I LOVE YOU, BUT YOU chose the worst fucking time to call.
Like all thoughts, it was mundane, spontaneous, and gratuitous. It flashed through my mind as I waited outside Darren Morgansen’s office to tell him thanks for the six million bucks, but I’d really rather bury my dick in his stepdaughter. In-fucking-definitely. Problem was, the person calling me was said stepdaughter.
And, I’d just said that I loved her.
Or at least thought it.
Yes. I’d thought it.
No, wait, I was sure of it.
Shit, I loved Jesse Carter.
Was in love with Jesse Carter.
But, of course, you are, little prick. Do you make a habit of impulsively pissing over six million bucks from an oil tycoon and breaking a contract with them?
This morning, in my dingy kitchenette, I’d known that I wasn’t just fucking Snowflake. I was also fucking SurfCity to death, because I would never come up with the money for the investment, and more than that, I was fucking myself over, because holy shit, I was about to be one million dollars indebted to someone. Wasn’t that the ultimate irony, though? I made so much money fucking people for a living, but in the end, it was one fuck that would cost me a million bucks.
Darren opened his office door and motioned for me to come in, so I let the call die rather than send it to voicemail. For the first time in a long time I didn’t feel cocky as a rooster. I was actually nervous. Not about the breaking the deal part. Fuck him. But about owing someone so much money. Usually, I was on the owed-to side, not vice versa. I could come up with the money, but not right away. I needed twelve months. Minimum. No one said he was going to give them to me.
“How are you feeling?” Darren asked as he led me to his underwhelming office. The thought occurred to me, for the first time, that Darren designed everything around him—himself included—to come off as unthreatening and harmless. A red alert started flashing inside my head. Ding, ding, ding.
He never wore expensive suits.
Always stood crouched, his chin down.
His lips. His offices. His relationships. He was almost conveniently weak.
“Please don’t pretend like you give a fuck.” I dumped my wallet and cell phone onto his desk, taking a seat. “Life’s too short for that.”
“Fair enough.” He watched me carefully, making his way to his seat. This time he didn’t offer me a drink, or a cigar, or his left lung. He offered me a pissed look that told me that he already knew I’d come bearing bad news.
Then he actually beat me to it. “You thlept with her.”
The gentleman code dictated that I shouldn’t deny nor confirm this statement, but the contract I’d signed indicated that I’d better speak up, unless getting slapped with a lawsuit was a turn-on. I settled for somewhere in between. I wasn’t ready to throw Jesse under the bus in case she hadn’t told him. And I strongly wanted to believe Jesse hadn’t shared her sexual exploits with her stepdaddy, because: super. Fucking. Gross.
“Whether I did or not is irrelevant. Circumstances change. I want out.” I lit up a joint coolly, throwing the still-lit match onto the desk between us. I did it mainly to spite him and to remind him that he was not the boss of me. Though I wasn’t entirely sure if that was true. The match sizzled and died, and I wished Darren would follow suit.
“You have a few more months left, I believe.” Darren cracked his neck, glancing at the time on my phone. He looked oddly at ease, and I wondered what kind of Xanax he was popping these days.
“She has a job. She’s got friends. She’s got me. None of that is going to change in the next six months, or years, if she decides to stay in Todos Santos.” The thought she might not made me want to break someone’s nose. “So the whole timeline issue is irrelevant. I’m not asking for the remainder of the money. I’m letting you walk away after paying me three million dollars for way more than six months.” For a lifetime. But, of course, I didn’t utter this shit aloud because for one, it was pathetic, and two, I knew Jesse was going to wise up sooner or later and go for a guy who deserved her. Life doesn’t stop for anyone. Even not for a low-bending asshole like me.
“The time limit was the reason we had a contract,” Darren argued, his left eye ticking, before adding, “but that was before you broke the contract. You’re right about one thing, Bane. Circumstances have changed.”
I leaned forward. “Don’t give me this bullshit. I helped your stepdaughter more than her therapist and the two of you have, combined.”
“Still broke a contract,” he said dryly.
I realized I didn’t have the time nor the interest to bicker with this clown, so I just waved him off. “Know what? Whatever. I spent around a mill of what you gave me. I’ll wire you the remaining two million back. We’ll call it even. Move on with your life and put that wife of yours on a shorter leash.”
“Bane.” He sprawled his bony fingers on the desk, grinning. “You’re not listening carefully to this entire conversation.”
I cocked my head to the side. “Huh?”
“You’re seriously, stupidly fucked.”
