by A. R. Torre
It was interesting to see the dynamics of another relationship. William and I were together against everything. His competitors. Judgments against our childless state. Our families. We were a bond.
Neena and Matt were the opposite. A break. If I hadn’t seen it in our power-outage visit, the truth reared its head at our first dinner together.
“Don’t eat that,” she warned Matt, tapping his hand with the top of her fork. “It’s not grass-fed.” He reluctantly put down the Wagyu rib eye skewer, which was a shame, because it was one of the best items on Protégé’s menu.
I lifted an amused eyebrow in William’s direction. “Does it matter if it’s grass-fed?”
“It does if you don’t want to get cancer,” she snapped, her voice a little loud for the intimate restaurant. I glanced at the closest table and was relieved to see no reaction from the couple there. Leaning forward, I stole the abandoned skewer, which was absolutely delectable, regardless of its source’s dietary history. Her eyes narrowed.
“We’re strictly keto,” she announced, and I wasn’t well informed on the diet, but I’d be surprised if the wine she was guzzling down was part of it. “Matt’s down fourteen pounds.”
“Wow.” I nodded as if fourteen pounds would make any difference on her husband’s stocky frame. “Matt, that’s great.”
He nodded warily, she glared at me, and I stifled a smile at the long list of things that appeared to piss Neena off. For one, not including the doctor title before her name. We’d introduced them to the club manager, as well as some friends of ours, and in both instances, she interjected the designation after I made the introduction. She also seemed to intensely dislike anything that tasted good. And she was insecure to the point of being unbearably possessive with her husband, yet overly friendly with mine.
In contrast, Matt was wonderful. Gracious throughout all her snide remarks. Funny and endearing, with a catalog of stories that kept us laughing during the entire meal. He was obviously head over heels for Neena, despite her neurotic behaviors, which only made me like him more. He and William had hit it off immediately, talking politics and sports, their conversations often leaving Neena and me to our own discussions.
Now, she leaned forward and gently touched my arm. “That couple you introduced us to? The Whitlocks? You said that you sit on a board with them?”
I nodded. “The charity wine auction. It’s an annual event that raises money for local and national charities. It’s the largest fundraiser in the county. Last year, it raised over ten million dollars.”
“I’d love to be a part of that.” She scooted her chair closer to mine.
“We’re always looking for volunteers.” I beamed. “I can add you to the list.”
“Well, sure, sure.” She waved off the mention with a flip of her skinny wrist. “But I was thinking more of the board. Helping with the administration of the event.”
I struggled not to laugh. She wanted to be on the charity wine auction board? It was the most prestigious event in town. I’d spent the last decade building the relationships and climbing the complicated maze of social ladders required to lead that board. I lifted my wineglass and took a moment to respond.
“The board applications are accepted in July.” I shrugged. “I’ll be sure to let you know when they open and can give you a recommendation.”
“That would be great.” She smiled, and the gesture pulled unnaturally at the tight skin by her ear, a telltale sign of a facelift—and a poor one at that. During the meal, I’d kept a careful catalog of her surgeries. A neck job, definitely. Eye work, if I had to guess. Breast job—without a doubt. Her thin lips would be the next item on the surgeon’s block, if I were a betting woman. And it was sad. Beneath all that, she had probably been a natural beauty.
Under the table, William’s hand settled on my knee, and he gave it a tender squeeze. I placed my hand over his and met his eyes. He smiled, and I knew what he was thinking. He wanted to be alone. Our last date here had stretched until almost midnight, as we had taken our time with the tasting menu, polishing off two bottles of wine during the five-course meal. He leaned forward, and I met him over a piece of kataifi-wrapped langoustine.
“You look good enough to eat,” he whispered in my ear.
I pressed a kiss against his cheek, then straightened, unsurprised to find Neena watching, her gaze darting between William and me as if paranoid that we were talking about her. I turned to Matt. “How’s the house? Any unexpected issues?”
