All In (The Blackstone Affair, Part 2) (3 page)

Brynne happened.

“That noticeable, huh?” The cat started
purring in my lap.

“I know my own child and I know when
something’s off with you.” My dad left the room for a minute. He
returned with two of the beers cracked and handed me one. “Mexican
beer?” He lifted an eyebrow at me and I wondered if I looked the
same way when I did it. Brynne had remarked on my eyebrow quirking
more than once.

“Yeah. It’s good with a sliver of lime
shoved down the neck.” I took a slug and stroked my new ebony
friend. “It’s a girl. Brynne. I met her, and I fell for her, and
now she’s left me.” Short and sweet. What else was there to say to
my own father? This was all that mattered or all that I could think
about. I was aching for her and she had left me.

“Ahhh, well that makes more sense.” Dad
paused for a moment as if letting it all sink in. I am sure he was
surprised by the revelation. “My lad, I know I’ve told you before
so this is not news by any stretch, but you came to your good looks
from your mum, rest her soul. All you got from me was the name and
maybe my bulk. And your blessings in the Adonis department made it
very easy for you with the ladies.”

“I’ve never chased women, Dad.”

“I didn’t say you did but the point is you
never had to. They chased you.” He shook his head in remembrance.
“Gods, you had the females clamoring for you. I was sure you’d get
caught sowing your oats and make me a granddad long before you
should have done.” He gave me a look that suggested he’d spent much
more time worrying about this than he’d wanted to. “But you never
did…” Dad trailed off and got a rather sad look in his eye. After
school I’d shipped off to the military and left home.
And nearly
didn’t come back...

Dad patted my knee and took a pull on his
beer.

“I never wanted anyone like I want her.” I
shut my mouth and started in earnest on the beer. Someone scored a
goal in the game and I forced myself to watch and pet the cat.

Dad was patient for a while but he got his
questions in eventually. “What did you do that made her leave
you?”

It hurt just to hear the question. “I lied.
It was a lie of omission but still I didn’t tell her the truth and
she found out.” I set the cat off my lap carefully and went into
the kitchen for another beer. I brought back two instead.

“Why did you lie to her, son?”

I met my dad’s dark eyes and spoke something
I’d never said before. It had never been true before. “Because I
love her. I love her and didn’t want to hurt her by bringing up a
painful memory of the past.”

“So you’ve gone and fallen in love.” He
nodded his head knowingly and looked me over. “Well you’ve got all
the signs. I should have realized when you showed up here looking
like you slept under a bridge.”

“She left me, Dad.” I started on the third
beer and pulled the cat back onto my lap.

“You’ve said that already.” Dad spoke dryly
and kept looking me over like I might not be his son at all but
some alien imposter. “So why did you lie to the woman you love?
Best to tell it, Ethan.”

It’s my Dad and I trust him with my life. I
am sure there is no other person I
could
tell, apart from
possibly my sister. I took a deep breath and told him.

“I met Brynne’s father, Tom Bennett, at a
poker tournament in Las Vegas years ago. We hit it off and he was
good at cards. Not as good as me, but we developed a friendship. He
contacted me recently and asked a favour. I wasn’t going to do it.
I mean, look at what’s on my plate at the moment with work. I can’t
provide protection for an American art student slash model when I
have to organize VIP security for the fucking Olympics!”

The cat flinched. Dad merely raised a brow
and got comfy in his chair. “But you did,” he said.

“Yeah, I did. I got a look at the picture he
sent me and I was curious. Brynne does modeling on the side and she
is…so beautiful.” I wish I had her portrait in my house already.
But the conditions for purchase were that it stayed on display at
the Andersen gallery for six months.

My dad just looked at me and waited.

“So I arrive at the gallery show and buy the
damn portrait within a few moments of seeing it, like a sodding
poet or something! As soon as I met her I was ready to send in the
guard to keep her safe if need be.” I shook my head. “What the hell
happened to me, Dad?”

