by Stacy Gail
Steele remained impassive, letting silence be his answer.
“I built this business from the ground up, dragging it all the way to the top by working myself half to death and pushing the envelope on promotion and innovation. The one thing I’ve never done was leave a trail of bodies behind me. I don’t suck people dry and I sure as fuck don’t toss them out once I’m done with them. Corporations do that. Governments do that. Not me.” He plowed an angry hand through his hair before he sat back down in his chair with a harsh breath. “Get out. This meeting’s done.”
“Right.” He got to his feet, but he hadn’t gone more than a few steps when Payne muttered another curse.
“Wait.”
Steele looked back.
“I don’t use people,” Payne reiterated, growling out each word. “If Essie’s got a complaint, send her my way and I can straighten this shit out with her.”
“She hasn’t complained. If anything, she seems resigned to the fact that life fucks her over no matter what she does. Your actions just hit that point home with her.”
“Fuck me,” Payne muttered while his scowl turned black. “Way to pile on the guilt, you prick.”
“Did I mention I overheard her brother offering to pay her rent for the next couple of months so she wouldn’t be flat broke by the time this contest is over?”
Payne rolled his eyes heavenward. “Oh shit, just what I fucking need, Twist one-upping me while simultaneously shoving my nose in my own fuck-up. Shit.”
“She turned him down. If anything, Essie seems to have more of a problem with stubborn pride than with an artistic temperament, so you’re in the clear on that score.”
“I’m not in the clear.” With a rough sigh, Payne leaned back in his seat once more. “What I am is an asshole. I didn’t think about how this was impacting Essie. All I thought about was how best to promote the House. That’s unacceptable.”
“You going to make it acceptable?”
“From the sound of it, she won’t appreciate me paying her bills,” he mused, drumming his fingers on the edge of the desk. “Not to mention that would look like favoritism if anyone ever dug around and found out about it, so that won’t work.”
“Do the finalists win anything by making it to the final round?”
“No, though I don’t see why I can’t change that policy and give the runners-up a monetary prize that would compensate them for their work. The grand prize winner gets a signing bonus up front as well, so no matter what place she gets, I can work it so that she’ll be compensated for her time and trouble.”
“She’ll accept that. It’s not charity, so that pride of hers won’t get in the way.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about Essie,” Payne remarked, his attention swinging back to him. “Where she lives, her financial situation, how she’ll react. Why is that?”
“As your chief of security, I know everything,” he deadpanned. “You should be impressed.”
“I’m impressed with your line of bullshit. I’ll take care of your Essie,” he went on, picking up the phone and hitting a button. “Just make sure you take care of her too, yeah? Otherwise you’ll have Twist to deal with, and that’s never fun, even on his good days.”
As he listened to Payne summon Scout so they could work out the details of runner-up prizes, Steele tried to figure out why the words “your Essie” made his blood heat up.
“Whoa, great timing. I was just about to call you.” Scout greeted Essie the moment she swung through House Of Payne’s front door. Essie barely had time to sweep the lobby for some sign of Steele, and when she didn’t see him, she tried to ignore the sudden leaden sensation in her stomach.
“You were going to call me?” Essie struggled to ignore how everything inside her felt deflated, and focused on the other woman. “What’s up?”
“I’ve got good news for you. The Mad Russian, aka Maximo, has agreed to come in early today so you and he can have a chat about his art.”
Some of Essie’s blue funk lifted. “Cool, you’ve totally made my day.”
“Just remember what Payne told you about him,” Scout warned, offering a leery grimace. “Try not to take anything he says personally, and you’ll get along great.”
“Got it.” Essie sent another casual glance around the lobby. A few customers were browsing through the touch-screen tattoo catalogues, and a few more were seated in the waiting area. But the man she’d had trouble getting out of her mind for days was nowhere to be seen. “I guess Steele isn’t working today since you’re not expecting the Queen of England?”
