His Little Black Book

by Thea Devine

  He came in with two cups of coffee and set them down on the blanket chest. “Okay. Intermediary time.”

  Shit. “Nice house,” she said, perching on the edge of the sofa. He sat on the chest and handed her the coffee, made exactly the way she liked it.

  She slanted a startled look at him, and in that moment she saw what Delia had seen: the bafflement, the resistance, the hunger, the restraint, the desperate wish that her choices hadn’t been so heedless. She saw the difference between a hedonist who had only wanted to play the game by his rules for his ongoing pleasure, and a man whose sole goal was centered all on the woman he had chosen.

  This thing between them had everything to do with her—what made her her, the mystery of her, and his need to know everything about her that complemented the opposite things in him.

  The spark, the attraction had nothing to do with body parts or sex, though that was there, too. It scared her how much he knew, how much he saw.

  But she understood too that he was a romantic under the skin, and he wanted to believe. He almost could believe because he wanted it so much. But for his own moral peace, he had to push her away because any relationship for him was not a cavalier display of power. And he knew, the way a real man knows, that she knew it and she knew the reasons why too.

  But what did she know about him? He loved music, played guitar, was a voracious reader, made good coffee; he was neat, tenacious, irritating, sarcastic, blunt, and, on every level, exciting. But these were superficial things; she didn’t know what lay beneath—except one failed marriage.

  But when she looked at him, she felt enfolded. She saw warm, cozy nights, shared days, energetic kids, and picket fences. She saw the kind of man a woman would want to marry…

  And that was the moment she fell in love. She wanted to be perfect for him, though the reality was that she would always be an imperfect sinner and that wall would always be there. An insurmountable barrier.

  “My ex-wife got everything,” he was saying. “This was all I could put together afterward. Damned lawyers. I hate intermediaries. Speaking of which, want to talk, Brooke?”

  Intermediaries…She mentally shook herself back to the cruddy business of what she’d done that was probably so unforgivable that nothing could ever happen between them. How stupid am I? But how could I know these feelings would blindside me like this, and it would be so different than I imagined?

  “Okay.” He moved the guitar and sat on the ottoman. “Here’s where we are. Three unbelievably beautiful girls come to New York, and in this incredible fairy tale, they all hook up with the biggest money pot in the nation, unbeknownst to each other. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t heard it with my own ears. And every time we try to get at just how three really inexperienced girls from out of town got together with I-Own-the-World Bohansson, we get this fuzzy explanation about an intermediary. So now it’s time to hear about the intermediary.”

  Brooke’s heart dropped a hundred feet. This would seal the deal. He’d despise her more than he already did, and he’d bury whatever nascent feelings he had about her deep in his cold case files forever.

  “Brooke—?”

  Was there a little compassion there? Did she have to tell him about the dual Mistress Clubs—and everything else? If she even looked at him, her heart would be in her eyes and it would just be another disaster.

  It was a disaster anyway, so she might as well tell him. It just seemed so unfair that fate should finally show her what she really wanted, and then ruthlessly take it away.

  He simply waited and waited, so she finally told him. Everything. From the day in the diner when she conceived her Mistress Club, to the moment at Images when Marielyce opened the door to Maîtrise for her.

  Counting the components: two Mistress Clubs, three incipient mistresses, six months of being kept and controlled, one dead lover, and one skeptical detective listening to her long, sad story with such a remote look in his steely gray eyes that she was ready to curl up and die.

  He should have known, Nick thought. Egan Bohansson had flat out told him about his father’s penchant for the young and wide-eyed. But there hadn’t been only three; there’d been dozens over the years. And the question he hadn’t asked was where Bohansson was getting those mistresses. Where did a man of his wealth, stature, and elusiveness traffic in that kind of young, unused flesh?

  He creates Maîtrise.

  Nick shook his head—it was so out of the realm of anything in his life. But Brooke and MJ and Delia had lived it, and had, by Delia’s account, enjoyed everything that came with it. How did a man get past that? Could he get past that? And why was he even thinking about getting past it?

