Messing with Miki (A MFM Ménage Romance) (Playing For Love Book 5)

by Tara Crescent

  Finn goes white. “She was having trouble getting around,” he whispers. “She wouldn’t listen to me when I suggested she get help. I should have insisted.”

  “Yes, yes. Mrs. Sanders tried calling for help, but she couldn’t get up. Luckily for her, her neighbors saw that her light was still on past her usual bedtime, and decided to check up on her.”

  My blood runs cold. It’s Monday night. Finn talks to his grandmother twice a week, and he has lunch with her every weekend. Had her neighbors not been paying attention, how long would she have laid there in pain, calling for help?

  Finn gulps. “Is she going to be okay?”

  The doctor nods. “Hip surgeries are always complicated, but your grandmother is only seventy, and she’s in good health. The surgeon’s working on her now, and she’ll give you an update when she’s done, but the prognosis should be excellent.”

  I squeeze Finn’s hand, relief running through me.

  Finn still appears shaken. “She has new neighbors,” he says. “She took them a pie. I thought she was crazy.”

  Oliver puts an arm around him. “Nana Sanders is a tough old goat,” he says, the affection in his voice obvious to hear. “She’s going to be fine.”

  Finn nods. “I’m going to stay here,” he says. “Go home and get some rest.”

  I shake my head at once. “I’m not going to leave you here alone.” A sudden thought occurs to me. “Unless you don’t want me here?”

  His light blue eyes meet mine. “It would mean a lot if you stayed,” he says quietly.

  My heart skips a beat at the intense need on his face. “Okay.”

  In the mad rush of getting to the hospital, I’ve almost forgotten Oliver and Finn’s reaction to my revelation.

  They were going to tell me something. What was it?

  Finn’s face is etched with worry. As much as I want to know what’s going on, now’s not the time to bother him.

  Two hours later, a tired-looking surgeon comes to the waiting area where the three of us are huddled, drinking some lukewarm vending-machine coffee. “I’m Dr. Perez,” she introduces herself. “One of you is related to Mrs. Sanders?”

  Finn rises to his feet eagerly. “I’m her grandson,” he says. “Is she okay?”

  The doctor nods. “The surgery went well,” she says, and Finn exhales, his shoulders slumping in relief. “She’s under anesthetic now, but you can see her for a few minutes if you like.” She gives Oliver and me a glance. “Only immediate family, please. Mrs. Sanders needs to rest.”

  “Go ahead,” Oliver says, squeezing Finn’s shoulder. “We’ll be right here.”

  Finn follows the doctor. Oliver leans on my shoulder. “I’m so glad she’s okay,” he says softly. “If anything had happened to her, Finn would have been devastated.” His lips twist in a grimace. “He wouldn’t have been the only one. Nana’s fed me more times than I can count. She’s always treated me like family.”

  He pulls his phone out of his pocket and types out a message. “I’m warning Janine,” he explains. “I’m fairly sure Finn isn’t going to leave Nana’s side tomorrow. And I won’t be in any shape for my morning meetings.”

  I don’t understand anything. Oliver is acting like I didn’t admit to hacking his company. I want to scream at him, demand to know what the hell is going on. Is this some kind of elaborate trap?

  He drains his coffee, a disgusted look on his face. “I’m going to go in search of something better,” he says, setting his phone on the seat next to him. “You want something?”

  I shake my head, not trusting myself to form words. The moment Oliver is out of sight, I pull my own phone out of my purse. Things are not going as I expected. Oliver and Finn were too unfazed by my news. I get the sense that I’m missing something important.

  Maybe Lancelot and Merlin will have some insight into their reaction.

  Hey, I type. Are you guys around?

  Oliver’s phone buzzes and my lips twitch. He’s always leaving it lying around, and Janine’s constantly bringing it back to him. I can imagine the way she would roll her eyes at him if she were here.

  I wait for either of them to reply, but neither of them does. Maybe they’re asleep, I think. After all, it’s well past two in the morning.