“No issues,” Neena said quickly. “It’s wonderful. Really needs very little at all.”
“It’s not anything compared to your house,” Matt began.
“But it’s great.” Neena’s grin grew strained. “Matt, eat the rest of the sablefish.”
“We’ve always loved that lot,” I offered. “It’s so private. And the neighborhood is so safe.”
“I’ve got to be honest.” Matt wiped at his mouth, oblivious to the daggers his wife was sending his way. “I expected, with it sitting vacant for so long, that it’d be ransacked. Normally you’ll see the appliances stolen, light fixtures gone—even the copper wiring stripped out.”
“This isn’t Bayview,” Neena said sharply. “It’s Atherton. Things like that don’t happen here.”
“It’s true.” William settled back in his seat as the delicate sounds of a harp began in the background. “Plus, everyone’s so nosy. You got a hundred housewives spying on each other through diamond-studded binoculars. Add in the private police force, security cameras, and guard gate, and no one even tries to do anything. That house could have sat wide-open for the last five years and no one would have taken a thing from it.”
I nodded in agreement, thinking of the sweet irony that the tennis bracelet on my wrist had come from Claudia Baker’s personal collection. “It’s true. Honestly, we don’t even lock our doors most of the time.” I sectioned off a bite of the poularde. “In the daytime, there’s no point, especially in the backyard. I’d rather come in to the fresh breeze, especially when the gardens are in bloom.”
William frowned at me. “You should keep the doors locked.”
I shrugged off the instruction. “You focus on WT and I’ll watch the house.” He chuckled, and I pierced a wedge of Wagyu and held it out to him, smiling as he ate it off my fork.
“I always lock the house,” Neena said firmly. “They say anyone would steal if given enough opportunities and lack of consequences.”
“I agree.” William nodded, and I didn’t miss the way Neena straightened with pride at his support. “It’s like leaving keys in a Lamborghini. At some point, even if not to steal it, someone is going to borrow it for a test drive.”
“Exactly.” She picked up her almost-empty glass of wine, and I wondered if she had changed the locks since they’d moved in. If so, had they gone to the trouble with every door? I thought of my key ring at home, a duplicate of the one I had returned to Claudia Baker’s junk drawer.
“Neena, how is Winthorpe Tech?” I smiled at her. “Everyone treating you well?”
I may have imagined it, but it seemed as if her shoulders stiffened with the question. “It’s going well.” She set down the glass and focused on her own plate, her knife scraping across the china as she cut into her piece of lamb. “The team has been very receptive to my presence.”
William, as expected, shifted immediately into work mode. “Any progress with Marilyn?”
“Some.” She pierced a piece of meat. “I’m meeting with her again tomorrow.”
“Marilyn Staubach?” I said, confused by what the capable surgeon would need help with. “What progress does she need?”
“I’ll tell you about it later.” William smiled, but his voice was tight and irritated. “Neena has another week to work with her.” He glanced over his shoulder, catching the attention of the waiter and signaling for the check.
I brought the wineglass up to my mouth and didn’t miss the tension that crossed Neena’s face.
Ano
ther week. I knew every tone in my husband’s arsenal, and that had sounded like an ultimatum.
CHAPTER 8
NEENA
If my job had been solely in Marilyn Staubach’s hands, it would have been doomed for failure. I studied the petite woman carefully, looking for some tell that could unlock her motivations, and was grateful for the grenade I’d found, one currently tucked into the side pocket of my jacket.
She stared back at me, then opened her mouth in a yawn. From the back of her mouth, I saw the silver glint of a filling.
“Why did you originally start working for Winthorpe?”
“Money,” she said flatly. “And I’ve decided I’ve had enough of it.” She lifted a delicate dark wrist and examined the face of a chunky plastic timepiece, one I’d considered buying myself—the built-in GPS an interesting but fairly useless feature.
“Well, surgeons make good money.” I drew a tiny dollar sign in the first bullet point of my notepad. “You could certainly go back to working in the field.”
