The Girlfriend (The Boss) (37 page)

I tilted my head and narrowed my eyes at him.

“I think this is something you should celebrate,” Neil said, happily changing the subject. “Maybe you and Emma could go out and grab lunch. Do a little shopping?”

Emma looked up, her spoon halfway to her mouth, her eyes huge. “Yes... I suppose we could.”

It was clear that the unspoken was, “We could also jam shards of broken glass under our fingernails.”

“Emma, if you have other plans—”
 

“Nonsense.” Neil wasn’t going to allow either of us an escape. “You and Emma need to get to know each other better, and Sophie, you need to get to get out of the house. You’ve been cooped up here for far too long.”

“Look at what you’re wearing, for god’s sake,” Emma said, resignedly backing up her father. “Dad’s right. We should go out, if only so you can get some color. And that’s coming from an Englishwoman, Sophie.”

I’d begun to understand Emma’s language, I thought. She was teasing me... or not. Maybe she was being honest. Or maybe not. But she wasn’t maliciously unrestrained, as she had been the first morning we’d met. She was talking to me the same way I’d heard her speak to her father. In other words, as a part of the family, or just someone she didn’t totally hate.

“Okay.” It
had
been a while since I’d washed my hair. They may have had a point. “Give me a second to shower?”

“By all means,” she said, her green eyes flaring wide.

After I’d thoroughly de-funked myself, I stepped into the closet and rummaged through my clothes. Neil came in and leaned on the doorway. “I want you to have fun today.”

“We will,” I promised him. “I haven’t really had a chance to see the city.”

“Don’t expect Emma to be much for sight seeing,” he warned. “But she’ll shop like a demon. Take as much cash as you’d like from the safe in my office.”

“Neil—”
 

“Don’t.” He raised a hand. “Consider it payment for your full-time nursing services.”

“Then give it to Josh,” I said dryly, adjusting my towel under my arms.

“Sophie, let me be perfectly blunt.” He walked toward me slowly with the cocky half-smile I had been missing lately. “If you don’t take some money, I’m going to start stuffing your purse with fistfuls of cash whenever you’re not looking.”

“I just don’t want to bankrupt you by going spend crazy or something.” Actually, I didn’t want Emma to think I was a gold digger.

“I appreciate that, since I’m so close to abject poverty,” he said with a grave sense of false sincerity. He regarded me seriously for a moment. “I’m not sure if you understand exactly how much money we have.”

“
We
don’t have any money,” I reminded him. “You have money. I have... a rapidly dwindling savings account back in the States.”

“
We
do have money,” he stated again. “I didn’t bring you all the way over here so you could have different scenery during your financial hardship. You told me once that you wanted to share your life with me, and I think a part of that is letting me share my wealth with you.”

“Okay, but you’ve been rich your whole life,” I reminded him. “You know how to be rich. How do you know I’m not going to just freak out and start spending like crazy all over the place? I don’t want to negatively impact your bank account, and I don’t want it to become a point of resentment between us. And you know I don’t communicate well about money. It makes me uncomfortable.”

“Ah.” He said with a nod. “You’re concerned that your inability to talk about money in a frank and impersonal way coupled with my open-handed nature will create some kind of financial issue?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m uncomfortable with this stuff, remember?”

“Maybe this will put your mind at ease. I don’t think it’s even feasible for you to outspend the money I make in a day from my investments and income from Elwood and Stern.”

“I didn’t know that.” My throat was super dry all of a sudden.

This time, his laugh was one of disbelief. “Sophie, the occasional day of shopping isn’t going to break me, provided you’re not buying up companies. Although someday, if there were one you particularly wanted to buy and you came to me with a solid investment strategy— you’d really have to have more experience behind you—”
 

“Off topic, baby,” I interrupted.

“What I’m trying to say is...” He blew out a long breath. His eyes fell on the drawers on my side of the closet. He went to the top one, opened it, and pulled out the flat box that contained my collar. He held it up. “May I?”

A twinge of desire made me clench my thighs.

He fastened it around my neck, and I looked at myself in the mirror. The diamonds winked in the light like the droplets of water suspended from the ends of my hair.

