The Billionaire's Command (The Silver Cross Club)

by Bec Linder

  Oh shit, how could I possibly turn him down after that? I arranged my face into an expression of sympathy, and reached out to touch his knee. “I’m so sorry! What happened?”

  “It’s my daughter,” he said, his voice breaking. I’d had no idea he had a kid. Was he married? No ring, but that didn’t mean anything. They all took their rings off before they cheated on their wives, like that gave them a free pass or something. “She’s been feeling so tired at school, and so we finally—well, the doctors said she’s got cancer. She’s only eight.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “We’ll get her all the best treatment, of course, but you just never know with these things. Christ. My little girl.”

  “I’m sure the doctors will take care of her,” I said. “Poor thing! Do you have any pictures you’d like to show me?” Inside, I was seething. I felt bad for the kid, of course—she didn’t deserve to get sick—but my dad had died in a crummy hospital ward after the doctors gave up on him, and maybe he would have lived longer if he’d had enough money for all the best treatment. Maybe he would still be alive. It was just how your cards were dealt: rich, you lived; poor, you died like a dog.

  There was no dignity in death. I’d seen it. Rich or poor, but at least if you were rich, you had a fighting chance.

  But my anger wasn’t really about Altman, and it definitely wasn’t about his daughter, who was very cute, and when I told Altman that I wished all the best for her, I meant it.

  I kept one eye on the clock while I listened to him and made soothing noises. I really, really needed to get going. Finally, after about fifteen minutes, Trixie sauntered past the bar, and I caught her eye and made the universal “please help me” face. It worked: she stopped, and I said, “Mr. Altman, why don’t you go with my friend Trixie here? I think she’s just what you need to feel better.”

  He looked at me, eyes rimmed red, and then looked up at Trixie.

  “Looks like you’ve had a rough day,” she said. “Want to tell me all about it?” She shifted her weight and her robe fell open to expose one of her breasts. I watched Altman’s gaze drop to her chest, and he swallowed.

  Done. “Take care of yourself, Mr. Altman,” I said, slipping off the stool. Thank you, I mouthed to Trixie, and she nodded at me and winked. Altman still hadn’t looked away from her chest. I slung my bag over my shoulder and beat a hasty retreat.

  Christ. The dangers they never told you about when you started stripping.

  And I was pretty sure that was nothing compared to what Turner would do to me if I was late.

  9

  I managed to make it home by 5. I took a quick shower and put on the dress Turner had given me. I dried my hair and wrapped it into a knot on my head, and put on some understated makeup, just some eyeliner and mascara and nude lipstick. Looking at myself in the mirror, I didn’t feel much like Sassy Belle anymore. Without the wig and the dramatic stage makeup, I was just regular old Sasha. Sassy was my armor, and without her, I felt defenseless. And brave.

  I wanted Turner to see the real me. Not Sassy.

  That was what scared me most of all. That I didn’t want to wear any disguises around him.

  I didn’t want to think about it. I tucked a lacy slip into my purse along with my phone and wallet, and then I headed for the subway.

  It was humid and miserable underground, and I started sweating almost immediately. I had to go to Broadway-Lafayette and then transfer to the Lexington Avenue line, and the 6 train took a million years to show up while I sweltered and wished I hadn’t been too cheap to take a cab. Even worse, the 6 was local service, and I was in for a long, slow ride uptown.

  It gave me entirely too much time to think.

  My conversations with Scarlet and Yolanda had me running scared. They both knew me pretty well, and they both thought that I—well, that my feelings for Turner went beyond the professional. I’d thought I was just telling them, very matter-of-fact, about my totally platonic business arrangement, but something I said, or maybe my tone of voice or my facial expression, made them think there was more to it than I let on.

  The thing was, they were right.

  I had feelings. I hated it. I didn’t want to. I’d been fighting it tooth and nail since my very first encounter with Turner, back when he was just a nice stranger who bandaged my bloody knees. I didn’t think he was nice anymore, but he wasn’t a stranger, either. He was real: a person I knew. Not well. I wasn’t sure if I would ever understand him. But he was a man, flesh and blood, and I wanted him at least as much as he wanted me.

