The Better Man (Allen Brothers Series Book 2)

by Barbie Bohrman

  Was he nice to look at?

  Oh my God, yes! A million times, yes!

  But as soon as he opened his mouth, his douche-ness just poured right out of him. It was like he couldn't help himself. Almost sad really, because being that insanely good looking should count for something. But with Max it was just…I don’t know, a bunch of nothing. It didn’t matter anyway, because I couldn't worry about Max all the time. I had bigger fish to fry. Like trying to figure out how to get the Benny from the Bronx wannabe away from my little brother so he could graduate and go on to art school like we had been planning all along. I’d be damned if anyone or anything was going to get in the way of that happening while I was still living and breathing.

  I busied myself for the next several minutes wiping down the already spotless counter and rearranging the recently rearranged rows of recyclable coffee cups. There was a high probability that I wouldn't see another customer for a little while. I decided to take out my planner from my messenger bag so that I could plan out my schedule for the next couple of weeks. I found that planning my life out two weeks ahead of time was the only thing that kept me sane. If I tried to tack on any more days, weeks, and months to that quota, everything seemed to fall apart on me.

  The tiny bell over the door rung while I had my head buried within my planner writing down my weekly trip to the grocery store in for the following Thursday afternoon.

  “I'll be right with you,” I said to the new customer.

  The stranger cleared their throat to get my attention, because God forbid, someone could wait another second or two. Nowadays, it felt like most people expected something immediately. Whatever happened to having patience and being courteous? Oh yeah, silly me, I forgot, they don’t exist anymore. I abandoned my planner and looked up to help the customer. And the stranger staring back at me wasn’t a stranger at all. I could have sworn I did an actual double take because I couldn’t believe who was standing right in front of me.

  Max Allen, who I had just been wanting to strangle to death in my head, was on the other side of the counter, a shit-eating grin plastered across his face that did not match the look of shock I know must have been plastered on mine.

  “Well, well, well,” he said by way of hello. “You're a very difficult woman to track down. But thank god for both our sake I never give up on a challenge because I'm about to change your life, Ms. Daphne Rodriguez.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  I had to admit that it made my day to see the look of shock on Daphne's face. But if she only knew just how much I had gone through over the last few days to track her down, she would be more pissed off than shocked. And I still had to tell her about why I was here to begin with.

  But all good things came to those who waited.

  Even though she had no idea what good things were about to happen, I was enjoying toying with her a little while longer.

  “I'm here to see you. Isn't it obvious?”

  Daphne wasn't amused.

  “Obviously, you're here to see me, because let’s face it, you’re not hanging around Queens for your health,” she said. “But why are you here to see me?”

  I decided to ignore her jab…for now.

  “So this is Perkatory?” I looked around the empty coffeehouse. Its décor was eerily similar to the coffeehouse that was on the television show Friends. “Are Ross and Rachel and the whole gang going to be here soon?'

  “Ha, ha, ha.” Daphne snapped shut the notebook she'd been writing in when I first walked through the door. “Seriously, Max, what do you want?”

  I couldn't help myself; I strolled over to the green velvet couch and sat down, sprawling out like I owned the place. “Is Gunther your boss?”

  “Max.”

  Her tone of voice matched her death stare. Daphne came out from around the counter with the wrath of hell burning in her eyes. As much as I loved to get her so worked up, I needed her working with me, not against me. I had to start dialing down the sarcasm if I wanted this conversation to go where I needed it to go.

  “Have a seat, Daphne.” I motioned to the end chair next to the velvet couch. “We need to talk.”

  “I can't sit and have a chat, Max. In case you didn't notice, I'm at work. I can't just take a break because you say so.”

  “I'm sure Gunther would understand if you took a ten minute break while there were no customers here to help.” She actually looked around and hesitated before taking a seat. I could tell that it killed her just a little bit to let me win this battle. “That wasn't so hard, was it?”

  “Max,” Daphne pulled out her cellphone and hit a button or two. “Ten minutes. You're on the clock. Go, start talking.”

  “Wow, okay,” I said with a laugh. “So much for being cordial.”

  “Really? You busted in here out of the clear blue sky while I’m working and are taking up my time. This is as cordial as I’m going to get, buddy.” Daphne defiantly leaned back in the chair and then crossed her legs with a flourish of a Vegas showgirl. A flash of movement by my open legs suddenly caught my attention. I looked down to see that she had started to swing her foot precariously closer to my nether regions. Lifting my eyes to hers, she had a smile fit for a snake curling up the corners of her mouth. While I had her gaze in mine, she checked her cellphone and then said, “And you’ve just wasted approximately…” she glanced up at me with that same sneaky smile playing on her lips, “thirty-three seconds checking your balls. Good to know your priorities never change, Max.”

  If I hadn’t been pressed for time, because it seemed like she was really sticking to the ten minute rule, I would jump all over her comment about my balls. But, I’d have to save my comebacks for another day. Instead, I decided to cut to the chase.

  “How would you like to be famous?”

  Daphne scoffed at the question. “Like you? Because I hate to break it to you, you’re not that famous, Max.”