  Still, I keep typing. It feels somewhat cathartic to talk about tonight’s weird turn of affairs. Something’s happened. I confessed everything to Oliver and Finn, and they didn’t even react.

  Oliver’s phone buzzes again. It’s probably incoming email, but who could possibly want to talk to him at two in the morning?

  They didn’t even blink when I told them about Kent. I’m missing something.

  His phone buzzes for the third time, and this time, the hair on the back of my neck rises.

  I’m missing something.

  Finn and Oliver like the same TV shows I do. Gabby had even commented on it one day, and I’d told her that it wasn’t that rare, so did Lancelot and Merlin.

  Oliver’s been divorced. So has Lancelot.

  Finn’s favorite pizza toppings? Pineapple and ham. Just like Merlin.

  They didn’t react when I told them I was hired to hack into their company.

  They didn’t even blink when I told them about Kent.

  Because they’ve always known.

  Bile rises in my throat. Disbelief fills my heart, but my brain’s finally connecting the dots, and it’s painting a damning picture.

  Finn and Oliver have been hiding an important piece of information from me, right from the start. Their identities.

  They’re Merlin and Lancelot.

  23

  There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Finn:

  I stare down at the frail, wrinkled-lined faced of my grandmother. She’s hooked up to an assortment of machines. Her eyes are closed, and her breathing is strained, but she’s alive.

  For too long, I’ve lived for work, and I’ve neglected everything else, but as I stare down at the woman who stepped in and raised me, who gave me a stable and loving home, I know the old Finn is gone.

  Spending time with Miki these past two weeks, chatting for hours with her online the three months before that, I’ve learned for myself what my grandmother’s always told me. Work isn’t everything. Family, friends, laughter, those are the things that remain when we have nothing else.

  Had my grandmother not taken her neighbors a pie in a gesture of welcome, would they have known her well enough to worry when her lights were still on? Would they have checked in on the old lady?

  I sit next to her and put my hand on her papery skin. “I started telling Miki everything when your neighbors called, Nana. I know I should have told her before, but I was selfish and greedy, and I couldn’t bring myself to give her up.”

  The beeping of the heart rate monitor is a soothing, steady sound in the brightly-lit room. There’s another bed in the space, a curtain dividing us. It’s empty at the moment, but I make a mental note to ask for a private room.

  “I should have brought her to meet you,” I continue. “I was nervous about so many things. I wasn’t sure how you would react to the situation, to our ménage, so I hesitated.”

  A nurse comes in and reads my grandmother’s chart. “Dr. Perez is one of our best surgeons,” she says encouragingly.

  “She’s going to need home care, right? Once she’s out of here?” My grandmother won’t want to leave her home, but her Brooklyn house has stairs that she’s going to have difficulty navigating while she recovers. I have so many things to figure out.

  She nods. “As well as rehab to get her moving again.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say dryly, smiling for the first time since I received that dreadful phone call. “Nana hates being dependent on other people. She’ll be up and hobbling around in no time, telling me that she’s quite alright and I should stop fussing.”

  The nurse laughs. “My mother’s the same way,” sh
e says. “I’ll be here for the next ten hours. I’ll keep checking on her, but she won’t wake for a few hours. Your best bet is to go home and get some sleep.”

  I’m not leaving, but Oliver and Miki are still in the waiting room outside. I should tell them to go home. I give my grandmother one more look and get to my feet. In the tumult of the last few hours, I’ve almost forgotten that Miki told us about User0989 hiring her. I saw the surprise on her face when neither Oliver nor I reacted to her revelation.

  She’s smart and sharp, and she’s got to be wondering what’s going on, and even though Mount Sinai isn’t the best place to have this conversation, I don’t think we can put it off any longer.

  I emerge from my grandmother’s room at the same time as Oliver returns from God-knows-where, holding a tray containing three cups of coffee in his hand. “How is she?” he asks me. “I’ve told Janine to cancel your meetings for tomorrow.”

