by Sierra Rose
“Maybe you should look into more volunteer work. You were happier when you worked with the kids.”
“You’re right. Sitting around here is getting boring,” she said. “Although, Paul is booking me all up with cocktail parties and fancy luncheons. Soon, I’ll be missing all my time here.”
“You don’t have to sit there, although the place isn’t exactly lacking in amenities, you must admit.”
“My gilded cage is lovely,” she said. “Thank you.”
“It’s midcentury modern,” he said, an effort to make her smile. She didn’t crack even a smirk. His face filled her phone screen, clearly frustrated that his repair attempt had failed.
“It’s completely unfair that you’re so gorgeous even when you’re a pain in the ass,” she mused, trying to muster her old teasing demeanor with him, the one she’d used to keep him at arm’s length until she accidentally fell in love with him.
“Remember that’s when Tinder beckons.”
“I’m off Tinder. Shut down my profile and everything. So you can quit needling me about that one time I went off the rails,” she said.
“I feel like there should be a celebration…What’s the name for the observance when your wife finally cancels her dating profiles?”
“I think it’s officially called getting your ass home from Dubai,” she deadpanned.
“Speaking of asses, Dubai is a pain in mine right now. These guys do not want to honor the terms of our deal. Also, they put curry in absolutely everything. Your omelet sounded like heaven by comparison.”
“Are you whining about the first class accommodations in Dubai? Some people would love to get the food you’re blessed with.”
“Fine, you win. I’m sorry, honey. I shouldn’t have made the crack about the SNAP card. The curry is truly in everything here.”
“The green tea ice cream was, as I recall, fabulous.”
“There’s probably curry in that, too,” he said.
“You’re a total wimp. I don’t know why I bother missing you.”
“Thick wrists,” he said with a cheeky grin.
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know since your wrists are seldom home.”
“I’m going to try to do better with the scheduling. Make it home at least once a week for dinner, take a day off on the weekends.”
“Wow! I might see you for an entire day? A seventh of your waking hours each week? That’s, wow, like fourteen point two percent of your time! Hashtag ‘spoiled wife,’” she said.
“Snarktastic after that omelet, aren’t we?”
“Absolutely. So the deal is, I’m not happy being canceled on and ignored. I get that the whole arrangement was about your business and your needs and your convenience, but I’m a person, too, and I have agency. I have chosen to throw my lot in with you, and I will not accept the table scraps. You can make time to show up for me. No excuses. You don’t tell the board of directors that you’re too busy, so don’t tell me that either. I’m knitted to your soul. Just ask Elvis.”
He laughed.
She loved hearing his glorious laugh.
“It isn’t that easy,” he said. “If you’d be reasonable for a second, you’d realize that I’m not ignoring you, I’m trying to strike a delicate balance between the demands of my job and my personal life.”
“Best I can tell, your job IS your personal life, and your professional life and everything else. Your spirituality and self-actualization and probably your sexual preference.”
“I think we’ve established my sexual preference pretty clearly. If you’re confused about it…”
“Then I should call your secretary and make an appointment? Because that’s next. A standing lunch meeting with me. An established dinner-at-home or dinner out once a week. With me. Not me AND some business associates so you can sneak in a meeting. Just the two of us. And one day on the weekend. Minimum. Two weekday meals plus one weekend day with no conference calls, Skypes, or meetings. Those are my terms, and they’re very generous. I haven’t asked you to change the hours you keep, be home before midnight, nothing like that. I’m asking for a couple of hours twice a week, and one day. It may not amount to much, but it’s necessary to maintain what we have.”
“I’ll think about it and refer to my schedule, see what can be done. I expect some weeks I can manage that, while others, due to travel or pending deals I wouldn’t be able to meet those terms.”
