Married in Michigan

by Jasinda Wilder

  I’m fresh out of the gym, dripping sweat, hair a loosely-braided frizz-bomb of kinky black curls, no makeup, wearing purple spandex booty shorts and a white tank top, the tightest one I’ve got to keep the girls in check while doing far too many barbell cleans than is sane. Sipping from my Hydroflask, Justin Timberlake bumping in my earbuds, I head home on foot to shower and get ready for my shift.

  My carriage-house apartment is a good twenty-minute walk from the gym, which is usually just enough time to cool off and let my heart rate settle. I’m walking briskly, minding my own business, head bobbing to “Tunnel Vision”, not really thinking of anyone or anything in particular—a few precious minutes of Zen, which I only really get post-workout, when I’m sweaty and out of breath and sore and pleasantly shaky from the high-intensity exercise.

  Thus, I’m not really paying attention to the world around me—in Petoskey in the summertime, you tend to get a lot of wealthy tourists driving fancy cars, and a lot of them aren’t exactly the most polite or thoughtful. So I’m not entirely surprised when a sleek, low-slung, absurdly expensive-looking sports car zips up the hill behind me, engine revving loudly enough to be obnoxious even over my music. I snort, watching the stupid thing with its stupid driver swerving around slower-moving traffic, darting and weaving as if the driver owns the entire road—nay, the world.

  I mentally dismiss the car and its driver, trying desperately to regain my moments of Zen.

  I’m about to cross a side street, on the other side of which I’ll turn left into the neighborhood behind downtown. A quick glance either way, and then I cross the street, head bobbing, singing under my breath.

  “Tunnel vision…for you…”

  Squeeeeeeal.

  Tires howl, an engine revs, and I trip over myself to stop from being run over by the same red sports car as it darts around the corner and jams on the brakes, squealing to an abrupt halt directly in front of me.

  I kick the tire. “Hey, watch it, asshole!”

  “Get in, Makayla.” A familiar voice, one I’d hoped to never hear again; or rather, which I assumed I would never hear again, and one which a tiny, teeny, and very stupid part of me deep down did sort of hope to hear again.

  I duck to peer in through the half-lowered passenger side window—the car is so low slung I have to bend and duck quite a lot to see in. And yes, my ears did not deceive me: the driver is, unsurprisingly, none other than Paxton deBraun.

  “Figures it would be you in this ridiculous car, driving like an entitled dick.” I’m off duty, and I’m annoyed, so my filter is…not entirely engaged.

  “Get in,” he repeats.

  I frown. “Um, no thanks. I have work in less than two hours, and I have to shower still. And, besides, I don’t get in strange cars with strange men.”

  Those damned eyes of his—they’re what get me. They’re…pleading, almost. Desperate, nearly. Along with that voice, which somehow manages to growl in annoyance while still being somehow soft, if not quite tender.

  “Please.”

  I blink, because it wasn’t just evidence of actual manners, but the tone in his voice. “I beg your pardon?”

  He snarls, a sound somewhere between a sigh and groan. “Makayla, please. Get in the car.”

  “Why?”

  “Are you always this difficult to deal with?”

  I laugh. “Yes.”

  “I need to talk to you. Please, get in the car.”

  “Paxton. I’m dripping sweat, I stink, I’m in workout gear, and I have to work soon. What could you possibly want to talk to me about, and so urgently?”

  His strong, elegant hands release the death grip he has on the steering wheel and rake backward through his fine, artfully messy dark brown hair. “Goddammit, you’re so impossible.” He lifts a buttock and slides a phone out of from the back pocket of his dark-wash jeans. Unlocks it, taps a contact from his favorites list. It rings twice and I hear a tinny, distant answer. “Mom. I’m having a dinner for some friends from DC—no, not those friends, this is work. I need to borrow Makayla. She’s scheduled to work today and I need her to get my condo here ready. Okay, thanks.”

  I’m speechless—for a moment. “I’m not cleaning your house for you.”

  “No, you’re not. But now you have the day off. Get in, we need to talk.”

  “I can’t afford a day off, Paxton. I have bills to pay.”

