Hot and Bothered

by Liz Maverick

  I hadn’t looked at the financials yet, obviously, but if Marchand brains had run the numbers, I believed Jack when he said it was solid.

  “My father is a dictator. He wants things the way he wants them. None of my brothers has settled down. None of us has completed his dreams for us yet. He says that if one of us displeases him, all three will suffer.” His eyes sparked, and he managed a little grin when he added, “I don’t think he realized when he sent us to New York to round out our education that we would develop a taste for American women.”

  I laughed. “What are his dreams for you?”

  Jack shrugged. “Become miniature versions of himself. Marry a French woman from a family with a lot of French money. Have three strapping heirs. Increase the family fortune. Keep it in the family, if you will. Keep it all close. Live for business. Never pleasure for pleasure’s sake.”

  I suddenly didn’t feel like laughing anymore. No denying I didn’t fit in that picture. But Jack didn’t fit in that picture, either. “And if you don’t?”

  “Cut off.”

  “Seriously?” I could hardly judge a guy for not wanting to go from billionaire to bills.

  He shrugged. “That’s the threat. None of us has tested it yet. But Luc somehow manages to indulge his natural wildness and still keep Father happy. Christian doesn’t mind playing the role of son, but then he is the heir apparent. He may just run it all one day. I am different.”

  Yes, he was. The Jack I’d known all those years ago had been a dreamer deep inside, more interested in the arts than in the finances. And now he was a dreamer on a leash. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I’d done a far better job throwing off the shackles of my past than he had of his.

  Jack was looking at me curiously. “You never really had a father in the picture, did you?”

  “Nope. It was just Mom and us.” I felt a pang as I said that.

  “Does she still work at the school?”

  The pain spread to an ache, which I tamped down. “She remarried and started a new family. She was lucky enough to get a do-over in life, and she made a run for it.” I chose the phrasing carefully. It sounded better than she ran away. “It’s really just me and Anna.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said, touching his arm.

  He knew I meant his father. He took my hand and looked into my eyes, startling me with the storm brewing there. “I’ll call a car to take you home.”

  “Show me the rest of your hotel. Give me the rest of your tour. Forget your dad. Sell me on it. We’ll pretend I have millions of dollars and can invest in it with you.”

  The grin on Jack’s face proved he liked the game, and I liked thinking I had the power to take his mind off his troubles.

  He held out his arm, and I hooked my elbow in his. He escorted me to the ballroom and began to talk. I could see dreamer Jack in there, reminding himself to talk about the rate of return and the profit potential but always detouring to talk about the way the stained-glass windows were designed to create prisms for a rainbow effect, and where an actress from the ‘20s had fallen into a ceiling-high champagne tower after a fight with one of her lovers. He put his arm around my waist and twirled me in a waltz, and I had a glimpse, just a glimpse, of what life could be like if I was a French woman with millions of dollars and Jack could have everything he wanted.

  “That’s it,” he said. “It would be wonderful, non?”

  “That’s not everything,” I said.

  “I need to see one of the rooms.”

  His eyebrow quirked up.

  “You wanted my opinion on the interiors.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to happen now,” he said.

  “Show me, anyway,” I said. “Just for fun. Who cares about your dad?”

  I guess I melted something in Jack, because he chewed on his lip, just looking at me for a moment with sweetness in his eyes. “You make everything fun,” he said quietly. “Always did.”

  I don’t know why something like that should make me blush, but it did. His gaze moved from my eyes to my mouth, and then he tore it away, like he was remembering he wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Jack led me to an elevator, which let out on the third floor, and then escorted me down the hall. The showroom was in the back of the hotel, in a corner suite only accessible using an old-fashioned skeleton key. Jack began to discuss the interiors of the room and how he would have renovated if the property were his. One room of the suite was dominated by what had to be the most enormous fluffy, glamorous bed I’d ever seen, which he pretended didn’t exist as he doggedly discussed closet space, the amount and quality of light and the art.

