Fierce (5 page)

I’d laughed out of sheer surprise. “Um…yeah,” I’d said, then looked around to see if Vincent were anywhere in earshot. “But, you know…rent.”

“There are other ways to pay the rent. You could do what I do.”

“No, I couldn’t. I’m too short. Nobody wants a five-two model with no boobs.”

“That is not what I mean.” She’d looked around herself, then slipped me a card.

Boris Aristov,
I’d read.
Agent.

“And again.” I’d made to give the card back to her. “No point.”

“Not that kind of agent, not like you are thinking. It is an escort service. Very expensive, very discreet. You could be making ten—” She’d waved a long, elegantly manicured hand. “Even twenty times what you are getting now. Thousands of dollars an engagement. When I moved to New York, it was cockroaches everywhere. A bathtub in the kitchen. Worse than Russia. And now? I have a doorman. I am living like a princess. I go on some dates, I have my regulars…” She shrugged an expressive shoulder. “The money, it is easy. And you are small, yes, and your figure is not so good as mine. But some men, they like that. The look of a little girl.”

Ick.
I’d thrust the card back into her hand as if it were on fire. “I’m not judging,” I’d hurried to say. “But—no. That’s not for me.”

“You are thinking they are nasty, sweaty, dirty,” she’d urged. “That you are standing on the street corner. But it is not like that. They take you to the functions, so the other men can see you and be jealous. You converse. You laugh at the jokes. You speak perhaps a little French. You are elegant. A lady. And then you go back to the hotel room and…well. We have all had the bad dates, yes? Where we were perhaps sorry it ended as it did, because it was not so much fun, and we had to pretend? How much easier to pretend when it is his tuxedo jacket you are taking off, when you are in a suite at the Four Seasons? When you have a belly full of champagne, and there are thousands of dollars in your purse? Beauty does not last forever, and men are, how do you say? Fickle. But money…” She kissed her fingertips delicately. “The stocks and bonds, they are beautiful.”

I’d said no then. I was still saying no now. It wasn’t even enough of a choice to
be
a choice. If this job depended on my sleeping with Hemi Te Mana, no matter how much I wanted to do just that? Then I’d go get another job. 

A stab of anxiety at the thought. Oh, God. Crawling back to Vincent…even if he’d take me. No. He wouldn’t take me. I’d be unemployed. 

Why couldn’t life be simple? 

I was home by eight-thirty, but the apartment was dark, and I felt a twinge of alarm. 

She’s fifteen,
I reminded myself.
She’s allowed to go out.
But why hadn’t she called me to tell me where she was going? That was our deal. 

When I went into the bedroom to change and get ready for a fabulous evening on the couch with my spreadsheet, I discovered differently. I flipped on the light, and Karen moaned and threw a hand over her eyes. 

“Oh. Sorry.” I’d already turned it off again, and felt my way in the dark to my side of the bed to pull out the flashlight I’d stashed there. “You not feeling well?” 

I crawled across the bed and put the back of my hand to her forehead, and she brushed it irritably away.

“I’m fine. Just a headache.” 

“You get your homework done?”

She sighed. “Mostly. I’ll get up early and do the rest.”

I wanted to say something else, but I didn’t. We’d talk in the morning. I changed into PJs with the help of the flashlight and went out again, closing the door softly behind me, to finish that schedule. 

When I woke up at six the next morning, sure enough, she was up and sitting at the kitchen table in her school uniform, her mechanical pencil moving methodically down over a sheet of graph paper. 

“Hi.” I kissed the top of her head. “Feeling better?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t raise her face to mine. “But I’ve got to get this done. First period.” She sighed and put a hand to the side of her head, and I felt another niggle of worry. 

“All right,” I said. “Breakfast?” 

“Um…can you do a smoothie? I don’t think I can eat anything.”

“Sure.” She was too thin, but then, she’d grown so much this year, no wonder her weight couldn’t keep up. My little sister topped me by six inches already, and I wasn’t sure she’d stopped. 

