Chapter Three #2
“I think she was young, and he was richer than me. He could offer her more. She tried to tell me it was all a mistake, but I think she just figured out what being with Manny was really like.” He took a long breath.
He didn’t like to think about what Deanna might have gone through.
Time had lent him some perspective. “Manny hates women.”
A sardonic look hit her eyes. “You don’t have to tell me that. I’ve recently gotten some clear evidence of his misogyny.”
The thought turned his stomach, but he forced himself to take a long swallow of the ridiculously expensive Scotch she’d ordered.
Had the CIA become a bit like the mob and they now had whole establishments as cover?
“Yeah, I’m aware. He stopped your heart.
I carried your body out, and I was almost certain you were dead. ”
She stared at him for a moment and then stood, and for a second he thought she was going to walk away. Instead, she moved to his space. “I think we should have this talk while I’m sitting on your lap, Benjamin. I think I’ll feel safer and more secure if your arms are around me.”
He didn’t hesitate. He pushed his chair back and found himself with a lapful of the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen.
Fuck, she’d been right. The minute they were close, he felt like he could breathe again, think straight again.
He let her scent wash over him as she stroked a hand over his hair.
“This feels nice. We’re going to shock the staff. ”
She chuckled, a sound that went straight to his dick. “Oh, we would have to do so much more to shock this staff.”
Top. Of course. “This place isn’t connected to the Agency. It’s connected to a club. Is the chef a Dom?”
Her body relaxed, and one arm drifted around his shoulders.
“Pretty much everyone. I think maybe one of the line chefs isn’t, but it’s most of them.
There are three clubs in Dallas that are somewhat connected, so they don’t all play at The Hideout.
Some of the younger workers do, but most of the married ones play at either Sanctum or The Club.
So don’t worry that they’ll be surprised. ”
He rubbed his cheek against her hair and realized she’d done this for him. She’d done this to make it easier for him to talk.
He was fucking falling for this woman. “I met Deanna in high school. The same one Manny went to. I was there on a scholarship. Well, I thought I was. I later found out the scholarship fund was supported by the Huisman Foundation.”
“His family paid for your school? And they didn’t tell you?”
“I suppose somewhere deep down I knew. I certainly knew I didn’t get an academic scholarship. I wasn’t that great in school, though I learned later on how to take a test. I got serious in college, but in high school I was all about two things—sports and girls.”
“I played volleyball and basketball,” she admitted. “It was fun. I’ve always liked being a team member. So you met Deanna there?”
He wanted to ask about her high school. He had so many questions, but he needed to give her this story. For her own safety. If she was smart, she would listen to what happened to Deanna and walk away from him.
He didn’t think for a second that she would, which was why he needed to stop being suspicious of her.
He trusted her on a base level. And hey, she hadn’t tried to kill him in months.
“Yes. She was an actual scholarship kid. She was on Manny’s study team.
Yeah, he was the kid who formed study teams, as he called them.
He was serious about test taking. If he didn’t make a hundred, his grandfather would punish him.
He would tell him that all he had was his brain since the family looks and charms had skipped a generation. ”
“Oh,” she said with a sad huff. “That’s mean. He was a kid.”
“I don’t know if Manny was ever a kid.” He was tired of talking about Manny, tired of his life revolving around a mistake he made when he was barely eight.
The mistake had been being friends with a neighborhood boy.
“But I mention the abuse he suffered because I saw it. I don’t think his grandfather ever physically abused him, but he certainly humiliated him. He never measured up to his father.”
“The same father who kidnapped Dr. Walsh? He was trying to steal her research, if I recall. From what I can tell, Huisman’s obsession with my handler comes from that moment in time.”
“I don’t know as much about it as I should. Manny was good at hiding his dark side from me. He tended to play the victim around me, and I bought it all.”
“He can be a victim and a bad guy,” Maggie corrected. “Sometimes it’s precisely how people slide into their villain era. I’ve often wondered if I could do that.”
“You?” This soft woman in his arms could never be a villain. “Never.”
