He was also big in a way that went beyond size.
When he entered the room, he took up everything—all the space, all the oxygen, every single bit of attention.
I’m like any woman, living in New York. I usually assess men around my age by their appearance. This man was not cute. His face was three hard slabs with two glittering black shark eyes in front. Underneath that lay a large, crooked nose that obviously hadn’t been properly reset after a break and a wide unsmiling mouth.
But he also wasn’t the kind of guy you classified with looks. More like the type you crossed the street to avoid, especially at night. He had a tattoo peeking out above his shirt collar, the head of a black snake with two red diamond eyes.
Goon. Bruiser. Ruffian. Thug. Gorilla in a suit.
Those were just a few of the ways to describe men who emanated with violence and danger the way he did.
I stared at him now as I did back then.
And he….he stared back at me, his shark eyes scanning me from head to toe and back again.
His gaze sent shivers through me and made my heart race—not with fear, though. With something else I couldn’t quite name because I’d never felt it before.
Who was he? Why was he here?
The answers to those questions came in the next moment when the little old woman finally dropped my arm and called out, “Hak-kan!”
That was when I realized that the man who’d made my nervous system go haywire was the little old lady’s grandson. The one she’d insisted only looked like a villain.
It was him.
3
PHANTOM
It was her.
Phantom had rushed to the hospital when he got the news about his grandmother. He lived in Rhode Island but had received the call just as he entered New York City with his cousin Victor to settle a score with their 24K rivals. It was a sign of his grandmother’s infamous good fortune that it had only taken him an hour to get here.
First thing first, he’d had a quick consult with the attending physician, who’d told him the details of his grandmother's accident and that they’d already patched her up.
“We’ll have a nurse do one more check over before we discharge her, but that’s it,” the doctor had said. “It’s a miracle that she didn’t break anything other than her nose.”
“No miracle,” Phantom had assured him. “My grams keeps it Lucky 3000. I’m zero percent surprised.”
Still, Phantom had hurried to where she was resting, just to congratulate her on holding on to that Toughest Broad in Chinatown champion belt.
However, he’d stopped short when he saw the woman sitting beside his grandmother.
It was her. Dr. Olivia Glendaver.
The memory of their first meeting ten years ago spilled into his head like a box of dropped bullets. And his heart stopped at the sight of her now, the same as it had done back then.
Yeah, he’d wondered about her over the ten years that passed. More than wondered, actually. He’d watched her from afar in ways that might not be deemed socially acceptable. And a few times, he’d been tempted, so tempted to touch.
He’d tamped down those urges, though, for over a decade.
But here she was again.
In a hospital room, sitting next to his grandma, like she was her blood relation, not him.
“Oh…hello,” she said, standing up. She looked just as confused to see him as he was to see her.
Phantom dropped his eyes to check her out before he could stop himself. Like a Chinese goon version of Joey Tribbiani.
The white jacket had covered up her body before, but now he could fully appreciate the curves he hadn’t been able to see back then. Full breasts underneath an exercise tank, and wide hips and thick thighs encased in bike shorts. So she was tall and slender, but not rail thin as he’d assumed.
She’d changed hairstyles too—a long weave worn in a ponytail as opposed to a Cleopatra bob. But other than that, she looked just like he remembered as if the ten years between now and the last time they met hadn’t happened.
“Hak-kan! Be nice! I told her you weren’t truly a ruthless villain. You just look like one!”
His grandma, speaking to him in Cantonese, ripped him away from that stare-down.
“Maamaa…” he said, re-focusing on his grandma in the hospital bed.
“Syun zai, what took you so long to get here? The tall black doctor is trying to leave!” his grandma answered as if that was way more urgent than her lost fight with that treadmill. “I am ready to die! I am so very, very ready to go on to my next life.”
“Can you tell me what she’s saying?” Olivia asked him. “She keeps trying to talk to me, even without the interpreter here, and I feel terrible that I don’t understand.”
Yeah, he could tell her, but she wouldn’t like it—especially the part where his grandma insisted over and over again that she was ready to die.
“She’s wondering what took me so long to get here,” he muttered instead.
“What are you telling her?” his grandmother demanded. She hadn’t even attempted to learn English even though she’d been living in America for longer than Phantom had been alive. “You must speak to the tall black doctor who came to my rescue! I am ready to die!”
“Thanks for coming to her rescue—she also said that,” Phantom added to Olivia, omitting all the rest.
A skeptical look passed over Olivia’s face. “She appears to be agitated.”
“She’s like 200,” Phantom answered. “She’s always agitated over something.”
Olivia laughed.
Big mistake making a joke. That laugh, light as summer rain, pierced his chest like a bullet.
But then she said, “Unfortunately, I must hie away. I’ve got this opera gala thing to attend. You’re going to stick around, right? I don’t want your grandmother getting too agitated as 200-year-olds are at great risk for high blood pressure—though hers was shockingly level, even after what happened.”
All he heard was that she had to go. She was going to leave, just leave without saying anything—probably because she had that polite southern shit on lock. So it was on him to say, “I remember you, and I think you remember me.”
