Chapter Seventeen
Magnus
F or someone full of sweetness and light, with marshmallows tumbling in her veins, Zoey is way tougher than she looks.
I’m not a fucking idiot. I know exactly what she’s asking.
Amelia, who apparently decided to call herself Amanda, did well. Turning up at the right moment. But I need to sort this out first.
The stupid part is, nothing happened with Michaela. It was business. It could have turned into something more, but I chose not to, and Michaela was fine with that either way.
Zoey’s bombshell of a friend who has money and clearly dates very moneyed men is a wrench in the works, but one I’m about to use and spin into gold.
Not the friend, per se, but the fact I was with Michaela at Jones’ Bar.
I squash the little bursts of guilt that flare. After all, I need Zoey’s place. I need to get my plans moving on the heart front, or moving further than where they are. And Michaela is a good way to do it.
But now I need to slightly spin things to fit.
“For someone who doesn’t care, you seem to care, Zoey.” I lean in and whisper my next words against her ear, and breathe in her scent. “I like it.”
“Magnus…”
I straighten up. “I told you how I was ready to move and I lost my job…”
I take a deep breath, like I’m telling her a dark secret, and the ping of unease in my bones helps. Of course it does, I’m creating a mood. I like her, she’s just caught in my plans and she’ll be compensated more than fairly, so I’m not feeling anything like guilt. Magnus Simpson does, over his dear gran, and that’s all it is.
“Thing is, Zoey, I never told you why. I needed to move on to help my grandmother. If I stayed in marketing, took another job, it would be long hours, way too many hours…”
“I don’t know much about the corporate world,” she says as I pause. I’ve paused to give myself space to think of the next words, and to gague her response. “But…I imagine it’s just like that.”
“You’re not going to suggest I should have hired someone to look after her?”
“No! She’s got her faculties. She’s strong. She reminds me a little of Tuesday Harry. Of my own grandma. They’re old, not imbeciles. People treat old people terribly. But not you. I think…I think you’re a good man. And you’re doing the right thing. I admire you.”
Okay, that might be a little guilt I feel, but I squash it dead. It’s just from hanging out with Zoey all day. She’s dangerous to black hearts everywhere. And she’s useful to me in a lot of ways.
“I worked with her, Michaela. She took me for drinks to try and talk me into working in the UK. I said no. That’s all. I also tried to get her to donate to that charity, where we went.”
She looks at me, her big eyes soft and sweet and she rises on her toes and kisses me and it takes everything I am not to grab her here and now. “You’re a good man, Magnus Simpson.”
“Come on.” I take her hand. “I’ll walk you to your door.”
As her fingers close around mine, I don’t probe why I’m not pushing this.
Getting this over and done with means I can concentrate on the heart of the job, and using Zoey is something that could work, but I don’t let that linger, not right now. Because she’s a little too good at reading me—perhaps not what goes on behind the Magnus Simpson mask, but the fact something’s going on, and that doesn’t help.
Back at the bookstore, I follow her inside and help her pack up the few cookies left over and the slices of cake. She doesn’t ask, I merely help. We work together in quiet companionship, and finally, when everything’s done, I take hold of her face in my hands and lift it to mine.
“Zoey, you helping me makes a world of difference. I might not seem that way, but it does. Gran’s…frail, and I had to turn down the job offer, just like I did last night. I…”
I brush her lips with mine and they’re so soft and warm and tremble a little beneath my mouth. That shiver of need from her, a need that’s loaded in ways I don’t want to fathom, shoots to my cock, yes, but it also shoots through my blood, heating me inside.
“It’s okay,” she says, her hands covering mine a moment, those big violet eyes pools I could lose myself in—Magnus Simpson could lose himself in—search mine, “I get it. She doesn’t want to leave, and I’m sorry I asked you about your friend and why you went to that bar—”
“Hey…” I smile at her. “I’d ask to, roles reversed.”
I want to kiss her. It’s a beat of need in my blood, the yearn for the pleasure she contains, the real heat of her that can coil about me, become the sweetest invasion, but I don’t. Just brush her mouth with mine, lingering once again.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Zoey.”
“Goodnight.”
I wait for her to lock the door behind me, and then I set off in the direction Magnus Simpson lives. It’s not until I’ve turned the corner I call my car service to collect me.
As I settle in the leather seat of the town car, I close my eyes as we head back to Manhattan and my office. It’s early enough—for me, and I tell myself I left without kissing her because it’s part of my plan.
Make her really want more of Magnus Simpson.
But a tiny voice that won’t shut up keeps asking if Magnus Sinclair is running away.
Because like it or not, Zoey affects me, too.
“Why are you here?” I scowl at Ryder as he breezes into my home.
“I was in your hood.”
“You never come here unless you want something.” I pour a drink and throw myself on the black leather sofa in my living room. Ryder picks up the tequila bottle, sniffs it, shrugs, and does the same, adding a big splash of soda water to his.