  I touched everything. Texture was paramount when developing a design plan for interiors, and I had to run my hands over everything. The plush velvet of the sofa, the curtains made from dupioni silk, the brass nails driven around a rectangle of crimson leather on the top of a desk and of course, the blankets and bed sheets.

  I walked to the bed and threw back the comforter, feeling Jack’s stare burning a hole in the back of my head as I massaged the bottom sheet with my palm. “Mmm…that’s some serious thread count,” I murmured. I reached for the blanket folded carefully at the foot of the bed and dug my fingers into the cashmere. “Oh, yes, that feels good.” I looked at him with wide, innocent eyes. “I don’t want to stop. I don’t think I can stop.”

  Jack crossed his arms at his chest, his eyes narrowing. But the very tip of his tongue came out and flicked across his lower lip before vanishing again, and I knew I had him.

  “You kind of have to really test these things out,” I said, climbing on the bed on my hands and knees. I bent my elbows and bounced a little. “Oh, this is fantastic.” I bounced more vigorously. “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah!”

  Jack cleared his throat, and I could hear strain in his voice when he said, “So you’d keep the mattresses.”

  “Oh, I’d definitely keep the mattresses,” I said breathily.

  I was learning how much fun it is to watch a man force himself to pay you the respect you deserve by keeping his hands off you when he obviously wants nothing more than to tear your clothes off. Of course, there was the downside of realizing that by insisting he pay you the respect you deserve, your clothes were not being torn off.

  I also realized that I wanted nothing more than to go to that gala with Jack, but I’d refused him twice and told him we could only be friends, and now I couldn’t bring myself to mention it. I still couldn’t put myself out there with him like that. Huh. I could let him go down on me, but the high school girl still inside me couldn’t tell him that I wanted to go to a dance with him.

  “You have no idea how much I wish this wasn’t so, but I’ve got another appointment,” Jack said.

  I blanched. “Oh. Oh, right. Sorry. I got a little carried away.” Shit. Shit! Say something about the gala, Cassie, or this is it.

  Jack held out his hand, and I let him support my weight as I clambered off the bed. He held on to that hand for a minute, staring thoughtfully at our linked palms. “I’d better go,” he said almost robotically. He let go of my hand to call the concierge for a car, giving them my address, and it was like his brain had gone somewhere else and shut off as we went to the elevators and headed down.

  “You are off to Italy at the end of the week?” he blurted somewhat idiotically since he already knew the answer.

  “Yeah. Brooks has a villa in mind…” I likewise idiotically babbled the rest of the explanation about it being between Siena and Florence while the part of me that wasn’t idiotically babbling was praying, ask me about the gala again. Ask me, Jack.

  Another pause. The guy from the concierge approached to let me know the car was here.

  Jack looked like he wanted to say something, but was holding back. Oh, shit, I thought miserably. He’s not going to ask again. With his father’s stamp of disapproval, he wouldn’t ask now even if he wanted to.

  Jack kissed my cheeks and settled
me into the limousine. “Until we meet again,” he said. I wanted to cling to his shirt. I wanted to pull him into the car on top of me. I didn’t want polite kisses and a goodbye, but that was what I’d engineered, wasn’t it?

  The door slammed, and we drove off and away from Jack’s arms. The limousine seemed unusually cold. At least, I thought woefully, I knew exactly where I stood. No unpleasant surprises at the end. Friends. True friends. So why wasn’t I feeling good about it? How many other scenarios could Ten Years Later Jack and I have an ending I could feel good about? Okay, one. I pressed my forehead against the cool window of the limo, closing my eyes. I knew why I felt shitty. Because my heart was suddenly beating again, in a way it hadn’t for a long, long time. I was leaving soon, and now I didn’t want to go, which was stupid because Jack’s father had made it clear that even if Jack and I could fix the past, it didn’t mean we had a future.

