Hard Liquor: Runaway Billionaires: Arthur Duet #2

by Blair Babylon

“Well, then, I’m sure the committee will see it that way. Yeah, that should definitely be accounted for.”

  “That’s what I want to specify.”

  “I can draw one up. I guess I remember how. Geez. Making me work at all hours of the night, and not the fun way, either.”

  He chuckled at her griping.

  She said, “Hey, if you change your will to someone else inheriting everything, and then if MI6 kills you before the committee reaches a verdict, we might have to start all over with him suing your estate. That would be awesome. Imagine the fees we would bill you, yet again. I could end up with your entire estate that way, no matter whom you leave it to.”

  Arthur glanced at her, a smile crooking the side of his mouth. “My, but you have a dark sense of humor, don’t you?”

  “Stalin said that dark humor is like food. Not everybody gets it.”

  Arthur laughed and grabbed the sheet over his chest. “Oh, that’s unsettling.”

  “I imagine it’s an internet rumor, but it was funny.” Gen rummaged in her purse for her phone and clicked a word processing app. “Okay, let’s go. You want to leave everything to charity?” She grinned. “That would royally piss Christopher off. Imagine the look of horror on his pointy, little face. He’d have to sue a charity to get it. Oh, my God. Let’s totally do that. Oh, the evil.”

  “Not to charity.” Arthur rolled onto his side and propped himself up on his elbow. “To my wife.”

  Panic zipped through Gen, and the gold and enamel ruby ring felt heavy on her finger. “Uh, is there something you haven’t told me?”

  He took her hand. “I asked you to marry me in Paris. I’m quite certain you said yes. You’re wearing my ring. Marry me tomorrow.” He glanced at the clock, which read a few minutes after two o’clock in the morning. “Later today. Let’s go to Las Vegas and tie the proverbial knot.”

  All so sudden. Not part of the plan. Must stick to her plan. She asked, “Don’t you have to ask the queen for permission or something?”

  “Only the royal family has to receive permission, and even then just the first few people in line for the throne. The rest of us nobles have gotten a ‘fuck off, marry whom you want,’ for the last century or so.”

  “But don’t you have to ask someone, for form or manners or something?”

  “My parents are dead, and your father is, too. Your mother is in no state to grant permission. It’s just us.”

  “But don’t you have to have a big society wedding or people will be mad?”

  “We don’t have time.” He took her hand. “You said yes, and I’m calling in your commitment.”

  “Why?”

  He looked up at her, his silver-blue eyes so serious. “Because if we’re married, no one will question why you’ll inherit. I don’t know how much of my mother’s money remains. I allowed Wulfram to waste it on start-up venture capital for friends from Le Rosey, and I’ve been siphoning from it for the upkeep on Spencer House. It might be just a few thousand dollars, but it will help with your mother and your debts. At least it’s something more than just an antique, out-of-fashion ring.”

  “Hey, don’t talk smack about the ring. I love the ring.” Gen was still holding his hands. “I don’t want your money. I’ll make plenty, just as soon as I’m offered tenancy.” If she were offered tenancy.

  “I want to do this.” Arthur sucked in a deep breath. “If MI6 does remove me from the equation, I want to be married to you. I want you to go on. I want you to live your life deeply and well. But for these few hours at least, I want to be your husband, and I want you to be my countess.”

  She tried to chuckle, but it came out a sob. Her chest hurt. Her heart was cramping. “My mother would have loved to see me get married, and Lee and Rose are going to kill me if they aren’t here.”

  “It’s now or never,” he said.

  “My mum would have been simply ecstatic if I’d married an earl and become a countess. She always loved everything about the royal family and the nobility.”

  “You will be a countess, for however long we have, and then you’ll have a sum of money that might help you a bit.”

  “I don’t need your money,” she protested.

  “Yes, you do, desperately. I only hope there’s enough to see you through until you’re offered tenancy.”

