“I have no idea how much money is mine. I don’t know anything. He’s closed my credit cards, or he said he would. And emptied my account of his money. And I owe him for the cost of the mess I caused today.” The sun sank into the horizon. “I’m dead to him. He’s done with me.”
Zeke stroked a finger down the edge of my cheek, and I shivered but not from cold. Was it possible heat could do that? Make you shiver with want? “He’s not done with you. He hasn’t even begun to know how not done with you he is. I’m going to let you in on a little secret.”
I swallowed. “What’s that?”
“He didn’t mean that when he said it. Angry men make stupid mistakes. I’m counting on your father’s temper to explode. There is nothing he’ll hate more in the universe than the sight of you with me. So that is just what we’re going to give him.”
Chapter Seven
Zeke did like to eat really fine food. I was halfway through a steak I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish, a glass of red wine that he’d informed me when he poured was going to be it for me on the alcohol front, and the pomme frites, as he called them before he switched back to saying French fries and leaving it at that. I knew the word pomme frites. They were on some menus in English like that. Plus, he overexaggerated how he said it, which actually I found helpful instead of obnoxious because I at least knew I hadn’t misheard.
It was awful always having to say ‘what’ only to realize you hadn’t not heard, you’d just not understood.
I set down my fork, and this time, he didn’t try to feed me more. We sat at his dining room table, fortunately, next to one another instead of across the table, which would have made me feel like we were playing at royalty in his pretend Versailles.
Zeke was so infallible in many ways, the fact that he’d hired a bad decorator gave me the smallest amount of pleasure. No one was perfect. Not even someone who looked like he did and had been as successful in life as he had been.
“Okay. Talk to me now.” He sat back in his seat and sipped his wine, obviously not cutting himself off as he had done to me. I didn’t mind. I was a lightweight, and we had to figure out how to have a conversation that didn’t end with him having to carry me somewhere.
I tilted my head. This was late for eating. When we lived in Europe, my father had kept us on American eating times. He didn’t like to eat past eight o’clock at the very latest. A ten o’clock dinner? It seemed almost obscene.
I was twenty-two years old. I could eat whenever the hell I wanted to, damnit.
“About what?” I’d told him all of my issues. I didn’t think I had any more. As far as I knew, all of my debt was familial, and no one was going to come looking to collect with a gun pointed. Of course, now knowing what I knew, I supposed that was possible.
“About what you want to do with your life.”
And there was the ten-million-dollar question. “I don’t know.” Same answer I’d been giving since they started to ask that in grade school. No idea. None.
“You’re an influencer, right?”
I almost spit out my drink. “Look at you, knowing that word.”
“I’m not that old, Layla. I know what an influencer is. You put on makeup and tell people what to buy. It’s like a new take on old marketing. And that’s what you do.”
I hated to tell him the truth. “I don’t actually post on my own Instagram account. That was—”
He held up his hand in that way I’d already discovered he did when he wanted me to stop speaking. “The company. Motherfucker.” He crossed his hands in front of him. “Well, we can take that back from them, and you can stop being a walking advertisement for whatever they think you should be. Pick your own products. That’ll be an income revenue for you, since you’ve already got that set up.”
Zeke was going to want to kill me in a matter of minutes. “I don’t want to be an influencer. I never did. It was just sort of something that got set up because of the book. And it kept going because it was good for public image to see me places.”
He leaned forward. “What do you mean you don’t want to do it? You’re already doing it.”
“I never wanted to.”
“Then why…” He held up his hand, but I hadn’t said anything. It was like he was stopping himself from speaking. “Okay. Not that.” I waited for the yelling. This was when my father would probably start doing that. Zeke wasn’t my father, thank goodness, considering the direction my thoughts often took with him, but he seemed like he might be the hollering type. Only he didn’t. “You wrote a book.”
He already knew I’d collaborated on it. “Yes.”
“Did you like that?”
One of the staff I hadn’t seen before came in, took our plates, and exited again quickly. “Why do they tiptoe around like they don’t want to be seen?”
Zeke took a long sip of his wine. “I don’t like people around. I’m easy to work with, in the sense that I leave people alone to do the things I hire them to do. But I don’t want anyone under foot while I’m at home. It’s totally a ridiculous problem to have. So when I hire them, they understand that they’ll get paid very well with a lot of autonomy to make me feel like I’m alone at my house, even though there’s a full staff here.”
That was interesting. I sat forward. “How do you even have that conversation?”
“I don’t. My manager does. Enough on this. You didn’t answer my question. Did you like writing the book? It’s about fashion. You tell people what to wear.”
No, he didn’t understand, but I’d not expected him to. “I would never tell someone what to wear.”
“Then what is the point of the book?”
Well, now that was a loaded question. But what was the point of anything when it came down to it? Why did we read anything? Do anything? “I tell people how to feel great in the clothes they already own, in their own style, and to make them feel really incredible in their own skin.”
He opened and closed his mouth. “Why would you do that? Why make people feel good in their own stuff?”
