could come up with at short notice. And what I’m about to tell you, I know you won’t repeat. I also know that if you do, Olivia will eat your liver. Which she’ll probably extract from your arsehole or some other ingeniously nefarious way.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” I say, rubbing my chin. “The mention of her in thigh-high boots was scary enough.”

“I forced Olivia to marry me.”

I chuckle. “Good one. That’s funny.” I nod my head as I consider how handling Mimi sometimes feels like juggling a bag of cats. Handling Olivia would be like juggling a bag of piranhas.

“It’s true,” he replies, amused.

“With the greatest respect,” I begin, “but fuck off. I can’t imagine anyone being able to force Olivia to do something she doesn’t want to do.”

“And you’re assuming she didn’t want to marry me?”

“Well, yeah. On account of you saying you forced her.”

“Persuaded might be a better word.”

“Blackmailed,” I say flatly.

“Not pretty but perhaps more than accurate.” Beckett tips his hand in a gesture that seems to say I couldn’t help it. “I discovered her weakness. It was her business, of course. I used it as leverage.”

I always thought Beckett had the capacity for ruthlessness. Now I know he has. Olivia made a shit ton of money when her start-up went public a few years ago. If I put myself in her shoes, faced with the prospect of losing VirTu, there isn’t much I wouldn’t have done to save it. Not for the money but because it’s your baby, your life’s work. In the early days, it’s all excitement and can do, but the next thing you know, you can’t sleep for worry, you’re graying prematurely, your dentist tells you you’re grinding your molars to dust, and your family is looking at you like you’re crazy for bothering. Meanwhile, you continue to bleed sweat and tears just to keep your dream afloat. And that’s difficult enough, but then throwing a spot of blackmail into the mix?

So yeah, I can imagine her marrying the ruthless bastard to save her company. But she’s still married to him. And I know that beneath the combative exchanges volleyed across the boardroom table, there’s a fuck-ton of heat simmering.

“The waves of your disapproval emanate across the table, Whit.”

I shoot the unrepentant bastard a grin. “I was just thinking, blackmailed to love sounds like the title of a terrible romance book.”

“A book that will never see the light of day. And the thing you must remember is that we’re still married.”

“Don’t tell me—because you’re holding her family hostage now.”

“Very droll.” Folding his fingers into his palm, he appears to examine his highly buffed fingernails. “We’re still married because she loves me. I don’t know what I’ve done to earn that honor, but I don’t take her love lightly—and God knows I made it hard enough for her—but I’ll spend every day of the rest of my life making sure she remembers I treasure her.”

“I’m pleased it worked out for you, but I can’t see how blackmailing Mimi would help.”

“Oh, so you admit it is Amelia.”

I don’t like to hear her name on his lips. “It’s complicated,” I say with a frown.

“These things generally are.”

“She works for me.”

“That’s one issue. A minor one. The company is big enough. She could go to another department, I’m sure. If you wanted her to. If you needed her to.”

He means if I find her a distraction. There has never been a more distracting distraction than Mimi Valente, not that I’m about to admit it.

“And she’s going back to Florida later this year.” Don’t make a hole in your life for me. I’m not going to be here long enough to fill it. The echo of her words makes my chest feel tight.

“Plans change.” His hands fall open, his tone reasonable.

“She’s pretty adamant about it, and my life is here. Anyway, I’m too busy for a relationship,” I find myself saying.

“And so we tell ourselves. Of course, you have your siblings as well.”

I slant him a look. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my family dynamics to him. We aren’t friends. He’s a major investor—a mentor, even—but that’s it.

“Don’t look so worried. Olivia tends to know these kinds of things, things that then come into the sphere of my existence whether I’d like them to or not.”

“Well, my family is fine. The only issue is their sheer number.” It makes for more opinions and more drama. If I take Polly’s perspective, it also means more love.

“I hear it won’t be long before you become an empty nester.”

“I don’t know where you’re getting your information from, but I live alone,” I say with a hint of amusement. “They don’t live with me.” Because my apartment is the only place I get any peace in the world. Except when Mimi’s there, and that’s more than all right with me. Maybe I need to blow up her aunt’s house for definite so she’s stuck with me. Then tie her to the bed to stop her from going on a fucking date tonight.

“Squeeze that phone any harder, and it will become a permanent part of your hand.”

Sure enough, a shard of hard plastic has already pierced my skin. This is ridiculous, I think as I drop it back on the table. This isn’t me. This isn’t how I operate. It’s all just so fucked up. I know the reasons she’s given me, but I’m not buying them. I know she’s scared. Scared of getting too involved? Scared of falling for me, but guess what? She’s not the only one. But it doesn’t stop me from wanting to be with her. Just the opposite.

“You take your responsibilities as the eldest sibling very seriously. There’s no getting away from that, it’s in your genetic makeup.” He folds up a forestalling hand as I begin to speak. “But what I meant to say is your responsibilities are coming to an end, I understand. The chicks will fly the coop, as they do.”

I shake my head. He has no fucking idea. “They might leave and they might not, but it doesn’t matter because my life, my job, my life’s work, if you will, is London. And Mimi fully intends on going back to Florida. In fact, as of this evening, she’ll be out on a date with someone else, some other fuck who isn’t me, just to prove it.” I snap my mouth shut. I can’t believe I fucking told Beckett—of all people! This is not the type of relationship we have.

“And you’re just going to take it?” He quirks a brow that might as well spell out you’re an idiot across his forehead.

“Well, I could take a leaf out of your book I suppose.”

“What do you have for leverage?”

“I was fucking joking!” I say with a laugh. “And no, I don’t want to sit here and just take it. But short of a possible kidnap and false imprisonment charge, what can I do?”

I want to lock her up, of course I do. It’s what the caveman in me wants—to throw her down on my bed and show her in no uncertain terms what she was built for. I want to bind her to my side and demonstrate over and over again how right we are together. Instead, I’ve played my reactions down. Shown little response to her plans and little interest in reasons. The only part of her I’ve shown interest in is her pussy, I realize belatedly.

“What can you do? Let me see… off the top of my head?” He actually taps the top of his head. “Tell her not to? Or what about, now here’s a revolutionary idea,” he adds with much sarcasm, “show her you’re a better option. A better bet. A better man. One worth risking her heart on. Because if you let her do this, if you let her go, you will regret it,” he says, all stiff upper lipped once more. And a little nihilistic. “Go home, Whit. Sort this idiocy out.”

“Tomorrow we’ve got—”

“Frankly, I don’t need you here. Your good cop requires a glass of scotch and a couple of Xanax.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Your usual diplomacy and aplomb are shot to fuck. You’re no use to the negotiations in your current mood.”

“That’s not true,” I grate out, refusing to sit here like a scolded kid.

“And if tomorrow you go back to London and find that she’s involved herself with another man, would there be any coming back from it for you? Would it aid your performance?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Spare me the platitudes. I only require you understand that, once she leaves, you will find, as trite as it sounds, that you will function differently. Possibly not at all for a little while. And if you’re as foolish as I was, you won’t discover this until she’s already gone. Second, when you find yourself having this mental breakdown, I will have you removed from the board.”

Now, there’s the Beckett I know. Blackmailed his wife into marriage? I can well believe it.

“Close the door on your way out,” he says in a final act of dismissal. Picking up his spectacles again, he adds, “Don’t forget to take the newspaper. Kerry will sort out your shoulders.”

But I don’t need a massage. What I need is Mimi.