She snorted. A bratty sound. “Hello, Mongolia?”
Funny how now it seemed like a cute story. “I forgive you for Mongolia. After all, you did let me hold on, and you got a squeeze in there. Tell me something, did you like how my ass felt in your hands?”
“Excus…” She’d gone stiff but then laid back again.
“I suppose I had forgotten that part. Sorry, but you’re making my point.
We were about to die and I copped a feel, and I should get a real talking to about that.
There should be some serious repercussions.
That was completely unprofessional of…me. ”
She was adorable when she was embarrassed. And he needed to consider the fact that after two seconds of her being affectionate with him, he was tossing out all the bad shit she’d done. But he wasn’t thinking that way tonight.
“Uhm, I think I’ll forgive you for that, too.
” He liked cuddling her. He could absolutely get used to this.
“If you go into your villain era, then be ready to have a boyfriend who helps you. Let’s keep it to the cool villainy though.
Maybe we can assassinate a couple of tyrants and free some people. ”
The smile on her face did things to his cock that she could probably feel. But she sobered and let her head drift to his shoulder. “Tell me what really happened.”
Guilt gnawed at him. “Manny… Our relationship is complex. We knew each other from a young age. He was so much smarter than everyone else. He was also slightly younger because his father pushed him so hard academically. I didn’t like how the other kids treated him, so I became his only friend.
I liked him back then. He was kind and ridiculously smart.
His father hated me. Said I was a waste of time, but Manny actually stood up to him when it came to me.
And then his father was killed and he went to live with his grandfather.
When we met again it was high school, and he was broken somehow. He’d gotten very dark.”
“From the profiles our team has been given, it’s highly likely there was a lot of abuse in his grandfather’s home, and the fact that his mother abandoned him probably led to his misogyny.”
“He truly loathes his mother. Loathed. She was killed during a robbery in Paris. I’ve often wondered if he arranged that,” Ben explained.
“But I didn’t see that back then. I saw an old friend who could use some help.
We got close again. Unlike his father, his grandfather did approve of our friendship.
To the point that he constantly criticized Manny for not being more like me.
I became the golden child of a family I didn’t belong to.
To a brother who wasn’t mine. But he was excellent at hiding his darkness.
He wrapped himself in this calm, peaceful doctor persona.
Even in high school. He would cause trouble and then step in to fix it, and everyone looked up to him. Everyone except his grandfather.”
“Who died conveniently after Manny graduated. I was surprised he refused an autopsy.”
Ben had thought this through long ago. “Why would he? Anyone who held stock in the company was gone, and surprise, all of that stock found its way back to Manny. So no, he didn’t care why his grandfather died. He might have done it himself.”
“What happened with Deanna? You got together with her before college, right?”
“We started dating during our sophomore year of high school, and I was comfortable with her. She was smart and funny, and she and Manny got along. She wanted to be a doctor, so they had several classes together. I wasn’t surprised when she announced she was going to the same college that Manny had gotten into. ”
“How did you feel about that?”
There was nothing to do but tell her the truth. “I was happy about it. Happy that she was getting what she wanted. Happy that she would have a friend there.”
“And you were also relieved.”
Well, no one said she wasn’t smart. “I was. I was never in love with her, and she’d started talking about us getting married.
She wanted me to come with her, but I had a baseball scholarship.
I wanted to see the world, to party and have fun.
I tried to break up with her but she was so fragile.
Her mother had recently died from cancer.
There was never a good time to break things off, so we tried long distance. ”
“She wasn’t your responsibility. You were a kid.”
“So was she, and we made some adult choices, so yeah, I felt she was my responsibility.”
She shifted. “So you took her virginity and felt responsible for her even though she made the same choice and didn’t think about what you would need when it came to college. She thought you would follow her because she was smarter than you. Because she needed it more than you did.”
That summed things up nicely. “She was smarter than me. It was pointed out on more than one occasion that she had more to give to the world than I did.”
“Ohhh, let me guess. That was Huisman.”