by C. R. Jane
“What’s your end goal for this, if you can’t even admit that you loved her?” I asked, curious to see what could drive a man that was obviously in mourning on a journey like this, one which would only result in more heartache.
Up to now, I had been able to convince myself something had happened to make her leave. She couldn’t have wanted to go. When you had put so much love into someone, it was hard to think your love meant nothing in the end. Now, Graham Kempner had shattered the illusion I had worked so hard to spin around myself. I didn’t want to follow him into the disappointment surely waiting for us at the end of his quest.
He took a breath and opened his mouth, and then closed it again without saying anything. There was a long pause, and the silence was so aggravating for some reason, that I couldn’t even eat my fucking burger.
“I have to find a way to forget her,” he finally said. “I think she took something from me when she left, and I can’t seem to find it. And if I don’t get it back, I don’t think I’ll ever truly be able to be happy again.”
“I’m in,” I said, like I had any other choice. Whatever Holland had taken from him, she’d also taken from me. And he was right, happiness wasn’t even a possibility until I got that back.
The problem was, I didn’t think I wanted that piece back if it didn’t also come with Holland.
I guess the family tradition lived on, the eternal pining for someone who didn’t love you back. My mother had loved my bastard of a father until her dying day.
I had a feeling I was doomed to love Holland like that as well.
Until my dying day.
Steven
A Few Months Earlier
I was doing my exercises for the day, and I couldn’t help but wonder how Graham’s meeting went with the other guy he’d found. What had this new person’s relationship been with Holly? How had Holly felt about him? Who had she been with him? To him?
Questions ran through my mind, leaving a sour taste in my mouth and a pain in my heart. Physical therapy had fucking sucked this morning, I just wasn’t improving. I didn’t even want to try to go back out on the field if it was going to be like last season. Hell, no one in the league wanted me if it was going to be like last season.
Even Nancy, my mild-mannered mouse of a physical therapist, had been frustrated with me this morning. “Do you even want to get better?” she had snapped after I had stumbled in after a night where I tried to drown myself with the contents of my liquor cabinet. I realized when I opened my mouth to answer her that I wasn’t sure what the answer actually was. I was dead inside. On the road to nowhere fast.
With that thought, fury hit me. How dare she come into my life, and then leave it abruptly in pieces? I’d been fine before she came along. Drowning myself in pills and alcohol yes, but that wasn’t too different than what I’d done last night. I had at least had some self-respect, been able to look at myself in the mirror without wondering what was wrong with me. What was wrong with me that she could cast me aside so callously? Or what was wrong with me that she’d even picked me in the first place? What weakness had she seen that made me a target?
My rage went on and on as I tried to do my squats. All of a sudden, my knee gave out, and I crashed to the ground; a loud crack echoed from my arm as it hit my tiled floor.
Fuck.
I couldn’t help the tears of frustration that built up in my eyes. I couldn’t continue like this. This wasn’t living. My heart might still have been beating, but I was a dead man walking for all other intents and purposes.
My knee ached, and I was a little afraid my arm was now broken from my fall. I rolled over onto my back, staring up at the ceiling, dark thoughts spiraling through my mind.
I thought about what Graham had said in the car. I’d been dismissive of it then. But what if…
I had tried the forgive and forget route. Well honestly, there hadn’t been a lot of forgiving. But there had been a lot of trying to forget.
And here I was, a broken, pathetic excuse of a man. And who was to blame?
She was. I would’ve gotten better that first time around. Would’ve done my physical therapy with someone like Nancy and come out with flying colors. I would’ve weened myself off the drugs and pills, the competitiveness inside of me not willing to accept any other option. She had broken me. That was the pure and simple truth. And Graham was right.
Maybe she did have to pay.
I would ignore the part of me for now that just wanted to see her face again. The line between hate and love was thin. Isn’t that what they always said?
I texted Graham.
I’m in.
Chapter 6
Holly
Now
My ass stung so fucking badly I wasn’t sure I’d ever sit again without pain. No, I knew that wasn’t true. I’d been caned before. I would eventually be able to sit again. I stared at the food he set down in front of me. Chicken. Broccoli. And a brownie on a small plate next to it. I didn’t remember my father having my Gran’s propensity for grease that she’d passed on to me or my uncle’s sweet tooth. Or maybe it was just my mother had fed him differently. Those days were hard for me to remember, like I put up some sort of blinders around the memories and didn’t like to let them out.
My eyes hurt. One of them was swollen shut. He’d sent me out injured before. I’d had to seduce my first mark with a still healing broken rib, but this was different. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to fuck me while I looked like this.
“I’ve been thinking of what job I wanted to send you out on.”
I cut into the chicken. I didn’t want to chew with my jaw hurting, but not doing so was going to be worse on me. I had to at least make it appear like I was eating.
His blonde teenager walked in. Her eyes widened when she caught sight of me.
My uncle gave her a pointed look. “Jazmine, this is what happens when you don’t listen to me. Holland needed to be reminded that while I always have her best interests at heart, she has to listen to me to make those things happen.”