  Chapter Five

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Brooks,” I said to the slightly pixelated video square on my laptop screen. I’d been saying it exactly that way for the past five years to make it clear that my boss was the boss and I was the minion. It started out as an insurance policy to remind him that our relationship had parameters in spite of the fact that we didn’t work in a corporate office together, and our relative ages were not that far apart whilst the number of zeroes in our bank accounts were as far apart as they could get. Now, five years down the path, my yes, sir, Mr. Brooks had a slightly more affectionate, relaxed twang to it. He still hated it, and every year or so asked somewhat impatiently why I couldn’t just call him Wyatt, but with both of us single, there was just no way I was going to start calling him Wyatt. I was interested in keeping the best job of my life, and Mr. Wyatt Brooks was slowly evolving more into family than anything else.

  That said, he sometimes liked to ask me about my dating life, not because I thought he might be a little too interested—but because he wanted me to know that we were on the same team and he’d be happy to have someone “spoken to” on my behalf, for example, if I ever complained I’d been done wrong.

  I’d never seen him exhibit a sexual impulse, but then, we didn’t see each other that often, which was why I occasionally made an exception and called him Charlie instead of Mr. Brooks since I so rarely received instructions from him anywhere other than through a computer or phone.

  In fact, whenever we got off the subject of the business at hand, I sometimes thought he seemed a little bored, the way my friends said their brothers sounded when they finally got around to calling. But since he usually asked me what I was up to on my off hours and encouraged me to have fun on business trips, I realized he was living vicariously through me. As smooth and charming as Jack Marchand was with people, my boss, Wyatt Brooks, was some kind of mess. And I realized a long time ago that I served an important purpose in his life and made sure that when I told him a story about what I’d done in Amsterdam or Crete or Barcelona, that I told it with as much color as I could while still being honest, all the while ignoring the near silence on the other end.

  He knew about my sister, Anna, since I occasionally flew her out to join me in various exploits, and she often appeared in those colorful stories, but they’d never met. I was pretty sure if my comparative loudness and bluster made him draw inward, meeting Anna would cause him to implode.

  So it didn’t surprise me at all that he wanted to hear about the soirée to which Anna RSVPd us, and I got a kick from watching his face as he tried to grasp how having tea and watching models walk a fashion collection through tables of women made any sense or was even an actual event. He looked quite severe, which I knew from experience was his puzzled expression, like he couldn’t think of anywhere he’d rather be less.

  After I’d hung up with the boss, I got ready for said actual event, and it turned out that Mr. Brooks might have his shortcomings when it came to social engagements, but he had good instincts; once I got there, I, too, couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather be less.

  It was a charitable event featuring teas from my favorite shop, Mariage Frères. As the scent of smoky lapsang souchong mixing with the more floral perfume of Earl Grey French Blue swirled around us, we were escorted to a six-top covered in china so fine it was all I could do to prevent myself from turning over a teacup and looking at the mark. Since we were first to our table, I scratched that itch by instead riffling through the favor bag where I discovered several hundred dollars’ worth of La Mer nestled in the bottom.

  And that was pretty much where the fun ended.

  Anna couldn’t have known that Irina’s invitation was actually Beatrix Swan’s invitation. Beatrix had bought the table for charity, which meant that the rest of us were her guests, the rest of us also including Mary-Ann Peterson. Poor Anna looked at me with enormous eyes when she realized she’d brought me to a tea party with the girls who’d been the worst bullies to me in high school.

  I knew it. I mean, I totally called it when I saw Irina at Anna’s birthday. It wasn’t a surprise to me that where one of them went, the others would follow. Lots of the rich kids from high school still traveled in little jet-setting packs, and les soldes was like a siren call to women. Besides, some of those cliques had turned out to be quite useful; I’d turned plenty of them into my boss’s clients and as many mixed feelings as I still had about attending that school, the connections had done wonders for my job.

