by Nikky Kaye
It was easier said than done. Something rubbed me the wrong way every time I pulled out the new black credit card with my name on it. The first easy purchase I’d made was the day before. In a window on Fifth Avenue I saw a jacket just like the knock-off she’d worn the first time we’d met, and I impulsively walked into the store.
It hadn’t taken more than ten minutes to get one for her, but it had taken another half an hour to splurge on one for myself. After walking ten blocks carrying the conspicuous bag and wearing the new coat, I’d stopped in a little café and looked up how to donate to a bunch of cancer charities. Being a billionaire was definitely something required practice.
Wherever we were headed now in the car, I was so distracted by imagining her reaction to the extravagant gift that I didn’t get to enjoy her reaching into my pocket for the book.
“Okay, so what did you—what’s this?”
“Zane Grey. Classic western stuff.” I’d picked it up at a secondhand store.
Her forehead wrinkled. “You mean like cowboys and Indians?”
“Yeah, I guess so. What are you reading right now, Miss Kincaid?”
She flushed and mumbled something about not having time. A hundred bucks said that the last book she read was something smutty.
The car stopped. Lexi looked at me expectantly. “Okay, here we are. Just keep an open mind, okay?”
Dusk had settled over the city like a blanket while we were driving, and I couldn’t see anything familiar outside the window. “Where is here?”
“It’s kind of a club.”
“I don’t dance.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not asking. It’s not that kind of club.”
Oh. Oh. “Is it a sex club?” My eyebrows rose.
“Lucas!”
I held up a hand. “I don’t have a problem with it, honey, but I wouldn’t want you to feel… well, uncomfortable.”
“It’s not a sex club, you… Neanderthal!” She smacked me on the chest. “Really? That’s where you go with that? Really?”
What could I say? Being around her took my brain in dirty directions. “What other kinds of clubs are there?” I doubted there was a lot of golf being played in lower Manhattan, although the idea of tycoons driving balls off the tops of buildings made me smile.
“Just get out,” she sighed.
I followed her through the door—but not too closely. The tight black skirt she’d told me about on the phone was even better when viewed from a few feet behind.
Blinking to adjust my eyes to the dim light, I looked around the restaurant, which was bigger on the inside than it seemed from the street. There was nothing that told me what kind of food they’d have, other than the mouthwatering smells lingering behind the waiter bringing out dishes. As long as they had meat, I would be fine.
“What’s this place called?” I asked Lexi, who seemed like she was looking around for someone.
“Settlement.”
Well, that made sen—actually, it still made no sense. Was it some kind of European food? Asian? Weird-ass fusion stuff, like Middle Eastern dishes turned into origami? You could get anything in this city, and the stranger it was, the more you paid for it. The décor gave me no hint as to what they served here, though.
Light twinkled from dozens of cutout metal lanterns dropping from the ceiling. Less than a dozen intimate alcoves, dominated by chestnut leather booths and copper-topped tables, bordered the room. Perfect for under the table hand jobs, I mused.
Planted in the middle were a handful of long, rough-hewn wooden tables and benches, where diners in jeans and cocktail dresses were squished up against each other. If they’d been strangers when they walked in, they sure weren’t anymore. I wondered if Lexi and I would have to sit close like that. Hell, she could just sit on my lap.
“Maggie!” Lexi waved, her flailing elbow nearly connecting with my nose. I grabbed her arm before it could do any accidental damage, and my hand was still wrapped around her bicep when a tiny, wiry redhead in a black button-down shirt approached us.
“Alexis?”
“Yeah, it’s been a long time,” Lexi said sheepishly. “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.”
“No problem! You’re just lucky I was on Facebook for once. Come on back.”
We followed her between the booths and tables to a hallway presumably leading to the kitchen. The noises and smells of a busy kitchen lurked behind an open archway ahead of us, but the redhead turned to an unmarked door on the right and entered a brief code in the digital lock attached.
