NATHAN
“Why Infidelity?”
Nathan lifted his eyes and met Portia’s across the long dining room table of his penthouse, the Manhattan cityscape twinkling beyond the bay windows to his immediate left. The weather had been playing tricks all week, changing from rain to sleet and back again with the waning, winter sun. But tonight, the temperature had spiked, encouraging rain, then dropped, turning rain to snow. He should’ve found it beautiful, but he was blind to it. Blind to everything except the growing suspicion in his gut. Had he guessed right about her? Was she a part of the enemy—as of yet, still unknown to him—who had bugged the Cromwell building, who were hellbent on taking his family, and company, down for crimes he hadn’t even known were being committed? Or was she just nosey? Had she held her own, unwavering as he’d tested her and punished her, because she really was just ‘Portia’, a young woman who’d recently moved to Manhattan from the Midwest, penniless yet hopeful, who’d seen The Infidelity Corp. as an answer? Just as Nathan had.
Her blue eyes were wide and innocent. In the low candlelight, she seemed almost too young, or perhaps she seemed too innocent for the red cocktail dress he’d laid out for her, the dangerously high stilettos of the same color and matching red lipstick. She looked like a vixen, like the confident, commanding woman he’d seen at the Winter Ball. He preferred to see her as that—mask and all—as opposed to the person she was gradually becoming before his very eyes. The real Portia.
Trusting. Lost. Naïve.
It didn’t make for a very level playing field…
…and it had certainly been muddying the waters of his suspicions of her. Could someone as apparently innocent as Portia really be working in cahoots with a government agency, undercover as it were, with the calculated aim of securing Nathan’s arrest?
“Couldn’t I ask the same of you?” he countered without batting an eye.
As they held each other’s gazes from across the long, candlelit table, Nathan pushed his finished plate aside and scooped up his untouched glass of scotch.
“I’m just making conversation,” she said in a small voice as it occurred to her that his tone had been a touch defensive.
Was she, though?
“I thought we both found our way to Infidelity for the same reason,” he offered.
She plucked her long-stemmed pinot noir glass from beside her water and took a thoughtful sip then conceded, “Maybe. But you have options. Vast options, and I don’t.”
“You say ‘options’, but you mean ‘money’.”
“I do,” she agreed.
“Money can’t change a person’s desires. It might be able to change a person’s mind, but not what’s in their heart.”
“You think ‘heart’ has any place in what you did to me in your office earlier?” she challenged, lifting her chin in the same proud way she had time and again at the Winter Ball. It was almost as if she’d decided to act like that woman again, like it had been too close a call that her guard had inadvertently lowered and Nathan had seen a sliver of who she really was.
“Fine, call it ‘want’ or ‘need’,” he negotiated. “You can pay a man to starve, but the money won’t erase his need for food. It won’t cause him to no longer want to eat. I could throw money at a woman in exchange for her ultimate surrender, but it won’t change whether or not she really has it in her heart to give herself to me like that.”
“Why do you need someone to ‘give themselves to you’?”
Nathan fell silent for a long moment after which he quietly admitted, “I don’t know.” After another long moment of staring at one another from across the table, he asked, “Why do you need to give yourself to a man?” When it became clear that her only response would be her increased breathing, shallow and clipped though she was trying to hide it, he questioned, “Or did you lie your way into this contract?”
Her voice was wind over reeds as she said, “No.”
“You didn’t lie about what you want out of this contract?”
Again, she breathed, “No.”
“And yet you badger me to tell you all of my secrets?” he pointed out.
Her voice cracked as she explained, “Isn’t that the dynamic?”
Was she groveling? Making excuses? Why did her tone sound as if she was pleading?
“The power I could have over you?” she rephrased. “Your secrets in my hand. My life in yours. Like we’ve each drawn our guns on the other. A standoff.”
“So, you want power over me,” he concluded. “You can’t see that if you knew it all, I’d only have more reason to take your life.”
Fear flashed across her pretty face, but she told him, “Isn’t that the edge we both want to see how close we can come to?”
He studied her in the low light. Her masks kept shifting, flickering as badly as the candlelight between them. An innocent girl playing dress-up, naïve enough to think clothes could fool anyone. She was acting or playing. Either way, this was a high-stakes game she would lose.
But she was right about one thing.
This was a standoff, and if she lost, so too would he.
Boldly, she set her glass of wine down and leaned in. “What have you been doing that if I found out, you’d want me dead?”
Without hesitation and perhaps without thinking, he slammed his glass on the table, scotch sloshing out, and yelled, “I haven’t done a damn thing. I don’t run Cromwell top to bottom. I don’t approve every investment.” Tears that he hoped she couldn’t see stung his eyes as his volume rose. “I might have to go down with the ship, but not because I was the one who steered it into the iceberg.”
A flicker of remorse flared behind her blue eyes and her lips parted with what might have been astonishment or regret. Nathan was too emotional to tell and already advancing on her, having sprang from his chair.
“Can’t you see why I need you?” He jerked her out of her chair, shaking off her every mask until there was nothing but raw terror on her face. “Can’t you?”
Stunned, she only gaped her speechless mouth and winced at his squeezing grip on her upper arms.
As he forced her through his penthouse, making a rough beeline for the soundproof, private playroom on the other side of a hidden wall at the back of the master bedroom, he growled, “It’s not because I have it all and I’m sitting on top of the world.”
He tossed her into the windowless room, its black walls and black-leather apparatuses a virtual void. The motion-sensor lights came on, glowing red. Hellish.
Crying, she stumbled, but caught herself against a leather bench.
“It’s because I’m being controlled!”
