Disciplined by the Dom (11 page)

“Most of them, yes.”

“LGBT kids who’ve been kicked out, drug addicts, abused minors?”

“You seem well-versed.”

“Actors aren’t the most stable bunch. Plus, I used to volunteer.” She was quiet, her fingers pulling at a hole where the stuffing had started to come through the back of a couch. Then, “Suicidal?”

He kept his voice as even as possible. “Yes.”

“How do you manage to avoid the whole social services thing?”

“We have a special pilot program accreditation,” he said.

“Family connections come in handy, huh?”

He rolled his shoulders, as if trying to shrug the association off. “Sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes not.”

“Well,” she said, slapping the back of the couch, “this was educational. Where’s the ladies’ room?”

He pointed at the door on the other side of the room, and off she went. Catie had so succeeded in disorienting him that she was gone for a full fifteen minutes before he noticed that something might be wrong. Catie didn’t strike him as a woman who loitered in bathrooms for the fun of it. And she was by herself.

Which was why it was doubly odd that, when he moved to knock on the door, he heard a muffled voice.

And he heard crying.

Under normal circumstances, Jake would have enough presence of mind not to walk into a women’s bathroom. He was not equipped to deal with the human side of Stephan’s House; he knew he would never be anyone’s shoulder to cry on, nor would he be the understanding face who convinced a wary teen to trust again. His role, his usefulness in this world, lay in what he could build with the money and the gifts he’d been given. He could build Stephan’s House, but he could not make it a place that helped people. He had to find others to do that. And he had accepted that about himself, long ago, and so Jake was not the first one to respond when any of the residents was in crisis. He was not the first one to respond when
anyone
was in crisis.

But he heard tears, and he thought it was Catie in there, crying. And he didn’t think. He simply opened the door.

Catie was there, but she wasn’t crying. She sat next to a painfully thin young woman with stringy, oil-darkened blonde hair who was crying quietly. There were scratch marks on the blonde girl’s arm, raised welts where she’d gauged at herself with something.

Only Catie looked up. The girl still continued to cry, oblivious. He hadn’t made much of a sound as he came in. Catie waited for him, looking at him, wanting him to do something, only he couldn’t think what. And now he stood there, open mouthed, gaping like an idiot, as he watched Catie turn her attention back to the girl in trouble. It was like watching the beam from a lighthouse whip around in a storm and settle on the place where it was needed. What he remembered most as he backed out of the room, careful not to make any noise, was that the look on Catie’s face was one he was coming to know: fear, then bravery, then determination. She bent her head to talk to the crying girl, and Jake knew that she’d seen him for what he truly was: hollow.

chapter
11

Catie thought she’d be happy for something to take her mind off of Jake. She was wrong.

Catie froze right in the middle of the bar when she realized where she’d seen the thin-faced man in the dark grey suit before. It had been bugging her all night, ever since he’d come in and settled at a table in the other server’s section. Catie had counted herself supremely lucky that Danny was able to get her this gig covering shifts while he went on tour with a theater group—it meant cash to replenish her quickly dwindling savings, it meant she’d be able to actually pay Danny rent for the use of his couch, and it meant she might have more time to help her grandmother. And it meant she might be able to think about something other than Jacob Jayson for the night.

‘Might’ being the operative word.

The bar was the hipster version of a rowdy kind of place—so, like, ironic rowdy—but it catered to people who could afford the bottle service, or were beautiful enough that it didn’t matter. Not necessarily her favorite sort of haunt, but hell, she could cocktail anywhere, and they were in need. She’d quickly been able to tell that the man in the dark grey suit wasn’t there socially. He was working, just as much as she was, and it showed on his face right up until the moment his clients—she assumed they were clients, or maybe potential clients—walked in. The clients looked like a scruffy band out of Brooklyn, on the cusp of hitting it big. Catie had figured the man in the suit was an agent or a manager, maybe in public relations. She’d seen it a million times before in L.A.

And it had hit her: she’d actually seen the
same guy
in L.A. He must do pretty well for himself, agenting or managing or public relations-ing. She’d made a mental note to let the other waitress know, and then she’d gone about doing her job.