  I’m not looking at him. I’m looking at Miki. Her face is white, and her eyes are filled with a terrible hurt when she looks at the two of us.

  She’s discovered the truth.

  Oliver reaches the same conclusion I do. “Miki, we can explain,” he starts to say, but she cuts him off with a vehement shake of her head.

  “I don’t want your pretty speeches,” she says, her tone harsh and jagged. “I don’t want your fancy explanations. What I want is the truth.” She turns from Oliver to me, her face a mask of stone now. “You lied to me.”

  Wordlessly, I nod. What can I say, really? Every accusation she’s going to throw at us is true.

  “When you sat next to me on the flight from Houston, was that an accident?”

  I take a deep breath. No more lies. Everything comes out in the open now. She deserves to know. “No. Oliver and I had been searching for you for months. Last summer, you succeeded in hacking into one of our experimental systems. The moment we found out, we started our search for you. The day before Thanksgiving, we finally uncovered your name. We were on that flight to discover what we were up against.”

  She frowns. “What experimental system? What are you talking about? I’ve never hacked into an Imperium network.”

  “It was a prototype, and we kept our involvement a secret. You were searching for Howard Lippman’s financial records because your friend Wendy Williams was representing Sandi Lippman in a contentious divorce case.”

  She draws in a sharp breath, and recognition dawns on her face. “That was Imperium,” she says softly. “Of course it was. All month, I’ve been feeling a sense of déjà vu as I’ve tried to break into your network. A feeling like I’ve done this before.”

  She lifts her chin and gives us a searching look. “Then you befriended me on DefCon. Why?”

  “We needed to keep track of who you worked for,” Oliver replies. “You were the only person that had ever broken into one of Finn’s systems. We needed to make sure that you didn’t target us again.” He grimaces. “That’s how it started.”

  “It was just supposed to be business,” I interject. “It became more. You were my friend, Miki. Our initial motives were suspect, but our friendship was real.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” she says flatly. “Then I showed up to your Valentine’s Day party.”

  “The IPO was three months away. Claudia had just threatened to make the photos of the two of us public. We were dealing with a difficult board of directors. We believed you’d been hired to hack into our company, and when you didn’t tell us anything on the forum, we thought you were a threat.”

  “So why not confront me right away?” She exhales as she figures it out. “You wanted to see what I was after.”

  I nod.

  “You befriended me for Imperium. Did you also sleep with me for your precious company?”

  “No,” we both say at once.

  “That was unexpected,” Oliver says. “That night, when you came after me, I was hurt and upset. We shouldn’t have done it, not until we told you the truth.”

  “But it was real.” I stare at Miki, trying to will her into believing us. “We started out under false pretenses, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care about you.” I swallow hard. “Miki, I was afraid to tell you the truth. I didn’t want to lose you. I love you.”

  “No,” she says harshly. Her eyes have a sheen of tears now, and she shakes her head again. “No more lies. For a year, my ex-husband lied to me. I thought that maybe I could begin to trust again, but I was wrong.”

  She pulls her keyring out of her purse and removes our apartment keys from it with shaking fingers. She sets them down on the plastic chair, right next to Oliver’s phone. “I think it’s safe to say,” she says, “that I won’t be at work tomorrow. Or any time after that.”

  “Miki, please.” My heart races in my chest. This can’t be the end. “I screwed up, okay? But I care about you and maybe I’m a crazy fool, but I thought you cared about us too.”

  She laughs bitterly. “I think it’s clear, Finn, that the only thing either Oliver or you care about is Imperium and the billions you stand to make when it goes public.” She zips up her coat. “Don’t call me.”

  We watch her walk out of our lives.

  24

  If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?

  Khalil Gibran

  Miki:

  It’s almost four in the morning when I get back to Wendy’s apartment. I’ve lived here since November. My clothes hang in Wendy’s closet, and those are my shoes scattered all over the bedroom, but the place feels like it belongs to a stranger.