Once a year he had all of us home. Sixteen—no seventeen now—of us would gather here and listen to him pontificate. Starting three years before, I’d found the whole thing terribly dull. Before that… it was like he was the pope, speaking directly from God into my heart. Why had that changed? I swallowed, somehow. Truth was, I didn’t know.
She nodded fast and scurried from the room. “She’ll be good for the ones with an innocence fetish.”
“When I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.”
Fair enough. He always had before. I knew so little about this man, and I’d lived with him for years. Was he straight? Was he gay? Pansexual? I really had no idea. In all of the years I’d been here, there had never been a woman or man in his life. He just sent us out to fuck others.
“While you took your punishment, I went ahead and considered what to do with you, Holland.”
I swallowed. That didn’t sound good. “Oh?”
He pushed a folder to me, and I stared down at it. The name on the outside was enough to make me scream inside of my head. No. No. No. Not the impossible “get.” Elliot Woodard. Billionaire. I knew his story without having to open that folder. I’d been listening to my uncle yell and scream about him for two decades.
Raised in the Midwest, he now lived in Houston. He’d been married to his wife, Cynthia, for fifty years before she died. He was seventy years old, a self-made finance billionaire. He never cheated on her. Not once. She’d been dead for three years, and he’d never fallen for any of the girls sent to him. He walked a straight line, never varied, never stumbled. He was the ungettable billionaire. Everyone my uncle sent to him failed in some way. He’d never fallen for any of us.
At this point, my uncle knew it, too. We’d even wondered if Elliot suspected he was the target of people like us.
“What am I trying to come home with?” I cleared my throat. “What’s the goal?”
He smiled at me slowly. “I want his w
ife’s engagement ring.”
I stared at him, wishing he had said just about anything else. “His dead wife’s engagement ring?”
“Correct.” He linked his fingers together.
I chewed my chicken. It was bland. That suited my mood. “She wasn’t buried with it on?”
“Nope.”
Elliot and Cynthia hadn’t had any children. There wouldn’t be anyone he would have immediately turned it over to. That meant the man had his dead wife’s engagement ring somewhere. And I had to get it.
“Anything else?” I set down my fork. I wasn’t even going to pretend to eat. My appetite was officially done.
“I want you to seduce him.” At this point, that was a given. I always assumed I had to sleep with whoever I got sent to. What else was I good for? I wasn’t some kind of cat burglar. “Six-month limit to get this done. I’m not sending you any help. He notices the help. You’ll be on your own. If you get into trouble, there won’t be anyone to bail you out. If you get arrested, they’ll find you dead in your jail cell. And if you can’t get this done, you should kill yourself, because if you come back here without that ring and him in love with you, then you’re dead anyway. I’ll make sure it hurts.” He leaned forward. “And then I’ll kill your guys. The ones you fell for, because you’re just so fucking pathetic.”
He pulled my stool out from under me, and as I hit the floor, the plate of chicken fell over, hitting me in the head. Covered in chicken, broccoli, and the plate, I wished he’d just kill me. I was good, but I’d never land seventy-year-old Elliot Woodard. He was the ungettable. And it wouldn’t just be myself I’d be dooming to death.
I hadn’t slept, but I’d lain in my old bedroom staring at the ceiling, wondering what the fuck I was going to do. My ass burned from the caning. My arm hurt from the fall off the chair, and my eye was still pretty swollen from the smacking around I’d taken. I had six months to get the ungettable.
First thing I had to do was to go someplace and heal. I chewed on my lip. A bad habit I did all the time when I was nervous, and it particularly hurt today. Still, like others bit their nails, I chewed my lip. Right then, I had to think. Think. Think. Think.
No one was impossible to infiltrate. I was a twenty-six almost twenty-seven-year-old woman. Men fell for me all the time. So what that he was seventy? Who cared? I’d make this happen. I could do it.
My stomach hurt. I didn’t want to. I wanted to be done with this. Were my only choices death or villainous behavior? What crime had I committed that led me here? Absolutely none. My parents hadn’t bothered to make a will. My mother had been orphaned when her parents died while she was in college. That had left my father’s family, and I’d been scooped up by Gran. Maybe my parents had thought they’d be around forever. Maybe they’d thought they’d get around to it eventually. Tears pooled in my eyes, which made my swollen one hurt even more.
I forced the crying away. Despite my despair at losing the guys who eventually came and found me, I didn’t regularly cry.
Gran dropped me here. Maybe she saw something in me that she thought meant I should live this life with my uncle, maybe she owed him something. I didn’t know. The few times I’d gotten to visit with her had been strained. I’d been with her when she died. There was that, at least.
I rolled over onto my stomach. I wasn’t going to sleep tonight. That was fine. I couldn’t stay here. Where was I going to go to plot my con? I had nowhere to go. I’d lived entirely off my uncle while doing his bidding since I was fifteen. He’d paid for my schooling, funded every apartment I’d ever slept in.
What was I supposed to do?
Anxiety helped nothing. I’d have to figure it out. I had the money given to me to deal with the Chef; I’d use that to rent something else. He wasn’t sending anyone to watch me. That meant that for the first time, I wouldn’t have to look over my shoulder for his goons. It also meant he thought I’d get caught doing this and die.