  I was falling for him, and it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

  Well. Maybe not the absolute worst. But it was pretty close.

  I stewed about it all the way uptown, until I got off the subway at Hunter and climbed the stairs to the street. Time to stop worrying. I needed to be Sassy for now. That was who Turner expected. It didn’t matter what I wanted.

  As I came out of the subway into the summer evening, I took a deep breath and imagined all of my worries leaving me as I exhaled. I forced my mind to go blank. I could think about things later. But right now I had to put my game face on.

  I walked the few blocks to Turner’s apartment, trying not to think about anything except the warm breeze against my face. It was a little before 7, and all the Upper East Siders were out taking their tiny dogs for pre-dinner walks. I didn’t understand the point of having a dog that small. If you wanted something apartment-friendly, why not just get a cat?

  Turner would never have a tiny dog. Maybe a wolf hybrid or something. He would train it to kill people who had displeased him.

  Christ.

  I recognized Turner’s building even before I saw the street number carved in marble above the front door. The doorman smiled at me as he held the door opened, and I wondered if he remembered me from the other evening. I didn’t look that different. More presentable, maybe, in my dress and nice sandals. Maybe that was why Turner had bought them for me: so I wouldn’t embarrass him in front of the people he interacted with every day. Although I had a hard time imagining that Turner cared too much about what the doorman thought of him.

  The lobby of the building was cool and dim after the bright heat outside. As the elevator doors slid closed, I pressed one palm flat against my chest, feeling the thump of my racing heart. I wanted to see him. I felt like a twelve-year-old with her first crush. Like the world was bright with possibility and wonder, instead of being the tarnished, soul-crushing place I knew it really was. Dog eat dog.

  The elevator opened on his floor, and I stepped out and rang the doorbell. While I waited for him to answer, I ran my hands over my hair, smoothing down the fly-aways. That was part of the reason I started wearing the wig: my hair was so dense and staticky that it refused to behave for more than about three minutes at a time.

  I waited, but the door didn’t open. I took out my phone and checked the text message Turner had sent me that morning. He’d definitely told me 7:00. I frowned and pressed the doorbell again.

  After a handful of seconds, I heard the deadbolt slide open. My heart started going even faster, racing in my chest like a thoroughbred. The door swung outward and Turner was there, looking tired and rumpled in a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his feet bare.

  I had never seen him look so… ordinary. He could have been any businessman at home in the evening after a long day. I felt an unexpected tenderness break open inside my chest. I wanted to make him a sandwich and curl together in bed, kiss the back of his neck until he fell asleep, and lie there in the darkness and listen to him breathe in the quiet room.

  I couldn’t. It wasn’t like I was his girlfriend.

  “Looks like you’ve had a long day,” I drawled.

  “I forgot you were coming over,” he said, rubbing his eyes with one hand. “Come in. Is it 7 already?”

  “It’s 7,” I said, moving past him into the apartment. The living room was dark, but there was a light on in the room beyond it, and I foll
owed the warm glow and found myself in what looked like the dining room. I had somehow missed it during my tour. There was nothing in the room but a large table surrounded by sleek wooden chairs, but the table was covered with papers, and there was an open laptop and a glass of amber liquid. Probably whiskey. Turner had obviously been sitting in here.

  I hoisted myself onto the table and sat there, feet swinging, watching as Turner followed me. He stopped in the doorway and looked at me. I slid my thighs apart slightly, hinting at the soft heat between my legs. His eyes dropped downward, but flickered back up to my face an instant later. No luck.

  “You’re a distraction I can’t afford right now,” he said. “I’m sorry you came all the way up here. I meant to call you and tell you not to come.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Anything that’s wrong with you, sex can fix.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Is that the fourth law of thermodynamics?”