She looked at me as if I were an idiot. “Thank you, Neena. Excellent career advice.”
“The stress rate of cardiac surgeons is one of the highest out of all the surgical specialists,” I pointed out, my cheeks burning at her sharp remark. Stupid Neena, my father used to say. Shut up, Neena. It’d been twenty years. Would I ever stop hearing his opinions? “Would you gauge your stress level to be higher or lower during your time at WT?”
“It feels like these questions could all be answered through an exit survey.” She changed the cross of her leg, and I watched the pale-blue scrub lift to reveal a functional white tennis shoe and ankle socks. I had to remember what she was. A lamb/owl, if I went off Charles Clarke’s personality profiles. Caring. Exacting. Detail and numbers oriented. She wouldn’t have put in her notice without researching other options and doing an extensive pro/con list.
“They could be.” I aimed for a demure smile. “But an exit survey can’t negotiate.”
She let out a harsh laugh. “Negotiate with what?”
“FDA approval is almost here,” I pointed out. “You’re talking about a seven-figure bonus that you’re walking away from. Help me understand what is so terrible about staying here for another three or four months.”
“You’re new.” She sniffed. “You don’t know what it’s like. The men are pricks. The women are catty, and William—” She arched a brow in my direction. “That man has spoken to me as if I was a piece of toilet tissue on the terminal floor at LAX. Granted, he’s an asshole across the board, so at least it’s not a racial thing. But I’m too old for that. I’m getting seven-figure offers shoved in my face every time I turn around. My life is too short and my 401(k) is too padded to accept working for William.”
She was right. I was new, but two weeks here had been enough for me to understand exactly what she was dealing with. The affable gentleman by Cat’s side had a temper. During this morning’s team meetings, he’d destroyed any warm emotions I’d nurtured in our opening meditative affirmations when he’d ripped the newest testing report into pieces and addressed the group as “a bunch of overpaid morons.”
“What if I kept William away from you?” I suggested. “You can skip the team meetings. Complete your final action items on your own. Work from home two days a week.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “You’re going to keep William from speaking to me? Impossible.”
She was probably right, but I plowed ahead, ready to use the thin envelope in my jacket pocket if necessary.
Maybe it wouldn’t be. Maybe this alone would be the key to getting Marilyn to stay. I hoped it would.
She was already shaking her head, as if she could hear my inner monologue. “My decision is made. I’m leaving in a week. He’s lucky I’m sticking out my two weeks.” She pushed to her feet. “I have to get back to my work.”
I reached in my pocket and pulled out the envelope. “I have one more thing to discuss.”
“Like I said, my decision’s made.”
“Marilyn.” I met her eyes. “Trust me, you’ll want to hear this.”
“Spit it out, Neena.”
“I know about Jeff.” Four short words that tasted so good on my tongue. I had practiced different ways to deliver the blow and heard the ring of victory in my response despite my best attempt to keep it out.
She didn’t move. Didn’t slump with defeat or stagger back to her chair. She didn’t blink or quake or react in any way at all. Her gaze swung toward me with the slow and practiced control of a woman who had been through it all. “Jeff’s dead,” she said.
I met her eyes squarely. “I can attest from my visit with him yesterday, he’s not.”
Forty-five minutes later, I watched as Marilyn revoked her resignation via email, the “Send” button clicked with a hostile amount of contempt. I didn’t care. I had secured my job, and her four kids and husband would continue thinking that her fifth son had died in early labor and wasn’t living in a convalescent home, blowing out the candles on his thirteenth birthday cake without a single family member in sight.
I brought the paperwork to William, quietly entering the sleek and sophisticated space that showed a sliver of the ocean. Everything was glass—the door I pushed to come inside, the walls between us and the adjacent office, the floor-to-ceiling windows that separated the room from a fifty-foot drop. There would be no quickies on the desk in this office, not unless he wanted the entire team to watch.
He glanced at the paperwork without lifting his hands from his computer keyboard, then nodded. “Fine. Close the door on your way out.”
