The Other Man (Rose Gold Book 1)

by Nicole French

  The Other Man

  Book I of the Rose Gold Series

  Nicole French

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or rendered fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Raglan Publishing

  ISBN: 978-1-950663-07-1

  All rights reserved.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy.

  Cover Design: Raglan Publishing

  Cover Image: Rafa Catala

  Contents

  Overture

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Intermission I

  Act II

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Intermission II

  Act III

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Nicole French

  The Hate Vow

  Legally Yours

  Overture

  January

  It wasn’t necessarily odd for Nina Evelyn Astor de Vries Gardner to be standing on a New York City sidewalk. After all, this was where she lived. Lexington and East Ninety-Second Street. The heart of the Upper East Side.

  It was odd, however, for her to stand outside her apartment building for nearly an hour. Clutching a bouquet of red roses. Unmoving while the petals swayed in the whistling winter wind and the doormen peering curiously from beyond the old brass-fitted doors.

  It was one in the afternoon, but Nina’s clothes were more appropriate for evening. In fact, they were the same pieces she’d worn the night before: an ice-colored silk shirt and A-line skirt from Chloe, plus her favorite Zanotti heels, three-inches of waterfall-colored leather. Winter whites. Flimsy for the frigid January weather, mitigated only by a heather gray cashmere coat left open despite the wind.

  Nina barely noticed. It might have been thirty-three degrees, but she was burning up. Just looking at the red bricks stacked to the sky, at the thick glass-paned windows that never seemed to open, made her heart beat faster. Made her skin prickle. Made her eyes water.

  She couldn’t understand why.

  After all, this was her home.

  Wasn’t it?

  For a decade, the Upper East Side had been the kingdom below her apartment on the twentieth floor, though one that had never and would never belong to her. That was what happened in the de Vries family when you were the second-born grandchild, and a girl to boot. You were stowed safely in your ivory tower, afloat in luxury. Wrapped in chains of diamonds and gold. Told exactly what to be and where to be it and when.

  And Nina had hardly ever bucked those edicts. Until last night. When her entire perfect world seemed to splinter into pieces, then reconstruct itself unrecognizably for a few hours of passion-colored pleasure, just to shatter all over again.

  And now she was here. Back in this same world. The same life. To put it back together.

  The problem was, she wasn’t sure she could.

  Nina Evelyn Astor de Vries Gardner sighed. It was a mouthful, those names. She’d always hated them. Even the first. “Nina” was short and almost lazy, considering in some languages it just meant daughter. As if that was all she was. And yet, wasn’t that fitting? Someone’s granddaughter, someone’s daughter, someone’s cousin—that was all she had ever been.

  Someone’s wife.

  She wrapped a hand around her left wrist, which only a month ago had been circled with bruises she had carefully hidden with a gaudy Bvlgari watch she only kept for just that reason. Calvin had a strong grip, and that night, it was locked with bourbon. They had a rule, of course. Never her face. She couldn’t act on behalf of De Vries Shipping if she looked like a bruised peach. And her grandmother, Celeste de Vries, the venerated head of one of New York’s oldest families, would have roasted Calvin on a spit before allowing something as untoward as “abuse” to touch her family’s pristine legacy.

  But now Grandmother was dead. Mother, per usual, was awash in gin. Eric, Nina’s cousin and new head of the family, was in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. And his wife was missing somewhere in South Korea.

  The de Vrieses were no longer pristine. And deep down, Nina knew the truth: it was all her fault. Complicity was just as bad as the crime. She was the coward who still hadn’t fessed up to her parts in her family’s mess. Instead, she had escaped her own guilt in the arms of a stranger and broken every vow she had ever made.

  Her real name should be Deceit.

  That’s not fair, doll.

  Nina started at the voice chiming in the back of her mind. A man’s voice. Lilting, self-assured, mischievous and earnest all at once. Mostly polished, but roughened with slightly rounded Ls and Rs, occasional overemphasis of the letter O. The kind of voice she previously heard only from taxi drivers, doormen, workmen. A voice that, despite belonging to a complete stranger less than twenty-four hours ago, was now so ingrained that it was acting the part of her conscience. Reminding her not to let anyone say anything bad about her.

  Not even her.

  Do you believe in love at first sight?

  He’d asked her in the early morning hours, when they were so exhausted that the line between asleep and awake was thoroughly blurred. The question had roused her anyway, sultry as a siren’s call. And like a ship, she’d crashed right into the rocks.

  Not until I saw you.