  “How much will you make today?”

  “I…I don’t know, I don’t have it broken down by day. I just know I can’t afford a day off.”

  “What’s your monthly take home?”

  “Four thousand, usually,” I answer, not knowing why answers just come out for this man when I’m normally disinclined to answer personal questions for anyone.

  He’s wearing a blazer over a white T-shirt, and digs into an inner pocket of the blazer, pulls out the fattest wad of cash I’ve ever seen in my life. Peels off hundred-dollar bills with blinding speed, until there’s a stack of hundreds that makes my head spin. He hands it to me. “There. Two grand. Covers half the month, should cover an hour of your time today.”

  I feel my fingers twitching—two grand would mean I could breathe this month. Pay Mom’s hospice bill, rent, utilities, and go grocery shopping all in the same month.

  Pride, however, is stronger. “I’m not taking your money.”

  “Mom’s already covered your shift.”

  He has me over a barrelhead. I can’t not work, but now my shift is covered. Which means I have to call Camilla and beg for an extra shift, which means explaining whatever the hell is happening right now. Granted, I did get paid handsomely for cleaning the penthouse, but that’s not enough extra to make all the ends meet, and if Camilla is planning to give me a bonus, I haven’t seen it yet and can’t afford to assume it’s coming.

  I glance at the interior of the car, which is a kind I’ve never seen before, and which looks like it costs more than all the cars parked on this street combined. The seat alone probably costs more than my entire life. “I’m covered in sweat. I’ll ruin the seat.”

  “Don’t care. I can get it fixed.”

  I sigh. “You really do know how to get your way, don’t you?”

  He doesn’t even respond to that, just waits until I’m in the seat, which is more comfortable than any car seat has a right to be. There’s open air over my head, and the suede under my thighs is so supple and soft it seems almost fake, a charcoal color that shifts when I subtly stroke it with one careful fingertip. Every surface of the interior of the car is carbon fiber, luxurious and soft to the touch. There’s a fire extinguisher in front of my seat, wrapped in suede to match the seat. The steering wheel is squared, more of a squircle than a wheel. There are dials and gauges, and the display is more of a heads-up display from a high-tech fighter jet than an automobile.

  “What kind of car is this?” I ask, because curiosity is a diabolical weakness of mine.

  “Ferrari LaFerrari.”

  “What an original name,” I quip, my voice droll.

  He shoots me an annoyed look. “For most hypercars, you have to put your name on a list and pay a hefty deposit to even be eligible to buy one. For a LaFerrari, you have to be invited by Ferrari to buy one.”

  “Do I want to know how much it cost?” I ask.

  “Tricky question. There’s how much I paid, and how much it’s worth. Which are not the same.”

  I shake my head. “Forget I asked. Either one is a number I’ll have no way of comprehending.”

  He nods. “Probably true.” There’s no sense that he’s even aware of the insult in that. “I’m not even really supposed to be driving this on public streets, but fuck it, right?”

  I shouldn’t ask. But I do anyway. “What’s the point of a car you can’t drive?”

  He taps the accelerator and the car launches forward, pressing me back in my seat; a jerk of the wheel, and we’re around a corner, and then seconds later we’re on US-31 heading for the McMansionville that is Bay Harbor. />
  “This is a track car,” Paxton says, his eyes and head in constant motion, as are his hands and right foot, as he guides the rocket ship that is this ridiculous vehicle at insane and illegal and unsafe speeds around traffic, sometimes crossing the centerline into oncoming traffic.

  “Holy shit slowthefuckdown!” I manage, biting the words out past a barely restrained scream. “And what’s a track car?”

  He snorts. “A car you only drive at a racetrack.”

  “So you’re a race car driver?”

  “No, Makayla,” he says, with exaggerated patience. “I own a race car. And it’s not a race car, per se. It’s a car designed to be driven very, very fast, which you can only legally and safely do at a designated track.”

  “And yet you’re driving this on the streets.”

  “Yes. Which is highly irresponsible of me, considering this is one of two hundred ever made, and worth upwards of five million dollars, minimum.”

  “Five…million dollars? For a car?”