I stared at him a long moment. Did I dare say what I wanted in response to his question? “Listen, maybe you’ve spent your whole life feeling incredible. I mean…look at you. You were probably always gorgeous. Even as a kid. Then you grew into how you are now. You wear the best cut suits and you wear them…they don’t wear you. In jeans, you look like they created denim just so you could put them on your body.”
“Layla, you’re going to make me blush.”
Hardly. He wasn’t the type. I could tell. I was a redhead. We blushed better than anyone. Or worse, depending on your feelings on the subject. I ignored the jab. We both knew he wouldn’t blush. “But most people go around feeling barely adequate in things they spend hours trying to decide if they want to buy. They stand there, and they can’t decide what they hate themselves less in. I work on that with them. In the book.”
“Because you feel so wonderful all the time.” His eyes were practically daggers to my soul.
He couldn’t have been more wrong if he tried. However, I wasn’t going to enlighten him. Why should I? Zeke could see me as he wished, the way everyone saw me, even those who claimed to love me. They’d never see how I saw myself, how I felt inside.
I hated getting dressed, despised my clothes. The mirror was constantly my enemy, and there was never a time I had any clothes that I actually felt like wearing.
All of that being true, I answered him just the way he’d want me to, just the way everyone did. “Sure, I love getting dressed. It’s so much fun.”
“I see.”
But he didn’t. And he never would, which was utterly disappointing. But men were only ever tuned to your soul in fantasy. In real life, they didn’t know how to touch you, didn’t cater to your wildest desires, and certainly didn’t know what it was that you didn’t say aloud. Marriages were business arrangements, and I’d just been slow to figure it out.
“So, yes, I wrote a book and people liked it. But I think I s
aid everything there was to say about that subject, and I’m not sure that there is anything left to write.”
He rose. “There’s always more to say. Textbooks are updated and celebrities seem to publish three or four autobiographies in a lifetime. We’ll find you another ghost writer and go again.”
If only it had been that easy. “Okay.”
“I’m going to go into your bank accounts tonight and figure some things out for you. Can you be up by nine and ready to go get some coffee and breakfast?”
Nine? That was easy. I never slept very much. I was up way before nine most days. I chewed on my lip. “You can’t get into my bank accounts without my information, passwords, whatever.”
“My guy can get in. Frankly, it’s shocking he hasn’t been able to get your dad’s yet. With your permission, I’ll just have him do that. Unless you want to write them all down.”
The sad thing? I wasn’t certain I knew what they were. I just kind of signed on through my computer which had all my stuff stored, but I didn’t remember what the passcode actually was or even know how much money I had.
What had he called me this morning? Pathetic. Yes, that fit.
I shouldn’t have slapped him. He’d just seen me more clearly than I’d seen myself.
“Layla? Is that fine?”
I smiled. The one I gave reporters who wanted my fall picks for fashion and I wanted to gauge out their eyes, because most people would never get to wear the fall picks either because of money or because they couldn’t fit in the sizes that kept getting smaller and smaller. Hence, my need to run.
“It’s fine. Thank you for your help.”
He took his napkin off his lap. “You look like I just asked you if you wanted to go have a filling drilled in your mouth. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I’m sorry. Long day. I appreciate the help.” When in doubt, be polite. One of the nannies had taught me that.
Zeke shook his head. “You’re lying, but that’s fine. Keep your secrets. I don’t want them if they don’t apply to our arrangement. I think tomorrow night we’ll start to be seen, to be photographed together. We’ll go to a club that’s opening. I’m over that scene, but I sometimes have to take clients to them. They like to be wined and dined. So we’ll go tomorrow night.”
I’d been to enough clubs in my life that I could actually choke on them. They were all the same when it came down to it, just the themes changed. “Sure. I brought clothes for Bali, not Paris at night. I am going to have to go shopping tomorrow.”
“You look nice in that blue dress.”
I looked down, sort of forgetting for a second what I’d put on. “Thanks. But this is not what the women wear to the clubs.”
“You’re right, of course.” He smiled. “Shows you how much I think about women’s clothing. I’ve always been more interested in getting women out of their clothing.”
My cheeks heated up. He was blatantly sexual in a way I just wasn’t accustomed to. Kit certainly hadn’t been that way, even when he’d been quote-unquote in love with me. Zeke had invited me into his room with his shirt still off. He’d touched me as it suited him to do so. Carried me around. Threatened to spank me for talking badly about myself. And now he was talking about undressing women.
I was strangely naïve, considering the public opinion about me and my relationship status had kept me from being pursued in any blatant ways for a long time.
“I’m sure you are.” I looked down at the table where my plate would have been had it still been there. I wished it were. I could pretend to eat more.
He took a long look at me that I could feel on my skin, even though I was staring down at the table. “You really are young, aren’t you? For moments, I almost forget. And then it rushes back.”
I was pretty sure he’d just insulted me again. That was Zeke’s way with me so far. Be nice, helpful, flirty, and then mean. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Amazing what I’d learned in less than twenty-four hours in his presence, and it hadn’t done anything to lessen how much I wanted him. If only it was me who he was trying to get undressed.
Of course, he’d have to do all the work because I’d probably miss the cues, considering that I hadn’t a clue how to flirt successfully.