  Even now, Nina was hardly surprised she had said it. Love was such a foreign concept. Her family said the word maybe once every five, ten years, when expected, and usually in front of cameras or other relevant audiences. Nina honestly doubted they understood what it meant. She wasn’t sure she ever did.

  Until last night, baby.

  Yes. It had been the truth in that beautiful hotel room, on that plush, soft bed, with his green eyes reaching the depths of her with just one look. Love had poured out of her like everything else. Curiosity. Desire. Humor. Lust.

  Love, though, was the reason, when he had wondered come morning just why they couldn’t make a real go of it, she’d gone against every instinct she had.

  She told him the truth.

  Broken his heart and hers.

  And run away as fast as she could.

  Because Nina knew if he looked at her like that again, she wouldn’t have been able to leave him. Not then. Not ever.

  Matthew.

  She thought the name silently to herself. Then thought it again. Drew her mouth around its consonants like she was suckin
g on a piece of candy, letting its sweet nectar glide over her tongue. And for a moment, Nina allowed herself to conjure his face.

  A long, straight nose with just a hint of a break at the bridge. Two green eyes framed by a sooty fringe of lashes. The lush, full mouth always hooked by a slight smirk. An impossibly square jaw dusted by a five o’clock shadow.

  Nina pressed a hand to her aching heart, to a bruise he had left. One of many she actually wanted. She’d managed to cover most of the spots on her neck and arms with concealer. But that one, bright as the roses she held, safely hidden under her shirt, she’d kept.

  Slap me, he’d ordered again under the lush fall of the shower, not for the first time that night. Slap me. Like the dog I am.

  He wasn’t a dog, but he certainly turned her into an animal. And so she had slapped him that time, surprised by the surge of power when her hand found his cheek. The sight of her fingerprints on his olive skin was intoxicating, almost as much as the way his body vibrated, like a guitar string that had just been strummed. He loved it so much that she asked him to do the same for her. Just to see what it was like.

  Matthew had pressed her against the shower wall, spread her wide as he found her depths again and again, and then, like a vampire, bent to her breast. He sucked the delicate skin between his teeth. And bit.

  Do you ever wear red? he had asked her, again and again as he drew a single rose bud up and down the length of Nina’s bare arm, leg, hip, thigh. Would you do it for me?

  Pleasure. Pain. It all danced through her, echoes of the first primal ecstasy she had ever experienced in her twenty-nine, almost thirty years. Her fingers pinched at the spot through her shirt, hard enough to expand the bruise. It wasn’t his lips, his teeth, but considering she would never see Matthew Zola again, it would have to do.

  I can’t take them with me, Nina had told him when he ordered the bouquet up to the room. And yet, as she fled, she captured them too. The final remnants of their scarlet night.

  Nina pressed her face into the roses, the scent taking her back to the room at the Grace Hotel. As scarlet as the letter she should be wearing. Then, with regret she didn’t bother to fight, she set the flowers down on the sidewalk and fished her wedding rings out of her purse. For a moment, she cradled them in her palm, observing the way the afternoon light blinked off the facets of the diamonds. Ten carats on a simple white gold setting, paid out of her own trust). She would have been fine with a much smaller ring, one that Calvin, on his respectable, but mid-level salary at the time, could have afforded.

  He had insisted that a ring like this was needed. If only to look legitimate. Legitimate…for a bride of only twenty.

  So pure and clean. So full of lies.

  In more than one fit of rage, Calvin had grabbed her ring finger and twisted cruelly. Once she had required a splint.

  “Don’t test me, princess,” he’d snap before taking a rough handful of her hair and yanking. “Otherwise I’ll spill all your secrets. You know I will.”

  Had it really been ten years of that?

  Could she survive ten more?

  Nina slid on the rings.

  It was time to go in. To face her life. Her husband. Her…home.

  Nina left the flowers on the pavement for someone else to enjoy. She had known from the start she couldn’t keep them. Color like that simply didn’t belong in her life.

  Part I

  RECITITAVO

  Chapter One

  Matthew

  “So this is what real money buys.”

  Derek Kingston, my investigative partner with the NYPD, and I stared up at the gleaming glass tower just a few blocks from the raging bull of Wall Street. A year ago, if you’d said I’d be on my way to the top of the De Vries Shipping building—a company that had been running the shipping industry in the tristate area since the seventeenth century—I’d have told you to have a few more, why don’t you?

  And yet, here I was. Matthew Zola. Middle-class Joe. One-time jarhead. Assistant prosecutor with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. Somehow doing favors for one of the most powerful men in New York.

