Chapter 33 Fin
Chapter 33
Fin
When I’m drinking scotch in my office on a weekday afternoon, you know things are bad.
I turn to the rap of a knuckle on my door, and Josie’s face appears around the lump of wood. She looks confused.
“What is it?”
“Your wife is apparently in reception.”
“Is she?” My heart beats twice in quick succession, as though I’ve done something wrong. It’s not that I’ve forgotten, but, fuck, he worked quick.
“I didn’t even know you had one of those. A wife.”
“That’s what happens when you take a vacation.” Struggling to keep my outward appearance calm, I turn back to the window. “You miss all the tea.”
“I’ll ask them to send her up, shall I?”
“I think that would be best.” I glance back at her, then my eyes slide over my desk. “Though maybe we should strip the room of sharp implements.”
“Do you really mean that?”
I chuckle and give my head a shake, but she comes into the room anyway.
“That’s not even yours,” she says, swiping an antique silver letter opener from my desk.
“I was just waiting to see how long before Oliver noticed.”
“You and your pranking,” she mutters, making for the door again.
“Josie?”
She turns on the threshold.
“How about you make yourself scarce when Mrs. DeWitt gets here?”
“You’re sure?”
“You wouldn’t want to hear a grown man cry, would you?”
“Maybe if it’s you,” she says, swinging away. “I can see why someone would want to stab you. Sometimes. But try not to allow it until after payday.”
“You got it.”
My gut twists as she leaves. No going back. But will we be going forward? Together? I roll my shoulders, trying to ease out the tension. Fat chance on that front. Am I an idiot for thinking she might go for this?
Or not go for it, more like. Please.
Fuck. I can’t go on like this. I need her. I need to show her how much I ... esteem? Crave? Love her? How I can’t imagine life without her.
I’ve always been impulsive, but I pray I’m doing the right thing.
I just want to give her everything. I want that everything to include me. I want to be responsible for her smiles, to always be there to dry her tears too.
The way I feel about her ... there are no words. Love is kind of primal. A part of humanity that’s as old as time itself. At first, I desired Mila. I found her curves desirable, her wit and her sharp tongue irresistible—I wanted to suffer its lash.
But the desired, the person, is just an ideal. The perfect person in your mind but not yet real. Then things change, and for me, they’ve changed fast.
I turn as the door creaks open, then bangs from the opposite wall, held only from bouncing back by my wife’s flat palm.
My wife. She is incandescent.
And that’s not really a compliment—more an observation.
“Josie, I see you’ve met Mila.”
My assistant’s frown appears from behind my much shorter wife.
“I’ll just leave you both to it,” she says, backing away.
“It was nice to meet you,” Mila says, turning her head briefly, ever the professional people pleaser. The only person she doesn’t want to please is me. “I’m sorry it wasn’t under better circumstances.”
It’s then I realize she’s holding the Jeff Koons balloon dog from the kitchen under her arm. She steps inside, and the door slams. I find myself ducking as twenty grand’s worth of whimsy crashes against the original window shutters.
“You bastard!” Her voice is low and vehement. “You careless shithead!” she shouts her next accusation.
“Careless? Me?” I glance from her to the dent in the shutter.
“Yes, okay. I was aiming for your head!”
“There’s always next shot.” But careless ? I thought she would’ve gone with calculated . Me? I’d go with desperate . “What are you doing here, Mila?”
“You know ,” she hisses.
“Roza is the one with the sight. The rest of us have to wait for explanations.”
The look she sends me. It’s downright murderous. I wonder if I’ll be able to persuade her to fuck me when she finally gets her hands around my neck. What a way to go. I’d enjoy the ride to the very end.
My hand trembles as I set my glass on my desk, but not because I’m afraid of anything but losing her. All the same, maybe I should put the glass in my drawer.
“You are careless,” she says, swiping up a vase.
Why do I even have a vase in my office? And what the fuck is it with this careless business.
“Careless with words,” she adds, sort of bouncing the piece in her hands as though weighing it.
“Did you ever work out why I call you bunny ?”