Darren opened a locked drawer in his desk, not sparing me a look. He took out a pile of documents from it and slapped it on the surface between us, before taking a steady breath, his expression blasé and foreign on his face, and said, “Why don’t you read clause number seventy-seven, point seven, Mr. Protsenko? Maybe the damages clause will make the penny drop.”
Then I finally got it.
The lisp.
It was gone.
It was gone, and so was the man I thought I’d read so well. Darren Morgansen straightened in his seat. He looked sharper, more alert. Not the same god the tycoons of Todos Santos were, but closer. Warmer.
What the fuck are you playing at, old man?
He slid the signed contract my way, and my eyes searched frantically for that goddamn clause I hadn’t bothered reading. I didn’t even have to ask why he’d faked a goddamn lisp. It was to throw people like me off. That’s why I’d skimmed the contract. Because he acted like a weak-chinned chicken. He wasn’t. He was something else entirely, and the worst part was that I had yet to figure out what. My eyes landed on the clause, and I could almost feel the chuckle Darren produced from his mouth inside my own throat, choking me.
77.7 In the case of termination or breach of the contract for any reason whatsoever by Roman Protsenko (The Entrepreneur), and with respect to the time, effort, and resources of Darren Morgansen (The Investor), The Entrepreneur shall compensate The Investor with $1.5 Million USD, which is a readily ascertainable sum certain of damages suffered by The Investor.
My eyes kept on reading and reading and re-fucking-reading the same paragraph over and over again, because it didn’t make any sense. How had I signed something like this? I was savvy. Every move I made was calculated to a fault. I may have looked like the easy-going pothead, and I certainly played the part—just like Darren played his—but I was a chess player, for fuck’s sake. Artem would kill me if he knew. If he was alive. Which he wasn’t.
Shit. Oh, God. Shit, shit, shit.
Darren propped his elbows on his desk, his smirk widening. He was having a great time. He pressed his index finger to the middle of the page and dragged it slowly back to his side of the desk, making a show of sighing. “Looks like you’re in a bit of a pickle.”
I stared him down, feeling the air inside my body turning into fuel, burning with anger. “What’s your fucking angle?”
He raised one eyebrow, poking his lower lip out. “Angle?”
“You didn’t go through all this trouble for nothing. What was your end game, Morgansen? And don’t fuck with me.”
He rubbed his chin in circles, thinking about it. “Fair enough. Seeing as you are indebted to me a sum of money you can never repay—two-and-a-half million dollars, I believe—and your relationship with Jesse is pretty much over, I guess I can tell you. It was about Artem.”
“Huh?” I wasn’t following him.
“Artem,” he repeated, “was my angle. See, I knew you wouldn’t be able to keep your hands off Jesse, and I never liked you, Bane. Even before I knew you, I hated you. I hated you because I hated him.”
“What business did you have with fucking Artem?” I spat out. I’d liked my mother’s former boyfriend, but he was a distant memory at this point. Mostly, I was sad for my mom. She’d really liked him.
Darren threw his head back and laughed. I wanted to punch his face, but wanted to hear his explanation even more.
Finally, he calmed down. “Artem Omeniski was Jesse’s dad.”
Here’s the thing about life: most of time, you’re in motion, so you don’t really know what’s happening around you. You are simply reacting to situations, and that’s why it is said that your life is actually nothing but a collection of your decisions. But sometimes, life is more than that. Sometimes, it’s a puzzle that falls into place with a click. Everything made sense now.
Pam and Artem had never been married. Therefore, Jesse was a Carter, not an Omeniski.
Artem had cheated on Pam with my mother, tearing Jesse’s family apart.
Artem was loved and adored by Jesse, and Darren hated him, or the idea of him. Consequently, he knew that I was the bastard child Artem had taken under his wing all those years ago. That’s actually how my mom and Artem had met. Around middle school, he’d gotten assigned to make sure I wasn’t going to grow up to be a serial killer or something, and we had weekly meetings. They’d wanted a Russian-speaking social worker I’d feel comfortable with, and I did. We hit it off. He’d come to our house. Eaten from our plates. Taught me shit. And my mother was always warm, perceptive, beautiful, and soft-spoken. They had similar values and thoughts and culture. I couldn’t fault him for cheating on Pam. Hell, he’d probably stuck around just to be in Jesse’s life. Who knew what Pam would have been capable of if he’d left?
“So you wanted to get back at Artem through me?” I rubbed my chin. “Are you aware of the fact that you can’t hurt dead people? They’re kind of beyond that.”
Darren shrugged. “Still. Jesse loved the bastard so much. He didn’t deserve all this admiration.”
“Did you kill him?” As far as everyone knew, Artem had fallen down the stairs and died in the office building where he’d worked. Broken neck. His death sounded too convenient. Darren stared at me with confusion. “I’m not a killer.”