  I curl up in the unmade bed. I slept here only four days ago, on Friday night. That day, I’d been alone and restless, but when I couldn’t sleep, I’d reached for my phone and chatted with Lancelot and Merlin.

  The betrayal cuts bone-deep. I haven’t just lost the two men who’d become important to me. I’ve also lost two of my best friends.

  I toss and turn, trying to fall asleep and failing. Finally, I get up and find a bottle of wine in the kitchen. I don’t bother with a glass. Taking it back to bed with me, I down its contents over the next hour, feeling tearful, lonely, and sorry for myself.

  In the morning, I can give myself a pep talk and try to make a list. In the morning, I can figure out what to do with the wreckage that once again surrounds me.

  Tonight, there’s just pain.

  When I wake, the sun’s shining through my window, and the radio clock on the bedside table tells me it’s noon.

  My head throbs and my mouth is dry, and I feel terrible, both physically and mentally. I get up and gulp down a glass of water. There’s no aspirin in the apartment, and I blearily contemplate going to the convenience store at the corner of the block to get some.

  Last night, I turned off my phone in the cab. I’m not ready to turn it back on, but bracing myself, I do it anyway and navigate to DefCon’s forums. I don’t want to hear from Lancelot and Merlin—no, from Oliver and Finn—but I’m morbidly curious about whether Kent’s reached out again.

  He has. There’s a message from him, sent at eight in the morning. Do you have the list?

  Another one, sent at ten. What the hell is going on?

  By this time, Kent probably found out I wasn’t at work. Are Finn and Oliver going to tell him I’ve quit? Somehow, I doubt that. The two men haven’t discovered what the CFO is up to, and until they do, I’m sure they’ll play their cards close to their chest.

  It’s none of my business anyway. I don’t work at Imperium. My relationship with Oliver and Finn is over.

  There are about a dozen messages from the two men. They’ve tried repeatedly to reach me.

  I don’t know why. There’s nothing to say.

  Once I shower, I make my way downstairs and go to the store at the end of the block. It’s an independent store in an ocean of chain retailers, but somehow, year after year, it survives. Maybe because the owner, Mr. Greene, is one of the nicest, friendliest people in the city.

  He’s worki
ng the cash register today. “Hello, Mr. Greene,” I greet him. “You’re not usually at the front.”

  “Camille quit,” he says. “She’s moving back to England. I just put up a help-wanted sign. You wouldn’t know anyone who’s interested, would you, Mackenzie?”

  I have no job. No direction. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I should start making a list about what to do next, but I can’t think of anything. Part of me wants to flee Manhattan, where everything reminds me of Oliver and Finn. Maybe another city will provide me a fresh start.

  “I can’t pay much,” he says. “Thirteen dollars an hour.”

  I have a habit of leaping before looking. I jumped into my relationship with Aaron too soon. I took the job at Imperium even though I shouldn’t have. I got involved with Oliver and Finn against my better judgment. This time, I’m going to do things differently.

  And until I figure out my next steps, thirteen bucks an hour is a start.

  “I might be interested,” I reply. “Can I fill out a form?”

  I’m closing a door. On Imperium. On User0989/Lawrence Kent. On Finn and Oliver.

  It’s the smart, sensible thing to do.

  Yet, I feel as if someone’s taken a baseball bat to my heart.

  Oliver:

  I finally get into the office at two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. Janine looks up at me. “How’s Finn’s grandmother?” she asks. “Your message didn’t give me any details.”

  “She fell and broke her hip. She had surgery last night.”

  She inhales sharply. “That’s terrible. Is she going to be okay?”

  “I think so. Finn’s going to be out the entire week, so cancel what you can, and I’ll pinch-hit for him.”

  “No worries. Miki’s going to be out today, I assume? She’s got a couple of meetings on her calendar. I can reschedule those for her.”