Owned: A Mafia Menage Romance (61 page)

Eventually we caught our breath, and eventually we slept, still joined together, finally complete.

I WATCHED DECLAN FROM across the garden, squinting under my upheld hand. He pushed his hair back with one self-conscious gesture, his fawning smile sending a shower of charm onto his unsuspecting companion.

“I feel like I should warn her,” I mused.

“You should probably warn him,” Bridget drawled. “Declan is not half man enough for Olivia. She is going to eat him alive.”

“Oh. Well let’s hope there’s video.”

I set my soda water down in the shade and surveyed the garden, cautiously pleased. It was a surprisingly large group of people, all friends of friends, all eager and polite. Everyone I met treated me as though I was instantly accepted and I was still working out a gracious way to act. Bridget referred to me as a “reformed lone wolf.” Secretly, I was still trying to acclimate to the idea, but if she thought I was reformed, at least I was half-convincing.

Edna stepped into the sun and then looked around. Catching my eye, she raised a hand to me.

“Our hostess would like a word,” I murmured.

“Then you should go to her,” Bridget nodded, her attention distracted by the catering staff beefcake.

“OK.”

“Just don’t cut me out of any more deals.”

I sigh-coughed. “Come on, Bridge.”

“I haven’t forgiven you yet,” she advised me with as much of an eyebrow quirk as physics would allow her.

“I know… I know. Me either,” I agreed. “How about if I introduce you to Peter…. Baron Peter Baarst?”

“What? Really?”

She followed the discreet gesture of my arm to the other corner of the garden where he was chatting animatedly with Jackson in the shade.

“Why is he wearing a scarf?” she muttered rapidly between her clenched teeth.

“Well… gee I don’t know? Because it looks good? Because it’s January?”

“Is there something wrong with his neck? Because he’s so pale? Like psoriasis or something?”

I rocked back on my heels. “OK. That is a weirdly racist thing to say.”

“Psoriasis affects all races!” she hissed back emphatically.

I held my hands, palm up. “Yeah, yeah,” I agreed cautiously. “Whatever you say. I think… Well, I think the scarf looks good.”

“It does look good,” she breathed huskily.

“You’re freaking me out, Bridget.”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “I’m freaking myself out too.”

“One sec… Peter?” I called out.

Peter turned and began to walk toward us, his hair a blazing halo of light in the sun. For a second, I nearly forgot to breathe.

“Peter, have you met Bridget Devareax? She is my gallerist.”

Bridget extended her teal-lacquered fingers to Peter, who drew them instantly to his mouth. His gesture pulled her slightly forward on her 7-inch stilettos and she tipped quite thoroughly into his personal space.

“Delighted,” she purred.

“The pleasure is mine,” he said in a low growl.

Oh geez.

I tiptoed away and met Edna at the arched back doors.

“Darling, hello,” she said, her face wrinkling earnestly. Once again I was struck by her quick, bird-like motions.

“Edna, I can’t thank you enough,” I began.

“Oh, pish tosh,” she retorted, waving her hand in the air. “It is I who should be thanking you. You’ve made such a change, such a marvelous change…”

“Well, it’s not really me,” I replied.

“Ha! Of course it is. You’ve changed, Declan has too… Jackson most of all, I should think,” she mused as she led me into the beautiful, old-Hollywood-glamour of her living room.

“He has?” I asked sweetly, knowing that she was right. I still loved hearing it.

“You’ve made a man out of him,” she declared. “Never forget that.”

I nodded, thinking to myself that it was strange how no one really seemed to understand him but me, at all. She underestimated him if she thought he needed anyone to make him more man than he was.

“So I wanted to give you this,” she began, holding out a small parcel.

“Oh Edna, you’ve done so much already,” I breathed.

“Don’t open it here,” she cautioned. “Go and find Jackson. It’s nothing really, but I thought you should have it.”

“I don’t know what to say…”

She stepped closer to me, her eyes bright and shining.

“There’s no one else who could have this, but you, really,” she continued as though I hadn’t said anything. I felt she was babbling trivialities to conceal a stream of emotions.
So like Declan,
 I thought.

“OK,” I said with a smile. “I will go find Jackson.”

“OK,” she agreed, her voice hoarse.

“Thank you again,” I murmured and leaned to kiss her cheek. When I pulled back, her eyes were wet and her nose was turning a sweet shade of pink.

“OK go!” she commanded me, waving in the air with her fast fingertips. “Go to your party!”

“OK, OK,” I chuckled, inordinately happy to see the emotion swell in her.

As I maneuvered back to the garden, Anneke whirled around a corner, nearly bumping into me.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “I was just looking for you!”

“Really?” I asked politely, just slightly put out to be distracted from my mission. I shifted the parcel to my other arm.

“Yes,” she nodded, blonde curls shaking all around her cherubic face. “Kevin and I must be going, but I wanted to just personally thank you--”

“Oh, no… No thanks necessary,” I averred with my hand up.

“No really, it was so sweet of you to set us up…”

“Oh! Think nothing of it!” I exclaimed as graciously as possible. I was happy for them, really. Truly. Just a little nausea. Just sometimes.

“It was a gift from heaven!” she objected. “No,
you
 are a gift--”

“Oh gosh, Anneka, I really am just so glad to see you both happy,” I said in a rush, angling away from her. “Thank you so much for coming, bye!”

I slipped away from her with a small wave, then gave Kevin another when I saw him crossing the kitchen. How that had worked out so well, I couldn’t even guess, though I imagined Jackson had probably smoothed it over with a few well-phrased words to Anneka. In any case, more power to them.