Right up until she realized that wasn’t the only place she had seen him. She’d seen him at Volare, too. And she hadn’t seen him in a bar in Los Angeles. She’d seen him in Brazzer’s office.

That was when the world stopped.

A big guy with a neck beard jostled her and tried to apologize in an affected southern twang that he probably thought was flirtatious. Catie blushed, first because she’d been lost in a moment of terror, and then because the physical movement reminded her of the ben-wa balls she wore inside her. It was an immediate jolt, a sudden, sexual reminder of Jake—and of what had happened, and of how vulnerable she’d just become. Belatedly, it knocked some sense into her: she couldn’t very well figure this out standing stock still in the middle of the bar like she had a spotlight on her, just waiting for the man in the dark grey suit to get a good look at her.

“Taking my smoke break!” she shouted at the bartender.

“I thought you didn’t smoke?”

But she was already through the swing doors that led to the back storerooms and the alley entrance.

Shit
.
Shit, shit, shit.

She had spent the past few days ever since she’d shown up, apparently unannounced, at Stephan’s House, convincing herself that she really could go through with her original plan. She could do it. She could write the story, she could make it truthful, she could save what was left of her family. She had dealt with her anxiety about being found out, about her eventual exposure, by being realistic. Not everything could possibly be as welcoming and nurturing and wonderful as it seemed at Volare, and she felt like she’d finally seen the darker side. First, Roman had brought her into his office to announce that he would be her mentor, but he’d only done that to foist her back on Jake as soon as possible. Which, at first, she hadn’t minded, but then she’d gone to Stephen’s House to get background for some catalog, as instructed, and Jake had been…

He’d been different.

Well, not entirely different. She’d been thinking about it all week, trying to figure it out. None of it made sense, was the problem.

Nothing she’d been able to find about Jake—about Jacob Jayson—had seemed like it fit the man that she herself had encountered. Some of it Catie remembered or already knew. His mother had been a sort of free-spirit heiress, indulging in all kinds of weird ashrams and fads, doing all kinds of drugs, lots of lovers. Had Jake out of wedlock when she was in her forties, no mention, ever, of who the father was. Anthea Jayson seemed to court the newspapers, reveling in the attention, in scandal and notoriety. And when Jake was born he apparently became a part of the show. Like a theater prop.

And then Jake himself: not too much tabloid coverage of him as soon as he got old enough to avoid it. The opposite of his mother, in that sense, which didn’t surprise Catie; she knew all about trying to get away from the kind of people your parents were. There were only a few society page mentions: when his mother died while he was away at Harvard, and then when he published his book on Shakespeare. A few academic articles, but they all tapered off, like he’d stopped taking his academic career all that seriously. And then a few mentions in the gossip rags, and then, five years ago, everything just…stopped.

It was like he’d disappeared. Like he’d just rejected public life, and instead threw himself into…Volare.

Catie realized she really had developed certain expectations about Jake, and maybe that hadn’t been entirely fair. She’d watched him, obviously, when he tended bar at Volare—tended bar! The heir to the Jayson fortune! His family built the freaking
railroads
, and who knows what else—and he was always so…solicitous. Like making sure everyone was ok, and everything functioned well, was his job. And then when he’d caught her, he’d been so high-minded about it. Noble, actually. ‘Noble’ was the word she was looking for. Determined to do right by everyone, and with the integrity to go talk to Roman, but still keep his promise to her. He’d gone from being the impossibly hot but remote Dom that she fantasized about to this impossibly hot Dom who was also impossibly chivalrous—who she still fantasized about. Who wouldn’t love that?

But now that she thought about it, she never could recall Jake in any kind of intimate conversations. The Volare lounge was this unspoken safe place for the kinds of people who frequented the club, the kinds of people who were often isolated by their own power, or fame, or wealth. It wasn’t unusual for people to come there for comfort, and Jake would watch over them. He would keep an eye on everyone, but he was never the one anyone cried to. He never involved himself personally whenever anyone had a problem. He made sure someone else did that. Catie herself had done more of that, just hanging around the lounge and talking to people, the way she did.