“Ha. Nice try at fishing for a name, but I’m not falling for it.” Scout grinned over at her. “I refuse to say whether or not it was the queen who got inked, though in all honesty I freaking love that idea. And as for Steele, he’s not here all the time, just when we have big-time events going on. Usually it’s his subordinates who hang around keeping the peace.”
“I see.” Disappointment hit Essie so hard it took her breath away, even as it baffled her. What the hell, she thought, putting a hand to her chest where the hit had hurt her the most. Since when did it feel like life or death if she couldn’t see someone? And not just any someone. Ezekiel Steele, a man she hardly knew.
Maybe being stuck inside her solitary cocoon had finally driven her batty.
“How’s the hand?”
Distracted, Essie dragged her attention back to Scout. “My hand? Oh, that. It’s good, thanks. The soreness is disappearing, see?” To prove it, she held up her hand to wiggle her fingers. “By the way, I was wondering if you happened to have a lost-and-found somewhere around here?”
“Of course.” Scout’s brows shot up before she ducked behind the counter, then resurfaced with a black plastic milk crate. “You’d be surprised what people have left behind. We once found a pair of pants in one of the tattooing booths. Can you imagine? Who the hell forgets their pants?”
“You’d think the person would have at least noticed a breeze going on down below.” Essie reached for the crate, half-filled with what looked like the picked-over leavings of a garage sale. “How did no one notice a client walking out of the House without their pants on?”
“When things get crazy around here—like a couple days ago with you, the incoming Royal and the dumbass paparazzi—an entire nudist colony could parade through the lobby and we wouldn’t notice. What’d you lose?”
“Just the one and only thing that holds my creative shit together. My sketchbook,” she clarified when Scout looked confused. “I’ve had it since before I knew I wanted to be a designer. Now it’s missing and I’m fighting an epic freak-out over it.”
“Oh, honey.” Concerned, Scout reached for a phone. “Do you need me to call Twist down?”
“Nah, he’s already looked for it up in his booth. That’s where I could’ve sworn I left it,” she went on, rummaging through the contents of the milk crate. A pair of gloves, a blingy Hello Kitty phone case, a paperback copy of Jade C. Jamison’s Bullet, a collapsible umbrella, some seriously hot Prada sunglasses, a jock strap… ewwww. What the hell. That was so much worse than pants. “Nope, not here, and I now need to decontaminate my hands. If my sketchbook happens to turn up—”
“I remember what it looks like, so I’ll ask around, see if anyone’s seen it. If I find it, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, just hang around the gallery and I’ll send Max your way once he shows up. And remember, if Max wigs you out, just come running to me and I’ll beat the shit out of him for you.”
Essie laughed as she headed toward the ladies room to give her hands a good scrubbing. But as she did, her amusement faded. She had no doubt that Scout could tear anyone to pieces, but obviously that opinion wasn’t mutual. That was on her, though, not Scout. Hell, not even she believed she could tear anyone to pieces. It wasn’t that she was incapable of fighting; far from it. She’d fought like hell to stay alive, then endured years of being put back together both physically and emotionally. She’d been too busy fighting to h
ang onto life to even think about learning how to fight for anything else.
Did that make her weak in the eyes of others?
That thought came out of nowhere, and the inherent unfairness of it pissed her off. She had been a victim once in her life, true. But did that mark her as always being a victim? Did people see her as too weak to take care of herself?
Was that how she saw herself?
No, came the answer immediately, and it soothed some of the edgy anger prowling inside as she made her way into the House’s open, white-walled gallery. She’d been a victim once, yes. But she hadn’t become what had happened to her. Her body had been broken, but her spirit was as strong as ever. She was a survivor, damn it, and she was working on living a life filled with hopes and dreams. She had a brain and a talent for fashion and one hell of a lot of ambition, and she was using all three to make those hopes and dreams come true. For all she knew, she might even luck out one day and find that special someone who wouldn’t give a damn about her past, or that she couldn’t have children. Someone she could relax her guard with, someone she could let close enough to touch her without making her freeze up or want to vomit…
The memory of Steele’s hand molding against her jaw rushed in so fast her skin tingled all over again.