  “I’d rather have you. I want you.”

  He looked at their hands. “At least you’ll have a little less worry.”

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “I want you to have it,” he said. “Even if you don’t want to marry me, I want you to draw up the new will.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I want to marry you. I just don’t want your money.”

  “The most important thing I heard is that you will marry me in a few hours, so that’s settled.” He rolled over and drew the covers over them both. “Afterward, we’ll decide who inherits my estate, such as it is.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll manage, somehow. But can’t you just give it to the dolphins or the rainforest or something?”

  “I would certainly rather you have it than allow Christopher to take that sum, too. Consider it canine maintenance.”

  “I’m not going to take your money for taking care of Ruckus! It’s just the right thing to do. What should I do, let him go to some shelter where some stranger would buy him and I wouldn’t even know whether or not he’s okay?”

  Arthur wrapped his arms around her and pulled her down to lie against him, skin to skin.

  The warmth of his satiny flesh suffused through her, and she went limp on his shoulder.

  He stroked her hair. “You’re arguing so that I won’t go.”

  She nodded.

  “You think that if you behave like a naughty little girl, if you don’t accept my money or you won’t draw up the will, that I’ll be forced to stay.”

  She nodded again, her nose rubbing on a pale blue streak in his skin where his tattoo crested over his shoulder. His smooth skin felt just like the uninked skin next to it. “I’m a lawyer,” she said. “If I don’t like what’s happening, I argue.”

  His arms firmed around her, and he kissed the top of her head. “We don’t have time to debate minutiae.” He sighed. “That’s where I was wrong. I thought we had time.”

  Gen wrapped her arms around his chest, feeling the heavy muscles sliding under his skin as he breathed. “One more question.”

  “Yes, m’learned friend?”

  “Yesterday, if you had already decided that you were going to get into the van, and if you knew that you would either be getting a new name or they were going to murder you, why did you take your passport?”

  He held his breath for a moment.

  Gen felt the seconds ticking by, two seconds, then three, as his chest didn’t move under her cheek.

  He blew out his breath and sucked more air in. “When I was dressing yesterday morning, my mind chewed on the fact that I didn’t need the passport and that it would be better off at home for the police to find. After I was gone, for whatever reason I was gone, they would think that I hadn’t fled the country or that I had had no intention to leave. Yet my hands picked it up, brushed the dust off of it, and tucked it into my suit breast pocket.”

  “Because—” she prompted.

  Arthur bit his lip, wrestling with himself. “Because I didn’t want to die, and because I was desperate not to leave you, and because a part of me was already planning to ask Casimir to fly us away so that I could be with you instead, at least for a few more days.”

  Gen snuggled down in the crook of his arm, holding onto him. “The prosecution rests.”

  Not All Appetites

  ARTHUR tossed Gen a gray robe from a dresser and grabbed one for himself. “The Devilhouse is like a youth hostel in this respect, I guess. Showers are down the hall.”

  “You’d think there would be showers in here,” she grumbled.

  “It’s not supposed to be a hotel.” He flipped the robe around his
body and knotted the terrycloth belt at his waist.

  She raised her eyebrows at him. “When you—um—came here before, didn’t you need a shower, afterward?”

  “No.” He nudged his feet into the slippers he’d dropped on the floor. They rubbed his heels. A little too small. Everything seemed to be too small for him.

  “Um—isn’t it—um?” she stammered.

  He glanced up and finally realized what she was getting at. “The Devilhouse is not a whorehouse.”

  “What did you do here, then?”

  Ah, here came the delicate part. Admittedly, he would not like to know about Gen’s sex life prior to meeting him, other than knowing the name or other identifying information about the man who had abused her.

  There was another regret of many, that Arthur would not be able to take a spectacular revenge on that predator. He wished he had pried that information out of Gen earlier, but then again, he had thought that they would have more time.

  But what should he say now?

  Gen said, “You’re taking forever to answer. Are you making something up?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Seriously?”