That was a dire thought.
I stayed there like that, concentrating on not moving, until the sun came through the windows. I pulled on a pair of black yoga pants that burned when they covered up my rear end, even with my undies on, and a long green tunic. A quick glance in the mirror told me that there was no point, none whatsoever, in brushing my hair or trying to do something about my face. If I’d had any question my uncle wanted me dead, I wouldn’t anymore. When he gave a shit, he told the goons not to strike our faces.
The proof was in the black eye and the bruises all over my body. I was a dead woman. And the guys would be, too.
When had they become that? The guys? They weren’t the guys. They were four of my ex-marks. Had I started doing that in the middle of the night? Earlier? A headache formed sometime around three in the morning, right between my eyes.
I’d get no relief until I bought some medicine. My uncle didn’t believe in pain killers. Hopefully, he hadn’t emptied that account of money. I doubted he’d thought of it. We were trained to keep liquid money in three to four different accounts at a time, less chance of being caught in one.
I took one last gaze. Whatever happened, now I was on my own… but then again, I had been, really, since I was ten years old. I’d loved Gran, but she didn’t love me. Not the right way.
There was a bus stop two miles from the house, and I set about to get to it, but I’d no sooner made it down the street than I had to stop to hold onto the yield sign. Maybe I was in worse shape than I realized. I hadn’t bled, but sometimes, a beating could put me off my game for days. I had to breathe. Somehow, I was just going to have to dig deep and gut this out. I had to make it to the bus. I had nowhere else to go.
“Holland?”
A voice I didn’t expect to hear caught my attention, and I turned toward the car that pulled up next to me. The passenger side window was down, which was how I’d heard Jamie to begin with. But now he parked and got out.
Continuing to hold on to the sign post, I stared at him. “What are you doing here?”
He was in a different car than the one we’d arrived in. He didn’t answer me, instead, touching the side of my face that wasn’t currently swollen. “Fuck. What happened to you?”
I laughed, although this was obviously not funny. “He wasn’t happy. It looks worse than it is.”
“I doubt that.” He stared at me a long moment, and I could practically see whatever he was thinking cross over his face as it happened. Not that I knew what he was thinking. There was a time I’d known him, even if he hadn’t really known me. But even just months later —was it months?—he had become a stranger to me. Maybe it was because he could really see me now for the first time.
Here I was, bruised, battered, exposed, and alone in the universe. If I’d been working this as a con, I’d have called it helpless female. But I wouldn’t have used that on Jamie. He wasn’t into this kind of thing.
“Jamie.” I had to get him out of here before he was spotted. My uncle had cameras on the house. I had to hope that he couldn’t see this far away.
“You’re not okay.” Without saying another word, he scooped me up into his arms. I cried out, the movement putting too much pressure on my rear end.
“Sorry,” he said, but he didn’t seem really apologetic, more like extremely focused. I’d seen him like this before, but it was always in relation to his paintings, focusing on me if I was his muse at that moment. But otherwise, I hadn’t ranked this kind of intensity from Jamie very often.
He set me down in the passenger seat in the car. When he was finally back in the driver’s side, he locked the doors.
I don’t know why I was compelled to speak. I’d stopped questioning my own motives long ago. Maybe my uncle’s goons had finally screwed up my brain. “The smartest thing you could do now is drive as far away from me as you can get. Hide.”
“No. That’s not happening, Holland.”
I shifted in my seat, staring at him through my one good eye. “Why not?”
“I don’t know actually. I
f Graham knew I’d been sitting out here waiting to see if you came out for the last eight hours, he’d tell me I’d lost my fucking mind. And he’d be right. But so help me, now that I have found you again, I can’t stop thinking about you.”
I shut my eyes, sinking down in the seat. “You’re obsessing. It will pass. Try to make good decisions in the meantime, so you don’t regret what you’re doing later.”
He snorted, and I forced my good lid open again. I didn’t know if I’d ever heard him make that noise before.
Jamie grinned, shaking his head. “I want some answers, Holland, and I don’t need you to tell me how to conduct my life. I’ve been stumbling through it all these years, making a mess of things. They’re my messes to make, and mine to clean up.”
I smiled at that description. It was strangely accurate. “You can have your answers.” He’d earned them, and if he was going to die for ever having the bad luck of getting into the sights of the man who had created me, then he should know the why of it. “I almost told you. Once. I’ll give you that, Jamie. You are the only person I ever wanted to confess all my truths to.”
His smile fell. “Why didn’t you?”
“My uncle sent me a picture he’d taken of you. One of his goons had a gun pointed right at your head. I decided right then and there not to. Instead, I stole a million dollars from you and ran for my life.”
Jamie pulled the car into the hotel I’d told them to stay at. He, it seemed, had listened. “Just tell me something before we go inside, was any of it real? Any minute of it?”
My head pounded. “Yes. Funny that you hooked up with the three of them. In my entire life, none of it was real, not until the four of you. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? Because even though so much of it was real, there was a whole chunk that wasn’t. Lies are always more damning than the truth.”