We couldn’t have looked less alike, in fact. Short and tall, fair and dark. I called her my sister, but she was actually my half-sister, nine years my junior. The daughter of my mother and stepfather, both of whom had been gone before I’d turned nineteen. The past five years had been a scramble to keep her. It had been that or foster care, and there was no way I was letting that happen, not to the little girl I’d cared for since her birth almost as if she’d been mine. I couldn’t remember when I didn’t love her, and I couldn’t lose her. 

I made her a smoothie, and she flew through her math assignment in a rush and was headed for the subway even before I left. We’d never managed to have that talk, but at least we’d both finished our homework.

At eight-thirty, I’d been back at my desk for a half hour. Martine had come in a few minutes earlier but hadn’t spoken to me yet, and I was making pretty good progress on my stack of work when my phone buzzed. Not Martine; an unfamiliar extension. 

“Hope Sinclair,” I answered chirpily.

A male voice greeted me. “This is Josh Logan, Mr. Te Mana’s assistant. He’d like to see you in his office, please.”

“Um…now?” 

“Right now.” 

“I’ll…be right there.” I hung up, but Martine was at the doorway to my cube, a printout of the schedule in her hand. And if a wrinkle had been allowed to appear on her face, she’d have been frowning. 

“When you’re free,” she said, “please come into my office to discuss this.”

Oh, man.
My heart skipped a few more beats. “I’ll be in as soon as I’m back,” I told her. 

Her beautifully shaped eyebrows rose a fraction. “Oh? Do you have an errand I’m unaware of?”

“I’ve just been called to the—the executive floor,” I prevaricated. 

“What?” Her eyes narrowed. “Nobody told me.”

“I don’t know. I just got a call that they needed me up there.”

She nodded briefly and began to walk toward her office. I was out of my cube when she said, “Hope!” 

I froze. “Yes?”

“For heaven’s sake, don’t go up there without a notebook and pen. What are you planning to do, take notes in your head? Trust me, your memory’s not that good.” She held up the sheaf of color-coded spreadsheet in her hand. “There are several deviations from my instructions here.”

Talk about a confidence booster. “Of course,” I managed, and ducked back into my cube for supplies. Then I rode the elevator up to 51, taking some deep breaths along the way.

I was wearing a dark gray pencil skirt today, together with a turquoise blouse and a short pale-gray mesh sweater with its hem daringly cut away to just above the breasts. A knockoff of the real thing, but Nathan had whistled when he’d come in and said,
“Very
nice. Those benefits are looking better and better,” forcing me to smack him in the arm.

If I’d known I’d be seeing Hemi again, though, I’d have worn my suit. Or would I? I shook my head. This wasn’t getting me anywhere.
Note One. You radiate calm. Poise. Assurance.

Oh, man. I so did not.

Note Two. Fake it. 

I’d never been on 51 before, needless to say. An expanse of white marble, glass, and black leather greeted me as the doors whispered open, and the scent of lilies was strong in the air. A sweeping circle of a receptionist’s desk, a mighty display of flowers on one side, the source of the scent, and a perfectly groomed African-American man in a gray suit sitting behind it.

“Yes?” he asked, his gaze sweeping down my body, pricing my outfit, and dismissing it. 

“Hope Sinclair. Mr. Te Mana is expecting me.” All right, maybe he was expecting to
fire
me, but he
was
expecting me. 

“One minute, please.” He picked up a phone and spoke a few words into it, gestured to one of the leather sofas and said, “Please have a seat.”

Before I could, another man was there. Fairly young, curly dark hair crisply cut. “Josh Logan,” he said, and smiled, looking much more human than the last time I’d seen him at the photo shoot. “I remember you, of course. Please follow me.”

So I did. Through yet another outer office with three women sitting behind desks, then down a short corridor to a pair of tall, pale doors at the end. A quick knock, and Josh was opening the door and saying, “Hope Sinclair.” 