“So Vicious was a part of this plan,” I said, trying to make sure all the pieces of the puzzle were neatly placed. Darren shook his head. “He helped you get to me.”
I thought about the meeting with Vicious all those months ago. About how he’d directed me to Darren. The latter shook his head.
“I met Baron at the country club a few months ago. Knew you were going to ask him if he wanted in on the deal because you look up to him. Everyone in this rancid town knows that you’re the next heir in line for the title of king. So I casually mentioned that I was looking to invest in local business. He didn’t know of my plan for you—he simply took the bait.”
“And how do you think Jesse is going to react when she finds out about this?” I gritted out.
“That’s the beauty of our situation.” He smiled, stretching his arms wide. “You would never tell her anything, unless you want to be drowning in debt for the rest of your miserable life. Everything I did was for Jesse. Artem was a vile man. I knew that from the moment I laid my eyes on Pam and Jesse all those years ago. I wanted to give Jesse the life she never would have gotten. And I did. But after Jesse was attacked by those boys, I needed to find a way to lure her back into reality. You were perfect. Beautiful, boyish, and most importantly—openly for sale.” He stopped, his eyes darting to my face. I didn’t even offer a tick of a jaw, looking blasé as ever. He continued cautiously. “I knew you’d be able to slay her demons for the right price, and I was eager to pay it. I thought it could go two ways—either you would fulfill your part of the deal and let her go quietly, because let’s admit it, a girl like Jesse is simply too good for a punk like you.” He hitched a shoulder, smirking. “Or you would break the contract, in which case, not only would I be preventing Artem’s favorite bastard from getting his precious SurfCity, but I would also be owed some serious money. Now, here is what’s going to happen—you are going to walk out of my office and end it with Jesse. Tell her you don’t want a relationship, and that she can still keep the job at Café Diem. Erase her contact from your phone. Ignore her texts. Leave her alone. Do all this, and consider us square. Disobey, and you’re in big trouble. Millions of problems, to be exact.”
There’s an unwritten rule about confrontation. The last one to speak usually won. Or, at the very least, the last one to speak normally didn’t lose. I wanted to be that person, so I did the only thing I saw fit. I smiled, like he’d just offered me a deal that was way too easy to refuse, when in reality, I knew that I was no longer drowning in deep shit. I was already half-dead.
I sent a hand to his neck, running my fingers through his tie, then yanking the tip. Hard. Not to choke him, but enough to show him that I could. And that I would, if need be. My face was so close to his, I saw the panic swimming in his pupils. He may have faked a lisp, but he couldn’t fake bravery. He was scared. Rightly so.
“I think you didn’t take one thing into consideration, Morgansen. I grew up here. I know this place. I am the place. You may have the money, but not the respect. Or the friends. Or the connections. You have zero power over me, and if you think I will cower and bow down to you, get lawyered up right now.” I let go of his tie, letting him drop like a sack of potatoes back to his executive chair, gagging a little. I paced to the door, easy, unconcerned, and smiling, though I felt none of those things. I stopped at the threshold and turned around. “You messed with the wrong motherfucker, Darren.”
“Dump her.”
“I’m sorry. Are you deaf now? Did you not hear my last sentence?”
“You’ll regret it, son.”
I hadn’t had the best history with dads in general, but I was pretty sure I’d rather pluck off my balls than ever hear Darren refer to me as his son. I slammed the door in his face, letting it rattle on its hinges in my wake.
Like hell I will.
I barely made the trip down in the elevator before bile glazed my throat. I threw my breakfast up into a manicured rosebush outside Darren’s corporate building, then wobbled my way to the nearest BevMo and bought a bottle of vodka to wash down a pack of Tylenols. Class before ass. After washing down two pills with a swig of the good stuff and discarding the rest of the bottle into a trash can, I leaned against my Harley, elbows-on-handles, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to say to Jesse.
The truth, you liar. How about you start being honest?
But the truth was complicated. It was messy and uncomfortable. And even I couldn’t fathom it all the way. For one thing, Jesse and I were kind of stepsiblings. Artem and I didn’t share any genes. In fact, he hadn’t even married my mom, but he’d played daddy when I’d needed him to, which was more often than not. Even though my mother hadn’t known he had a family until it was too late—I’m sure she figured it out when she went to his funeral and was too much of a saint to share with me, not wanting to tarnish his reputation in my eyes—she felt close to him. Bright side to this bombshell: at least now I had a definite answer to my mom’s question whether she was going to meet Jesse anytime soon: hard pass.