What else would start tingling if he touched her elsewhere?
“You’re Essie, yes?”
Startled, she turned away from a framed tattoo created by Payne—an open book with galaxies, unicorns, armies and rocket ships exploding out of it—and into the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. Half a second later it registered that they belonged to the most dangerous-looking man she’d ever seen.
His blonde hair was hacked off in a Viking-like, brutal faux-hawk, with the crown of his hair left to grow in a thick curtain that was kept carelessly draped over one ear, leaving the other side of his head exposed. His unsmiling mouth was framed by a full beard that was maybe a week away from being wild. Tattoos—many of which were adorned with Cyrillic writing—covered every inch of skin she could see from the neck down. He had the agile, muscular frame of a middle-weight boxer or MMA fighter, and was just rangy enough to be a perfect model for some of the designs floating through her brain.
Wow.
He was perfect for the biker line she wanted to create.
“Hello?” His voice carried an accent that spoke of mysterious, vaguely ominous eastern European lands forged by secrets and unrelenting cold. But the underlying irritation in it made her drag her attention back to the present. “Are you Essie, or no? Should I waste my time somewhere else?”
“You’d look great in leather.” Luckily that was on her list of materials, and simply drinking him in filled her with all sorts of inspiration. “And I have another design that would be great for someone like you who’s a living canvas, though I have to wonder… would a tough guy like you ever wear fine-gauge black mesh? To show off your body art, of course, not because I think you’re a ‘black mesh’ kind of guy. If I made a slim-fit, long-sleeved shirt out of black mesh and made the cut uber-masculine, I know you could pull that off. Question is, would guys like you wear something like that? Hmm.” Then his words sank in, but only as an afterthought. “Oh yeah, I’m Essie and you’re Maximo, right? Hi. Could we talk about your melted mandala? I’ve got an idea for it, but I need to know how you feel about my manipulating your design so that your art can be translated into fashion.”
Still without blinking, he began to smile and didn’t stop until she half-feared his face would split in two. “You’re not what you seem,” he observed cryptically before he gestured for her to join him as they walked deeper into the elegant gallery that took up the majority of the House’s first floor. “What about my mandala?”
“I love it,” she said simply, shrugging. “I’d love to be able to use it in my line of activewear. Some of my favorite clothes are yoga pants, matching tops and jackets. It would be great if I could make your work a part of that.”
“Mankind was blessed the day someone invented yoga pants.” Maximo’s announcement came with a heartfelt sigh as he walked beside her, his hands folded in a thoughtful, almost scholarly way behind his back. “The way they cling to a woman’s thighs, the way they cradle her ass, just begging for a man to see if his palms fit there as well. There should be a law that all women from ages nineteen to ninety must wear yoga pants for at least part of the day.”
“That’d be like living in Disneyland, though. If you saw it every day, it’d stop being special. Be thankful for the little glimpses that keep you appreciative.”
He lifted a brow, those laser-steady eyes on her. “You surprise me. No yapping at me for being sexist?”
That made her blink even as a crazy suspicion hit her. If she didn’t know better, she’d swear the man was deliberately trying to provoke her. When she hadn’t responded like he’d expected, he seemed almost disappointed. “If you want me to make noises about equality, I guess I could. But that just makes me envision a world full of men squeezing their flat asses into yoga pants, and I’m going to be honest—that’s a world I seriously want nothing to do with. If I have an itch to see men in Lycra, I’ll hit the drag bars and see how the true experts do it.”
A bark of laughter escaped him. “You think men can’t pull off yoga pants? How wrong you are. I myself have pulled off many, many yoga pants.”
She had no doubt about that. “The yoga pants I’m envisioning could be pulled off by anyone, even you, so if you’re ever overcome with the need to feel pretty, I hope you give them a try. How’s that for equality?”