  “I’m famous-ish in this city. Everywhere I go people know who I am and know my name. It makes getting in to certain places all over this city so much easier.”

  She bit her bottom lip as if to hold in her laughter. “I never had that problem, so, no, I don’t want to be famous.”

  Dammit, she was right about that. Obviously, since everywhere I went to film my segments, she was either already there or had been there before me. I made a mental note to ask her how the fuck she was able to be so…so stealthy about her movements all over the freaking city. Looking around the coffee shop, I was starting to struggle to figure out how I could approach this. I had thought for sure that the famous angle would do the trick since, hey, she’d been doing everything I’d been doing for attention, right?

  “Max,” she said, breaking me out of my thoughts. She gave a tiny wave of her cellphone and said, “You’re wasting your time.”

  And that’s when I noticed it…her phone. It looked like it was the most banged, scratched, cracked, and beat up crappy as hell phone that I had ever seen. It set off alarm bells in my head and then it all just clicked. See, the legwork to track down Ms. Daphne Rodriguez unearthed a couple of things about her that I’d been wondering about. One of which was how she got into these places that were supposedly pretty exclusive with their clientele sometimes. But two, was why she was working two full-time jobs.

  She needed the money.

  Now that piece of information was something I could get behind and use to my advantage to get her on my side. It was that or head back to the office and face my boss with the shit news that Daphne wanted no part of this. And if I were going to have to face Oliver with bad news about Daphne, I’d probably stop at a nearby animal shelter to adopt a puppy or two before that conversation happened.

  Yeah, the money angle was definitely the way to go.

  “How would you like to make more money, Daphne?” Her eyes and body language didn’t betray her. But she did put down her cellphone on the table next to her for the first time during our conversation though. That had to count for some
thing. So, I pushed a little more. “Even better, how would you like to have one job where you would make more money combined than the two jobs you have now?”

  “How do you know about that?” she asked with her eyes narrowed. “Did you hire a private investigator or something, Max?”

  “Answer my question first, and I’ll tell you how I tracked you down.”

  She worried her bottom lip, struggling to give in to me in any way, shape or form. I admired that about her just as much as it drove me nuts. She was the kind of person who would fight tooth and nail until the bitter end, even if she knew she was wrong. Daphne was the most stubborn and ambitious person I had ever met. Basically, she was me but in the female form. And for a moment, I had to shake off the strong attraction I had to her on a physical level since in order for all of this to work for both of us, I had to keep my dick in my pants.

  “That’s a stupid question. Of course I would prefer to only have one job instead of two. Who wouldn’t? But I’m not you, Max,” she said with the tiniest of sneers. “I have to work for everything I have. My family depends on it.”

  “So, if I gave you that chance, would you take it?” I asked with a grin and she responded by giving me a barely imperceptible nod. Leaning forward, I rested my elbows on my knees and tried my best to look relaxed by her answer. She didn’t need to know that my entire career was resting on this little meeting between us…and I wanted to keep it that way. “Come work with me at the station.”

  Daphne barked out a laugh so loud and sudden that it caught me totally off guard.

  “You said you would take the chance, so why is that so goddamn funny?”

  She was still laughing a little as she said, “Because you and me working together, you and me doing anything together, is never going to happen, Max. Hell will have to freeze over first.”

  This was going to be more of a challenge than I thought. I would have to raise the stakes a bit more to get her to see the light. “Is that so? Well Satan must be wearing a winter coat and long johns then, because I’m being serious, Daphne. You come work with me on the show…together as a team. It’s a full-time job so you would obviously have to leave this shithole, no offense. And you would have to leave the other job at Macy’s, because yes, I know about that job too.”

  “And pray tell, Max, why would I drop everything, leave my jobs, which I’d been at for a long time and have some damn good benefits, to come and work with you on your show? Last time I checked my show was doing just fine on its own…yours, not so much.”

  “This is why,” I said and pulled out a pen from the inside pocket of my leather jacket. On my palm, I wrote out the salary figure that Oliver had confirmed would be her starting pay when, not if, she came on board. I knew from my detective work that it was way more than what both of her current jobs paid her combined.

  At the end of the day, money talked and bullshit ran a marathon. So I knew going in that it would be probably be the only way to engage her in this conversation and to entertain the idea of working with me on my show.

  When I turned my hand around to show her the number, Daphne glanced at it and didn’t say word. Hell, she barely even moved an inch. It was like the woman was completely unflappable. But then she reached up and adjusted the high ponytail she had all of that beautiful brown hair in even though it didn’t need fixing. Once she finished, she nervously played with the ends of her hair as if needing a distraction from the thoughts that must be racing through her mind.

  I had her.

  But I couldn’t let her know that I knew that she knew that I knew I had her. I had to be careful and not scare her away.

  “Daphne, hear me out, okay?” I asked carefully aware of how precarious my position was. She nodded once more. Good, good, she was willing to listen. “We’re both already doing the same thing. Obviously you’re doing pretty well with your YouTube channel, and I’m doing pretty well at my gig. But can you imagine if we joined forces? Who knows what could happen or where we could go with our success together? Maybe the major networks would notice and then we’d really be raking in the dough and living the life. How awesome would that be?”