“How fancy is this restaurant?” I muttered to Lexi. “We don’t even get to eat with the regular folk?”
It was even dimmer after she shut the door behind us, but there was another door ahead with light shining from underneath it.
“Do we need a secret password for this one?”
“Shhh!” Lexi jabbed me with her elbow.
Maggie turned around, dropping her hand from the other doorknob. “You didn’t tell him?”
“Tell me what?” Goddamn, I was tired of secrets.
“It’s a book club,” Lexi blurted out. “It’s kind of exclusive and the members are pretty wealthy.”
Seriously? I crossed my arms over my chest and looked between the two of them, waiting for a better explanation—or the punch line.
Maggie’s pale face looked like it was floating above her black shirt in the dark. “This is my restaurant.”
Okay.
“My ex-husband gave it to me in the divorce.”
Well, that explained the name. But… “A book club?” I prompted.
She crossed her arms over chest, similar to how I was standing. “He thinks he’s a big deal. My ex.” Maggie snorted.
Lexi leaned against the wall, loosening her scarf. “He kind of is.”
“Okay, fine. He’s kind of a big deal.” Maggie rolled her eyes. “He likes to read. He was too big a deal to go hang out at a bookstore and talk about the latest bestseller over tea and cookies, so he started getting together with other big deal friends to talk about what they’re reading. I said they could use my private chef’s table once a month for their little meetings.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Now, they don’t know you, so maybe just listen hard and try to be polite.”
“I’m always fucking polite!” Well, most of the time. Some of the time. Probably.
The two women traded looks.
“So who’s the big fucking deal ex?” I asked as the door before us opened. Hurriedly I stepped back, accidentally pinning Lexi to the wall. She thrust her hips into my ass, and I shifted away from her a little.
“Oh, sorry!” A tall man stood in the doorway, looking surprised to see the three of us—or at least, two of us. “Hey, Mags. Your second sous needs new knives.”
“Go fuck yourself, Silas,” Maggie said cheerfully.
I recognized the celebrity chef at once, despite the shadow cast by his tall, lean frame. Silas Warner had spent ten years on TV and owned a bunch of successful restaurants around the world—less this one, I guessed.
“I would, but I’m playing hard to get.” Warner smirked down at his ex-wife, who was fuming at least six inches below his chin.
Maggie glared up at him. “Silas, this is, uh…”
“Lucas Knox,” Lexi supplied for me. “I’m Alexis Kincaid. Maggie said we could come by the, er, meeting.”
He blinked, the membership drive clearly unknown to him. “Maggie, you angling to be the club secretary again?”
“No way. I know you like to fuck your secretaries.” She shuddered dramatically, but the flash in her eyes and the flare of regret in his made me wonder how true that was.
“Come on in, Lucas. I’ll introduce you to everyone.”
Maggie slipped out the other door, disappearing back into the hallway. As Warner held the door open to the inner circle, I hesitated.
“Do I get any say in joining this, uh, billionaire book club?” I whispered to Lexi.
“Nope. Conside
r it a different kind of social networking. It’ll be good for you.”
Well, shit. The last time a woman said that to me, it was just before my mother washed my mouth out with soap. Hopefully this evening would leave a better taste on my tongue.
Chapter Six
Lexi
We followed Silas into the room, where a handful of men sat around a stainless steel table.
“Can’t have more than four members at a meeting,” he told us.
“That exclusive?” Luke drawled.
“That small.”
It was true. I counted the three of us plus three other men, which meant I was flattened against the wall. We barely fit in the room and only six chairs fit around three sides of the table. Barely a foot in front of the open side was a big steel frame with a deep ledge, which served as a pass to the chaotic kitchen in front of us.
“You’re just in time for soup, Lucas,” Silas said as a tureen and a ladle were set down on the pass, followed by a stack of soup bowls. “Gentlemen!”
He didn’t need to get the group’s attention; everyone was watching us like we were the next course.
“This is Lucas…”
“Knox,” Luke supplied easily, but I saw his back straighten and his shoulders tense up.
