Chapter Three
I GOT THE JOB.
I got the job. My first real, credited, someone-is-actually-going-to-pay-me-to-pretend job, and I'm standing in my kitchen the size of a phone booth, vibrating with the need to tell somebody, anybody, so I grab my phone and scroll to M for Mom and my thumb is already moving—
Oh.
Right.
My thumb stops, and my chest drops like the floor of an elevator giving out.
Because Mom made her choice a long time ago, and it wasn't me, it was the man who married her and looked at me like furniture, and you can't call a person to celebrate when they've already told you, gently, over a nice dinner, that maybe some space would be healthy.
So. Not Mom.
I scroll back up. Past nobody, past nobody, past...aha.
Mr. H.
Here's the thing about having exactly one number worth calling. A smart girl would play it cool. Wait a day. Not lead with her entire heart at nine on a Tuesday. But since this smart girl (hi, still me) is also lonely, broke, and about to burst—
"Hi, Mr. H, are you busy?"
And now I'm standing in the entryway of an apartment so high up the city looks like a rumor.
Apparently are you busy translates, in the native language of Mr. H, to a car at my curb and a doorman who already knew my name, and the man himself is looking at me from across all that quiet money like he can't quite remember why he let me up.
It's the first time I've seen where he lives.
I take back every mean thing I've ever thought about penthouses.
This one could hold my entire life and still have room left over to echo.
He's ditched the suit jacket. Sleeves shoved to the elbow, forearms out for the general public to deal with, and okay, a girl could lose an entire afternoon to those forearms, and my borrowed heart clearly agrees because it picks right now to start up, quick and giddy, thump-thump-thump against a set of ribs that did not order this.
Slow down, heart. We've talked about this. Racing is on the official list of Things That Are Bad For Us, right up there with grapefruit and skipping pills, and here it is, sprinting over a man's forearm like it's got a bus to catch.
Not helping, I tell it. Focus.
Because here's what I've finally figured out about my Mr. H, and you can quote me on it.
He's the exact hero every billionaire romance warns a girl about, which works out beautifully because it keeps the initials.
Has an obscene amount of money, the kind that makes waiters nervous.
Hates anything with even a rumor of love or feeling attached to it.
And is Hard to understand on a level somebody should probably study for a living.
Hot, honorable, hers, and now three bonus Hs, free of charge.
At this point the man's less a person than an acronym.
"Don't get any ideas," he warns me, like he can hear the whole internal monologue.
"Shouldn't I be the one saying that?" I gesture between us. Between his face and my everything. "You were the one who invited me up, not the other way around."
"You have a disturbing tendency to read something in nothing."
"Ouch. That's mean." I press a hand to my borrowed heart, wounded. "Is that your way of saying unappealing?"
"What do you want to drink?" he asks, already turning toward a bar cart worth more than everything I own put together, and I have to physically stop myself from pocketing something off it for the memory. Also—
"Since you didn't say no, then that means the opposite, right?"
I know he's already warned me against reading something into nothing, but c'mon now.
"You find me attractive!"
"Water, then." It's so cute when Mr. H tries playing it cool like this, and it has me smiling while I watch him pour with the unbothered economy of a man who's never once spilled anything in his life, and hand the glass over without letting our fingers touch.
Which I notice because lately I notice everything about him, and that's rapidly becoming a full-time job nobody's paying me for.
"Have you eaten?"
"Actually, I wanted to invite you for dinner." And here it comes, the whole reason, bubbling up out of me. "I got the job! My first one! There was an audition and everything, this director, he had me read in his suite at the—"
"You went inside the hotel room of a man."
The temperature of the room drops about forty degrees.
"I mean, when you put it like that—"
"How stupid can you get?" His jaw has gone to stone. "You could have been raped."
"I have pepper spray," I offer.
"And what if he has a gun?"
"It was broad daylight."
"You really think sunlight will keep a psychopath from hurting you if he wanted to?"
And here's the truly unfair, upside-down thing about me.
He's furious. Properly furious, the kind that has a man like him spending a word like raped in that expensive unbothered voice.
And he's furious because he doesn't want me hurt.
A smart girl would be chastened. Instead my whole traitor chest goes warm and my heart does its little unauthorized skip because apparently his temper is just one more thing to love about him, which is the exact opposite of the lesson I'm supposed to be learning here.
"You're right," I admit, all the fight going out of me. "I was foolish and careless. Forgive me?"
