Under Contract

by Jeffe Kennedy

  A rill of fear iced her despite the heat of the bathwater. Had he killed someone? She’d never felt in real, physical danger from him before, but now...

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t look at me like you’re afraid of me.”

  “You can’t command my thoughts and emotions, Ryan,” she said quietly, almost feeling sorry for him. “That’s not something you can control.”

  He looked mean, on edge. “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t control.”

  “I think you’d better just tell me. This is out there now and I need to know what it is.”

  “Promise you’ll at least stay the night.”

  “No.”

  He uncurled his fists and, for a moment, seemed about to lunge at her. He restrained himself, seizing his wine and draining it. She braced herself, expecting him to hurl it across the marble bathroom, but he set it down with exaggerated care, then glared at her.

  “Stop looking like you’re about to run. I won’t hurt you. I’ve never hurt a woman in my life, outside of a scene.”

  “Who did you hurt?”

  He scrubbed his hands over his face, kept them there. “Promise me, Celestina. Throw me a bone here.”

  Despite her uncertainty, the insidious fear, her heart ached for him. It made no sense, but she wanted to offer comfort. Something about that soul-deep recognition of his pain. Like and unlike her own. His was older, blacker, with roots back to that library and the little boy who read all the books—memorizing the dictionary definitions. God knew she had no compass, had made terrible choices and had seriously screwed up her life. Still, she needed to trust this. Give him what he asked for when he’d been so generous with her.

  Following her instinct, she moved over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “I promise to hear you out and to give you time to make promises to me in return, if I need them. I promise compassion. I promise not to tell anyone if keeping your secret doesn’t compromise my morals.”

  He laughed soundlessly and dropped his hands, staring her down. “I could threaten to tell everyone about our arrangement if you do.”

  “Don’t ruin this by being a pig. I’m making you the best offer I can.”

  Reaching out, he put his hands on her shoulders, going slowly as if he expected her to pull back. Then squeezed gently, as if to prove his self-control. “I’m sorry. That was a terrible thing to say. I would never do that to you.”

  “I actually knew that, which is why it didn’t bother me. Now tell me the rest.”

  * * *

  Impossible that he would, but also inevitable. Such an unusual woman, his Celestina. Trusting in him even when the fear and uncertainty showed clearly in her eyes. And offering him compassion, of all things. Such a strange, even old-fashioned thing to say. Something his mama might have said—and it felt like a balm to that deeply buried, angry wound.

  And he’d blown it already. Now that she knew he had a secret, she wouldn’t trust him until he laid it out there. Staring into her probing gaze, he considered lying—or at least glossing. Too dangerous. Too much risk that she’d detect the lie. She wouldn’t give him much more rope. Dangerous either way.

  “You know,” she said, lifting her hands to lay them against his cheeks, framing his face and searching for some answer, “you don’t have to tell me this.”

  “But you’ll go if I don’t.”

  “I’d have to. But you and I don’t know each other well. This...arrangement, the way you set it up, means that we don’t owe each other these truths. If this were a real love affair, then I’d have a right to know who you are. As it is, you owe me nothing beyond the payment you promised.”

  “Harsh.” Perhaps this had been a terrible idea, to go about it this way. He never second-guessed his decisions—what the hell?

  “But true.”

  He wanted to argue that she was wrong. That he did owe her this and that she, by God, owed him far more, but he had no grounds to say so. “It seems I’m fucked either way—you’ll leave if I don’t tell you and, if I do, you might leave anyway.”

  “Yes. It wouldn’t be a huge thing though. We’d both go on with our lives. No hearts broken or homes wrecked.”

  He slid his hands up the silken length of her arms to her wrists, holding her hands against his face. Not for her, perhaps. He was no longer certain it wouldn’t cripple him to lose her. And, due to his own dismal lack of emotional control, he had but one path to make her stay.

  He’d decided long ago that no one would ever know, and he’d stuck to that resolution. Telling her would be one of the very few times he’d ever changed his mind. Disaster or triumph? That remained to be seen. Despite the high stakes, the thrill of risking everything for the big prize fired his blood. The same thing that had driven him to get out and fight through those dark years spurred him on now. Nothing risked, nothing gained.

  “Let me tell you a tale then.” Grateful for the physical contact and moving cautiously so as not to spook her, he turned her so she sat sideways on his lap, cradled against him, a soothing weight. Staring out into the delicately lit garden, he saw only the wretched past.

  “It happened a long time ago.” In another life, it seemed. To another person. “I was seventeen and working my way through college, getting my undergrad degree in business. There was...this guy in my class. Rich. Arrogant. Privileged. Total git. Should have been at an Ivy League school, but he’d flunked out of several and ended up at our state school.

  “Man, I hated that guy.”

  Celestina stayed quiet, listening with her head on his chest and one hand stroking his shoulder, as if to soothe him. Oddly it worked, smoothing away some of that old rage.