  “I am absolutely concocting something to tell you,” he said, thinking fast.

  “Why did you come here if it’s not something you want to talk about?”

  “We came here tonight because it’s safe for us to hide here. What happens in The Devilhouse stays in The Devilhouse, but more importantly, I didn’t have to run a credit card here, nor did Casimir or Maxence, who are known to be with me. The security cams are not linked to the internet, and there is no guest registration to be sent to a central database. No one would think to look for us here. If there is any place in the world where we could hide, this is it.”

  “So, what did you do here, when you used to come here?”

  The answer was complicated. “Not all appetites are proper subject matter for polite conversation.”

  She shifted, her bare toes poking at the thick carpeting, and ducked her head so that her thick hair swung around her face.

  “Something else?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.” But her voice was choked.

  He walked over to her and lifted her chin with his fingers. “Pet?”

  “It doesn’t matter, and I don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  She looked down and away, her huge brown eyes damp. “Am I enough?” She sighed. “I mean, would I have been enough? It’s okay. You can say no or yes because it doesn’t matter, anyway.”

  “Enough?” He was still perplexed.

  “If we had gotten married—”

  “We are getting married, later today, unless you’ve changed your mind,” he reminded her.

  “No, I mean, if we had really gotten married, if we had been married, if we had lived together and had kids and made a life together—”

  His breath caught in his chest at the picture in his head of Gen, holding their children in the Great Hall at Spencer House. His bones ached with the loss of that future.

  She asked, “—would I have been enough? Would you have needed to keep coming to a place like this, for something else?”

  He was gutted with what she had thought of him. “Oh, Gen. No. I would have never darkened The Devilhouse’s door, ever again.” He stroked her upper arms, the robe nubbly under his fingers. He added, “Not unless you were with me.”

  “Me?” she squeaked.

  “Certainly.”

  She glanced at the saltire cross looming in the corner, the steel X that almost reached the high ceiling beside the blue couch.

  He said, “I would have tied you to the saltire and had my way with you.” He smiled at her, tilting his head. “My wicked, wicked way.”

  She was still fidgeting. “But just with me. Not other people?”

  He lifted her chin and kissed her, his lips lingering on hers. Close to her lips, he whispered, “Only you, even if I had lived to be a hundred, only you.”

  She clung to him, her arms around his chest and back. She said, “I was kind of worried that you did something really weird in here, something you wouldn’t have wanted to give up.”

  He laughed. “It wasn’t really so depraved at all.”

  “Oh?”

  He looked down at her. Without her shoes on, her brown eyes only came to his shoulder, and she felt small and fragile in his arms. “You sound disappointed.”

  “Well, geez. With your reputation, I figured it would be something really kinky, really nasty. I was all prepared to do some dirty, horrifying things to keep you interested.”

  He cracked up. “What were you thinking?”

  “Doesn’t matter. If you were never up for it anyway—”

  “But maybe I would have been, knowing that it wouldn’t have frightened you off.”

  Her finger traced his collarbone under the robe, and he shivered at her touch. “Maybe we can talk about it—”

  With that, he realized what she was doing. “You’re tempting me.”

  “I should hope so, with what I just suggested I might let you do to me.”

  “No.” He leaned back and turned her head to look up at him. “You’re tempting me. Arguing didn’t work, so you’re trying temptation. You’re trying to make me stay.”

  With her chin in his hand, she nodded.

  “If it were up to me, my love, I would spend every day of the rest of my life with you for a century, but it isn’t.”

  She snuggled back into his arms, turning her face to his robe. Her voice was muffled and choked. “I know.”

  He held her a while, rocking her until she drew away to take her shower.

  As she was leaving, he asked, “Can I borrow your phone?”

  “Sure,” she said as the door was closing behind her.

  He dialed Casimir’s private number. When Caz picked up, Arthur asked, “Where are you?”