His mouth works. He looks at the ceiling like it owes him money. "Do whatever you want."
"Thank you for forgiving me." "I didn't say—" He stops himself. Closes his eyes. Opens them. "Never mind. What do you want to eat?"
"What do you want to eat? My treat."
"You should be more prudent with managing your earnings."
"But I love spending my money on someone hot and honorable."
He glares at me. It's a truly world-class glare.
"And mine," I add.
Silence.
I let it stretch because I'm brave, and stupid, and both of those things are having a wonderful time.
"This is the part," I inform him, "where you shut me up with a kiss."
"Or I can just kick you out."
"I'm sorry, I'll behave."
"Then don't make me repeat myself." There's an edge under it now, the voice of a man who's not used to saying anything twice and doesn't intend to start. "What do you want to eat?"
I want to keep every glare he makes in a little box. Instead, I pick Chinese.
A WHILE LATER HE'S watching me demolish my second carton of takeout with the expression of a man witnessing a slow-motion accident he's legally required to attend.
"Have you been starving yourself?" he asks.
"I need to keep an eye on my weight," I explain with my mouth full, which somewhat undercuts the glamour.
"When was your last meal before this?" I open my mouth to lie. I'm good at lying, thank you, with references.
"I catch you lying," he warns, before I get a syllable out, "I'll have the doorman bar you from the building."
"You can't really do that."
"Lie to me, then. See for yourself."
I put down the carton. "Last night," I fess up.
He looks at me like I've personally disappointed several generations of his family. "Why?"
"I was saving money."
"The same money you wanted to spend on me."
"Okay, I admit it, I'm not that good at handling money."
"Clearly."
"But since I plan on becoming a successful actress, I can just pay someone to look after my money."
"You need to learn how to do the things you're intending to outsource." His voice doesn't rise. Somehow that's worse. "Otherwise you'll be taken advantage of."
"If you're the one taking advantage."
"I'm serious."
"So am I."
"Fine, then." He leans back and folds his arms. The forearms are back, doing nothing, ruining my life. And he gives me his whole terrible attention, the kind that makes the rest of the room go quiet and out of focus. "What are you so serious about?"
And I could joke. I'm always joking. It's my best trick and my only shield and it's gotten me out of every room I ever needed to leave. But since he asked...
"You," I tell him. "I fell in love with you at first sight."
He doesn't so much as blink. "Then you're even dumber than I thought. I won't change my mind. I'll never see you as a woman."
"Then how do you see me?"
A pause. A small one, but I've started collecting his pauses, and this one has weight.
"A little sister."
Oh.
And my heart, the one that isn't originally mine, the one a stranger died to hand me, gives a hard, off-beat thud at those two words, little sister, like they reached a room in me I've never once been inside.
It doesn't make sense. It hurts for no reason I can find, and I do what I always do with a thing that hurts for no reason I can name.
I shove it somewhere I won't have to look at it, and I keep going.
"Okay. I'll take it." I stick out my hand across the ruins of the takeout. "You're my big brother from now on."
"Are you insane?" It comes out rougher than his usual unshakeable calm, like I've knocked something loose in there that he'd bolted down on purpose.
"About you? Yes." I keep my hand out there, shameless, grinning, terrified. "That's why I'll take anything that lets me stay in your life. So how about it, big brother?" I wiggle my fingers. "When can I move in?"
I watch the no form. It gets all the way to his mouth, and I know that mouth. That mouth has a doctorate in telling me no.
His lips part.
"Tonight," Mr. H says.
And then he looks like he wants to arrest himself for it.
TONIGHT.
Tonight.
The word kept coming down in him like a gavel, and there was no court on earth where he could overrule it. One word, and he had handed a broke girl in a thrift-store jacket the keys to the one place he had sworn no one would ever get inside again.
He had told her he saw a little sister. It was the cruelest sort of lie, the kind with just enough truth in it to stand up in court because he did not see a little sister.
He saw a woman, and she was grown, broke, and blazing, and a good thirteen years too young for the thoughts he had no business having about her.
And that was the smaller of the two crimes.
The larger one was beating in her chest at that very moment, and it had been his little sister, and the two truths sat down in him side by side and refused, no matter how he arranged them, to be the same size.
Forbidden. There was no gentler word for what she was to him, and Maximo had spent his whole life not needing gentle words.
He would send her away. In the morning, when she was fed and safe, when it could be done cleanly and for good.
He already knew that he wouldn't.