Again he seemed torn between amusement and irritation that she hadn’t gotten flustered. “I like.”
“The thing is, I would like your permission to give the appearance of cutting your mandala design in half,” she explained, coming to a stop to bring out her phone. She’d sketched and colored the concept at home, then took a picture of it to show him. “What I want to do is put a mandala on the interior lower pant leg, so half shows in the front, half shows in the back. When the wearer stands with legs together, if they’re viewed straight on, it looks like the two halves make a whole. I also would like to echo this on a matching jacket, with the two mirroring mandala designs decorating the forearms. The melted drips would flow to the extended cuffs, and the last drip of color would be where the thumb holes go. You see?”
He looked down at the phone she held, reaching out to enlarge the photo. “You draw?”
“Of course. All designers do.”
“You draw.” He nodded to himself, as if this had some great meaning for him. “No one knows how hard it is to be an artist. You suffer with it. You starve for it. No one you know sees value in it, or you. Not even when someone else tells them your art is good. No one knows how you wrestle with images inside your head, how you have to force them out into the world, yet even then what you create never comes out exactly the way you envisioned it. No one knows what this is like, except another artist.”
“I’m lucky that I come from a family of artists.” But she had the impression that he hadn’t. “Well, my mom and brother, anyway. But from the time I was a teenager and decided fashion was going to be my thing, I had everyone’s support. I take it you didn’t have that?”
“I had myself. No one else was necessary.” He reached out and expanded the photo of the pants. “Why place the mandala at the knee? Why not over the crotch?”
That was it, she realized. He liked to shock people. Shock them, or distract them. Distract them from what, she didn’t know or care, because she understood. He did it to push people away. She had her own avoidance behaviors, so it was easy enough for her to spot.
“Two reasons. The first is that I need these mandala designs to touch, and no woman likes to call attention to the fact that her thighs touch.”
“You women worry over such ridiculous things. No man cares if his woman’s thighs touch. It’s how they open that matters.”
“The second reason,” she went on as if he hadn�
�t spoken, “is that I’d have to be a frigging idiot to put a design that drips anywhere near a woman’s va-jay-jay. Gross, dude. Just gross.”
For a heartbeat he stared at her as if he was the one who’d been sent into shock before he threw his head back and roared with laughter. Essie smiled along with him; she couldn’t do anything else, it was such a great laugh. And as she did, it occurred to her that the likes of Scout and Payne might not know Maximo as well as they assumed they did. Whoever he was, whatever he was, she had a feeling he wasn’t what anyone would expect.
When his humor at last eased into chuckles, she pocketed her phone and shook her head at him. “You’re not what you seem either, are you?”
His brows went up even as his smile lingered. “It seems we have this in common. Not a bad thing to have in common, in my opinion. I’m told you’re the little sister of Twist, yes?”
Essie sighed. So much for keeping that fact under wraps. “Yep.”
“I like your talent. I like your family. You may use any piece of art I’ve created for the House as you see fit.”
Delight bloomed along with excitement. “Thank you, Maximo.”
“Make it Max. My family called me Maximo. I want to stab the sound of it.”
Yikes. “Max it is, then.” Anxious to steer the conversation to less stabby waters, she cleared her throat. “Do you have any favorite pieces that you think might translate well into the world of fashion? I’m always open to suggestions.”
A shoulder lifted before his attention flicked to a point beyond her shoulder. Then he scowled so thunderously she snapped around to see if they were about to be mauled by a bear. Surprise zipped through her when her gaze latched onto Steele as he stalked toward them, determination in his every step.
Chapter Eight
For no reason that Essie could fathom, her skin burned with invisible fire as Steele approached. He was here, her brain babbled repeatedly, and she had to clamp her lips shut to make sure those happy words didn’t tumble out on their own. But she couldn’t ignore that she was suddenly and ridiculously happy. Happy he was there, happy to see him, happy he was coming toward her.