Her gaze lifts, but not her head.
“Because you bounce like that—just like that vase—when you’re in my hands.”
“You’re careless with people’s feelings,” she continues, as though I haven’t spoken.
“I thought my actions were quite pointed today.”
“Bastard!”
The vase flies, and I duck. “You already said that one.”
Mila’s chest heaves, her hands balled into fists. “You are a bastard, and I can hardly believe it, but you are the one responsible for almost ruining my business.”
I feel my brow furrow. This isn’t the direction I was expecting. In fact—“Honeybuns, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t call me that! And you don’t know because you’re fucking careless!” This she says on a sob. “The night we met, you were at that wedding with Charlotte bloody Bancroft!”
I shake my head. “Wrong. Matt was my plus-one. I had to bribe the fucker with an expensive single malt to get him to come along.” I didn’t want to take a date—I didn’t want to take him. But I also didn’t want to be there alone. “She might’ve been there, but she wasn’t with me. What the fuck is this about?”
“She saw you come out of the closet looking disheveled, and she heard you laughing about what we’d done. Laughing about me back at your table!”
“She might’ve seen me looking less than my usual pristine self,” I say edging my way around the desk as Mila follows. Or stalks. “But if she did, that’s on you. You and your roaming hands, slut muffin.”
“Be serious!” she cries. “Try it, just for one minute!”
“I am serious. I’m serious about you. And whatever I’ve done, I’d rather be sorry for it, sorry for fucking up, than never having tried to keep you.”
“You fucked up, all right. You fucked the head of your fan club!”
“My what?”
“Charlotte Bancroft is obsessed! She has a forum all about her career ... and you. To join, you have to prove your allegiance. Fucking buckteeth and crossed-out eyes!” she says, kind of jerky and angry and all waving hands.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Not only that, but I’m also a little worried. “Are you okay?”
“No, I am not okay. I am very far from being okay. Your high priestess tried to ruin me—she set them on me, Fin. Her fans. Her disciples. You laughed, and she painted me as some ... skank. Someone who didn’t deserve to be happy, let alone be paid to arrange other people’s happiness—one of the most important days of their lives!”
I straighten, suddenly furious. “I know nothing about that, but I can guarantee you I wasn’t laughing. You want to know what I said? To Matt? I remember the moment as clear as day.”
“You shouldn’t have spoken to anyone. What happened between us was private—I thought it was special!”
“It was fucking pivotal,” I say, pulling out my phone. Matt answers at the first ring.
“What the fuck is all that noise coming from your office?” he says, forgoing a greeting again. “Are you moving furniture or something?”
“Kind of,” I answer, watching as Mila eyes my computer monitor. “Remember the night I met Mila?”
“Yeah,” he says suspiciously. “Haven’t we already had this conversation?”
“I went to get us a drink and came back without them. You remember what I said, don’t you?”
“I told you already, I’m not telling Mila. I’m not your emissary—we’re not in fucking high school! And how fucking stupid would we both sound if I told her you had a premonition after a knee-trembling moment in the coat closet with her?”
Mila’s brows come down like a shelf as she grasps a heavy-bottomed stapler as an appetizer to my monitor.
“Matt,” I demand. “What the fuck did I say?”
“That you’d just met the woman you were going to marry,” he mutters. “That you could feel it in your stupid, hollow bones. That match your stupid, hollow head.”
“That’s all you had to say.” I end the call. “Roza was right. Evie too. This is kismet, fate at work, through and through.”
“Liar!”
I’m so relieved she’s a terrible shot as the stapler thuds against the far wall. That would’ve knocked me the fuck out.
“That woman hid her identity!” she yells. “She told her followers I shouldn’t be allowed near other women’s men. That I shouldn’t be allowed near you!”
“Maybe it is my fault. Maybe I shouldn’t have told Matt, and then Charlotte wouldn’t have overheard. But I had to tell someone because I was bursting out of my skin with happiness, Mila.”