  “He made my life a living hell. I don’t know why he picked me, except that I didn’t fit in and was an easy target. I had a...well, a hick accent back then. My clothes were for shit. I lived in this awful apartment building where I shared one bathroom with ten other rooms on that floor. Junkies, crackheads. Someone was forever puking in there or shooting up, crapping on the floor. Even when the shower worked, I felt filthier coming out of there than when I went in. When I could, I snuck into the campus gym and showered there, but that was tricky—illegal as I couldn’t pay the membership fee. I cared more about getting expelled than smelling bad. It wasn’t like the girls wanted anything to do with me, which I figured then was the main reason to smell nice.

  “But this guy, he hounded me about it. Called me the Redneck Hobo and always went on about how I was probably this homeless guy scamming the university. Well, he said it often enough and loudly enough that the proctor started giving me grief, sending letters. I didn’t have a mailing address—nothing anyone sent to me would have survived where I lived—so I used this mailbox at a group house near campus. Grad students and stuff. They’d just pull their own mail out and leave the rest for the other residents to get. I’d go by at night to check and it worked well enough.”

  Every night he could, which wasn’t as often as he should have gone. One of a number of mistakes.

  “Well, I missed a couple of letters from the school and then somehow it turns out this guy had started dating someone who lived in the house. He saw my name on a letter from the university—how’s that for shit luck?—and he takes it to the proctor. I get called in and cops are there.”

  “Mail fraud,” she whispered.

  “Bingo. Stupidest law on the books, if you ask me. Worse—that address had been my dubious proof of residency so they not only wanted to nail me with various charges, they wanted me to cough up two years of out-of-state tuition.”

  “Were you a resident?”

  “Fuck no. I’d split my home state when I was a teenager, got my GED and went as far as possible.”

  “So they had you.”

  “They had me, dead to rights.”

  “What did
you do?”

  “What could I do? The cops booked me, then found out I had a record. All juvie, but still. I was still technically a minor at that point so it wasn’t sealed.”

  Celestina sighed, though he couldn’t decipher the emotion behind it. All the ugliness of that time. At least she’d know it all, which would make her the one person in the world who did. A strange calmness filled him, an almost philosophical distance from that boy he’d been.

  “They let me out on bail, mainly because they didn’t have room to keep me overnight, and they didn’t figure me for much of a flight risk. I was to report back for court the next day, but I knew what would happen. They’d slap me in a state-run school, barely a notch above prison. I wasn’t going back to a hellhole like that.”

  “How did you make bail?”

  “A buddy from one of my jobs. I offered him twice the amount to front it. Cleaned me out, but I knew I had a paycheck or two coming—my timing was at least that good. Problem was, they went to that same mailbox. Back before the blessed invention of direct deposit.” Odd that he could laugh. Or maybe that was just buffering himself against the worst part. “I had to risk going to get the money. And guess who was watching for me?”

  “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes. He sat there in his fucking Aston Martin and watched the mailbox on the off chance he could catch me. Then got out and held up that paycheck and dangled it in front of me.” It came back so clearly, the quiet residential street, the greenish glow of the streetlights. The way Douglas Whittaker—the third, thank you—had held up that envelope that represented his chance of escape and sneered at him. Looking for this, Hobo Boy?

  “Tell me you didn’t kill him,” Celestina whispered.

  “I came near. He didn’t know punks like me. I knocked him down with the first punch. He saw me as some redneck derelict, but I had a stocky frame, more muscle. I’d grown up knowing how to fight dirty.”

  “Oh, Ryan...”

  “Thing was—I couldn’t stop. I kept punching him, whaling on that pretty face, his fucking privilege, loving the way it went to mush under my fists. He’d never sneer at me again. I wanted to kill him. I could have and walked away happy.”

  Celestina made a choked sound and he relaxed the grip he’d tightened on her. She pushed away from his chest, but surprised him by not pulling away entirely. Instead she stayed and searched his face. “What stopped you?”

  “You’d like me to say I had some kind of crisis of conscience, that I looked at my bloody fists and realized I’d become just like my father and I needed to step away if I wanted to be a better man than that. That I thought of my mama and what she’d tried to teach me.” He laughed at the thought, the sound scraping a throat that had gone tight, and Celestina flinched a little. Good. Better for her to know. “No, I stopped because a car came down the street and the headlights caught me. People jumped out and started screaming. I ran. And I took my goddamn paycheck with me.”

  She pursed her lips, thoughtful. “How’d you get away with it?”

  “Got a shady shop to cash my check—even with blood spatter—for a hefty fee, got on the first bus out of town. Created a new identity, found a book at the library to get rid of my hick talk, got another GED, saved up some money, established real residency, and started over. Ponied up for a PO Box that time. I was lucky.”

  “Lucky?” She sounded astonished. Appalled, too. But she hadn’t pulled away yet. “So your name isn’t really Ryan Black.”

  “Yes, it is.” Through blood and sweat, that name was more his than the one his miserable parents had bestowed on him.

  Celestina seemed taken aback by his forceful tone, but brushed her fingers over his shoulders, thinking. “How do you know he didn’t die? He could have, you know.”

  “Because I checked, of course.”

  She looked fully surprised by that. Of course she’d think that anyone who’d done what he did would have moved on and never looked back. “It wasn’t difficult—the assault was in the papers. I knew his name and what hospital they took him to. I’d call his room—make sure I talked posh like he did—and ask whoever answered to put him on the phone. Later I could track him through the internet.”