Just before I made it out through the doors, Bridget stepped in front of me and blocked my path. I stopped in my tracks and cocked my head, waiting impatiently for whatever emergency she had manufactured.

“OK I forgive you,” she announced, leaning toward me.

“Ha!” I laughed and wiggled my eyebrows. Mission accomplished. “You like Peter well enough then?”

“Holy Christ that is the sexiest German accent I have ever heard,” she hissed in a low whisper, her eyes all wide and dramatic.

“Well, yeah… That’s because it’s Dutch,” I explained.

“I mean did you hear that?”

“I heard it.”

“It’s like sex on a cracker, Margot. It’s like fucking slippery manjuice--”

“Oh my god, stop.”

“And did you see him? He looks like the bad guy in that movie… uh…”

“Blade Runner?”

“No, the other movie.”

“I have no idea,” I admitted.

She caught her lower lip between her teeth, piercing the candy-coating of black cherry lipgloss. I had never seen her violate her own makeup before. This was serious.

“Ladyhawke!” she blurted out, pointing directly at my sternum.

“Uh… OK. I’m pretty sure Rutger Hauer is actually the
hero
 of Ladyhawke, but whatever.”

“Whatever,” she agreed from a mental distance of about six miles. Her gaze swept the patio like a searchlight, finding Peter’s tall, broad presence just next to the wisteria trellis with Declan.

“Hey, are these bandage dresses, like, literally bandages?” I asked her distractedly. “I mean, is there a secret clasp to unravel you or whatever?”

“I am gonna climb him like a tree,” she whispered under her breath, then began walking away.

“Yeah, OK, bye then,” I waved as she stalked slowly toward her prey.

“Hey there you are,” breathed a voice in my ear.

“Oh, thank god,” I sighed. His hands slid around me from behind, clasping together over my taut, swelling belly. I covered his hands with mine and hung there in his arms, loving how perfectly we connected. Finally I could slump against something solid. Something that would always hold me up.

“Edna gave us a present,” I said. “We are supposed to open it.”

“OK!” Jackson agreed. “Lay it on me.”

I held up the parcel for him to flick open the tape closure, then ripped the paper away. Carefully I flipped it face up, temporarily blinded by the sunlight reflected off the picture glass in the ornate silver frame.

“Hey wow,” he said softly. “That’s your mother?”

“It sure is,” I said, my voice slow with recognition. My mother grinned from the couch in my living room. She held one hand up with a martini, and the other arm was draped casually over the back cushion. Next to her, Aunt Winnie held up a matching glass, her ankles tucked primly under her bottom. Behind them, Marlon Brando stood mid-wave, a cocky, lopsided smile on his face.

“It looks like they’re toasting us,” he chuckled.

“I had no idea Edna was so sentimental.”

“Well, me either,” he admitted.

Biting my lips together, I silently stared into the photo, realizing how natural and lifelike it seemed. I could believe that they really saw us through the image, through time. It almost felt like this was a missing artifact, the one that tied them all together. The one that tied all of
us
 together.

“Well I think this is the nicest engagement present we’ve gotten,” he said, kissing my hair tenderly.

I could only nod as my heart swelled. Everything was different, but everything was fine, just as Jackson had promised. Yes. Now everything was complete.

###

End of Book 4, “Beloved,” the final book in “Billionaire Brothers,” the complete serial.

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Billionaire Brothers 2, Book 1

Meg Watson

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“I want you to go over there and drop your tits on that guy by the door.”

“Melita!”

“What?” she whined, all innocent, her lips pursed in a cartoony O shape.

“Just…. quit it, please,” I sighed, barely able to hear myself over the southern rock blaring above our heads.

“Do it,” she commanded, her eyebrows raised in a straight, serious shelf of kohl black.

“I’m not doing that,” I muttered into my gin and Diet Sprite. Angling carefully away from the door and the hunk standing next to it, I positioned my cleavage over the table and tried to camouflage it with a bar napkin.

“You should
totally
 do that!” she insisted as though she hadn’t heard me, plucking the napkin from my fingers and tossing it away. “It’ll be good for you! And me too! I can, like, live through you voraciously or whatever.”

“Vicariously,” I corrected her automatically. Apparently that word-a-day calendar app was starting to take hold. Sort of.

She shook her head, her shiny black curls dropping onto her forehead one by one.

“What?” she hollered against the music.

“Nevermind!” I yelled back just as the song finished. My voice punched out into the open air, and several people turned around to look at me like I had deliberately smacked them in the back of their expensively gelled heads.

“Christ, Melita, can we just go?” I said, gritting my teeth and lowering my voice to an appropriate level.

I ducked back toward my drink and hunched forward over my purse, wishing I could disappear. Crowds and bars have always made me feel conspicuous and dorky, and the skin-tight sheath dress she forced me to borrow before we left her apartment wasn’t helping at all. Every time I exhaled I could feel my own breath on parts of my cleavage I was sure weren’t supposed to be exposed.

“See, you’re too smart,” she nodded sagely, plucking her straw between her purple lips and sucking down another huge swallow of her drink.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She shrugged. “You’re all brain. Too smart for your own good with all your words, your big thoughts. You live up in
there
,” she growled, eyes narrowed, her dark grape fingernail describing a lazy triangle somewhere near my forehead, “when you should be living all
down in there
.” Her hand dropped dangerously close to my thigh and she pointed at my crotch with short, stabby motions.