“Knox?” one man asked. His suit was obviously expensive, but his medium brown hair needed cutting and he hid extraordinarily green eyes—one of them blackened and swollen—behind some hipster glasses. “Any relation to Charles Knox?”
My heart pounded. This was the first test of the evening—or maybe the second, if I considered the confined car ride with the sexy bastard beside me a challenge.
“Yeah, illegitimate son. Pleased to meet you…”
“From what I’ve heard, he was the bastard.” He stretched his hand out across the table. “Nathan Brownlow. Real estate.”
Luke’s shoulders eased as he shook hands.
“You might recognize Marcus here,” Silas said as he gestured toward the man seated nearest to us.
You might say that.
Marcus Blake was a pretty infamous motivational speaker. I didn’t think he was even forty yet, but he’d made a very successful career out of motivating people to empty their bank accounts in return for the secrets to his success. His steely eyes examined us from under a shock of black hair. After a brief hesitation, he shook Luke’s hand.
His voice was gravelly when he spoke. “Don’t forget Viktor, Silas.”
The last man had pulled the tureen toward him and was splashing a creamy soup into the little bowls and onto the table. I wondered how much would end up on his neat chestnut beard by the end of the meal.
Silas commandeered the ladle. “Ah yes, Viktor. Our resident Russian.”
“What line of work are you in, Viktor?”
When Viktor turned to blink at Luke’s friendly question, I noticed a thin white scar stretching from his ear to under his beard like a macabre cheekbone. “Business,” he said flatly with a soft Russian accent.
An awkward silence fell over the table when he didn’t offer anything more than that.
Okay.
Luke turned to meet my gaze, both of us a little unsure what to do or say next. It was a strange group of men, this billionaire book club. I wasn’t sure how they managed to squeeze their egos and wallets into the room as well. He narrowed his big blue eyes at me, as if to say “You did this to me. You brought us here.” He wasn’t wrong, and already I was wondering if I’d made a mistake.
Well, it wouldn’t be my first.
Nathan pulled a bottle of hot sauce the size of my head out from under the table and pushed it over to Luke.
“This is our talking stick.”
“The hot seat,” Marcus added.
Luke looked a little bewildered. “This is all kinda Lord of the Flies, huh?”
“If you want a turn to talk, you hold the hot sauce,” Silas explained. “Otherwise things can get… heated.”
“Talking about books?” Luke looked incredulous. Surely a man who said he needed regular bail money knew something about arguments getting out of hand.
Viktor blinked again, like a lizard. “Sometimes we discuss magazines,” he said with a straight face then went back to slurping his soup.
“It depends on the book. We instituted the hot seat rule after somebody picked 50 Shades of Grey.” Nathan rolled his eyes, wincing when the movement hurt his black eye.
“You get that shiner fighting over books?” Luke asked.
“There’s a girl.”
“There’s always a girl,” Luke commiserated.
I bit my tongue.
He shrugged his jacket off, revealing a thin black t-shirt underneath. The tattoos on his arms caught my attention for the umpteenth time. One day I would ask him about those, and if there were any others on his body I could discover…
In deference to Luke’s newbie status, no more discussion of books—or women—was had. It might as well be a book club for The Economist, since they mostly talked about finance and politics. Since I’d grown up on the fringes of such conversations thanks to my father, I promptly zoned out. By the time the entrée came out, Luke’s eyes were also glazed over.
The smell of the perfectly seared filet mignon made my stomach twist and gurgle. I hadn’t realized when we came that I wouldn’t be able to eat at the restaurant myself. Oh, I could probably escape out to the main dining room and claim a seat at a bench, but I didn’t want to leave Lucas alone.
While the others were talking and he was chewing on his steak, he curled his finger to beckon me over. It only took a few mincing steps before I was at his side, but it still surprised me when he pulled me down onto his lap.
“Eep!” My hip hit the edge of the steel table. My hands flew to his shoulders. “What are you doing?”