“I don’t think it’s a crime to be twenty-two,” I said finally, because something needed to be spoken or it was just going to get even more weird. “And I think I am young in a lot of ways and not young in others. In some capacities, I was born old.”
“Fair enough.” He actually ran his finger over the top of my hand, and I shivered from the contact. Why did he do that, and then in the next breath, be so obviously scorning of me? He was a confusing man. “Are you hoping to move the book writing into a fashion career? Making your own handbags? Or shoes? Or something?”
That was a fair enough question. “No. I’m not.”
His eyebrows shot up. Maybe at how fast I’d said the no. “That might seem a logical next step. Take the success of the book—I looked, it was successful—and turn that into a career in fashion.”
It might. But I didn’t want to do that. “I know I’m frustrating. Why can’t or won’t I just do what made sense? Take steps, make things happen. I was born into privilege. Use it.”
“I’m not interested or concerned with your privilege. That was a non-answer you just gave me. Is it that you can’t draw? Another I’m stupid thing? Because I’m sure in this day and age there is software…”
I held up my hand, imitating him, and he smirked at me as he stopped talking. “I can draw. It’s not that. I just don’t want to.”
I was actually a great artist, when I used to do such things. But I hadn’t given that a go since I was a child and wouldn’t again.
“Wasn’t your mother an artist? She was, right? I remember it was a big deal when she killed herself because out of the two of them, your mother and your father, she was the success at that point. Married the poor guy who was trying to make it. Had four kids and died. Her paintings go for a fortune.”
My body went cold, the same way it did whenever she was brought up, which was almost never. People knew better than to talk about her, because my father had made it clear that she was never to be brought up. Ever.
Your mother died eight years ago, Layla. I’m not going to discuss her now. Let dead be dead.
“My mother didn’t kill herself.” I was done with this conversation. It’d only been several hours, but I’d go back to bed rather than speak about this at any length. It hurt my stomach to think about her, made me want to pound things and declare that I wasn’t that flighty, that somehow, I’d manage my life better. Even with all evidence to the contrary.
“I thought she did.”
He had to know that I didn’t want to talk about this. The man read my body language well enough to know when I was lying. He was pushing this subject, and since he was so big on the word ‘no’ I was going to use a version of it to end this night.
“She accidently took too many pills. She didn’t kill herself on purpose. No one has any reason to think otherwise, and I’m going to bed.”
“You haven’t had dessert yet.” As though he’d summoned him, the man who took our plates arrived with two more, setting them down in front of us. “And I apologize. That wasn’t well done by me. I assumed you could talk about it, considering it happened twenty-one years ago. I get it. Some things aren’t ever discussed. I have my own secrets, keep yours.”
It wasn’t a secret. He was just trying to get me to admit something I couldn’t do because it wasn’t true. She’d accidently overdosed on sleeping pills because she was so exhausted taking care of four children under four with an absent husband that she hadn’t paid attention to what she was doing. It hadn’t been suicide.
That was what I’d been told, and that was what I was going to believe.
Because I wasn’t sure how I could digest the idea that she’d left us in our cribs to scream for twenty-four hours, until my father returned from his business trip to find us s
tarving, soiled, terrified, and dirty. My brother wandered the house. Two years old. He’d tried to bring us bottles, but they hadn’t had milk in them. Did anyone know if he’d seen her? Did anyone ever ask? Was it just me who didn’t know?
I didn’t remember any of that. Just what I’d heard over the years. My grandmother’s whisperings. My aunt’s drunken ramblings. The way that my mother’s best friend, Lois, had stared at us with empty eyes one afternoon when she’d just had to see us again after a decade of not. That was when those things came out.
It was an accident. It couldn’t be suicide. Because it was too awful to contemplate if it was.
We’d left Chicago after that and never lived there again.
The winters were hard there, or so I had heard.
“It’s good. The chocolate mousse. Better than any I’ve ever had in restaurants.”
He’d distracted my thoughts, and I stared down at the light brown concoction in the dish in front of me. “I haven’t eaten dessert since I was twelve.”
My words actually jarred him to the point that he always dropped his spoon. “What? Why? Layla, you are missing out on some of the great things in life. You know the expression, ‘life is uncertain, eat dessert first’?”
“Because the standards of beauty are unfair. Because the nanny said I was getting fat in the hips. Because I didn’t curve like Hope and Bridget did, not in the same ways. Because it was clear that they would use their brains in the future, and if I didn’t want to end up in prostitution, I’d better figure out how to keep myself physically attractive so I could use it in other ways.” I picked up the spoon and shoveled some of the sweet into my mouth. For a second, it was delicious. Rich. Frothy. Creamy. I took another bite and then another spoonful. Then it was too much.
I set the spoon down. It was…a lot to digest. I wasn’t used to it, and the sweet was almost bitter because it was so much.
“Here.” He handed me a glass of water he’d poured for me, but I hadn’t drunk from yet. “Go easy, princess. You don’t have to win a race. I won’t pull it away from you if you eat it slowly, and I don’t even know what not having dessert in a decade and then eating that would do to you. I bet you have to build up a tolerance.”
Redhead On The Run (RedHeads Book 1) Page 8