“Your mother loved to read all the poets.
Keats, Shelley, Byron.” He smiled just slightly. “It happens that
way sometimes. You find the one for you and that’s all there is to
it. Men have been falling in love with women since time began, son.
You just finally made it to the head of the queue.” Dad took
another drink of his beer. “Why does…Brynne, need protection?”

“That congressman who died in the plane
crash has got a replacement. Name is Senator Oakley from
California. Well, the senator has a son, one Lance Oakley, who used
to date Brynne. There was some trouble…and a sex tape—” I paused
and realized how horrible it must sound to my dad. “But she was a
very young girl—only seventeen—and terribly hurt by the betrayal.
Oakley was a right prick to her. She sees a therapist…” I trailed
off wondering how my dad was taking all this in. I drank some more
beer before telling the last part. “The son got shipped off to Iraq
and Brynne came to study at University of London. She studies art
and conserves paintings, and she’s absolutely brilliant at it.”

Dad surprised me by not reacting to all the
ugliness I’d just told. “I am assuming that the senator does not
want publicity about his badly behaving son to hit the news.” He
looked annoyed. My dad hates politicians no matter their
nationality.

“The senator and the powerful party that’s
backing him. Something like this will lose them the election.”

“What about the opposing party? They’ll be
looking for it as hard as Oakley’s people are trying to bury it,”
my dad said.

I shook my head in question. “Why are you
not working for me, Dad? You get it. You can see the bigger
picture. I need about ten of you though,” I said wryly.

“Ha! I’m very happy to help when you need me
but I’m not doing it for pay.”

“Yeah, I am very aware of that,” I said,
holding up one hand. I’d tried to get him to come and work for me
for a long time and it was sort of a joke between us. He never
would accept any money though—stubborn old fool that he was.

“Has anything happened to suggest that your
Brynne needs protection? Seems a bit alarmist really. Why did her
father ask you?”

“The senator’s son is still finding trouble
it seems. He was home on leave and one of his mates got killed in
an altercation at a bar. More loud noise that politicians hate for
a reason. It causes digging into places they don’t want people to
know about. Could just be an isolated incident, but the friend knew
about the video. Brynne’s dad went on full alert at that point. In
his words, ‘When the people who know about that video start turning
up dead, then I need to protect my daughter.’” I shrugged. “He
asked me to help him. I said no initially and offered a referral to
another firm, but he sent me her picture in an email.”

“And you couldn’t say no after you’d seen
her picture.” Dad worded it as a statement. I knew then that he
understood how I felt about Brynne.

“No. I could not.” I shook my head. “I was
mesmerized. I went to the gallery show and bought her portrait. And
when she came into the room, Dad, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
She intended to walk to the Tube in the dark so I introduced myself
and convinced her to let me take her home in my car. I tried to
leave her alone after that. I really wanted to…”

He smiled again. “You’ve always been a
protective lad.”

“But it became so much more for me than just
a job. I want to be with Brynne…” I looked over at my father
sitting quietly and listening, his big body still fit for a man of
sixty-three. I knew that he understood. I didn’t need to explain
any more about my motivations and that part was a relief.

“But she found out that her father hired you
to protect her?”

“Yes. She overheard a telephone call in my
office. Her dad exploded when he realized we were seeing each other
and challenged me on it.” I figured my dad might as well know the
whole bloody mess.

“She felt betrayed and exposed I imagine. If
her past with the senator’s son, or whomever, is something that you
know, and didn’t tell her you knew?” Dad shook his head. “What were
you thinking? And she should be told about the death of that other
bloke—about the possibility of a threat toward her.
And
that
you love her. And that you intend to still keep her safe. A woman
needs the truth, son. You’ll have to tell her everything if you
want her to trust you again.”

“I did tell her.” I blew out a huge sigh and
leaned my head back on the couch to look at the ceiling. Soot
stretched and rearranged himself in my lap.

“Well, try harder then. Start with the truth
and go from there. She will either accept you or she won’t. But you
don’t have to give up either. You can keep trying.”