She stilled, letting him know she hadn’t forgotten him even before she said, “Yes, of course, I was so worried about your grandmother that I didn’t think to bring it up. You’re Dawn’s friend.”
Dawn’s friend. What a strange thing to be known as, considering what she’d put his cousin through recently.
It had taken Victor months and a threat against their other business partner, Han, to come back out of his break-up misery. In fact, after Phantom got his grandma settled, he would meet up with “Return of the Mack” Victor to kill some enemies currently hanging in chains in The Silent Triad’s warehouse in Queens as a sort of toast to him finally being over that shit with his ex.
So, no, Phantom did not consider himself Dawn’s friend.
But the woman standing before him, her face open and sincere…
She did mean something to him, especially now after she helped his grandma. Also, there was a certain honor code in his world. He couldn’t just let her walk out of here without issuing a proper thank you.
“Listen, you did me a solid. So I’ll do you one, too.” He pulled a business card out of the inside pocket of his suit. It didn’t bear his name or a title, just ten digits where he could always be reached. “You ever need anything, this is the number to call.”
She hesitated. Then took the card from him with a shy smile that turned his dick to stone. “Thank you. That’s very thoughtful of you to offer me your assistance.”
Fuck, was she always this polite? Even in bed? The things he’d do to her if he ever got the chance to find out…
But she wasn’t his, he reminded himself. She belonged to that pretty douchebag.
That thought turned him into a sour bastard. Someone petty enough to add, “And tell your boyfriend you cleared his debt with The Silent Tr
iad.”
She tilted her head, her smile fading into confusion. “My boyfriend? Do you mean my fiancé, Garrett?”
Ten years ago, she’d known better than to tell the creepy dude who’d shown up in her office that the Ken Doll in the photo was her boyfriend, Phantom noted. But she’d obviously been so surprised by his pronouncement that she’d let his name slip.
Yeah, Garrett. The douchebag who’d come back like herpes six years ago after their first break up.
Phantom had wondered if she knew about the gambling a few times, about all the debts her boyfriend had racked up with the kind of banks that weren’t backed by the FCC, and her response told him the answer to those questions.
“Yeah, Garrett,” he replied. Then he ground his teeth and said, “Better get to your gala.”
“But how…” she started to say.
Only to get interrupted by the arrival of an ER nurse who announced herself in a flurry of Cantonese. “Hi, I’m An. I just came on shift and was told you needed a nurse who could speak Cantonese. I’ll do your final check-up, and then we can get you out of here. I’m sure you’re eager to go home….”
Phantom turned his full attention back to his grandma, letting the doctor know this conversation was done, and he wasn’t down to answer any of her questions.
But he knew exactly when she quietly slipped away because his grandmother pushed away the penlight the nurse was shining in her eyes to tell Phantom, “She’s leaving? Hak-kan, why? Why are you letting her get away? I am ready to die!”
4
OLIVIA
“Finally, you’re here. My mother’s about to have a conniption fit,” Garrett said in lieu of a greeting when I met him on the steps outside of his parent’s 13,000 square foot townhouse in Lenox Hill, where the gala in honor of Chrysanthemum was taking place.
Their abode was maybe a fraction of the size of the Glendaver estate in Kentucky. But this being New York, its size was three times as impressive. Jack Easton Jr., the son of Easton Whiskey’s Virginia-based founder, had bought the townhouse back in the late 40s as a reward to himself for guiding his father’s company through prohibition, The Great Depression, and a World War II ban on the manufacturing of whiskey.
A wise investment, as it turned out. The house now belonged to his great-grandson, Gerald. Otherwise, mere 8 figure millionaires would never have been able to afford this much house in Manhattan proper.
Still, it never failed to amaze me that both Garrett and I had grown up in houses where galas were held on a regular basis.
When we’d first met at a mutual friend’s party we’d spent hours marveling at all the things we had in common. Whiskey bottle labels with our last name splashed across them, heir status to liquor fortunes, and extremely difficult, nit-picking, and withholding mothers.
So I usually went out of my way to get to these functions on time because I knew what it was like for Garrett to get judged by his mom.
But not tonight. Tonight I was still reeling from what the old Chinese lady’s grandson had revealed about my fiancé.
“What the heck, Garrett…?” I asked him before running down what had happened with the Cantonese-speaking grandma and her huge, intimidating son.
Garrett shook his head after I finished. “You helped the grandmother of one of The Silent Triad’s Dragons? What are the chances?”
“Dragon?” I repeated. “What does that mean?”
Garrett frowned, and he shifted uncomfortably. “He’s one of the three heads of The Silent Triad, an international Chinese mafia syndicate—basically a criminal who didn’t take it too well when I refused to help him wash his money. I’m just glad you’re okay.”
Now, it was my turn to frown. “He made it sound like you owed him money, not like you’d refused to help him out.”
“Yes, well, he’s a criminal. And I suppose he believed that I somehow owed him something after turning him down.”
That didn’t make any sense, and I opened my mouth with so many more questions.
But before I could ask them, Garrett took my hand. “We’ll talk more about this later. Right now, we must get inside and say hello to Mother.”
I let Garrett pull me along but made a mental note to circle back around on this later.