  “For a Ferrari LaFerrari Aperta? Yes.”

  “I guess I’m not sophisticated enough to understand how that’s possible.”

  “It has a hand-built V-12 making 950 horsepower, weighs less than three thousand pounds, has a removable carbon-fiber hardtop, goes from standstill to sixty-two miles per hour in two-point-four seconds, and there will never be any more of them ever made.”

  I roll my eyes, make my voice deep and cartoonishly gruff. “Oook oook. Me man. Me have big car, because me have small penis.”

  His eyes cut to mine. “I saw the way you were looking at me yesterday. I think you know very well that’s not true.”

  I shift in the seat, keep my eyes on the road outside the passenger window, and then cast a glance upward to the sky overhead, visible through the car’s removed hard-top—which, apparently, is one of the reasons this car is so expensive. Finally, I find my grit.

  “I wasn’t looking at you any kind of way.” I huff. “And besides, you’re so self-absorbed it’s a wonder you even know I exist.”

  “I may be self-absorbed,” he says, his voice a low growl that somehow matches the snarl of the massive engine, “but I noticed you.”

  I snort. Keep my eyes trained out the window. “Right.”

  A fingertip brushes a droplet of sweat off the back of my neck. “I noticed you enough to know you’re a hell of a lot sexier out of that dumbass maid outfit.”

  I shiver at the delicate touch of his finger at my nape. Shift away, lifting a shoulder to dislodge his touch, and the memory of it—though the latter seems nearly impossible. “Stop.”

  “Stop what, Makayla? Touching you? Or telling you you’re sexy?”

  “Both.”

  “What woman doesn’t want to be told she’s sexy?” His voice is a purr, and I refuse to make another comparison to the engine of this stupid vehicle.

  “This one,” I lie.

  He sniffs a laugh. “Yeah, okay. Pull the other one, Makayla.”

  I don’t respond to that. “Where the hell are you taking me, anyway? And do you have to go a hundred and thirty miles an hour—HOLYSHITWATCHOUT!”

  “I’m going ninety, not a hundred and thirty, for one thing,” Paxton says, breezy and casual, as if he hadn’t just swerved a half-second and millimeters away from smashing into the back end of a semi. “And for another, I’ve been through several exhaustive advanced driver’s training courses by the world’s foremost racing and evasive driving instructors. So just fucking relax, would you? I’ve got this.”

  I scrabble at the handle and the seat belt—you’d think for a track car, this would have oh-shit bars for the passenger, but no. Too fancy for that.

  “Aren’t you worried about getting a ticket?” I ask.

  Another dismissive snort. “Cops around here know my cars, and they know who butters their bread.”

  “Meaning they’re paid off?”

  “Not paid off. But our family makes hefty donations every year to the department and I, in turn, miraculously never seem to get a ticket. Mostly because I may drive fast and seemingly recklessly but I’m an excellent driver, and I never endanger the other drivers. They don’t always appreciate that fact, but such things are often lost on plebeians.”

  “Plebeians?” I echo. “Really?”

  “They were a member of the lower socioeconomic class in Ancient Rome,” he explains, with dismissive loftiness dripping from his voice.

  “Yes,” I say, drily. “I’m aware of what a plebeian is.”

  He catches the tone in my voice this time, amazingly. But he doesn’t apologize or try to backtrack. Just shrugs, grins.

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask again.

  “Home.”

  5

  Even though he’s going relatively slowly at this point, the turn onto the wide, winding driveway still somehow manages to feel effortlessly reckless. We’re approaching one of the homes in the area that routinely appears on national lists of “most expensive homes.” Sprawling, with columns and walls of glass, multilevel decks facing Lake Michigan and several hundred feet of private lake frontage, with a built-in boathouse and enough garage space for a fleet. A large house is a mansion; this is an estate, in the sense of the word used by aristocrats in eighteenth-century England.

  I always figured this place belonged to Camilla’s family, but I never knew for certain—it’s one you can see from US-31, but only from a distance, and you get the sense that you’re only seeing a fraction of it, and that the interior would be even more impressive than the outside.

  Of course, knowing the wealth of the deBraun family, they may very well own more than one house in the area.