“Is that what you tell Dubai? That you may or may not be able to keep to your terms depending upon what week it is? Bullshit, Brandon. You’re hedging because you don’t want to commit. News flash. You already committed. In Las Vegas. So you’re going to have to make a real, tangible effort to have a relationship with me EVERY SINGLE FUCKING WEEK or we might as well call it quits and let Lena have it all. I no longer much care who gets the company. It’s a thorn in my side, which is the only thing I may ever agree on with your stepmother. Power Regions is a selfish bitch.”
He laughed. “What?”
“You heard me. Your company? Your dad’s legacy? Total soul-sucking nightmare bitch from hell. It takes more of your time, your heart, and soul than I’ll ever have.”
“You cannot listen to Lena. She’s melodramatic. Always has been. I’d hate to see that rub off on you.”
“I’d hate to see you get all patronizing, but I just did. I think I mentioned once that Power Regions was such a phallic name. But I’m thinking now it’s more of a dominatrix, a stern mistress who won’t let you go.”
“Ha, ha.”
“Ah, condescension, my old friend,” she said acidly, “but the truth is you can’t resist beating your head against a wall, like this pointless Dubai excursion, to try and prove to the board that you’re at least twice the man your father was. And whether you are or you’re not, this will take our marriage down. And any other relationship you have that’s any more serious than the one with your dry cleaner.”
“You’re just full of wisdom today. Maybe get some sleep, get in a better mood, I’ll call you later.”
“I don’t have an appointment, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath waiting for you to call me.”
“If I say I’ll call, I always call. Don’t act like I’m unreliable. I’m out here working to build a better life for us and—”
“Save the martyr routine, babe. You have money, plenty of it. The company’s already huge. You’re trying to prove yourself to someone, maybe the ghost of your disapproving father. I don’t know, but it sure as hell isn’t something you’re doing for my benefit.”
“I work. I have a job. I’m not going to apologize for it.”
“I’m going to find someplace to volunteer. I expect to hear tonight which days we’ll be scheduling lunch and supper each week. I want a standing date. None of this Tuesday one week, Thursday the next. We can set a time and both work around it.”
“You’re not being reasonable.”
“You’re trying to weasel out of spending time with me. Just set it up. You make time to get your hair cut. You make time to eat and work out. Make this part of your routine. Nonnegotiable.”
“Are you sure you were in marketing and not legal?”
“Positive.”
He grinned as she smiled. They said goodbye and she hung up, her screen freezing on an image of his handsome face.
Chapter 12
Brandon Cates looked out his hotel window at the cobalt, blue water. The marriage was already too much trouble. He was halfway around the world and couldn’t shake the effects of being hitched to someone like Marjorie. She had a way of infiltrating everything he did and every thought he had. He’d chosen a bottle of water from the honor bar, a tubular green bottle that he immediately remembered Marj liking. He put it back and got a bottle of Evian instead. Nice, neutral clear bottle with the Alps on it, nothing phallic at all. He’d already ordered a café mocha with his breakfast…when he didn’t like coffee or chocolate. Just because the smell reminded him of her. It was infuriating.
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sp; It seemed like every hour either the publicist or the legal team alerted him to some fresh hell. Celebrity bloggers and gossip magazines had latched on to Marj after the article was released and now gigabytes of negative press were piling up. If it were the old days, there would have been reams of extra edition newspapers devoted to trashing his wife. As it was, his team was scrambling to compile defamation suits while countering false claims with meticulously sanitized facts and demanding that unflattering statements be taken down under threat of litigation. A Google search for Marj Cates weight returned over thirteen thousand hits already. Marj was in fabulous shape and even if she weren’t, her weight shouldn’t be the subject of such rampant speculation.
There were three times that many hits on the search term Marj Cates slut. He knew because he’d typed it in at the prompting of his disgusted publicist. Already photos were surfacing from past relationships, from office parties and bachelorette parties and other events where his wife was wearing low cut dresses and holding alcoholic beverages and invariably sitting on some guy’s lap. Usually an older guy, probably a boss.
