Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42790 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 214(@200wpm)___ 171(@250wpm)___ 143(@300wpm)
“Why are you being so cruel?” she whispers.
“The truth usually is.” I let myself ease back into my chair as though I’m bored, as though my own pulse isn’t going hard against my collar. “Now stop wasting my time. Do we have a deal?”
And here it is, the moment I’ve steered this whole conversation toward, the trap sitting open between us with its jaws back. I’ve told her she’s free. I’ve told her I’m finished. I’ve laid out the exit she ought to be leaping for with both hands, a clean end and a settlement more generous than any court would grant her and the golden boy waiting in the wings the entire city picked for her in the first place. All she has to do is say yes, give me a child, and walk out into the better life everyone agrees she should have had.
She lifts her eyes to me, and her chin does the brave thing it always does in the half-second before it crumples, and she says the only words in the language that can keep her.
“I can’t give my baby up.”
They’re exactly the words I expected. I know her well enough, even now, even with Nolan’s photographs burning a hole in my desk drawer, to have known she would never hand a child over to a man like the one I’m playing. I built the entire trap on that one certainty.
And I still feel the relief slam into me hard enough to drive the breath clean out of my chest, and I have to hold my own face still by main force so she won’t see what her answer has done to me. Because those six small words are the key to her cell, and I have just turned it on her, and the worst and most shameful truth of my entire life is that I needed to hear them. I need her to stay mine. I would burn the franchise and the fortune and the name my father never gave me to the ground before I’d let her walk out that door and into Barrymore’s car, and I will die before I let her see one flicker of it.
“Fine, then.”
This is my answer. It’s the only one I have in me.
“You’ll remain my wife, so that you can be a mother to our child. But make no mistake about the terms of it.” I hold her gaze across the desk so she’ll know I mean every word. “One mistake from you, and I will cut you out of that child’s life so completely you’ll be reading about its birthdays in the papers along with everyone else.”
“What mistake would I ever—”
“Another man,” I say.
Her eyes go wide and wet. “I would never—”
“Then we won’t have any problem at all, will we.” I tip my head toward the door before she can finish swearing me an innocence I can’t let myself believe in. “I’ll see you at home.”
She gets to her feet, and her legs don’t quite hold her, and she catches at the arm of the chair to stay upright. “T-Trey...”
My jaw locks down so hard it aches, because my name in her mouth used to be the best sound in the whole world to me. She’d say it sleepy in the mornings, say it laughing into her coffee, say it soft against my shoulder in the dark, and I built a small quiet private religion out of the way she said it. Now it goes into me like something with an edge, because she’s saying it the way a person says a name they’re begging, and I have made very sure she has nothing left she’s allowed to beg me for.
“We’ve discussed everything that needs discussing,” I tell her. “I expect you ready when I come home. The sooner we get you with child, the sooner we both get what we want out of this.”
She goes. I watch the heavy door settle shut behind her and I sit dead still in the big chair until I’m certain she’s past the elevator and out of earshot, and then I let out a breath with six months and one ruined morning packed down inside it, and before it’s even fully out of me I’m reaching for the phone, because the only thing I have ever known to do with a feeling is put it to work.
I call Nolan.
He’s the man I keep on retainer for the work that can’t be done out in the open, the one who quietly profiled three separate sets of investors for me before I let any of them near the team and saved me a fortune in every case. He picks up the way he always picks up, on the second ring, no name, no greeting, no weather.
“Boss.”
“I need a favor.”
“Sure.”
I give him the names without any preamble. Barrymore first, and longest, everything there is to be had on him going back a full year, where he goes and who he sees and what he wants and whether any part of what he wants is currently asleep in the farthest guest room of my apartment. Then Raymond Glasgow, because a man who walks into my office with a folder of photographs already copied and waiting is a man who has been planning this a great deal longer than a single morning, and I want the name of everyone who sat at the table with him while he did it. Then two more names off the board, the two who’ve always been the loudest on the subject of the right schools and the right grandfathers.