He sits on the sofa opposite and turns the glass in his hands. “Just wondering how things are going?”
“I’m working on the girl.”
Ryder frowns. “The bookstore thorn in your side girl?”
“Yeah, I—”
I stop abruptly as heat prickles my skin.
“I was talking about the Sinclair jewels. You remember those, right, Mag? The Sinclair flagship? Our father’s weird-ass plan from the great beyond?” Ryder looks at me, like he’s studying a bug. “You like her.”
“She’s easy to like, if you like that sort of thing,” I say smoothly. “Zoey’s sweet. But stubborn.”
“You’re more sex and steel than sweet and stubborn. And…” He points at me with his glass, “you slept with her.”
My fingers tighten on my drink. “Why would you say that?”
“You did, didn’t you?”
“When did you turn into Mr. Morals? It happened. So what?”
Ryder rests his glass on his thigh and draws shapes on the arm of his sofa with a finger. “Oh, nothing. Just you know, big, bad, Mr. Power and Money Sinclair slept with someone sweet. Notice how I didn’t say fuck? I used that old euphemism, slept. Because I saw you at that dumb party with her, and—”
“Do you have a point?” I glare at my brother. “If you’re concerned about this interfering with the rat maze I’m being made to run through, don’t be. I’m able to multitask.”
He sighs. “You can do that. I’m aware. But I’m also aware you usually crush someone like this woman to get what you want.”
“Crush is harsh.” It’s true, but I follow the line of the law. I’ll skate close to the edge, but it’s more pleasing to see how I can push rules. And… I frown. “If I crush her, then all my good work is moot here.”
“So, you don’t need to move yet on your project.”
“If you want the damn earrings, you can have them.”
Ryder gives me a contemplative look. “I’m not sure it works that way. They’re marked for you.”
“I don’t have anything to wear with them. Besides, my ears aren’t pierced.”
He takes a long swallow of his tequila. “You’re funny, dickwad, really.”
“Hey, you’re the one who’s mostly obsessed with them.”
“Yeah.” He stares into his glass for a long moment. “But you notice how things shifted after Hud got his ring? We’ve all discussed this, but our father’s up to something.”
“He’s dead.”
“That’s not going to ever stop him making a point.” Ryder laughs softly. “And you know what I mean. There’s something bigger and the fact these up until recently only rumored about family heirlooms are turning up, tied into the Sinclair flagship, I don’t know…I don’t want any of us to fuck this up.”
“By that, you mean me.”
He sets the glass down and stands, hands in the pockets of his jeans as he goes to the window and leans against the frame, looking out into the dark. “I think you’re doing something morally…not okay.”
“Not okay?” I take a swallow of my drink. It should warm me, not send a shiver of ice through my blood. “As in reprehensible?”
“I think you doing this might negate whatever good you’re going to do to show you have heart.” He breathes out. “Whatever the fuck that means.”
He’s got that right. “So I let this be until after all of this?”
“It’s only two weeks.”
“Our mother met her.”
“I know.” Ryder turns and looks at me. “What are you going to do?”
It’s a good question, and I do have answers. I’m going to take Zoey’s place. But perhaps I can hold off, no matter how I go from wanting to eke it out to rushing it so I’m not stained by her goodness. That shit eats down deep.
“I have a foundation ready to go. I have charities. I’m giving all over the place. Some of them I’m not even going to use for taxation purposes.”
Ryder rolls his eyes. “That’s what accountants and business managers are for. The bottom dollar matters, I know that, but don’t screw up and lose our heritage.”
Now I stand, too, and go and pour myself another tequila, straight. “I’m not about to. The Sinclair name, our family company, they mean something, and they add something to all of our brands. They give us depth. I’m not about to let a little curly haired creature get in my way.”
My brother just gives me a look that says the world. And I get it, I do. Zoey has a way of getting in the way, of sliding down deep, of causing the kind of trouble I never expected.
Zoey can be a backburner project for the next two weeks. I can manipulate things to my advantage, go in less until this other situation is dealt with, and then finish with a perfect landing.
Actually, knowing my mother, I wouldn’t put it past her to keep an eye on the Zoey thing, even talk to Jenson. But I can manipulate that, too. Set up something to take care of Zoey. Make it look like my plan was that all the time.
And the more I think, the more I start to reshape my plan, and my fake gran sits in the center, with Zoey, with the Sinclair jewels, with my father’s meddlesome ways for me to keep the balance of our heritage in the proper hands—those belonging to me and my brothers. I can use it all to show I have heart.
I smile at Ryder. “Don’t worry. I have a plan.”
It’s almost midnight when my phone rings. I think of ignoring it as I’m neck deep in work, setting things up. But it’s Georgio. I hit answer on my phone and his voice fills the room.
“We got a problem, Boss.”
“This problem got a name?”
“Bronn Lichtenfeld.”
Fuck.