You are as good as he is.
Quite the thought to hold in your mind when you’re walking across acres of gray carpet, past a seating group of more black leather on one side, a pale conference table surrounded by eight chairs on the other, toward an almost-bare desk that was more like Command Central, set in front of wall-to-wall windows looking out over the Manhattan skyline. 

All of which I barely noticed, because I was looking at the man who’d stood as I entered, whose eyes were locked on mine for the entire interminable journey. 

Breathe. Walk. Don’t you dare trip. You are not a deer in anybody’s headlights. You are a woman. A soon-to-be-unemployed woman who can at least keep her dignity.

At last, I was there and able to stop. “You sent for me?” I asked, as coolly as I could manage. 

The faint suggestion of a smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “Good on ya,” he said, surprising the breath right out of me. “Please.” He gestured with one hand. “Sit.”

I stopped for one frozen second. Once again, he wasn’t wearing his suit coat, and the sleeves of his tailored white shirt were rolled up to reveal most of his bulky forearms. And one of them had a tattoo.

Not
a
tattoo. A
Maori
tattoo. Surely that was what it was. I’d done some research on the Maori before my interview. Polynesian adventurers who’d rowed, incredibly, across the unknown expanse of the Pacific in an age of celestial navigation to inhabit New Zealand. A fierce, proud warrior culture of handsome men and beautiful women. 

And those tattoos. Intricate, curling, stylized things of great personal and cultural significance that covered an entire bulky upper arm, and sometimes more. More in this case, because Hemi’s started a full four inches below his elbow, the deep blue of the inked patterns a contrast to his bronzed skin. 

It was only half a second’s hesitation, and then I was sitting down again, looking resolutely at his face, which wasn’t much of an improvement in the keeping-my-composure department. The hint of a smile was still there, letting me know he’d noticed me checking out the ink. And his eyes still held me. I might not be a deer in the headlights, but I was a deer in the wolf’s sights, for sure. 

No, you aren’t. You are strong.

He didn’t move. He was the least fidgety man I’d ever seen. “We had a date,” he said. 

“Did we?” I lifted my chin again. “Or did you issue an order and not stick around to see how I responded?”

“I wasn’t aware that my orders were optional,” he said softly. 

“Perhaps I’m laboring under a misconception. I thought the
droit du seigneur
went out of style a while ago.”

His gaze sharpened even more, and the smile was gone. “Was I exercising that right?”

“I don’t know.” I kept my voice level with a major effort. “Weren’t you?”

I could see the smile now, not just a hint of it. “Reckon you could think so.”

“Ah.” I tried to steady my breathing. “Yes. Well. I
did
think so.”

“Mm. You’re very perceptive.”

“Really?” I widened my eyes at him. “Does that take a lot of perception? You aren’t exactly subtle.”

This time, I surprised a bark of laughter out of him. “Oh, I don’t know. I suspect you didn’t know everything I was thinking all the same.” 

“And
I
suspect that I had a pretty fair idea.” 

“And that idea isn’t…appealing to you.” 

His deep voice was velvet over steel. He wasn’t a wolf, I decided. He was a tiger. With eyes that held his prey mesmerized during that sure, soft-footed approach. And, finally, the lunge and the killing blow. 

Well, I was tired of waiting to be pounced on. Deer could fight, too. “Why did I get this job?”

A flicker of the brown eyes at that. “Because Martine chose you.”

“Why?” 

“Because I told her she should.”

“Oh.” That knocked the wind out of my sails a bit. “Why?” I managed to say.

“Because I want to fuck you.”

My notebook fell from my hand onto the carpet as I stared back at him. The tiger had pounced. 

Everything inside me had turned to liquid. Everything but my spine. It had me standing up, and him rising, too. And then, before he could say anything, my right arm was hauling back as if in slow motion and coming forward fast. 

I slapped the CEO across the face.