She was being tried in the court of public opinion, and it was taking all his resources and more than all of his patience to keep her from knowing the half of it. Because she was being eviscerated. Everything from her chosen form of birth control (photos of her ob/gyn records were visible on TMZ and showed the date her IUD was inserted and which manufacturer made the damn thing) to her shoe size (word on the street was she wore an 8 which was evidently considered big) was scrutinized and commented upon. He wanted to hide her, take her to some remote island with no Wi-Fi until the next scandal broke and they were old news.
Cates Bride Back Fat: See the Pics popped up on his phone screen. There was a picture, obviously altered, of Marj in a strapless gown with a bulge of back fat above the seam. It seemed like every middle school bully suddenly had a blog and PhotoShop and nothing better to do than target Marj.
So managing his meetings on the Dubai deal were actually far less troubling than the firestorm of media scrutiny on his bride. He’d been advised by the publicist (the same one who made him get a spray tan) not to tell the press to back off, not to seem defensive. It was almost impossible to listen. In light of all the dreadful things being said about her—that she was only after his money, that she was ugly and fat and stupid and probably had a contagious disease—he cringed when she called him back, hoping his anguish over the blogs didn’t show when they Skyped.
She was still plenty mad about their night out, and he couldn’t really blame her, but he was tired of hearing about it and thinking about it. He had to protect her and try to clean up her reputation without letting her know that this was going on. He’d instructed the IT guy to block TMZ and a couple of other sites from the house network. If she wanted to look at celeb gossip she’d have to go to Starbuck’s and use their Internet. He had taken the precaution of having his secretary notify Britt and ask her not to tell Marj about the negativity in the press about her. He tried to safeguard her from every possible angle. She would still find out, but he wanted it to be later rather than sooner.
When she called, instead of being glad to see her face, since he missed her enough to order coffee, he felt annoyed. He was spending most of his waking hours trying to put down negative online outbursts about her, and she was rather ungratefully complaining about her boredom and neglect. He wasn’t about to tell her that he was spending his time in Dubai largely working on protecting her because it would defeat the purpose.
Still, it wounded him that she thought him indifferent and was starting to have sympathy for Lena, whom she’d once dubbed the Wicked Queen and vowed to help him defeat. He missed the days when they were partners in crime like that, when they weren’t working at cross purposes and all alone as they were now.
He thought about sending her flowers or a present—it’s what he’d always seen his dad do when Lena was angry—but she hadn’t responded all that well to the diamond necklace. He had never heard of a woman who didn’t like to be given diamonds when he messed up. But Marj was different, which was both the best and worst thing about her. She wasn’t like anyone else, but that made her unsettling, unpredictable. He left the hotel room to meet with Charles, the VP from the London office who’d come out to help with the closing. They were determined to find a pizza or something in this town that didn’t have curry powder added. Charles had a phone full of photos of his wife and two adorable kids. The thought of those pictures gave Brandon a headache, possibly from a bad case of jealousy.
He had no idea how to protect Marj from public scrutiny and still keep her content with him. It was a balancing act he had no experience at. He was used to handling business deals worth tens of millions of dollars, the jobs of hundreds of American and overseas workers hanging in the balance. He managed it handily, making sure every detail was handled with meticulous care, with the appearance of it all being effortless. He was a natural at that, at ordering the lives of thousands, at bringing in surges of capital at just the right moment to secure a deal or save a project.
He wasn’t just the public face of Power Regions. He was a veritable king. Scores of people depended on him, and he wore that mantle of responsibility easily, flawlessly. It was the weight of one woman’s expectations that threatened to break him. Because a personal relationship, a marriage, was far outside his comfort zone, far beyond his expertise. He might be brilliant at inspiring confidence at a corporate level. In matters of the heart, he struggled. He felt—stunted. As if he had never developed whatever skill he now so desperately needed—empathy perhaps or some kind of interpersonal communications ability he’d never honed.