  “I don’t know anything about thermodynamics,” I said. “Is that what makes water boil?”

  “You’re very good at pretending to be stupid,” he said. “If only you actually were stupid. That would make this situation far less complicated.” I opened my mouth to ask him what he was talking about, but he crossed the room in two long strides and bent to kiss me.

  It was our first real kiss.

  His mouth crushed against mine, firm and demanding, and my eyes slid shut. My clients wanted to kiss me, sometimes, and I would give them a dry peck on the lips and direct their attention elsewhere. It wasn’t that I had anything against kissing, I just found it kind of tedious. It was inefficient, and not very interesting.

  But with Turner, oh—it was something else entirely. He ran his tongue against the closed seam of my lips, and when I opened for him, he teased me with teeth and tongue, nibbling at my lower lip, sliding his tongue against mine in an exquisite glide. My backbone turned to liquid. I gripped two fistfuls of his shirt and surrendered myself to him. I had never imagined that kissing could be like this.

  He pulled back, finally, and rubbed one thumb along my cheekbone. “I’ll have to send you home,” he said.

  His voice was tinged with what sounded like regret. What was it that Scarlet had said? Hook, line. Sinker. I opened my eyes again and looked up at him. The expression on his face was so raw and open that I instinctively looked away, like I wanted to respect his privacy or something. When I glanced back a second later, he’d wiped his face clean of whatever it was. The man returning my gaze was Mr. Turner, The Owner, cool and unreadable.

  But beneath that was Alex, hidden inside.

  I understood him, then. We weren’t so different after all. We were both concealing something: our true selves, the careful heart, the hot blood. What my mother would have called the soul.

  He saw it in my face. His hands, resting against my knees, flexed once, fingertips digging into my thighs, and then fell away. “Okay,” he said.

  It was strange to hear him say that word. It seemed too casual. “Okay?” I asked.

  “If you won’t leave, then you can help me,” he said.

  I didn’t remember telling him that I wasn’t planning to leave, but whatever. He was a puzzle, and I wanted to spend a while longer poking at him. One of my brothers, when he was about ten, got a Rubik’s cube for his birthday, and spent a solid two weeks doing nothing but twisting it around and around, trying to get the colors to line up. I understood the impulse, now.

  “Help you with what?” I asked.

  “Crisis at work,” he said. “I could use an extra set of eyes to go through this paperwork.”

  “What kind of crisis?” I asked, worried. “I was there, like, three hours ago and everything seemed normal.”

  He frowned at me, brow furrowed. “You were—oh.” His face cleared, and he laughed. “You sweet thing. The club is fine. Surely you don’t think that’s my only business venture.”

  “Isn’t it?” I asked, and then blushed and wished I had kept my mouth shut. He had just told me that it wasn’t, and now I looked like an idiot.

  “You really don’t have any idea who I am, do you,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “You’re Alex Turner,” I said. “You own the Silver Cross Club, and you’re the only person I know who doesn’t have a television.”

  He leaned in and kissed me again, slow and heated, and then pulled back and said, “I haven’t watched television in five years, and I don’t intend to acquire the habit anytime soon. Now, are you going to be a good girl and help me, or do I have to send you home without any dinner?”

  “Yeah, I’ll help,” I said. “It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing I’ve done for a client.” I said that deliberately, trying to provoke him with the reminder of all the other men I’d been with, but he just turned away and picked up a manila folder.

  “I need you to go through these papers and highlight any mentions of Bywater Ventures,” he said. “And if you see the name Martin anywhere, or Reginald Martin, set it aside and show it to me.”

  He handed the folder to me, and I took it. It was several inches thick and bristling with sticky notes. A few paper-clipped sheafs of print-outs poked from the top. God, what had I gotten myself into? “Don’t you have a secretary for this sort of thing?” I asked.

  His mouth twitched to one side. “No.” I waited for him to continue, but he sat down in front of his computer and pulled a stack of papers toward himself with every indication of going right back to work.