  “Come on,” I said. “I told Eric we’d be there at noon. It’s five after.”

  As we started down toward the sunken lobby of the DVS headquarters, my phone rang in my pocket.

  “Hold on.” I reached for it, but it immediately slipped out of my gloved fingers to the marble steps.

  “Here you go, buddy.” Derek handed me the phone. He arched one brow. “Who’s ‘Lady Godiva’?”

  I snatched the device away, frowned at the caller ID, and swiped it off. “No one special.”

  “Special enough to earn a spot in your contacts, though. I don’t know the classics well enough. Why Lady Godiva?”

  Lady Godiva was the wife of a medieval nobleman who supposedly agreed to ride through the town naked if her husband agreed not to overtax the people. The Western world’s first exhibitionist, I guess.

  I rolled my eyes. “This one likes to be watched.”

  “Is that what they teach you in law school? Dirty stories about old ladies?”

  I ignored Derek’s amused stare while we walked the rest of the steps down into the lobby.

  Finally, he shook his head. “Man, you have all the fun. Maybe I should start trolling bars for married chicks too.”

  “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” I said. “Matter of fact, I’m trying to break the habit. There are enough fish in the damn sea without that mess.”

  Derek just laughed. “I’ll believe it when I see it. The day you stop cruising for married chicks is the day I become Mayor of New York. Unless…”

  I looked up sharply. “Unless what?”

  Derek pushed his sunglasses down his nose to eye me up and down. “I’ll put it this way, my friend. Did the fisherman get caught?”

  Before I could answer, a flash of light over his shoulder caught my eye. Bright silky hair, like a waterfall of gold. I shoved Derek to the side and took off after the girl.

  It was her. I knew it was her.

  Two weeks ago, I’d wandered into my friend Jamie’s bar on the Lower East Side, drenched by rain and pretty sure I would end up going home with some random and probably taken woman. As Jamie and Derek both love to taunt me, I did have a, uh, pattern. It wasn’t that I went looking for chicks with diamond rings or boyfriends living in the next state. They just happened to find me. Was it my fault they weren’t getting what they needed at home? They knew the score, and so did I. No one got serious, and no one got hurt.

  So, yeah. I thought I knew exactly what I was getting into that night when I stumbled into Jamie’s bar, soaked and lonely.

  Instead, I met her.

  Tall, blonde, with looks as classic as the red rose I’d played over her naked body and a mind as sharp as its thorns, Nina Astor was a dream incarnate. She wasn’t just the perfect woman. She was perfect for me.

  It had been nearly two weeks since I’d met Nina Astor at the bar Envy. Since we spent half the night talking over wine and tapas—something I honestly never thought I’d do with a woman. I wasn’t the up-all-night type. I was more the love ’em and leave ’em type. After hours of trading quips and small plates, neither of us could take it any longer.

  “And if I told you…if I said it could only be one night?”

  What? Inside, I reeled. One night? How could something like this only last for one night? This was already the stuff of legends. Nina and I hadn’t done anything more than kiss, but I knew it would take years, decades even, to penetrate the depths of what we could be together.

  One night? She might as well have asked for one second.

  But her gaze didn’t waver. She was completely serious.

  The tip of her nose had reddened in the cold, and her lips were swollen from our kisses.

  “One scarlet night,” I murmured as I swept my thumb over her plump lower lip. “Well, if that’s all I get…I’ll take it.”

  My heart plummeted the second I said the w
ords, but I knew they were true.

  Home.

  The word had echoed through my mind the moment I’d slipped inside her, the second warm, slick welcome had squeezed my cock, the instant her flower petal lips touched mine.

  It never occurred to me before then why we call it “coming.” But it’s true, you know. When you do it right, and with the right person too, it really is an arrival. Her body was like coming home.

  But God has a funny sense of humor. After too many years of helping others break the ninth commandment, of course I fell for a married woman. Given my track record, that was just a matter of probability.

  Two weeks ago, Nina Astor and I met by chance. But come the next morning, Cinderella disappeared into thin air. What did that make me, the prince?

  Not fuckin’ likely. People had called me a lot of things in my sad, sorry life. Bastard. Asshole. Homewrecker. Sinner. Prince Charming definitely wasn’t one of them.

  Maybe that’s why I kept trying to find the girl even after she told me not to. By some crazy magic, love makes you a better version of yourself. I still wasn’t ready to go back to what I was before.

  Unfortunately, neither I nor the extensive tools at my disposal could locate her anywhere. And I’d been looking for her ever since. Of course, when I didn’t have my other job to do.