11. Maisie
11
MAISIE
I shake my head and laugh. Even I’m aware this is an unusual way to have a date.
“Now we have our facade of a working lunch in place,” he says seriously, “I want you to tell me about yourself.”
“What?” You could knock me down with a feather.
“That’s what people do on dates, no? They get to know each other. I am here, and you have my whole attention. Talk to me. Tell me anything you like.” He leans back, relaxing his body even as his mind is as alert as ever.
“Well, the Parkside development?—”
“No,” Sev cuts me off. “If that’s really the thing your heart desires to tell me, then okay. But it’s just a cover, Maisie. This isn’t actually a work meeting. It’s a date. Tell me something you’re passionate about. A hobby? Do you read, perhaps?”
I press my lips together.
He knows I read.
“Tell me what you do in the evenings when you’re not going on dates.”
Dangerous truths shimmer in the air. We’re edging too close to the truth, and I go mute. I can’t think of anything that isn’t, “I don’t dance on tables.”
His gaze doesn’t waver, and he waits with un-Sev-like patience. He doesn’t look away, or glance at the clock. He doesn’t even reach for his glass when our drinks arrive.
No, he just looks at me as though I’m the sun and he’s a terrifying overgrown Triffid plant-monster who gains energy from my presence, as I flounder and wonder what I should say.
What can I possibly say that would interest a silver fox like Severino Blackwood? Older. Billionaire. Notoriously bad-tempered mafia boss.
Stalker. Orgasm giver.
I can’t figure out what to say for around eleven-and-a-half million years, or probably a minute.
Sev, meanwhile, seems happier by the second. He relaxes. The scowl that I thought was chiselled into his brow melts away. And I swear... Is he smiling? Just the tiniest upturn of his generous mouth. A secret little smile that I feel is only for me.
Is this how he looks when he watches me on those cameras I found in my apartment?
And suddenly, I have my voice. I’ve been longing to have someone to tell about my opinions on a really popular vampire book series, and Sev is offering to listen.
I tell him. Everything. And he listens with all the appearance of loving this. I’d be incredulous, except that I don’t think my boss can act.
Our food arrives, and I talk with my mouth full. Sev eats too, slowly. He barely glances at it, cutting the bloody steak without a care for the proximity of his fingers to a sharp knife. Whenever I pause, he interjects with a question, luring me out.
I wanted to be seen? I wanted a man to pay attention to me? Sev pays attention like there will be a life-or-death test at the end of the meal.
For my mother, I was always the audience for whatever drama was happening to her. I didn’t mind it. She wasn’t interested in my dull little stories from school when she could tell me about her own troubles. It never occurred to me to question that. And when my mother was ill, everything was about her.
My father is profoundly uninterested in anything I say or do.
I don’t know how, but talking about books slides into telling him about myself. I don’t even know what Sev says to prompt it, but I tell him about my mother’s death, and my father’s controlling behaviour when I moved in with him at sixteen.
And he listens without judgement.
“I’ve been ignoring his calls,” I confess, but I don’t admit why. My dad threatened to sell me off as a mafia princess to benefit Mitcham, from when I was eighteen onwards. Getting a degree saved me at first, but the reason I got this job is I had to get away. Have some of my own money, so when Dad tried to force me to marry against my wishes, I had options.
Instead, I’ve fallen in love with his best friend, who is also my boss. I thought this was a crush, and I’ve told myself it doesn’t matter that Sev won’t claim me. But it does. I love him.
And the way my dad keeps trying to call and talk to me has my spine prickling cold. I’ll have to choose, sooner or later. Escape, freedom, and never see the man I love again. Or stay, and end up married to a London mafia boss of my dad’s choosing, and maybe be able to see Sev from afar. Sometimes.
And that might have to be enough. I trail to a halt in my chatter when the waiter comes to collect the plates I’m surprised to discover are empty. I squirm with discomfort that I’ve said way too much. Bored him. This could be one of my last chances to really spend time with him, and I just wasted it telling him about myself and my fictional companions.
Sev has eaten the salad as well as the steak, and it occurs to me that he is an actual adult, with mature tastes and decision-making that give him a body I suspect from the slight views I’ve had of his forearms, touching his chest, and sitting on his muscled thighs, is sculpted by discipline and work in the gym.
“She’ll have tiramisu, I’ll have an espresso,” Sev orders.
“What about you?” I ask when the waiter has left again. “Tell me about you, since this is a date.” I tingle at that word. My first proper date. Well. Fake date.
“What about me?” Sev shrugs. “There’s nothing interesting about me.”
Apart from being powerful, gorgeous, and bad-tempered. “I bet there is.”
“You want to know about my childhood? How my brothers and I fought our way up through the London mafias? How I covered my scars with tattoos, and there is barely an inch of my chest that isn’t inked? How I did things that I regret to gain the power I have?”
His jaw clenches. This is a reminder that Sev isn’t tame. He’s brutal and powerful and I shouldn’t be playing with fire.
“My brother Rafe made it his pet mission to save the school we went to and make it less shit. Vito left for Italy in a thinly-veiled search for some connection to our roots, but ended up doing the same thing Rafe and I did—accumulate power.”
His mouth twists. “There’s nothing interesting about me. I sabotaged Rafe, and he sometimes responded. I’m richer than either of them, and Morden is more powerful.” He heaves a sigh. “But now they’re both married and have families on the way, and I just have cold, hard cash.”
