Insecure

by Ainslie Paton

  “Violence, destruction, end of the world, sex or excess.” He looked across at her. “Preference?”

  If he wasn’t going to take her to bed then he had to talk. “How did Buster get her name?”

  He muted Gatsby flinging shirts at Daisy Buchanan. He squared his shoulders off on the arm of the lounge and faced her. She did the same and brought her legs up, stretched in front of her, toes pointed towards him.

  “She used to call me that when I was a baby. One day she came into the room, I looked her in the eye and called her Buster. It was the first real word I said.”

  She smiled and Mace did too, a crooked half embarrassed smile. “That’s a cute story. How did she come to be your Malcolm?”

  He turned his head to look at the TV. There was room for a Sumo wrestler and his two size zero girlfriends between them. If they touched it would be no accident. If he went back to one phrase sentences she’d be bereft.

  “What happened to your parents?” he said.

  She inclined her head. Her turn, that was fair. “My father died when I was five. He had a brain tumour. I only have the vaguest memories of him.” Mace watched her, but his expression gave nothing away. “My mother didn’t cope well without male affection. She had a series of boyfriends who I do remember, then suddenly there was new daddy, Malcolm. He left his wife for her. He was always ambitious, a social climber, and she was very beautiful. She was a better fit with his plans than his first wife. I was eight when they married. I was twelve when she died.”

  “How’d she die?”

  “An accident.” He took that and gave nothing back. He made her want to tell him more, simply because he felt no need to push for it. “She broke her neck skiing.” She shook her head remembering her fractured childhood, where she’d wanted for nothing but was starved for affection. “I had a stepfather who found me a nuisance because he already had two boys who lived with their mother. He remarried almost immediately. He didn’t know what to do with me. There were lots of babysitters, tutors and activity camps, then boarding school.”

  “Do you look like her?”

  “Like my mother? No. Why do you ask?”

  He shifted, closing some of the distance between them. “You said she was beautiful.”

  “I don’t look like her.” Not beautiful, decorative. Not the kind of woman men lost their heads over. Not the kind of woman who needed them to. She had a figure that was fashionable and wore clothes easily. She had a face that was pleasant to look at but was too strong to be called beautiful. It was his turn. “What happened to your parents?”

  He looked away, then reluctantly back. “My father shot through before I was born. My mother was...Buster used to say, delicate. Now I know she was bipolar.”

  He looked back to the TV again. He had a way of making a full stop physical.

  “What happened to your mother, Mace?”

  “Want to go to the bedroom?”

  And then starting a new, altogether disconnected sentence.

  She did, even if he only wanted her to avoid talking, but she wanted this first. “Tell me.”

  His eyes came back to hers. “She stepped in front of a bus.”

  Her toes curled. He looked down at his leg, hooked up on the seat, but that was the only hint of emotion in him.

  She couldn’t ask the question she wanted to. “How old were you?”

  “Seven.”

  But she couldn’t not ask it either. Something about what he didn’t say. “Were you there?”

  He looked up and sighed.

  “You can tell me to shut up.” But if he did, she’d feel cheated, depleted somehow.

  “Would you shut up if I took you into the bedroom?”

  She gave him back a dose of the silent treatment he was so good at dishing out. But if he dragged her in there by the hair she’d do what she could to help him.

  He dropped his head forward and rubbed the back of his neck. “One minute she was holding my hand, the next she stepped out on the road. I remember the driver’s face. He was screaming before he even hit her.”

  “Oh God.” It was her turn to look away from the flatness in his eyes.

  “Don’t.” He touched her foot and she brought her vision back to him, confused. He’d closed more distance between them. “You have nothing to feel bad about.”

  “I’m not so great at casual conversation either. I don’t know how not to push the point. It works in business, but otherwise I make everything too serious.”

  He said, “Princess Severe,” but his hand was warm over her instep.

  “Apparently so.”

  He shifted again and her foot was in both of his hands. He stuck a thumb into her sole and it hurt. She flinched and he pressed again, but this time she was ready for it. “What are you doing?” He stroked up her instep and the move was inextricably connected to her eyelids. She closed her eyes and groaned.

  “Why are you glad you don’t look like your mother?”

  “She was so beautiful she never had to learn to do anything for herself. I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted to be like Malcolm. I wanted to be powerful and independent. I wanted to run my own life, not need someone to run it for me.”

  “Looks like you got that.”

  She nodded. She had the career she’d dreamed about and trained for, the future she’d worked for, almost ripe enough to pluck.

  “Why do you hate him?”

  She opened her eyes and fell into his. His hands were on her feet, but his gaze was all over her face. She rested her head back on a tower of cushions. He started on her toes. It hurt. She had tension in her toes, how the heck was that possible? “I don’t hate him.”

  His hands stilled. She lifted her head, wondering if he’d gotten bored and gone back to watching TV. He was watching her. He’d remembered. “He’s not a good person.” Mace’s hands started moving again.