Neil’s big hands splayed across my stomach and my chest. “Remember when we were fighting, and I told you that you could ask me for a million dollars and I would give it to you?”

I reached up to touch the collar. “This isn’t—”
 

“Three point six.” His gaze met mine in the mirror as his hand came up to cover mine, over my throat. “Why did you accept this?”

“Because you wanted to give it to me.” I had missed this intimacy, the purposeful touches. I’d missed submission. “Because it meant something to you and I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

“I wanted to give it to you because I love you, and I wanted to express it to you in an extraordinary way. To give you what no man in your past ever has. Perhaps it’s insecurity, perhaps it’s immature and selfish and insulting to you... but there is a part of me that wants you to have everything you want. Things you didn’t know you wanted. And I want to be the one who gives them to you.”

“That sounds like you’re buying my love,” I pointed out.

“No. You’d give me your love anyway. If I thought otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.” He slipped his hand down my body.

My knees went weak, but I knew he couldn’t hold me. I caught myself with my palms against the mirror, my fingers clenching and unclenching. I watched their reflections, then the reflection of Neil’s hand between my legs. My arousal, awakened by Neil’s touch, reached an unexpectedly quick high. I soaked up every delicious sensation.
 

God, I’d missed his hands on me.

I turned in his arms and pressed my body full-length against his. “It’s cruel to get this started when you’re not going to be able to finish it.”

“I feel like I might be able to finish it, today,” he said with a grin.

“I’m not going to fuck you right before I go out shopping with your daughter.” I giggled. “And definitely not if I’m going to be spending your money. That would make you my sugar daddy or something. Ick.”

“Emma gets dressed much quicker than you, anyway, so she’s probably waiting already,” he said with a rueful smile as he reached behind me to unclasp my collar. “How about I spend today resting, and we can try tonight. I actually feel... healthy. Or at least as close to it as I’ve felt in a long time.”

I wasn’t going to count my chickens before they were hatched. Neil could feel fine one moment, tragically ill the next. But I beamed at him and said, “It’s a date.”

“A date makes it sound like we’d be going out. I’m planning on going in.” he said with a smirk.

“You must be feeling better,” I teased. “Get out, let me get dressed.”

When I came downstairs, Emma was waiting beside the door, texting. She held up a finger before she finished, then looked up brightly and said, “Ready?”

I followed Emma to the car. “I like your coat,” I said, considering the dove-gray wool. It couldn’t really be wool, though.

“Totally synthetic,” she reassured me. “Just as warm.”

“But what about all the chemicals that come from making synthetic stuff?” I asked, and immediately wished I hadn’t.

“You don’t really want to argue about saving the planet, do you?” Emma asked with the lift of an eyebrow.

“No. No, actually, I kind of want to get drunk.”

“Ooh, let’s do that, please. Much better than shopping, even if it is ten in the morning.” She clapped her gloved hands together. “I know this great pub, it’s about twenty minutes away but they have vegan food. We’ll pretend to be there for lunch and get super drunk instead.”

She gave the address to the driver before we got into the car, and I settled back. What the hell were we going to talk about?

“How is my dad doing?” she asked, point-blank, before her door was even shut.

“Oh. Um.”
 

“I’m sorry to ambush you,” she went on. “But I haven’t had two seconds alone with you to ask, and all dad will tell me is, ‘I’m fine, better than expected, don’t worry about me.’ He’d say that even if the Grim Reaper were standing right next to him.”

“He’d try to pass him off as a business partner.” I sympathized with Emma’s frustration. Besides Josh and the other home care nurses, I was the only person who ever saw how bad things really were for Neil. Around everyone else, he used some inhuman amount of willpower to keep his pain from showing.

“Please,” Emma said, and her eyes were so big and round in her face she looked like the cat from
Shrek
. But not in a funny, manipulative way. “Is he going to be okay? Does he have any idea?”

I took a deep breath as I considered. “Right now, things are on track. I know it seems like he’s dying, but that’s just the chemotherapy.”

“It didn’t make him this sick before when I saw him,” she pointed out.