Brandon’s previous relationships had been superficial at best. A fancy dinner or two, a lavish weekend getaway not unlike the Mexico trip he took Marj on, a few weeks of carefree sex. Then he’d be too busy with work and stop returning calls and texts, and the women would just fade away without drama. It was pleasant that way, no confrontation, no arguments. Just a slow freeze out and he’d never think of them again. He enjoyed his freedom and not answering to anybody.
It was, in Brandon’s world, way past time for the fade out with Marj. Except for the truly inconvenient fact that he wanted to keep her around. Not just because of his family’s company and securing that inheritance, but because she was so different. She wasn’t like anyone else he’d ever known. Her energy, her irreverence, her resilience. She was necessary to him. That was what he was afraid of. Brandon had a creeping awareness that she was becoming a needed, indispensable part of his life. He felt off balance and grouchy because she was unhappy with him. He wanted to tell her he was totally justified in being busy since he was mostly busy trying to slap libel lawsuits on anyone who called her a slut online or in print media. He had alerts set for whenever her name appeared in the same post, comment or tweet with a host of unflattering words like “whore” and “gold digger”. So far, slut was winning by thousands. Odd, considering how rich he was, but apparently nothing beat a nice misogynistic insult when trolls were acting up.
Monitoring all that negativity was taking a toll and he really wanted pancakes. Diabetes or not, Brandon Cates didn’t indulge in white carbs, in sugary snacks. They were unhealthy and he’d learned to stop craving them. If only Marj were something he could train himself to stop craving.
He tied a flawless bow tie and surveyed his tuxedo in the mirror. The restaurant had a formal dress code. The meeting itself was so pivotal that he set his phone to silent. All those heinous insults would have to wait, piling up on his bride’s name until after his dinner was over. Dinner promised to be many things—elaborate, lengthy, and utterly without pancakes. The zoning commissioner and the head of his legal team in the Middle East were meeting him at the restaurant. The very dining room itself was something worthy of a magazine cover, all muted gold and sea views. His party was already waiting, the grim Tariq looking out the window, avoiding conversation with Gemma, the stunning blond attorney.
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sp; Brandon shook hands with them both, and they ordered the tasting menu, a six-course extravaganza that started with a beef tartare wrapped in nori. He winced, refusing to let himself pick the seaweed off his meat. Tariq seemed to enjoy the food at least. Perhaps an innovative meal would mellow the man who had made this trip a burdensome necessity. As they ate, Gemma kept the conversation going, talking about how stunning the city was, how much she’d enjoyed the opportunity to explore it. If one listened to her, one might think she was there on a pleasure trip, and not stuck in the Emirates because of the recalcitrant zoning commissioner.
“Of course, I adore Egypt. I’ve lived there four years and it’s ideal, so vibrant. Nevertheless, it lacks the sophistication of Dubai. Coming from London as I do, I miss a bit of refinement at times.”
“We’re glad to provide an elegant change of pace for you, Miss Randall,” Tariq said.
“It would be ideal, in fact, if we could resolve our zoning issues and let Miss Randall complete her sightseeing and get home to her fiancé,” Brandon said a little tightly.
“Ah, we finished, Dalton and I, alas,” she said.
“I apologize,” Brandon said.
“See, there is no hurry,” Tariq said with cheerful malice.
“I’m sure Mr. Cates is in a rush to get home to his new bride. Haven’t you seen her in the papers?”
“Hardly,” Tariq said.
“Here,” Brandon said, showing a photo from his phone, “this is Marjorie.”
“Such a nice name. I thought all Americans were called Brittany or Lindsey,” Gemma said with a laugh.
“Not all of us. I’d look a bit foolish being called Brittany,” Brandon returned, and again she laughed. She had a lovely, musical laugh. Tariq glanced at the picture with a nod and returned to his leek puree with caviar, which was rather as dreadful as it sounded. After two more courses, and no progress whatsoever on the zoning, Tariq excused himself to attend his daughter’s dance recital and left Brandon alone with Gemma.