  He’d had enough of Bohansson and of everything that had ever touched him. Including…

  Her—so young, vibrant, gorgeous, and defiant, crumpled up like the past six months’ experience had eroded her inside. It was always going to be there for him, and he was too old to waste time wishing it weren’t so.

  “Brooke.” She reluctantly looked at him. “Don’t cry—I can’t deal with that, or that kind of pain. You will mend. Only I’ll always see the cracks—and God help me, that will shatter you one day.”

  She lifted her head, held back tears by sheer iron will, and said in a quavering voice, “One other thing. I had thought that someone with a hell of a lot money owned Maîtrise. Maybe even Thane—just to fill his bed.”

  “Yeah. I got that, too,” he said. “I’ll look into it.”

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “It will be,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”

  The next morning they convened again at Dev’s apartment to strategize.

  “I think we need to get Baines out in the open,” Nick said. “He’s sitting back thinking that everything’s good, that one of you is bound to be arrested, and he hopes in particular that it’s MJ. So instead, what if MJ goes out in the open? If MJ goes back to Maîtrise to find another well-heeled guy, wouldn’t that set him off?”

  MJ said, “It could. He had a thing about how women treat their men. If he thought I was being cavalier about Thane, now that he’s dead, he could go a little crazy.”

  “It’s the crazy part I don’t like,” Delia put in. “It’s too risky.”

  “No,” MJ said. “I want to do it. Otherwise they’re going to hound us forever, and we’ll never have a life. How dangerous could it be?”

  “We’ll be with you every step of the way,” Nick said. “Ben would arrange it—a carefully orchestrated glimpse so the media’s on your heels, then over to Maîtrise and see if something explodes.”

  “I’ll do it,” MJ said.

  “We’ll set it up for tomorrow,” Ben said. “The sooner the better, while the tabloids are still screaming for blood.”

  MJ did it up to the max the next morning. Dev had brought a selection of sultry clothes from Brooke’s apartment, including skyscraper heels, and she put on full battle makeup.

  “How’s that?” she asked.

  “Attention grabbing,” Dev said. “So here’s the drill: We’ve got manpower following us and staked out around Maîtrise, so if there’s a situation, we can deal with it. Your job,” he told MJ, “is to hook the reporters and get to Maîtrise. Our hope is that Baines gets the word, follows you there, and something happens.”

  “Got it.”

  “Probably nothing will happen, though,” Dev reassured her.

  “I’m not worried,” MJ said, but she knew Delia and Brooke were. “And I have my dressing room key just in case.”

  “We’re going with you,” Delia said to Dev.

  He brought the Mini Cooper around and they crowded into it. The plan was for MJ to be seen near Brooke’s apartment, where some reporters still hung out, hoping that Brooke would return. After that, it would be luck and some of Dev’s contacts to draw whatever news posse was scouring the city to catch up with her.

  He stopped the car across the street from Brooke’s building where, as predicted, about two dozen m
edia people had cameras and microphones trained on the windows and front door.

  “Okay, this is it.” MJ opened the door.

  As soon as she was on the sidewalk, Dev drove up a few feet and then honked the horn. Immediately all eyes swiveled to him, and then to MJ, who was posed looking wistfully at the building.

  “It’s a mistress!” someone shouted. “Let’s get her!” They instantly folded their cameras and equipment and started coming across the street. MJ waited till the optimum moment, then hailed a cab.

  Dev zoomed behind her cab, keeping an eye on her, and flipped open his cell. “Hey, Grogan, I’ve got a bead on a mistress. Going south from West End Avenue and that apartment. Call the others. I’ll keep you posted.”

  The chase was on, culminating in a crowd of reporters converging on the building that housed Maîtrise, banging on the front doors, storming through them, and aiming a storm of questions at the doorman.

  “Where’s the mistress? Did you see her? Why is she here? What is this place?”