“Whenever you’ve visited, your father has done everything he possibly could to make sure you didn’t see how sick he was. Now, it’s a little harder. Part of it is how he looks, I think. It’s difficult to believe he’s feeling fine when his hair and eyebrows are gone and his fingernails are falling off. But believe me, things are going a lot easier for him now that he knows what to expect.”

She nodded, her lips pursed. “If things were really bad, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?”

“I would.” I didn’t even have to consider the answer. “He’s your father. I’m not going to keep anything important from you. Unless he were to say, ‘don’t tell Emma,’ but I don’t think he’s going to do that.”

“You’re right. I’m acting paranoid.” She bit her thumb as she stared out the window. “I haven’t been spending enough time with him.”

“Neil doesn’t want you to put your life on hold to worry about him. He’s told you that.” I’m sure that wouldn’t lessen her feeling of regret if he did die and she perceived herself as wasting time she could have spent with him.

“What would you do, were you in my shoes?”

What.

“Um,” I began, super eloquently. “Is that rhetorical?”

“No.” She shook her head firmly. “I have no experience with this. I don’t know what I should be doing.”

Had Emma really just asked me for advice?

“Well, he did mention that you’re not calling as often as you used to,” I ventured. “He knows you’re busy, but maybe if you just gave him a call now and then.”

“I’m always worried I’m going to wake him up or bother him,” she admitted.

“Well, I’m the one usually answering his phone lately.” Maybe that was the problem. Maybe she was afraid she’d get roped into a conversation with me. “Do you want me to just tell you if he’s sleeping or having a bad day?”

“I suppose,” she said cautiously.

“I’m not going to use it as an excuse to keep you from your dad.” I paused. “Is that... were you worried about that?”

“I know you’re a good person.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “But I don’t really know you.”

“And all that shit happened with Elizabeth. Look, you don’t have to trust me. I know I’m not going to do anything shady to you. Eventually you’ll know that, too.”

“It’s not that I think you’re going to maliciously attack me or keep my father from me. It’s only... your actions at the magazine seemed suspect. And my mom...”

“Hates me,” I finished for her. “It’s not a secret. And I don’t like her very much either, so we’re on equal footing.”

“She’s not a fan.” Emma’s eyes flared wide as she rolled them.

“I don’t have any contact with her, really. She calls for Neil and I give him the phone—” My heart lurched. Emma’s chin tilted slightly, and her eyes narrowed. I think we’d landed on the same conclusion at the same time. But I had to be sure. “Is that why you haven’t been calling or coming over so much? Did your mom say something?”

“Oh, this is quite uncomfortable, isn’t it?” Emma made a popping sound with her lips. “She... may have hinted to me that you were not wanting people to come around.”

“That’s silly. She could have come over any time she liked. She just had to ask Neil.” Silence hung between us a moment. Too quickly I added, “I literally only say ‘hello’ and ‘I’ll go and get him’ to her,” and I sounded defensive even to myself. But I’d never tried to prevent Neil from speaking to Valerie, and I resented that she’d given that impression to her daughter.

I tried again. “Actually, Emma... I really like having you at the house. It makes it feel less lonely.”

“I thought I would be intruding.”

“Not at all.” My stomach roiled at the thought that I’d somehow kept her from her father when she’d wanted to be close to him.

And I was furious at Valerie for even planting that suggestion in the first place. But she was Emma’s mother, so I wasn’t about to address it. I didn’t like feeling as though I had to compete with another woman. It was so... tacky and daytime soap opera. While a part of me acknowledged that sometimes, people just didn’t get along and it had nothing to do with any sense of jealousy, I wasn’t going to try and fool myself into thinking that was the case here.

I was enormously threatened by Valerie.

“I’m sorry, I should have given you the benefit of the doubt.” Emma shook her head. “And I don’t mean to drag down our whole day. I promise I will call dad more often.”

Amazingly, my thoughts of Valerie and how mad I was at her faded away as Emma and I had a few vegan friendly beers— her convictions didn’t extend to yeast— and we chatted. Mostly about Neil. Emma told me all about how much he spoiled her as she’d grown up. He’d protected her, too. The only one of his girlfriends besides me that Emma had ever met was Elizabeth.