  Malcolm was a genius, a ruthless, arrogant, controlling mastermind. He’d taken a small, privatised credit union and built a global financial services organisation with offices on four continents in fifteen years. But he was also a corporate psychopath, utterly lacking in empathy, brutally uncaring about anything except the business, and capable of destroying anything and anyone standing in the way of his plans. And that extended to family. He’d sidelined his eldest son, Bryan, without a hint of regret when he’d judged him too soft to be of value to Wentworth Finance.

  She didn’t want Mace to stop. “He was a terrible stepfather.”

  He’d been absent and cold. And from what she’d watched Bryan and Thomas go through, not much better as a father. Bryan was ousted from Wentworth four years ago with nothing but a handshake, and a letter telling him he’d voided his claim to a redundancy payout by being incompetent. Father and son hadn’t spoken since. Malcolm had a granddaughter he’d never bothered meeting. She shivered. That wasn’t going to happen to her. Bryan got distracted by marriage and his passion for flying light aircraft. Jacinta had her eye firmly on the prize and not one of the other leadership team members had the ear of the board or was close to being anointed in Malcolm’s stead.

  Mace squeezed her foot. “But you work for him?”

  “Shocking human being. Great businessman.”

  “You admire him?”

  “I...why am I telling you all this? You work for him too.” Though were it not for Mace being seconded to the takeover project and everything going bad yesterday, he’d never be in the same airspace as Malcolm, let alone close enough to hear him shouting.

  He dragged his knuckle down her instep and she closed her eyes. She was telling him because she liked what he was doing and it was oddly comforting to have someone to talk to other than Jay, and because Jay knew Malcolm she didn’t talk to him about this stuff.

  “No. I don’t admire him. Objectively I respect what he’s done, what he’s achieved, but he’s a deplorable person and there is nothing to admire in his lack of basic human decency.”

  Mace’s hands moved to her calf.
Those clever fingers knew what they were doing. “What do I get if I keep talking?”

  His thumbs rolled in small circles across the muscle. It was answer enough. “It’s complicated. I do hate him, but I have to respect what he gets done. When I take over I’ll do it differently, but I’m not naive enough to think it’ll be easy. There’ll be sacrifices. There won’t be much of a personal life. But I’m okay with that. It’s a small price to pay.”

  “You think that’s small?”

  “You think that’s ridiculous.”

  He shook his head.

  She sat upright and almost pulled her leg away from his hands. He couldn’t possibly understand what drove her, or the thrill the business gave her. “Tell me—you think it’s insane, don’t you?”

  “Why do you care what I think?”

  She settled back with a laugh, but she did care. She cared what the odd geek from IT thought about her, which was worse, so much worse, than wanting him to drag her into the bedroom and go caveman on her body. The latter was simply physical.

  “So, yesterday?” he said.

  He wanted to know how much she had riding on the shareholder meeting. He’d heard the shouting, it was a fair question. If Wentworth shareholders had approved the takeover, the company would’ve leapt from fifth biggest in the league banking table to third. So yes, she’d had a lot riding on that meeting, since she’d convinced the board to launch a takeover of their nearest rival in the first place. No meeting, no vote, no approval, no offer. The target company accepted an alternate bid. There were no prizes for coming second.

  “I’ll have a couple of weeks of being in the doghouse with Malcolm and the board, but there’s always Plan B.”

  She got fingers dancing closer to her knee, and the eyebrow.

  “Oh, you didn’t think I had a Plan B?”

  He moved so suddenly she started. He planted a hand on the sofa near her hip and a knee level with her thigh. His other hand went to the curve of her ear. He squeezed.

  “Ow! That hurt.” She put her hand to her ear, rubbing the sting he’d caused. He was back on the other side of the lounge before she’d scrambled to a sitting position. “What did you do?” He hadn’t squeezed that hard, but her ear still smarted.

  “I’m listening to your body.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Plan A, Plan B, Malcolm, they make you tense, Princess.”

  “And you can tell that from pinching my ear.”

  He gave her his moustache-twirling grin. It made her forget about her ear and her tense toes. Made her wonder what miracles his fingers might wrought unleashed on the rest of her tension. He was right, she was always tense. It was one of the sacrifices. Like working weekends, like not having someone like Mace in her life. She really should go to her desk and make sure Plan B was going to be as effective in fixing her mess as she hoped.

  “What do you want, Mace?”

  He held out his hand. “Temporary residency.”

  She granted it.

  8: Arrogance

  With his lips and tongue and teeth, with the press of his fingers and the slide of his palm, Mace took the tension in Jacinta’s frame, the tightness in her muscles, and the ever-present fatigue she dragged around like a bank vault, and re-routed them through her body. Everything coalesced in a new form of pressure, an unbearable, shuddering, aching need.

  She lost the use of speech around the time he found she loved his too tight grip on her hips, and he gripped her harder, marking her possessively. All that was left of her vocabulary was garbled in her throat, escaping in tattered breaths and strained gasps. She lost the use of her brain around the time she looked into his eyes and realised he was as into her as she was him. He didn’t simply make her feel good, he drove his own pleasure through her limbs and into her heart. He lost his reticence to speak around the time she discovered what tilting her pelvis did to him.