I was pretty sure Jesse would want nothing to do with my mother and me, and even if she could overcome the twisted misfortune of our connection, there was still the deceit factor. I was going to have to own up to signing a contract where she was pretty much nothing more than a pawn. A means to an end. Then, finally, there was the money issue. I was officially indebted to Darren—millions upon millions of dollars I did not have. I could sell Café Diem, and the new hotel definitely had to go. Without a doubt, I was going to lose my pants in the upcoming months—probably the houseboat, too. I tried to tell myself that I would eventually reinvent myself. I always had.
The liar. The con. The thief. The escort.
I wore many hats, playing people like they were my favorite instrument. They say you win some, you lose some, but the latter, I’d never really experienced. Not until I’d gained something that actually mattered.
Fuck it. I would lose my pants, and my properties, and my business, but not her. Not Jesse.
With that in mind, I hopped on my bike and headed toward her house. The plan was to come clean, and maybe try to convince her not to kill me. I was hoping my pissing all over Darren’s threats and choosing her over the money was going to earn me some bonus points. Of course, I’d never been fucked by a guy who agreed to take me out for money, so what the fuck did I know?
Shit.
When I arrived at El Dorado, I pushed the automatic button for the neighborhood’s gate and watched as it remained locked. Jesus fuck. They’d changed it. They’d changed the electronic system. Didn’t take a genius to know who’d done it.
Samantha was the only person who’d given the key to an outsider.
Now, she was no longer a client.
What she was, was: pissed, vindictive, and no longer of use to me.
I parked my Harley in front of the gate. My foot was already on the first black railing, when I heard someone behind me.
“Trespassing in broad daylight. If you want to buy your lawyer their next Cabo villa, just open a GoFundMe account,” Vicious practically yawned.
I turned around, tipping my chin down to inspect him. He was tucked inside his silver Aston Martin One-77, one arm resting on the edge of his open window.
“Just open the fucking gate.”
“Bane. Didn’t recognize your face without the pube hair. Where you headed?” He skipped the snarky comment, and that’s how I knew even he took pity on me. Wow. I must’ve looked like one pathetic piece of crap.
“The Morgansens’.” It pained me to even say Darren’s last name.
Vicious flicked his Ray-Bans down, scrutinizing me. “Business going well?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I was still hanging from the gate like a drunken monkey when he pushed his automatic button and the thing started moving. I hopped down. Vicious cocked his head to his right.
“Get in.”
“I have my bike.”
“They’ll see you with it inside—they’ll freak out. Samantha Haggins got a verbal spanking the other day for giving her boy toy the keys. Any guesses who he might be?”
Damn. I shook my head and got into his car.
Vicious didn’t try to coax any details out of me on our ride to the house, and I tried not to think about how nervous I was to see Jesse. When he dropped me off in front of the colonial mansion, he produced a joint from his pocket, lit it, took a hit, and handed it over to me.
“No longer strangers,” he said.
I stared at him impatiently, but took the joint, because I needed it. I shook my head. “I think I’m in deep trouble, Baron.”
“Good. That means that there’s someone in your life that’s worth the risk.”
There’s a saying in Russian. Trouble never comes alone. I should have known when I left Darren’s office that there was more to come. But I didn’t, because I was so fixated on the unfolding clusterfuck I’d gotten myself into, I hadn’t even bothered to return Jesse’s call.
She opened the door, her eyes and nose red, the rest of her face the palest I’d ever seen. Her hair was a mess, and her eyes lacked that mischievous zing that made my dick hard. I immediately forgot my long, elaborate speech and took a step in, jerking her into my arms.
“You okay?”
“Shadow died.”
“Fuck,” I breathed, clutching her harder, my nose buried in her hair. “When?”
“This morning. Pam found him, but didn’t call me. He had cancer. She’s known for…a while.”
Jesse delivered the news with the kind of detachment that showed me that she was still in shock. Now was not the time to drop another bomb on her ass, and definitely not the time to drag her into my war with Darren. At the same time, I was aware that he was about to arrive home sometime soon, and I needed her out of there. I pulled back, running my fingers over her eyes, hair, cheeks, lips. Doing inventory, making sure everything was intact. That my Jesse was still mine. She was. For now.
“Where is he now?”
She looked up to the belly of her stairway. “I carried him up to my room. I didn’t know what to do. I need to bury him. But, Roman…”
She burst into tears again, and I held her for a few minutes, feeling the blood roar in my ears, before marching in and going up the stairs. Pam was coming down as I was going up. Her face told me she no longer wanted to fuck me, or if she did, it was with a broomstick up my ass. I flipped her the finger and continued to Jesse’s room, picked Shadow up, wrapped him up in a sheet, and carried him downstairs.
