21. Mason
Chapter 21
Mason
“ H ello, Ladybug,” I say. “Join me for breakfast.”
She shakes her head, but her eyes dart to the sugar porn that is the buffet at this place—as I hoped they might.
“Please,” I say. “Give me a chance to apologize.”
She storms over, eyes slitty. “Apologize for what?”
“The stalking,” I say earnestly. “I shouldn’t have done it. If someone had done it to me, I’d be as upset as you.” And if they’d happened to be male, they’d be in a hospital recovery room, but I’d better not give Sophia that idea.
She seems to be at a loss for words, which must be a first for her, and maybe for philosophy majors in general.
“I also wanted to tell you something,” I say. “Something I guarantee you want to know.” Actually, I have two such morsels of information, and it’s a wonder I didn’t need to use either of them last night because I fully expected to have to.
“Tell me what?”
She asks the question with feigned nonchalance, but I can see her curiosity is as aroused as my cock is at the sight of her.
I gesture at the table in front of me and smile as if this isn’t a strategic move to earn her forgiveness.
“It had better be something interesting.” She grabs a plate and fills it with enough sugar to make even Buddy the Elf sick.
Setting her plate at my table, she tells the waitress taking our drink orders that she wants a chocolate mocha and looks at me as if she dares me to say something disapproving.
“Can I taste it?” I ask Sophia when the waitress leaves.
Her cheeks turning red, she glares at me. “Taste what?”
“The mocha.” I suppress a chuckle that almost sends my tomato juice up my nose. “What did you think I meant?”
She turns redder than my juice, confirming that she thought I wanted to taste her. The thought of it makes me hard… or more accurately, harder .
“Sorry.” I grin, feeling anything but. “I meant the coffee, of course. I was just reading an article about how good coffee is for one’s health—assuming you only drink it before noon.” And don’t have milk and sugar in it, but saying that would sour this particular olive branch.
She snorts. “Is that reverse psychology?”
I cock my head. “What do you mean?”
“You say something that’s bad for me is a health food and hope I won’t want it anymore. Or do the reverse and claim that kale rots your teeth.”
“No. Coffee really is good for you. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s a bean. It’s already known to help athletic and cognitive performance, but as it turns out, it also protects against chronic diseases and lowers the risk of cancer.”
“Huh.”
“And so, I’ve been meaning to try it,” I say.
“Wait.” She stares at me incredulously. “You’ve never had coffee?”
Great. Another one. Like I haven’t already been teased endlessly about this by my teammates.
I shake my head. “I tasted espresso when I was a kid, and it was bitter, so I didn’t see the need to do it again… until that article.”
She considers this for a second. “I had the same experience with beer and also haven’t had any since then.”
Huh. “Maybe people should give kids things that they don’t want them to consume later in life.” Like sugar, I almost say, but stop myself in time.
“It would have to be a bitter substance,” she reminds me. “Else the plan might backfire.”
Shit. So my sugar idea is a bust anyway. “I can’t think of many things that are bitter and bad for you. Beer might be the only one, actually.”
“What about chocolate?” she says.
“If it’s dark, it’s good for you,” I say. “I put some on my salads.”
She blinks at me. “Dark chocolate… on salad?”
“Why not?”
She shrugs. “I guess it’s not all that different from putting chocolate into mole sauce. But still. Sounds obscene.”
“It’s delicious, I assure you,” I say. “Or I put it into my smoothies instead.”
“Smoothies, of course.” She shakes her head. “The closest I’ve gotten to one of those is a slushy.”
I don’t take the bait. “I’m sure the chef could make one for you.”
She looks around. “Speaking of chefs and restaurants, why did you come here? I thought you’d be at the one from last night.”
“I figured you’d think that, which is why I came here.” And got the chef to make me this tofu scramble I’m currently enjoying, one which looks enough like an egg scramble to avoid a repeat of the perilous diet-related conversation—a strategy that clearly didn’t bear any fruit.
Sophia gestures around the place. “Where is everyone?”
I might as well rip off that Band-Aid. “I wanted us to have privacy regardless of which restaurant we ate at, so I booked all the suites.”
Her eyes widen. “All of them?”
“Yes.”
She thoughtfully bites into the healthiest item on her plate: a blueberry tart. “You spent a fortune just to talk to me.”
I nod.
“I guess I could’ve avoided this if I hadn’t dodged your calls,” she says after a pause.