  Before he could stop them, half the horde had breached the interior doors and was swarming into the elevators and up into the private sanctums of the rich.

  MJ had ducked into her dressing room, but even that was no safe haven. The reporters would be there in minutes, unless they were too taken by what they found in the spa and lounge.

  Above her, all was pandemonium. It was a gold strike, a career-making story, a far better story than the mistresses—which would take most of the pressure off her, Brooke, and Delia.

  She didn’t know whether Dallan had taken the bait and followed her here, but she wasn’t about to go look for him. It was time to leave.

  She peeked out of her dressing room, debating which way to go. The elevators were full with photographers, cameras, noise. The stairwells, too. Maybe she should go to Vanessa’s office and hide out there. The door wasn’t obvious, fitted into the paneling, and maybe there was some other way from there to leave the building.

  She eased her way downstairs, past the reporters swarming up the back stairwell who were too focused on the story of Maîtrise to really take notice of her.

  She found the living room surprisingly empty, though it had been gone over thoroughly—obviously there was nothing of interest there, or someone would be there with a camera and a crew.

  She went to the far side of the room, where Vanessa always seemed to appear by magic, and scanned the paneling for the door. There was a little brass knob embedded waist-high in the one of the panels. She pushed it, it swung open, and—

  “So there you are,” Dallan said.

  She froze.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, MJ. We’ve been waiting for you. Do come in.”

  She made an impulsive movement to turn, but he grabbed her arm and yanked her inside, where Alaina Bohansson was sitting behind Vanessa’s desk.

  “Here’s the last of them. We’ll kill them all, and then his monstrous evil will be wiped off the face of the earth.”

  “I’m going to burn everything out of existence,” Alaina said. She stood, held up both hands, which were full of the little black books, and dropped them into a wastebasket. “Here they all are.” She came out from behind the desk and set the wastebasket by the door. “All the whores. All the girls. All going to die.” She motioned to Dallan, who pulled MJ to the door. “You’re going to die, MJ. For abusing Ian’s trust and for fucking my father.”

  MJ felt pure heart-stopping terror and knew that despite the precautions surrounding her, she was going to die.

  Alaina flicked a lighter. “He was a fucking shit, and you’re a stinking whore.” She bent to light the contents of the basket, and MJ leapt, propelled by horror and fury.

  She crashed into Alaina, who dropped the lighter and fell back onto the floor as a flame whooshed up behind them. Dallan screamed, and smoke and flames poured out of Vanessa’s office as MJ pummeled Alaina, who had turned into a scratching, writhing animal.

  She couldn’t hold on much longer.

  Everything was whirling, the smoke had filled her lungs, and the effort of containing Alaina felt like it was crushing her heart. Alaina was breathing fire…or was that her imagination? Or was that Dallan, singed and staggering out of the flames, in tandem with the wail of fire engines, the pounding of footsteps, and screams and babbling voices suffused with fear, voices calling out, calling her name, the fire getting hotter, Alaina almost rolling her over onto her back. MJ fought back, Alaina’s wild determination to punish and destroy no match for her own determination to live and survive. She jammed her smoke-racked body down hard on Alaina’s and kept her pinned to the floor.

  Dev wrote the exclusive story, the one about the poor little rich girl whose daddy slept with girls her age. How, growing up, she’d always felt in competition with her father’s paramours. How she’d vowed to make him pay someday.

  And then there was the other story, the one about the middle-aged middle manager who liked to dictate and dominate, who lost control of his mistress to another man.

  That man, Dallan Baines, and that daughter, Alaina Bohansson, were two points ready to converge, the lust for revenge of one poised to feed the demand for retribution of the other.

  And so Dallan Baines concocted his master plan whereby he assumed the identity of Ian Baen, master chef, got hired by Rae Bohansson, and began his seduction of the very willing Alaina Bohansson.