  “This isn’t my home,” I say, helplessly pointing out the obvious.

  “I said home, not your home.” He doesn’t look at me, but his attention is nonetheless focused on me. “Although—” he cuts himself off, starts over. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask, panic tingeing my voice.

  “Nothing.”

  The driveway winds around aimlessly through acres of manicured, richly green lawn for a quarter of a mile or so before coming to an end at a bank of garage doors…I count six doors, each one wide enough to admit two cars abreast. He touches a button somewhere near where the missing panel of the roof would fasten in, and a garage door slides open. The home towers above us as we wait for the door to silently open, stretching away in both directions as well as upward. Behind us, the lawn arches away, with a few stands of elegant birch and towering pine here and there to diffuse the view of endless grass. The door now open, Paxton gently nudges the gas so the car moves just above an idle through the door and into a cavernous garage filled with row after row of gleaming metal and glass. There’s an obvious gap where this car is parked, front and center in the collection, which is so vast as to make even me—a complete neophyte when it comes to cars—dizzy with the collective value in this garage.

  This car, obviously, is one of the Crown Jewels.

  Parking it perfectly in the space, Paxton unfolds himself from the driver’s seat and makes a quick circuit of the glittering, sleek, red hypercar, examining it for imperfections. A slender man in a black and white suit, wearing actual white gloves, waits off to one side—he’s buttoned up, stern, serious, and polished.

  Paxton addresses him. “Hey, John.” He tosses something large and black and red over, and John, the suited man, catches it, a look of horror on his face.

  “Please, Mr. deBraun. One doesn’t toss the key to a LaFerrari.” John’s voice is smooth and cultured and vaguely English, and clearly disapproving.

  “Like you’d drop it?” Paxton says, a wave of his hand dismissing the topic. “Give it a polish and gas it up, would you? And replace the top.” He grins easily. “Thanks, Johnny.”

  With an actual half bow of his upper body, John turns away. “Sir.”

  I snort at the absurdity, gaining me two looks of bemusement and disapproval. Paxton grabs
me by the hand and hauls me through the rows of cars—I see several logos I recognize: Porsche, Ferrari, and Lamborghini, as well as others I don’t recognize. Paxton pauses in his march through the cars, gesturing with a sweep of his arm at a section of the garage—mostly red and yellow cars with similar lines as the Ferrari. In fact, an entire quadrant of the massive garage is dedicated entirely to Ferraris.

  “That right there is why we got an invitation to buy the LaFerrari,” he says. “Several of those are one-of-one ever made, and all of them are rarities in the car world, and even more rare in the Ferrari-owner world.”

  Dozens, at least. Some old, some new, some in between.

  I roll my eyes and yank my hand away from his. “Congratulations.”

  He catches the sarcasm, miraculously. “There are people who would pay a fortune just to get a look at the contents of this garage. This is one of the greatest car collections in the world.”

  “I don’t even own a car, Paxton. So if you’re thinking I’m going to, like, swoon over you because your dad owns some fancy cars, think again.”

  “Well, to be fair, it’s not just Dad. Some are Grandpa’s, some are Uncle Nicholas’s, and a couple are mine.”

  “Which are yours?” I ask, curiosity once again getting the better of me.

  Oh boy—judging by the way his eyes light up, that question was a mistake. He makes an about-face and wades through row after row of polished metal and chrome to the far back corner. He stops at a small, old hunk of metal—it’s rounded and cute and quick looking, rather than sleek and sexy.

  Paxton runs a hand over the curved, rounded hood. “1956 Porsche 356 Speedster, matching numbers, all original exterior and interior.”

  I sigh. “In English?”

  He laughs, and sighs. “It means old car go zoom zoom.” He opens a hatch in the rear where a trunk should be and I see the engine, looking the worse for age. “It means this car looks and runs exactly as it did when it came off the line in 1956, that the engine, transmission, and exhaust system are all original to the car as manufactured, as well as the paint, body, seats, everything. Makes it rare and valuable. This is one of the most desirable of the classic Porsches.” He says it Por-shuh, two syllables rather than one.