  I sighed. Getting information out of him was like squeezing blood from a stone. I slid off the table and sat across the table from him. I watched him for a few moments, waiting for him to announce that this was all a big joke and we could have sex now, but he turned pages and pecked at his laptop and didn’t pay any attention to me.

  Fine. I leaned across the table to grab one of the highlighters sitting beside his computer. He didn’t blink or look up. I uncapped it and stuck the cap on the end. I opened my folder and picked up the stack of papers, and whacked the bottom edge on the table a few times, straightening things out. Turner didn’t react.

  Well, there was no helping it. I gave in to the inevitable and bent my head to work.

  It was incredibly boring. The papers were some sort of business document, and I didn’t understand half the words they used. It was something about buying and selling, and stock offerings, and something else about reorganization and shipments. I saw Bywater mentioned here and there, and I highlighted the name each time it appeared. A few dozen pages in, I found a reference to a Mr. Martin, and I highlighted that and set the page to one side.

  After a while it got to be automatic—scanning the page, highlighting if necessary, moving to the next one—and my thoughts wandered. If Turner didn’t only own the club, what else did he do? What sort of crisis had him enlisting me, a woman he was paying an awful lot of money in exchange for sex, to review paperwork on a Wednesday evening? Maybe he was in the Mafia, and federal prosecutors were building a case against him, and I was his last chance to avoid prison. I spent a few minutes in a romantic daydream about visiting him in prison. I could take him care packages with books and baked goods, and the other prisoners would be so jealous of his sexy visitor that they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves.

  Then I realized what my brain was doing while I wasn’t paying attention, and rolled my eyes at myself. For Christ’s sake, Sasha. Prison wasn’t romantic.

  He probably wasn’t in the Mafia, anyway.

  I came to the end of one paper-clipped set of papers and decided I needed a break. I capped my highlighter and said, “You aren’t in the Mafia, are you?”

  Turner looked up, frowning. He narrowed his eyes at me. “I’m afraid I misheard you.”

  “The Mafia,” I said. “You know, the mob. Gangsters. You don’t own any laundromats in Queens, do you?”

  “The—no,” he said. “I am not in the Mafia. Are you finished with those papers?”

  “Some of them,” I said, guilty. He was so focused
on his work, and here I was distracting him with my dumb questions. “Here, I found one that has Martin’s name on it.” I slid the paper across the table to him.

  “Excellent,” he said. He looked at his computer screen, and then said, “It’s almost 8. I’ll order some food.”

  “I’m not that hungry,” I said, and just then my stomach rumbled loudly enough that I was sure Turner could hear it.

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “It sounds like you’re hungry,” he said. “Late nights working call for Chinese takeout. Any preference?”

  “Sesame chicken,” I said immediately. “And some of those crispy noodle things.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “I’ll order some steamed vegetables instead. It’s better for your waistline.”

  My jaw dropped. “Are you telling me I need to watch my weight?”

  He didn’t smile, but his eyes crinkled slightly, and that was enough.

  “You’re teasing me,” I said. “Oh my God. Don’t you know that’s against the law?”

  “I’m fairly certain that isn’t a law,” he said. “You know you’re gorgeous. You can eat as many crispy noodles as you want.”

  “Thank you,” I said. This was turning out to be a weird evening. First he’d said okay, then he teased me about my takeout order—next he would reveal that we were long-lost siblings, or something. Except that would be disgusting, so I hoped it didn’t really happen.

  Plus, then I couldn’t ever have sex with him again.

  I really, really wanted to have sex with him again.

  And not just sex: I wanted to lie in bed with him, my head resting against his chest, and listen to his heartbeat. I wanted to wake up with him in the morning and tangle our feet together and go back to sleep for another hour. Stupid things. Unrealistic, movie-happy-ending things.

  Rule fucking one.

  He went into the kitchen to order, and I heard him running the tap and opening the refrigerator. Maybe he’d finally bought some food. He came back a few minutes later with a glass and a bottle of Coke, and set them down in front of me.