“That’s not true or you would’ve found me before. You wouldn’t have given Evie my card; you would’ve—”
“I was terrified. My feelings were so fucking big.”
“Are you frightened now, Fin?”
I temper my smile—that was a little too Dirty Harry for a woman of her stature. “That depends,” I say, on the opposite side of the desk now, my gaze flicking behind her. “Can you lift that TV from the wall?”
But then she pulls out my chair, dropping into it quite suddenly. Her hands pressed to the sides of her head, her beautiful hair comes alive between her spread fingers.
“She made people come after me. Told them lies—then made them lie!” Her head comes up. “Why would she do that? She almost ruined me. I lost work, respect, my clients. Money! I was forced back to the place it took me so long to climb from. And for what? What did I ever do to her?”
“Attract the interest of a man who turned her down. A man she probably saw as her meal ticket to more publicity, more opportunities. And then, you married him.”
“So, she wanted to be me, basically.” Her answer—her thoughts—instantly take the wind from her angry sails. “It’s what you said, that I wanted your notoriety. That I was using your body.”
“I was hurt, that’s all. When the plane landed in London, things changed. I worried all I would ever be to you was a crutch. A name. Not someone who loves you.”
“Love,” she repeats. Hopefully?
“Yeah. I love you. I loved you the day we wed. But you’ve been on my mind and my heart for longer than that. I’m sorry. So sorry.” For what I’ve done and for what’s to come.
“But when the plane landed, how did the press know about us? How did they know to be there? I know how they got the photos on the island, but how did they know we’d married or even who I was before we landed?”
“Because I called ahead. I called them, Mila. I gave them the scoop.”
“You . . .”
“Bastard?”
“You deceitful, conniving, fraudulent fuckboy!” she yells, jumping up again.
I just couldn’t see any other way, though Matt would die laughing if he knew his part in this.
On the flight back from the resort, I’d googled Bridgerton , which he’d mentioned during our phone call. I didn’t have time or the bandwidth to watch the show, but I was curious. And grasping at straws. So I downloaded the Kindle app on my phone, along with a couple of books in the series. Romance books.
Come to think of it, maybe Matt would die of embarrassment that he’d inadvertently outed himself as a closet romance reader. Though it kind of makes sense.
As Mila slept, I found myself absorbed. And I’d learned that, according to the romantic novel dictate, what’s needed at the point of a romantic fuckup is a romantic gesture like no other. Failing that, some dastardly underhanded dealing.
And I’ve got both bases covered.
“If I am, I’m your fuckboy. Yours alone. For the rest of my life, if you’ll have me. You were right to be wary—I am almost forty, and I’ve never lived with a woman. Never committed myself. But I want to. I want to commit myself to you.”
“You don’t even know the meaning of the word!”
“I’ve thought about you constantly since we met. In fact, from that night, I didn’t fuck another woman.”
“Are you expecting a medal? A bloody prize?”
“I’m trying to tell you I didn’t want anyone else but you. And that I was too chickenshit to do anything about it. I gave your card to Evie when I really should’ve found you myself.”
“Why should I trust you after what you’ve done?”
“Just listen to me for a minute, please. You said that love means betrayal and lies to me. Before you, yeah. It did. When I was just a kid in college, I fell in love. Or I thought I did, but my family—they weren’t on board. I thought we’d get married, but my grandfather offered her money to leave the state. She took it, and I was devastated, not just about her leaving, but that the man who raised me did that to me. I guess I just made sure never to put my heart in that position again. Because maybe I just wasn’t worth it.”
She begins to move again, rounding the desk. “It sounds as though you’re saying you only love me because I don’t want your money? That’s not trust.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I love you in spite of the fact you won’t fucking take it. I love you despite the fact you’re being pigheaded and proud.”
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to do here. You can’t distract me—you called those tabloid ... Little Bird ... fuckers!”
“I did.” I back away as she advances, but it’s just for show. I’m going nowhere. Ever, if I can help it. “I did the wrong thing for the right reason. Twice.”
Her eyes narrow. “You’d better not have called them again.”
“I think you should read your emails.”