“True, but you have the right not to talk to me. I’m in the wrong… but I appreciate you saying that.”
She cocks her head. “So, back to the information you bribed me with?”
“What about it?” I look at our non-empty plates.
“Can you tell me what it is? I’ll stick around here until the end of breakfast. I promise.”
I tsk-tsk. “You’d make a bad hockey strategist.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” She tosses a tiny muffin at me, which I catch and set back on her plate before putting on my best poker face—something I do during critical game moments.
“If you want the info early, you’ll have to go on an excursion with me,” I say.
She purses her lips and looks thoughtful. Meanwhile, her drink comes, and she pushes it toward me.
I take a tiny sip and can’t help but flinch.
“What?” she demands.
“I think they forgot to add coffee to all that sugar.” I take a gulp of tomato juice to get the treacle taste out of my mouth. “But hey, at least it wasn’t even remotely bitter.”
She samples the drink and sighs. “If you ask me, this needs another spoonful of sugar. What’s the excursion?”
I shrug. “Anything involving nature. You pick.”
She arches an eyebrow.
All right. The best way for me to make up for my invasion of her privacy is to share something embarrassing about myself. “They didn’t have any nature documentaries on the TV in my room, and I need my nature fix.”
She cocks her head. “You like nature shows?”
“Love them.”
I prepare for the onslaught of the usual jokes, but she just smiles approvingly. “You’d probably enjoy visiting my mansion.”
“On account of the tortoises?”
She purses her lips. “Your dossier on me is that thorough?”
I shake my head. “I knew about Donatello and April before we met. Theodore showed them to me.”
“Oh. You guys hung out?” Is that a hint of jealousy in her voice?
“We didn’t hang out that much, but when he heard about my fondness for all things nature, he had me visit his sanctuary, and I had a nice chat with Dr. Kelpcon.” Or it was nice until it started to seem like she wanted to use me for some sort of human breeding experiment… involving the two of us. Oh, and what made that last bit worse was that her flirtations coincided with the moment I noticed the white buttons on her lab coat.
Sophia waggles her eyebrows. “Did Dr. Kelpcon tell you all about Donatello’s sexual prowess?”
I grin. “She did, but she also shared some fun facts I didn’t previously know, like how those tortoises have lungs on their back.”
Sophia crosses her arms in front of her chest. “She never told me that.” She bites her lip. “I think it’s my lack of a big cock.”
I arch an eyebrow.
She blushes again. “I meant Donatello, not you.”
“Huh?”
She looks at me pleadingly. “Can we move on?”
I resist the urge to smile. “The lungs in question are just under the shell, so if you scare a tortoise, it will hide inside with a loud hiss.”
“Huh.” Sophia grabs a muffin absentmindedly. “April did hiss at me the other day, when I accidentally snuck up on her.”
“There you go.”
She munches on that muffin so seductively I stare at my plate to maintain my equilibrium.
“What else did the good doctor tell you?” she asks.
“She told me about the birds that ride your tortoises.” Having recovered somewhat, I look back at her, just in time to see her lick crumbs from her lips, which makes the aforementioned cock way bigger.
Because I’m pretty sure she was not talking about Donatello.
“Ah, right.” Sophia chuckles, her blush almost gone. “According to Dr. Kelpcon, the birds and the tortoises have a symbiotic relationship. Something about ticks in the folds of tortoise skin.”
Whew. The phrase “the folds of tortoise skin” settles my dick… a little. “If you ask me, you have much more of a symbiotic relationship with those tortoises than the birds do. They need someone to pay rent, and you oblige.”
“And what do I get?” She picks up a mini-doughnut. “The junk I eat doesn’t include ticks.”
Is she serious? “You get to feel the relaxation from watching them.” I sure would.
Her cheeks flush again. “Those lovebirds—or love tortoises—hump way too much for me to be able to relax around them.”
At the mention of humping, my eyes get drawn to her cleavage, ending my cock’s brief reprieve.
“So… what was that bargaining chip of information?” she asks, shifting in her seat.
Ah. Right. “Mr. Berger is alive and well.”
She stares at me in confusion.
“You wanted to know if he made it,” I remind her.
“I did?”
I sigh. “The guy whose life we saved.” I’m being generous when I include her in that “we.”
“Oh. The hairy guy who was having a heart attack?”