  The breath punched out of him and he eased deeper. “Glorious, you’re fucking glorious. Hot, so wet. Jesus, Cinta, never want to pull out.”

  She was happy with that, it was entirely reasonable.

  “Not leaving this bed till neither of us can walk.”

  Again, a no-brainer.

  “Too beautiful like this. Too damn much. You make me high.”

  And she was high with him; on the threat of him, the reality of him, the way he punctuated her body with stops and starts and long strokes and quick dashes, the way he reared up over her then curled around her with firm hands and wandering lips.

  “All that tension is for me now.”

  “Oh, God. All for you, Mace.”

  He took her bones and liquefied them. He took her senses and blew them wide open till she was screaming with the delight of it; soaring, soaring, outside her body, outside her mind, but grounded in his arms wrapped tight around her, in the choppy rhythm of his breathing and the feeling of being held secure.

  When his breathing eased, he relaxed his hold on her. “You okay?”

  He was curled around her back. She murmured her assent. She didn’t want to do anything to tempt him to roll away, though they were both slick with sweat and sleep was the ideal celebration of a joining that rocked her to her core.

  “Cinta, answer me.” There was urgency in his voice, and his arms tightened around her waist.

  “I’m fine.”

  He resettled her so he could see her face. “Don’t say that if it’s not true.”

  She put her hand to his face, his cheeks bristly now. She had the rasp of his scruff all over her body and she still tingled with it.

  “I can get a little intense,” he said.

  “I liked your intense. It made me come harder than I can ever remember coming.”

  That seemed to satisfy him. He dropped down on the pillow beside her and looked up at the sky. But their bubble was broken. She was learning the secrets of his body, now she needed to know what was in his head.

  “Last night was good, great—this was better.”

  He scoffed. “You do remember.”

  “So do you.”

  He closed his eyes as though he didn’t like being caught out. “I remember something else. Someone hit you.”

  She groaned. That had slipped out, alcohol and the danger of the man, the fear of what she might do when she no longer cared to hold back. Her instinct was to roll away, but she wanted him to know she wasn’t a victim looking for sympathy or a white knight to chase the dragons away. “I was hoping you’d forget that, or think it was...”

  “A game. You really thought I’d think that?”

  “You didn’t think that? Last night, that’s all we were, a game.” But now, now what were they, what could they be? What did she have time for them to be?

  “For maybe two seconds I thought that. Until I looked in your eyes. Someone has hurt you.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  He came up on one elbow, hand to the side of his head. “Distance doesn’t heal everything. Last night I tried to be easy with you.”

  “But not then.”

  He shook his head, looked away. “I forgot myself.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Not if I scared you.”

  “You didn’t.”

  He turned his head and looked down at her. “But someone did.”

  He wasn’t going to let it go. She rolled to mirror his pose. “Last night I was pissed off and drunk, a little scared, and being deliberately reckless, hitting on you like I did. I didn’t think you’d care what I said. And I did trust you. Not in a he won’t take naked pictures of me and post them all over the internet way.”

  “What? You thought—”

  She put her hand over his mouth. “But in a this guy isn’t going to hurt me physically way.”

  He shook free of her hand. “You couldn’t have known that.”

  “You told me you weren’t dangerous.”

  “Cinta.”

  He was chastising her. No one called her that. Her mother
and Malcolm had insisted on her full name. She was Jacinta at work. At school she’d been Jac, and she was Jac to Bryan, and Jay called her Cin, but Cinta was a new one. She liked it and felt vaguely silly for it. “You weren’t lying. You wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “But some other guy did. For all you knew, I was that guy.”

  Before her one night stand turned himself inside out over a comment she’d never meant to make, she had to put him out of his misery. “You think I randomly hit on you, that you were just there—right place, right time?”

  “I think.” He frowned and resolved whatever he’d been about to say with, “Yeah.”

  “I was reckless, but not dumb. I knew who you were. I’ve been watching you.”

  He sat up, hauled the sheet over his lap and crossed his legs. “Watching me.”

  Was he creeped out? She’d made it sound stalkerish. She sat too, but didn’t bother covering herself. There was nothing about her body he hadn’t seen, touched, excited. She needed to explain that she’d chosen him in a calculated way from watching him work, seeing him interact with others.

  “You only think you know.”

  Was he angry? Did he feel used? There was no hint in his voice, no shade in his expression to tip her off. But his fist was furled in the sheet.

  “So tell me about you. Tell me what else you get intense about.”

  “No one else, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I wasn’t...you don’t.” Fabulous, she sounded like him. She touched his knee. She wasn’t sure how to soothe him. She was annoyed with herself for wrecking their peace and with him for his sudden petulance. He knew which way was up when he got in her car.

  “Maybe the curfew is over.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed. It’d gotten stupidly complicated. She’d check the police website; the sooner Mace left the better. She had things to do.

  “Intense is my default mode.”

  Feet on the floor, she stopped.

  “I’m either in something or I’m not. I’m no good with half-measures.”