  Theirs was a six-month affair, linked by their hatred of Thane Bohansson and Alaina’s determination to do something to punish her father for his outpouring of money, time, and attention on all those other young women. Dallan Baines had only thought to take his own secret revenge, and suddenly he was presented with a lover, a plan, and a partner all in one blow.

  The plan was simple: Alaina would lure her father to the small family room, where Ian/Dallan would grab him from behind and keep him in a chokehold long enough so that Alaina could have the sadistic pleasure of snuffing out his useless life.

  They’d almost gotten away with it, and they had destroyed his pleasure palace, his reputation, and his name. The tabloids had a field day identifying those who were caught at Maîtrise, though none of them were the notorious three mistresses.

  Alaina and Baines were awaiting trial. Case closed.

  Brooke banged her gavel on the living room table.

  “I hereby call the last meeting of the Mistress Club to order.”

  It was so good to be home, and even better to be able to go out in public without causing a frenzy. She’d gone back to Chicago for the month after the sensational arrest of Alaina Bohansson and Dallan Baines. MJ had stayed here at the apartment, and Delia had gone to Maine to contemplate her life.

  Now they were together again, and everything was different. Everything had changed. They had changed.

  “So I went back to school, to the diner, and it was so weird,” Delia said. “I felt like it was a million years ago. I can’t even remember who I was back then.”

  “Yeah, I thought that, too, when I went home,” Brooke said. “I didn’t tell Mom and Dad half of what happened. They’ve finally decided to sell the apartment and go their separate ways, so that was sad. And after our experiences—well, everything seems kind of sad right now.”

  “Not for me.” Delia smiled. “Dev and I are—”

  “That’s great! But you were in Maine.”

  “I never said I was alone.”

  “Wow,” Brooke said enviously. “He doesn’t have any problem with the whole mistress thing?”

  “He’s kind of fascinated by it, actually. But then, he’s much younger than Nick Galligan.”

  “Who?” MJ asked, her ears pricking up.

  Brooke sighed. “Galligan.”

  “No! No shit.”

  “No, period,” Brooke muttered.

  “Anyway, Dev and I will do the book,” Delia said. “Ben’s already shopping an outline and a couple of chapters with publishers, and we’ll see what happens. So I’m okay.”

  “I�
��m okay, too,” MJ said. “My family’s probably been rabidly devouring all the coverage and pretending they don’t know me, but that’s okay. That’s how it’s always been. And I made a decision while you guys were gone.”

  “What was that?” Delia asked.

  “I like being a mistress.”

  There was a long silence, and then MJ went on, “I like what I like, and I think it belongs in a mistress relationship, not a plain old vanilla marriage. I was deeply in love with Harold, and I want to find another man just like him. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “Well. Okay.” Brooke was a little nonplussed by her certainty. Certainty was enviable. She wished she were certain about anything. “That was the purpose of having this last meeting: to try to get those happily ever afters going.”

  “New apartments and jobs,” Delia put in.

  Brooke nodded. “I drained my bank account paying the rent on this place all those mistress months. A job sounds good to me.”

  “Nick’ll come around,” Delia reassured her. “It takes a while for older guys to wrap their minds around it.”

  “It’ll take me a while, too. And now, let’s go out to dinner to celebrate old friends and new beginnings.”

  Delia moved out two weeks later to be with Dev. MJ followed the next month, having hooked up with a lover who was willing to keep her.

  That left Brooke alone, keeping herself busy while trying to sort out her life.

  The problem was, love clobbered you. It came out of nowhere, and it was always the least likely man—like one much older than her. Yet after meeting him, no other man seemed right for her.

  It was crazy. It shouldn’t work like that.

  And all the slinky sexy tricks she knew could never seduce him. They had nothing to do with love and everything to do with power, manipulation, and control. That had been her life for six months, and how could he be certain about her motives or her honesty after that? She was envious that Delia could just step into something bright, hopeful, and new.

  But Delia had handled the thing right: no investment, no regrets. And MJ was happy, too, making that monumental decision to yield to her nature and return to the mistress life.