“You’re friends with my dad, too,” I’m compelled to point out. “And you do good things in Morden. You’re a good boss.”
He pins me with a look of such intense hunger it takes my breath away.
“I am neither a good friend to your father, nor a good boss. I am not a good man, Maisie, and it would be better for you to remember that.”
“You’re a good friend to me,” I say impulsively, reaching across the table and taking his hand. Paper creases beneath my elbow and Sev blinks in shock.
“I’m definitely not your friend, Miss Matthews. Do not mistake me.” The words are harsh, but for almost the first time in this meal so far, he turns away. He can’t look me in the eyes as he lies to me, I realise.
We are friends. More than friends, too. He’s my boss, my forbidden lover, my stalker. My teacher.
But he is also my friend.
And he doesn’t let my hand go. No, he traps it beneath his, like a cat that has caught a bird that it shouldn’t have, and cannot eat, but must keep and play with all the same.
We’re so close. I can almost taste the truth between us. He’s as lonely as I am. He wants a family like his brothers have, and I crave that too. We’ve worked together for two years, and I know this man’s stormy moods better than the familiar London skyline out of my office window.
“Sir.”
My head snaps up and I jerk my hand back guiltily, but Sev holds on, and my heart springs into my throat like a bouncing baby animal.
“Espresso and tiramisu, enjoy.” The waiter sets the cream, coffee, and chocolate dessert down in front of me, and a tiny cup of coffee in front of Sev, then his gaze snags on our joined hands for a beat. I bite my lip. But Sev isn’t letting up. He doesn’t let me escape, and the waiter retreats wordlessly.
And when Sev calmly lifts his coffee to his lips as though this is what we do now. Like he only has one hand available, and so do I, and who needs two hands? Overrated.
“Eat,” he orders when I just sit there in shock. Because this isn’t normal for my boss.
I pick up my spoon and dig into the layered dessert. It explodes on my tongue, but I can’t really taste how delicious it is. How decadent.
Because in the silence, Sev begins to stroke his thumb over the back of my hand, gentle and insistent, and my insides melt.
“I guess the story I should tell you is something fun, rather than try to scare you. When we were fifteen, Rafe, Vito, and I made some money—I won’t say how, that’s less savoury—and we decided to celebrate. Vito was just beginning to embrace our Italian heritage. So he insisted we go to a chain Italian restaurant because we’re teenagers who didn’t realise that is about as similar to Italian food as I am to a gorilla.”
“A silverback gorilla…” He kind of is like that.
A smile ghosts over his face. “Indeed. So Vito says this is educational, and he orders everything on the menu.”
I giggle. “Seriously?”
Sev nods, a nostalgic softness in his eyes as he says, “He was an idiot. This food starts piling up. They wouldn’t give us anything without payment, so he threw notes on the floor like a five-year-old amped up on sugar in charge of a crime syndicate… Which is pretty much what we were, even then.”
I’m entranced. This is Sev as I’ve never seen him.
“Vito hates half of it. His mouth twists every time he eats an olive because they’re so salty and oily. And there are pizzas for miles. Forty, maybe? I forget. And he insists we’re going to all try everything, and we’ll eat the lot.”
“Oh noo… Were you sick?”
Sev gives me a pitying look. “More than once. All of us. I couldn’t even look at Italian food for about two years.”
Then he’s telling me about their first tattoos, and the time Rafe’s got infected and when they eventually dragged him to the doctor the dragon looked like a goat, and it had to be inked over and begun again. And when Sev wore too much aftershave, started a fight when Vito called him on it, and they had to sleep in the corridor for a week because the bottle broke and spilt into the carpet of their joint bedroom.
There are other stories, I know. The ones he alluded to. Dark things that happened to him and his triplet brothers, but he doesn’t tell me those, and my heart is so light.
He’s revealing to me parts of himself I could never have imagined, and from the way he shakes his head, and looks into my eyes, I’m certain he hasn’t told anyone this for years. Decades. Possibly ever.
We sit for hours, talking, until the restaurant is empty of lunchtime customers, and the staff are beginning to make subtle hints that he’d like to close up before dinner service. Sev ignores him for a while, but eventually I glance across at him enough that he rolls his eyes and flicks his fingers for the bill.
“Did Mr Blackwood’s lady enjoy her meal?” the waiter asks me, placing two little wrapped squares of chocolate beside my plate.
“I’m not his lady,” I blurt out, then immediately regret it when Sev’s expression darkens. Shit. “I mean, I’m his…” Nothing. I’m just a girl he watches but won’t do anything about. I’m beginning to doubt my sanity. “He’s my boss.”
There’s an awkward silence as he slides a sceptical glance to Sev, who has returned to his statue mode.
“Thank you.” The waiter turns to go, and my cheeks heat. He must think… God knows what he imagines is going on.
Sev pays without meeting my eyes.
I’ve totally messed up his favourite restaurant for him.
“Sorry,” I whisper when we’re in the car on the way back to the office.
“What?” he snaps.
“They know.” I grasp around for the right words. “About… Us.”
Sev scowls, rubs his forehead, and doesn’t reply.
And I realise that maybe there isn’t any such thing as us. He might stalk me. He might teach me. I might love him. But I’m just his dirty little secret.