“His name, as it turns out, is Hampton Berger, and he’s made a complete recovery,” I say. What I don’t mention is that our shared lawyer wasn’t going to divulge this to either of us, so I used my own channels to find out—the same Max Stolyar who gave me the dossier on her.
“Hampton Berger?” She chuckles. “Do you think his friends call him Ham?”
“Ham Berger?”
“Hey,” she says. “He survived, so it’s not in poor taste.”
“Not in poor taste? That heart attack might’ve been the result of eating too many hamburgers. Besides, should someone with the last name Papachristodoulopoulou really be throwing stones?”
Her eyes widen. “You said that correctly.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” All it took was a lesson with a private speech coach who’s fluent in Greek—no biggie.
“Very few people are able to do that,” she says. “Until now, it was just my butler who could. Not a single professor can do it in school.”
“A shame for those so-called philosophy professors. Greek to them should be what Latin is to Catholic priests.”
She smiles. “I believe they do the Mass in English nowadays.”
“Ah. Right.” I shouldn’t have used an example related to religion—it makes my parents spring to mind.
“Are you okay?” she asks, her eyebrows pleating in a small frown. She must’ve picked up on my change in mood.
Should I tell her about my parents? I feel like I owe it to her after everything. But no. I can’t. There’s a reason I’ve never told anyone. Not to mention, it’s not a fair trade. All I learned about her from the investigation is ultimately minutia: where she goes to school, her credit score, and her plans to go on this cruise. Max didn’t tell me anything deeper, and nothing like her most painful secret. Not that I think she even has such a thing, given how cheerful she?—
“Mason Tugev!” slurs a vaguely familiar accented voice. “As I live and breathe. It is you.”
I spin in my seat and take in a super-thin guy in a rumpled uniform, a bottle of vodka in his hand and two liters on his breath.
Sophia gives me a questioning look, and I shrug, as confused as she is.
“It is I,” the guy says after a hiccup. “Your biggest fan.”
Well, that explains why he’s here.
“Hi,” I say in the friendliest tone I can muster—because you have to be nice to the fans. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” As much of a pleasure as it’d be to search for alcoholic ticks in the folds of a drunken tortoise’s skin.
“Wait, you don’t recognize me?” He slams his vodka on the table and extends his cadaver-like hand to me. “I am Ivan Vorobey.”
Sophia’s eyes widen, so I start to suspect he’s a celebrity of some kind, but I don’t have any clue as to how I know him. I mean, I’d remember that name: if translated from Russian, it’s Jack Sparrow, which is the name of the pirate played by?—
“He’s the captain,” Sophia says, just as I was about to make that leap. She lowers her voice and leans closer to me. “And he’s drinking.”
Ivan gestures at his bottle dismissively. “Just a little digestif after breakfast.”
He takes my water glass, spills its contents on the floor, then fills it to the brim with vodka. “Have a shot with me,” he says. “To honor our meeting.”
“Sorry, I can’t drink that,” I say.
“Stomach ulcer?” he asks in a horrified whisper usually reserved for discussing conditions like cancer. “It happened to my old man. The doctors forbade him to drink.” He shudders. “I believe you can still take your vodka rectally, but my papa refused that option, worried it would make him gay.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, but I simply push the vodka away and, keeping my tone fan-friendly, I say, “My coach forbade me—and I respect him more than any doctor.” It’s not even a complete lie: Coach always tells us not to binge drink, and such a “shot” would qualify as that. More importantly, I need to stay sharp to keep up with Sophia.
“But of course! Of course.” Ivan downs the glass he poured for me in one long gulp. “One should always listen to one’s captain, coach, wife, and mistress.”
I can tell that Sophia, like me, is wondering if he means the BDSM-type of mistress or the woman he’s cheating on his wife with.
“So,” Ivan says. “I wanted to ask you about that game where you scored three goals.”
Fuck. I look at Sophia for help, but she’s clearly still holding a grudge because she says, “Ah. Great. You boys have your talk. I’m going to go select that excursion.”
“Thanks,” I grumble.
“No problem.” She leaps to her feet, blows me a sarcastic goodbye kiss, and departs, leaving behind a faint scent of mango and watermelon.
I turn to Ivan. “Can you be a little more specific?”
He pours himself another glass of vodka. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve scored a hat trick in many games.”
“Ah.” He downs the drink. “I mean the one where you punched that guy. And that other guy.”
I suppress a sigh. This is going to be a very long morning.