“You need to eat too,” he said, his left arm pinning me to his waist and his right hand reaching for the fork.
“Lucas!” I hissed.
“Relax, honey,” he whispered in my ear before raising his voice. “That is, if y’all don’t mind too much.”
It was then that I realized the group had stopped talking and was watching us. My face flamed.
“No, not at all. Be my guest.” Silas smirked, wrapping his hand around the bottle of hot sauce. “Hot sauce?”
I grew even hotter as Luke raised his fork to my lips, feeding me a bite of filet. His hand splayed out over my abdomen, hot through my thin blouse.
“Nah. It’s spicy enough.” He hauled me further up on his thighs. Viktor barked out a laugh.
Embarrassed but hungry, I let Luke feed me. I squirmed on his hard lap, which grew harder underneath me.
“Easy there,” he murmured to me between bites. “You’re playing with fire, Alexis.”
I flushed. “I’m trying to get comfortable.” It was a lie. I was trying to make him uncomfortable, and by the looks of things it was working. Being this close to him was torture for my hormones—the way he smelled, the feel of his body and his thick, strong, colorful arms bringing the delectable food to my lips.
My skirt rode up as I shifted until he put the fork down and lay his hand over my legs. Growling at me, he tried to tug the hem down. I whimpered, hungry for both more steak and his fingers.
“You’re trouble, Sexy Lexi,” he muttered. “Couldn’t you wear pants today?”
I gasped as his knuckles brushed my inner thighs, and my core clenched. He froze, his lips brushing against my ear.
“Don’t make me put you over my knee, honey.”
“I’m already on your knee, Luke,” I said shakily, closing my eyes as his fingertips made circles on my skin. My skin felt hot and prickly all over, and it didn’t help that all the other men in the room were probably looking at me.
A familiar, sinking sensation of shame snaked through my gut, like how I felt a million years ago with that damn video. I felt exposed and conspicuous, and when I wriggled to get out of Luke’s arms, he could tell my mood had changed. My ankle wobbl
ed in my three-inch heels when I tried to stand, but when I tripped somehow the wall held me up.
I pulled my scarf out of my coat pocket and tied it tight around my neck. The chaos of the kitchen beyond us rushed in my ears like white noise as I tuned out everything else, and I pulled out my phone and pretended to do stuff on it. Totally absorbed in what I wasn’t doing, I jolted when Luke stood up and put his jacket back on.
“Thank you for your hospitality, gentlemen.” He looked like he wanted to tip his hat before realizing that he wasn’t wearing one. “I gotta get my girl home now.”
“Nice to meet you, Lucas.” Nathan smiled.
“Next month we read War and Peace,” Viktor said. “Unabridged.”
I guessed that was an invitation. Mission accomplished.
“Well, okay then,” Luke said. “I guess I’ll be seeing you.”
“I’ll get your info from Maggie,” Silas said.
Luke nodded as he put his arm around my waist. At first I thought he was just being affectionate, then I realized he was helping to steady me. My breathing seemed easier once we got out the door into the swaying light of the lanterns, and my anxiety had almost totally subsided by the time we were back outside in the cool evening air.
He looked me in the eye, his arms still wrapped around me like a corset.
“There’s a movie version of that, right?”
Chapter Seven
Luke
“Lucas, this is not a movie! This is real life!”
“It’s not your life! It’s mine!” I glared at him.
Michael Cohen was a lot easier to take when he wasn’t acting like an arrogant turd. What would he know about real life? He’d probably never had to take his mother for chemo over and over again, picking her hair off the carpet with the hopes of getting a wig made for her. He’d never wondered why his father didn’t love him or done backbreaking manual labor to pay the bills.
For Michael Cohen, life had probably been fair.
Lexi fidgeted in the corner, her hands in her lap on the leather couch in Cohen’s office. He stood at his desk and I stood in front, facing off in a battle of the wills—or at least, a battle of my sperm donor’s will.