  “In the kitchen. Jeffrey dropped off a mountain of food for breakfast.”

  His stomach rumbled, gnawing on itself. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  He left Gen a text to herself on her phone, explaining where he had gone and Caz’s phone number in case she needed him to lead her in.

  Arthur showered and found some clothes that fit his burly frame passably well in the racks behind the men’s spa area. It wasn’t shocking that most of the guys who worked at The Devilhouse were probably tall, fit, and muscular.

  He found his way to the huge nightclub at the front of the plantation house.

  The stillness on all three floors of the nightclub—the main dance floor and the two exclusive upper balconies that ringed the club—was unnerving. Usually, music and the chatter and shrieks of thousands of people filled the expanse, and everyone jostled for a view or to order a drink at the bar.

  His footfalls echoed off the concrete walls in the dark that towered in the space. A few twinkling lights led the way to the kitchen area while he climbed the clanging iron stairways to the second floor.

  The emptiness was end-of-the-world creepy.

  He shoved open the swinging door to the kitchen and found Casimir and Maxence sitting at a steel table, smearing cream cheese on bagels that steamed their baked scent.

  Casimir called out, “Arthur! You have to try these! There’re eggs and things if you want, too, but these bagels are delish!”

  Arthur settled himself in a chair and sliced a bagel. The oversized bread donut warmed his hand. “Hey, Caz, can I borrow your plane this morning?”

  He laughed. “Sure. My sister doesn’t need it back for a few more days. Where are we going?”

  “Las Vegas.” Arthur bit into the bagel and ripped a chewy hunk off. “I say, these are good.”

  Casimir and Maxence exchanged a wide-eyed glance.

  Maxence took over. “Your Lordship, the Earl of Givesnofucks, why perchance do you want to travel to Las Vegas?”

  He said, “I’m going to marry Genevieve this morning.”

  C
asimir shook his head. “When I proposed this very plan for myself only a few months ago, you talked me out of it.”

  “Absolutely,” Arthur said. “There were several and plural damn good reasons why you shouldn’t have done such a rash thing, Prince Monster, but I don’t need anyone’s permission. I don’t even have a niece who would be petulant if not offered the role of flower girl.”

  “You have two nieces,” Casimir pointed out.

  “Who have been told all their lives that I am a dissolute scoundrel who stole their father’s fortune. For such small children, their hatred of me is large.”

  “Surely there’s some reason to do this the proper way,” Caz said.

  “None at all. Today. I want it done today. I’m alone in this world, and I don’t want to leave it that way.”

  Maxence reached across the table and gripped Arthur’s shoulder. “You’re not alone. You’ve never been alone.”

  Arthur inclined his head and grasped Maxence’s fingers. “I know, but a family is different. Genevieve is different.”

  Casimir and Maxence glanced at each other, but they couldn’t refute that.

  Hell, Casimir better not even try.

  Arthur asked, “Do you two assholes want to stand up with me? Unless you want to perform the ceremony, Pope Fuckitall.”

  “Still not qualified,” Maxence said, heaping more cream cheese on another bagel. “Besides, you’re a Church of England heathen. I don’t know whether a proper Catholic ceremony would take in such defiled ground.”

  Casimir asked him, “When do you want to leave?”

  Arthur shrugged. “An hour?”

  Casimir scowled at him and picked up his bagel. “You do like to make things difficult, don’t you? I’ll see if our embassy can smooth the way with air traffic control.”

  What Happens in Vegas

  GEN walked down the aisle of a tiny chapel in Las Vegas, Nevada. The beams on the high ceiling had been painted white. Indeed, the whole chapel was dingy white except for the garish silk-flower leis strung from the corners of the room and hanging on the six pews.

  At the head of the aisle, past the benches, Lord Arthur Finch-Hatten, the incorrigible Earl of Severn, stood with his friends Maxence and Casimir, along with Elvis, who was dressed in a sparkling white track suit.