“Where are you taking the dog?” Pam barked from the kitchen, fixing herself a drink. I didn’t answer. I wanted to kill her, her husband, and Dr. Wiese, who’d taken the shortcut and dropped the C-bomb on Pam, just because he’d known it would be easier, that Jesse was fragile and sensitive when it came to her dog.
“Come on, Snowflake.”
I hoisted Shadow to the trunk and climbed into the Rover. Jesse followed in silence. I drove to the reservoir on the outskirts of town, knowing there’d be plenty of land for me to bury him there. Snowflake sniffed and looked out the window. I didn’t want to force a conversation, knowing how many things were going through her head. Sometimes she held my hand. I wanted so bad to squeeze hard and tell her there was more. That she needed to be strong for me, because shit was about to get real complicated, real fast.
“Jesse.”
“Mrs. B is dying. Her kids don’t want to come to California to say goodbye,” she said flatly, staring out the window, flicking the glass with her thumb and forefinger.
I bit down on a string of curses. “Is that so?”
“Yeah. They said I should stop contacting them. I wanted them to come here while she was still lucid, but that’s not going to happen. Know what else is not going to happen? My going back to living with Pam. I’ve had enough of her bullshit. The only thing I really cared about in that house was Shadow, and he is gone now.”
I knew I was cooking up a disaster, considering the shit I was keeping from her, but couldn’t stop myself, anyway. “You’ll stay with me.” It wasn’t a question.
“I was thinking of asking Gail. She needs a roommate.”
“She needs better taste in music,” I quipped. “If I hear My Chemical Romance blasting from her phone one more time, I swear someone will get decapitated.”
I expected a snort, a laugh, anything. But nothing ever came. I reached to touch her thigh. “Hey. It will be okay.”
“No, it won’t. My dad’s dead. My dog’s dead. My best friend is dying. The only person I have left is you. Well, and Darren and Mayra, I guess, but they only care because they have to. One is paid, and the other is just embarrassed by his sorry excuse for a wife.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t think Darren cared for her. If he had, he wouldn’t have pulled this type of shit. But hey, what the fuck did I know about love? A lot, apparently. For starters, I knew that it hurt like a motherfucker.
I parked her vehicle a few feet away from an old sycamore. The earth beneath it was loose and damp, easy to dig. I took out a shovel I’d picked up from the gardener’s shed from the trunk, flung my shirt to the driver’s seat and started digging. She watched my back all the while. I carried Shadow into his burial spot and covered him in dark soil, then grabbed a pointy branch and wrote down his name in the sand. Shadow Dog Carter.
“Let’s give him a eulogy.” I tugged her to my side, wrapping my arm around her shoulders and dropping a kiss on the crown of her head. “He was a good dog. He deserves it.”
She stared at the fresh pile of mud mounded under the sycamore, her chin shaking. I wanted to suck her agony into my own body until she felt better, even if it killed me. And the worst part, was, I knew I was wronging her by not telling her about my meeting with Darren this afternoon. About Artem. And still, I couldn’t see her hurting more.
“Once upon a time there was a little girl,” she started, crouching down and burying her palm inside the soil. “The girl was scared of the dark and loved Kit Kats. There were four fingers on every Kit Kat. One for her. One for her father. One for her mother, and one…” She paused. I knew she was smiling, even though she was looking down. “The girl wanted a companion, so her daddy gave her a puppy for Christmas. The girl named the dog Shadow, because he followed her everywhere. In the pouring rain and the blistering heat. He was there for her when her daddy died. He was there for her when her mother reinvented herself and decided that the girl no longer fit into the picture. He was there for her when they took her soul and all that was left behind was her scarred body. He was there for her, even though she wasn’t there for him. The girl was too scared to face the real world. To take him to the vet. To save him.”
“Jesse.”
She shook her head, a tear landing on the soil beneath her. “Why does the truth always hurt so bad?”
You tell me. I’m drowning in it right now.
When I was young and impressionable, Artem had given me a piece of advice I’d liked so much, I’d tattooed that shit onto my torso, just in case. A tribute to the man I hadn’t known would be such a magnificent part of my downfall.
Don’t fall in love. Fall off a bridge. It hurts less.
I liked it because it was funny. I’d had no idea it was also true. I picked Jesse up, and she buried her face in my chest. I wasn’t much good at comforting, but I wanted to make it as easy as possible for her.
“Give me Mrs. Belfort’s kids’ numbers,” I said.
I called them the same evening, when Jesse was taking a shower.
The next day, they were on the plane.