And then there was what had happened at Stephan’s House.

Catie kicked open the delivery door that opened on a side alley and propped it open with a brick. She didn’t actually want to go outside—January in New York
sucked;
she did not understand why anyone who could live in California would choose to deal with this suckage instead—but she needed the fresh air. Thinking about Jake always clouded her mind.

She wondered, for the millionth time, whether she’d made too big a deal about what had happened. What
had
happened, really? She’d walked into the bathroom and the sounds of crying behind one of the stalls had transported her immediately back to high school, when half the girls she knew had had serious problems, and she felt like she’d known exactly what to do. The girl’s name had been Alice. Alice had half-heartedly cut at herself, and was almost as upset about falling back into bad patterns like that as she was about what had made her cry. She’d said that—“bad patterns”—and Catie could tell Alice had been to therapy—therapy most likely provided by Jake and Stephan’s House.

Alice had just talked. Man, that kid had been through more stuff…

And Catie had just listened, tried to let the girl know she cared. When the door had opened and Jake had walked in, Catie had had this momentary thought of the two of them, together, helping Alice. Like playing house. She’d wanted very badly to see Jake help Alice. He’d been a jerk to Catie all day, but in a way, that was so inept it was almost funny, and if it had been a movie, this was where Jake would have shown his true colors, saved the day, been the hero. He’d be someone Alice could rely on.

Instead he’d gotten this
look
. And then he’d walked away.

The look itself had been weird. Odd. Like this flash of raw emotion—of
pain
, almost—and then, like a curtain had been a drawn across his face, it was gone, and all that had been left was…nothing. His face had become a blank. And he walked away. He’d seen there was someone in trouble, he’d felt
something
, and then he had walked away.

Suddenly, Jacob Jayson didn’t seem like someone anyone should rely on.

Maybe that was a bit harsh. Obviously Catie’s reaction to that would be more personal. She had kind of a grudge against people who left other people hanging. She’d tried to figure out what Stephan’s House was all about—narcissism? Control? An attempt to clean up the family name after years of his mother’s exploits? Maybe just the best he could do, even with all that money? No, that wasn’t fair. Obviously, the truth had to be more complicated. She knew she was being irrationally judgmental, but she wasn’t having a rational reaction. She was having an emotional one. She just couldn’t understand walking away from someone who was in pain. But Jake did, and it meant he was like all the other people who had disappointed her in life. He was no better. Maybe not worse, but no better. It meant she had been living a fantasy these past few months at Volare.

And all that made her think maybe she could go through with Brazzer’s exposé after all. Except now there was a man outside, in the bar, who had seen her at Brazzer’s office, and who had seen her at Volare. A
member
of Volare. Obviously, the man in the dark grey suit hadn’t recognized her; she doubted he remembered every young actress type he saw in L.A., even the ones who showed up in a tabloid office. The man in the grey suit must have been there placing a story or making a deal for one of his clients to get photographed “candidly” by the paparazzi—stuff like that happened all the time. He probably hadn’t even noticed her.

Right?

“Shit,” she said to the empty alley.

The real, if remote, possibility that she might be exposed, in the very way she was planning on exposing Volare—well, no, she would do a better job, she’d make it look good, otherwise she couldn’t live with herself—made it all very real. And there was the fact that it was Friday, and she’d decided to obey Jake’s order, even though she had to cover a shift, even after all that. She had, as he’d instructed, carefully inserted the ben-wa balls, thinking of him the whole time. Why? What was wrong with her? Even now, she could feel them inside her. They kept her…not constantly aroused, unless she thought about Jake. But constantly aware.

That’s what pissed her off, if she were being honest. What made it a challenge, still, to commit to what she had to do. She was disappointed in Jake, and she was hurt by that disappointment, hurt in a way that felt bigger than just one man, like she’d had a glimmer of hope that maybe some people, somewhere, wouldn’t let you down, and she’d pinned those hopes, fairly or unfairly, on Jake. And yet still,
still
, thinking about him could get her hot. He still had a hold over her. She still dreamed about him, about the things he’d already done to her. He was still inside her head, and now…