I took out my mobile and pulled up the
picture of Brynne looking at the painting and held it out for Dad.
He smiled as he studied her image through his glasses. A
reminiscent suggestion in his eyes told me he was thinking of my
mother. He handed it back after a moment.

“She’s a lovely girl, Ethan. I hope we get
the chance to meet some day.” Dad looked me straight in the eye and
told me like it is. No sympathy, just the brutal truth. “You’ll
have to follow your heart, son…nobody can do that for you.”

♥

I left my dad’s place later in the
afternoon, went home and worked out for three hours in my gym. I
kept at it until I was nothing but a quivering mass of aching
muscles and sweaty stink. The bubbly soak in my tub after was nice
though. And the smokes. I smoked too much now. It wasn’t good for
me and I needed to tone it down. But fuck, the urge was strong.
Being with Brynne had soothed me enough so I didn’t crave it as
much, but now that she’d left, I was chain smoking like the serial
killer we’d joked about in our very first conversation.

I hung the Djarum off my lip and stared down
at the bubbles.

Brynne loved taking baths. She didn’t have a
tub at her flat and told me she missed it. I loved the idea of her
naked in my bathtub.
Her naked
… This was something that did
me absolutely no good to think about but yet I’d spent many hours
doing it. And if I reasoned why, was the basis for everything
that’d happened with us.
Her naked…
That photograph Tom
Bennett sent to me was the same one I bought at the show. From a
pragmatic view it was just a picture of a beautiful naked body
anyone would appreciate, male or female. But even with the little
he told me in the beginning, paired with that picture of her in all
its vulnerability, allure, and stark beauty; the thought she could
be in danger or that someone would purposefully hurt her, polarized
me to go out to the street and get her safely into my car. I just
couldn’t walk away from her and keep my conscience intact. And once
we’d met my mind went mad with fantasies. All I could see in my
head while we talked was…
her naked
.

My bath started losing its heat after an
hour, and understandably, its appeal. So I got out and dressed and
went in search of the book.
Letters of John Keats to Fanny
Brawne
.

Something Dad mentioned reminded me of it.
He’d said my mother loved reading the great poets. I knew Brynne
loved Keats. I’d found the book on the sofa where she’d obviously
been reading and asked her about it. Brynne had confessed her love
for him and wanted to know why I even had the book in my house. I
told her that my dad was always giving me books that people left
behind in his cab. He hated to toss them out so he would bring them
home whenever he acquired anything decent. When I’d bought my flat,
he’d hauled over a few boxes of books to fill the shelves and it
must have been in the lot. I truthfully told her I’d never read any
Keats.

I was reading now.

Keats had a way with words I was
discovering. For a man who died at only twenty five, he sure packed
some emotion into his letters to his girlfriend when they were
apart. And I could feel his pain like it was my own. It
was
my own.

I decided to write her a letter using a pen
and paper. I found some nice cotton stationary in my office and
took the book with me. Simba flickered his fins from the aquarium
when I walked up, always expecting a treat. I am a sucker for
begging animals so I dropped in a frozen krill and watched him
devour it.

“She loves you, Simba. Maybe if I tell her
that you are pining and off your feed she’ll come back.” So I was
talking to fish now. How in the hell had I got to this lowly point?
I ignored the urge for a cigarette, washed my hands and sat down to
write.

Brynne,

“
I do not know how elastic my spirit
might be, what pleasure I might have in living here if the
remembrance of you did not weigh so upon me. Ask yourself my love
whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammeled me, so
destroyed my freedom.

…
All my thoughts, my unhappiest days and
nights have, I find not at all cured me of my love of Beauty, but
made it so intense that I am miserable that you are not with me…I
cannot conceive of any beginning of such love I have for you but
Beauty.” July 1819

I know you will recognize the words of
Keats. I started reading the book you like. I can say I have an
understanding now of what the man was trying to express to Miss
Brawne about how she had captured his heart.

Like you’ve captured my heart, Brynne.

I miss you. Thoughts of you never leave me,
and if I can say it once more and have you believe me, then I guess
there is some comfort in that. I can only try to make you know what
I feel.