I didn’t judge criminals. The pre-40s version of the Glendavers had been a hillbilly mob family before the government declared their wares legal again, and they adopted airs. Also, the mafioso, Luca Ferraro, had given my clinic its largest donation ever in exchange for my performing home visits during his wife’s pregnancy.
And, not to stereotype, but I was pretty unsurprised that the menacing guy who’d let himself into my office ten years ago also ran a criminal organization.
But how crazy was it that my clean-cut fiancé knew Dawn’s criminal friend? They were so opposite. I couldn’t even imagine them talking.
I recalled how haywire everything inside of me had gone as soon as he showed up at the hospital. How he'd looked at me…and sent shivers down my spine.
How would it feel to lay underneath someone that big and heavy, to wrap my legs around his thick waist? Wait, what are you thinking, Olivia?
As Garrett led me through the doors of his parent’s Beaux-Arts style limestone townhome, my cheeks warmed—for reasons that had nothing to do with the heat blasting inside the mansion Metropolitan Architecture once called “an ode to the gilded age.”
Okay, maybe I should remind Garrett that it was my birthday and ask for some sexy time tonight. It had been a while since we managed more than a super tired quickie. And obviously, my body was out of sorts if I was fantasizing about another guy, just because he’d stared at me in a way that made my nervous system act up—wait a minute, is that Leighton.
All thoughts of the gang leader I’d inadvertently met at the hospital dropped away when I saw my willowy blonde stepsister talking with Garrett’s parents.
“What is Leighton doing here?”
I tried to stop short, but Garrett kept on walking, dragging me with him. He was determined to present me to his mother.
“She saw the reminder card on my desk,” he explained quickly. “And she asked if she could come, too.”
Again, I frowned. I’d done such a good job of mostly avoiding my much younger stepsister since she moved to New York two years ago to attend business school at Manhattan U. I’d forgotten she was interning with Garrett’s firm this semester even though I was the one who’d made the introduction at her request.
She wore a black evening gown, the same as me. But she was dainty and pretty in a way you’d expect for a member of high society. Whereas I always felt so out of place at these things, she appeared like she fit right in.
And looking at her now, I doubted few would suspect that she hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in her mouth but had it unexpectedly placed there when my dad decided to leave my mother for hers.
“Livvy!” she gushed as soon as I arrived. She beamed and pulled me in for air kisses as if we were the best of friends. “I’m so glad you’re finally here. We were all afraid that you wouldn’t make it.”
“Of course, she made it,” Garrett’s mother, Tilly, answered for me with a sniff of her long thin nose as she also gave me air kisses. “Chrysanthemum is one of her favorite operas, very close to her heart, even if she couldn’t spare anytime whatsoever to help us plan our gala.”
Oh, geez. I very deliberately turned to greet Gerald Easton as opposed to acknowledging her dig. "How are you doing, Gerald," I said, doing another set of air kisses.
No, I didn’t have time to plan elaborate galas, even for an opera I loved. Tilly kept saying that dedicating myself to one of her many charitable efforts would be a fantastic way to transition out of my career after Garrett and I had a baby.
She didn’t ever seem to hear any of my rejoinders about how I planned to keep working, even after children. Just like she never seemed to hear any of my gentle corrections about being from Uganda. Not Malawi, the African country she’d dec
ided to direct her charitable endeavors toward before Garrett and I even met. I supposed in her mind, all African orphans were pretty much the same.
I didn’t hold her against Garrett, though. Lord knew my parents were an even hotter mess in comparison. They’d both remarried much younger spouses almost half their age, and seven years after their acrimonious divorce, still couldn’t stand to so much as be in the same room together.
If we were back in Kentucky, my mother would probably be complaining about how I ran off to the big city and started some random clinic instead of dedicating all my spare time to her Kentucky Children Charities organization as she and my big sister, Skylar, did. So really, Tilly was tame in comparison.
And at least I knew Garrett would find an excuse to pull me away if her barbs became too direct. That was the only way we managed to get through these events. If one of us gave the sign, the other had to come up with a way to extract us from the conversation, no matter how preposterous the excuse.
As if reading my mind, Garret said. “Look at this. We all need drinks.”
But then, instead of pulling me away, he turned to my stepsister and suggested, “Leigh, why don’t you come with me to fetch libations?”
I inwardly jerked. Was he seriously going to just leave me here alone with his parents on the birthday he’d forgotten?
Yes. Yes, he was. He started off in the direction of the bar without waiting for our response or even taking a drink order. I mean, he knew I always just sipped on one glass of champagne at these things, but still, he could have asked.
“An intern’s work is never done,” Leighton singsonged before following him toward the bar.
“What a sweet girl,” Tilly observed as they disappeared into the well-dressed crowd.
Yes, she certainly appeared to be all sorts of helpful now, I admitted. Leighton seemed far removed from the selfish brat I remembered, who’d barely been able to hold a conversation that didn’t involve herself or her friends, or something she and her friends did that was so fun. Maybe her two years in New York had helped her turn over a new leaf.
Phantom: Her Ruthless Fiancé: 50 Loving States, Kentucky (Ruthless Triad) Page 3