  But this trio was different. My personal hydra. The three girls who labeled me a slut after I’d lost my virginity to Jack. This is happening for a purpose. Jack’s right. This is an opportunity to say goodbye to the past. Or at least take control of my own narrative.

  Once I assured Anna I was fine, she set about having the time of her life, glancing at me every so often to make sure I was still conscious and the right color while she played fashion critic with Irina. There were five of us girls, and since the elephant sitting in the sixth chair wasn’t talking, this left me to make inane small talk with Beatrix and Mary-Ann. Not exactly how I’d fantasized things would go if I ever saw them again. Heavy machinery, blood, tae kwon do and hit men, yes. I’d thought about it. Tea and madeleines? Um, no.

  Irina had been at Anna’s party, of course, but now I got to see that all three women were still unfairly pretty, even with ten years on them. And still unfairly rich, assuming their rocks were real. I was about to find out if they were any nicer or at least any smarter.

  I now had another reason to wish I’d taken Jack up on his offer. Not only because it would have been a certain kind of justice, but also because it would have given me something fun to talk about. But Jack hadn’t called me since the hotel, and there was no way I could have missed his call because I stared at my cell phone so long and with such longing, it was a surprise it didn’t levitate from the amount of energy I’d spent on it.

  After we’d discussed the weather and shopping—you’d think we couldn’t run out of things to say about that, but it was pretty awkward—Mary-Ann brushed her blond fringe to one side and said, “Um, I feel really weird about the slut thing in school.”

  “I…um…” I mean, really. What do you say? Bitterness was so exhausting. I wanted to put the past behind me, especially if it meant Jack was for real this time even if our destiny was limited to making out in bathrooms every ten years. “I’ve forgotten most of the details,” I said.

  “I doubt Jack has,” Beatrix said, that crooked cupid’s-bow mouth of hers quirking into a smile. “He rampaged like a bull all over the five-year reunion asking if anyone knew if you were coming. At least two out of the three of us—and I’m not saying which two—tried to get in his pants that night, but his eyes were on the door the whole time, hoping you’d show. He told everyone what really happened in high school.”

  For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe what happened between us had haunted Jack as long as it had haunted me.

  “How long are you staying in Paris?” Beatrix asked.

  “My job takes me to Italy in a week, actually,” I
said. The urge to compete made me want to make it sound more than just part of my job, so I did the reverse, stubbornly emphasizing that I wasn’t jet-setting around having tea and picking up bags of premium face cream on a regular basis. “I’m looking into a villa for my boss. I manage luxury rentals all over the world, so if you are looking for something, just get in touch.” I took a pair of Brooks Property cards out of my purse and handed them over. I guess your money can say you’re sorry since your mouth can’t seem to do it.

  “Oh, what a perfect match!” Irina took a card out of her bag and handed it to me. “I’m starting an events company. If you ever need help putting something together for your boss or his clients…”

  “Absolutely,” I said. Irina’s really trying to be nice.

  “Cass, there’s supposed to be a famous rose garden out back,” Anna said, with that very particular expression that said, we must talk. “Let’s go look.”

  I took my sister’s hint, and we headed for said garden, which was very small and crowded. “Ladies’ room,” she said. I nodded, and we detoured for the restroom. Anna clucked over the gorgeous vintage wallpaper, marble and ornate fixtures and sighed as we headed into neighboring stalls. “I can’t afford any of this stuff and, besides, it’s not right for the gala. I didn’t know,” she said in a low voice. “You must be très bored.”

  High-fashion spreads with million-dollar dresses were fun to look at, but my practical side favored the magazine features about how to mix and match designer pieces with Main Street finds. You’re so high-low, Anna always told me. I grinned. I liked it that way. Expensive shoes, a killer bag and at least one important piece of real jewelry, absolutely. But I’d also be perfectly happy with a Main Street cardigan from the Thanksgiving Day sales, because I’d probably spill my coffee on it, anyway.