The dismissal would have made a regular woman bristle with irritation, but I only wanted more. A psychologist would have blamed the unhealthy pull to rejection on my father, but I knew what a ticket into this world would cost me. Dirty, underhanded deals. Slow and relentless seduction. A twisted contortion that might break my spine in two but would roll me higher and higher on the rungs of society until I was where I belonged, looking down on women like my mother and Cat Winthorpe and in complete puppet-master control over men like my father and William.
It would come. Already, I was closer.
CHAPTER 9
CAT
William quietly worked the Aston Martin’s stick shift, his hair ruffling in the breeze as he took the curve leading up to the small cliffside restaurant. The night was silent, the wind soft.
I turned in the seat to face him, admiring his profile in the dusk, the blue glow from the dash faintly lighting his distinguished features. I fell in love with those features my junior year in college as I peeked at him over the top of my computer screen from the corner of the interns’ room. We’d all been slightly terrified of him, his rare visits to our room punctuated by lots of cursing and—more often than not—the firing of whoever had screwed up. Our turnover rate was insane, and crying was common among the interns, everyone tense and dreading the moment that they’d invariably make a mistake.
My own misstep had come just before Christmas. Our fellow students had all flown home, their social media accounts full of Christmas trees, ice skating, and spiked eggnog. A dwindling group of five had stayed to meet the increased workload of a corporate takeover that William was masterminding. I’d spent six hours on a spreadsheet and, at some point in the process, sorted a column without including all the fields—an error that completely invalidated every other cell in the spreadsheet. Four hours later, relieved to finally be through with the task, I’d added the spreadsheet into the shared drive without noticing the error.
When William burst into our room, I snapped to attention, watching as he carried a printout over to our supervisor’s desk and set it before her, stabbing the page with one finger. I heard my name and straightened, steeling myself as she pointed in my direction. His gaze swept over the room and stopped on me.
It was our first eye contact, and I felt empowered by it, rising to my feet as he strode toward me. His expensive dress shoes clicked along the tile, and his eye
s were as dark as his suit. He’d stopped before my desk and held the spreadsheet up. “I suppose this piece of worthless shit came from you?”
I don’t know why I smiled. It was something we’d dissected over champagne on our honeymoon and in late-night walks down memory lane. I should have been terrified. I should have stammered out an apology. But instead I met his eyes with a smile he later described as cocky and sexy as hell. I smiled and . . . stunningly enough, William Winthorpe, destroyer of companies and notorious prick . . . began to smile back at me.
I came to work the next morning and found a first-class ticket to Banff in my desk drawer. I lost my virginity to him in a mountainside cabin on that trip. When we returned to San Francisco, I packed up my apartment and moved into William’s sleek downtown condo without a minute’s hesitation.
He tapped the horn at a passing opossum, and I held on as he swerved.
“I heard about Marilyn.” I captured a loose tendril of hair and cupped it against my neck. “She’s definitely staying?”
“For now.” He accelerated through the turn, his gaze on the road. “Neena talked to her. Brought her to her senses.”
There was no doubt that we needed Marilyn. She’d spent months working on our FDA trials and had developed a key relationship with the testing contacts. Losing her would set us back six months, easily. “She’s probably being heavily recruited.” There weren’t many scientists with her pedigree. Add in that she was black and female and she was probably getting a fresh job offer every day. It was impressive that Neena had changed Marilyn’s mind, and without offering her more compensation or perks.
“She is.” He glanced at me. “Neena thinks I need to work on my management style.” He wasn’t happy with the assessment. I could see it in the way his second hand joined his first on the steering wheel, the set of his mouth, the rigid line of his long body as he hunched forward in the seat. My husband, for all his confidence, was also impossibly hard on himself.
“I don’t know about that,” I said carefully. “You’re a genius. Without you, there wouldn’t even be a Winthorpe Tech, or a Winthorpe Capital to fund it.”