  “Still?”

  “Yes. I can’t seem to help it, though I look less often now. A while back I arranged to transfer a large sum of money to his family—not him, but to his folks, who paid the hospital bills.”

  “From the sounds of it, they didn’t need the money.”

  “No. I needed to do it. Make amends, though it hardly counts. For my own peace of mind.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Yes and no. I don’t think about it as much anymore.”

  She looked thoughtful. “You were a minor and this was—what?—twenty years ago?”

  “Pretty much spot-on.”

  “So you can’t be charged. Statute of limitations has to be up, even if they could have gone after you once you were an adult.”

  He lifted a shoulder, feeling restless. “Yes. I made sure to track when I was clear of that. But that just means I’ll never be held truly accountable for what I did.”

  She frowned slightly. “I don’t know about that. At what point do you let it go, I wonder?”

  Never. He could never let it go, lest he forget and revert back to that. “I saw him once.”

  Her lovely dark eyes widened, gratifyingly shocked. “You didn’t!”

  “I did. At a conference.” It had been so bizarre to lay eyes on the guy again, to recognize him and not be recognized in return. Whittaker had looked the same, only older, and Ryan—well he in no way resembled Hobo Boy. He’d felt the gut-punch of panic, followed by a surge of old guilt and even more profound rage. He’d gone to the hotel gym and spent hours sweating it out. Then managed to look the guy in the eye at a meeting later and even shake his hand. Back then he’d wished for someone to tell, who would understand what that moment meant.

  Someone like Celestina.

  So far she hadn’t given her opinion, still thinking through all he’d told her. But he had to know. Couldn’t wait a moment more to find out if he’d be forgiven or damned in her eyes. He set her apart from him, on pretext of pouring himself some wine, though mostly he wanted to spare himself from feeling her physically pull away.

  “The point is, Celestina, that’s who I am, at the core. It’s who I was, who I always will be. I have violence in me and that’s why I do what I do. Part of me likes hurting people. Having them in my control and suffering for me. It’s ugly, but I think I...I think I need it, to keep from ever exploding again like I did that night. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to walk away. I’ll transfer you all the money you need now. Consider it the price of your silence.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  She turned over the whole ugly story in her head—including the huge chunk he hadn’t verbalized. Perhaps that he hadn’t even realized he’d revealed...that I looked at my bloody fists and realized I’d become just like my father...It fit with the rest, with what she’d suspected from his tale of hiding out at the library.

  And now he stared her down with that challenging glare, daring her to condemn him as he’d so thoroughly judged himself. Some people might think he should have to pay his debt to society. What he’d put himself through, however, seemed far worse than what the justice system would have leveled upon him. Extraordinary that he had managed to do so much, at such a young age.

  That simmering rage, the contained sense of violence—all channeled into building his fortune. And into sex. Oh yes, she recognized that anger as another face of her own—the defiance of fate and all the bad luck she’d thought life had dumped on her. She’d done nothing with hers, though. Nothing like he had. She’d just brooded on it, letting the edges crumble until she lost her footing, while Ryan clawed his way out of one far deeper and more p
erilous.

  “Just tell me,” he nearly growled. Then made an impatient sound, climbed out of the tub and snatched up a towel. “Never mind. Don’t. I know the answer already. How could you possibly trust me, knowing this? Any day, at any moment, I could lose my temper and beat you to death. There wouldn’t be headlights to save you. Maybe you should go to the police, to the reporters and tell the story. It’s no more than what I deserve.”

  Bemused, she let him spin, vent that resentful energy. Dark things. Oh yes, she understood him better now. Maybe better than he did himself. A tantalizing, empowering thought.

  Finally he rounded on her. “Are you going to say nothing at all?”

  With deliberate languidness, she lifted her wineglass and sipped. Set it down again. “I was waiting for you to let me get a word in edgewise. Are you done telling me how I feel?”

  He opened his mouth to say something to that, a mean glitter in his eye, then deliberately closed it. Blowing out a long breath, he sat on the side of the tub, the towel clenched in his fists, looked at her and waited.

  “Better. You’re wrong. You are not the same person you were that night. I—”

  “Yes, I am. Don’t kid yourself that—” He bit off the interruption when she raised her eyebrows at him. “Sorry. I’ll shut up.”

  “Do that.”

  He looked chagrined enough at her firm tone that she had to smile, even as part of her wept for that kid inside him that so feared rejection, who seemed to crave her forgiveness and understanding. She could at least give him that, in return for all he’d done to help her.

  “As I was saying, you’re not the same person. You couldn’t be. Not with all you’ve done since. You’re smarter now. Certainly wealthier. You created Ryan Black from the wrecked foundation of that poor kid who was only fighting for his life.”

  “I wasn’t fighting for my life, Celestina. I was never in mortal danger from that git.”

  She stood, letting the water sheet from her body, distracting him immediately. His hot gaze raked her. Stepping out, she took a towel and began drying herself, dragging his gaze from one part of her body to another.