  Daphne still looked anxious as she played with the ends of her hair. She looked around the coffeehouse a couple of times before saying anything, almost afraid that someone might over hear our conversation. But the place was still as empty as my conscience was sometimes.

  “You’re not joking,” she said out loud.

  “I’m not joking.”

  A buzz started coming from her cellphone on the table next to her. Without breaking eye contact with me, Daphne reached over and silenced it with a quick press of a button. Then, the bell over the door to the coffeehouse jingled. With my back to the door, I noticed how Daphne’s eyes went wide as saucers at the same time whoever was behind me started whistling a strange, yet familiar melody.

  Where had I heard that song before? Dammit, now it was going to drive me crazy.

  “And who do we have here?” a man’s voice asked of Daphne.

  “Derek,” she replied with a hint of warning.

  I turned around and saw this Derek for myself. He had a devious smile on his face with a look in his eyes like it was Christmas morning. “Oh, you’re no fun, Daphne.”

  Derek walked further into the store like he belonged there, until he went behind the counter and in through the back door. With that, Daphne suddenly announced, “Your time is up, Max.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?” I asked.

  Was she serious right now? I was giving her the chance of a lifetime and she had been fucking humoring me for ten minutes?

  “Daphne, does that mean you’re saying no?”

  Gracefully, and not at all the nervous and anxious woman I had been sitting across from a few moments ago, Daphne stood up and wiped her hands down the apron she had tied around her waist. When she looked down at me, I got the sense that had it not been for this Derek person coming in, I would have probably gotten more time with her to talk things over.

  “I…I need to think about it, Max.” She looked to the door behind the counter that Derek had disappeared to. “And I need to talk to my family first about all of this.”

  “Sure, of course, but I do need an answer sooner than later.” I wouldn’t rush her or force her hand, but Oliver would be breathing down my neck if I didn’t have something to say for myself about Daphne. And that something had better be positive; otherwise I was seriously fucked out of a job. “How about this? I’m going to be heading over to The Red Room in Chelsea tomorrow night. Who knows? Maybe you already were heading there yourself. Either way, you should come on down and meet Adam, my cameraman and me. Maybe we can do a trial run and see if it works for you.”

  The wheels were spinning in that gorgeous head of hers so fast that if you listened closely enough, you would be able to hear the mechanics of her thought process. But my career hung in the balance, so if she needed to think some more before we closed the deal on this, so be it.

  “I’ll think about it,” was all she said. But it was the way she said it that had me feeling a little less uncomfortable about the outcome. Because it might have been the first and only time that Daphne had ever said anything to me with a genuine smile on her face. Not an I’m-going-to-cut-off-your-balls-and-feed-them-to-you-slowly kind of smile, which was the usual from her as far as I was concerned.

  “Great, I’ll have your name added to the list. And since I’m such a swell guy, I’ll put down a guest for you too.”

  She rolled her eyes at that.

  At least she wasn’t saying no outright, so if this was all Daphne was going to give me for today, I’d take it.

  But if she didn’t show up tomorrow night at that lounge in Chelsea, I would be right back here in the middle of nowhere, AKA, Queens, doing another pitch so that she would be forced to save my ass one way or another.

  It was way too early for me to be awake and anywhere on a Sunday. But because it was the monthly Allen Fami
ly Sunday Brunch at my oldest brother Jack’s house, I had to make an exception. He was married to Avery, technically a nurse practitioner, but I liked to think of her as a real-life Mary Poppins. She was the one who came up with this brilliant idea of bringing the family together more often. And since Jack was pussy-whipped, of course he made me and my other brother, Trevor, fall in line with him.

  I was still bitter about it but there was at least one…no, make that two silver linings when it came to having brunch at Jack and Avery’s house. And it came in the shape of twin girls, my nieces, Isabelle and Annabelle. They were four and a half years old and were the greatest things ever. Because to them, I was the greatest Uncle ever.

  As of this morning, it was a coin toss as to whether I would show up at brunch today. But I kind of needed the distraction. I couldn’t just sit around and wonder whether or not Daphne would show up later tonight. Not only had Adam already text me once to see if she would be there or not, but Oliver had also sent me two texts wondering what was going on too. And then just now as I was trying to enjoy this perfect Spring New York City morning, strolling down Central Park West, my cellphone buzzed with another message from Oliver. This time I knew he was super angry with me because I couldn’t understand a goddamn word he texted.

  Oliver: I got the wog, so stop playing sillybuggers, mate.

  Since I didn’t speak Crocodile Dundee, I figured texting him back a simple reply would cover all my bases.

  Me: Ok

  It must have worked because he didn’t text me again. Good thing too, since I had finally arrived at Jack and Avery’s place. I could tell I arrived not only because I obviously knew where the fuck my brother lived, but because I could hear Isabelle and Annabelle belting out “Fancy,” by Iggy Azalea at the top of their lungs from halfway down the block. And the closer I got to their front door, the more mangled the lyrics were between the two of them. What was even better was how the large windows that anchored the main bay window of their brownstone were wide open so that anyone and everyone walking within a stone’s throw could hear my nieces butcher the fuck out of that song.