She might have breathed, “By who?” but all he could hear was his own pulse pounding in his ears.
“Because I’m a puppet, wearing a mask, being made to say and do things, remaining in the dark otherwise! There’s no accepting it, without…”
He trailed off, chest heaving, adrenaline flowing, as he towered over her and watched silent tears streak down her pretty cheeks from where she cowered.
It drained him, having let his emotions—the truth—erupt out of him, and it wasn’t with rough hands that he lifted her.
He held her tightly against the firm wall of his chest, cradling her head and feeling her tremble in his arms.
Each word was a gruff exhale, “Do you want to be here?”
“I don’t know,” she rasped, urging him back so that she could stare up at him.
She looked like a fallen angel in the dim, red light that bathed the hellish room.
“Do you trust me?”
“No,” she whispered. Then, taking a step back in her dangerous stilettos, she peeled the straps of her red dress off her shoulders and let the garment flutter to the ground. “But you don’t trust me either.”
Drinking in the sight of her—the lines and curves of her slender body illuminated in a soft, red glow—he groaned at her flawless nudity.
In the next breath, he was on her. Portia’s long, smooth legs wrapped his waist as he lifted her onto the bench. He squeezed and kneaded her fleshy hips as she hungrily unfastened his belt, opened his slacks, freed his hardening body with her warm hand.
That evening, as they moved together in the red glow of a soundproof room, Nathan didn’t need to use chains and whips, didn’t need to tie her up, punish her, be the master to her slave…
…and he didn’t know why, but thrusting into the slippery, hot folds of her tight body, lips brushing lips, sweat beading up and rolling down both their chests, was enough.
More than enough.
It was all he really wanted.
By some magic, he woke with Portia in his arms as the cool, winter light of dawn brightened his bedroom. There was a distinct chill in the air, but under the covers, Portia’s hot body draped over him, was warm.
He didn’t want to leave her, but he had business to attend to. Always.
It wasn’t until he’d gotten his fill of savoring the stillness of this perfect morning that he slipped out from under his sleeping angel and quietly dressed in a tailored Armani suit. Within minutes he was three floors below in his office, tending to emails with the urgency of a man eager to return to his lover before the hustle and bustle of a typical Thursday at the Cromwell Corp could enslave him to twelve hours of stress and grief.
Arguably, it had been wishful thinking, which his mother Guinevere made abundantly clear when she barged into his office unannounced and uninvited.
“You weren’t answering your phone,” she told him as though it was an acceptable reason for interrupting what should’ve been a quiet, productive morning. She brought with her the Head of Security, a man by the name of Kurt Washington who was commonly referred to as ‘Sergeant’ by both his subordinates and, evidently, Nathan’s mother. “Close the door, Sergeant.”
Once he had, Nathan joined them on the lounge side of his stately office, but no one sat.
Guinevere stared at Nathan with the kind of gravity to warrant a death in the immediate family. Since the two of them comprised his immediate family, he reasoned this could only be about the looming investigation. After taking a tense moment to smooth her boney hands down her crisp, Chanel skirt-suit—a pastel purple relic from the 50s that, according to Guinevere and most fashion magazines, would never go out of style—Guinevere announced, “There’s a snake in the grass.”
“I’m aware, Mother.”
“No, I don’t think you are,” she snapped.
Interjecting, Sergeant suggested, “Let’s be careful about what we say.”
“That again?” asked Nathan before mouthing the word, ‘bug’?
“We have to assume so,” said Guinevere as she cut her stunning green eyes across the room.
“Shall we discuss this elsewhere?” offered Nathan as he pointed one finger upwards, indicating the roof.
Moments later, Sergeant held the steel door open for Guinevere and Nathan to step out into the snowy and bitter cold. The roof of the Cromwell building was railed off with five-foot steel walls so that no one who ventured up here would accidentally plummet forty floors to their death.
When they reached the walled railing, Guinevere urged the Head of Security to clue Nathan in on whatever had seemingly aged her overnight.
“First thing this morning,” Sergeant began, “I recognized a disturbance in the surveillance feed.”
“Okay,” said Nathan after the man had let that hang in the frigid air for a beat.
“I won’t bore you with the details, but for a stretch of approximately one-hour last night, the feed was replaced with a loop of footage of you and a young lady sharing dinner.”
“So, we’re talking about my penthouse,” Nathan clarified, unnerved.
Impatiently, Guinevere demanded, “Please tell me you didn’t leave your apartment last night, that they weren’t able to sweep in and do god knows what in your absence.”
Understanding her, he clenched his jaw, as Sergeant explained, “All of the feeds were interrupted and replaced with looped footage of a mundane hour. I’m talking every floor, every elevator, every inch of this building that our surveillance cameras cover. We have to assume that, best case scenario, bugs were planted.”
“And worse case?” asked Nathan.
Guinevere folded her frail arms against the blustery wind as it kicked up a flurry of snow, and said, “Worse case, they copied the content of our hard drives, took photos of our files, duplicated all of Cromwell’s accounts, legitimate or otherwise.”
“If I can cut off the head of the snake,” Sergeant assured them both, “then it’ll give us a shot—”
“Head?” asked Nathan. “What ‘head’? Who’s the ‘head of the snake?”
Sergeant and Guinevere exchanged a grave look then she nodded, permitting their Head of Security to deliver what Nathan sensed would surely be quite a blow.
But it was his mother who challenged, “This woman you’ve been seeing… what do you really know about her?”
“Portia?” he asked, putting two and two together. His stomach bottomed out through the snowy roof faster than a Cromwell building elevator and he grimaced. He hated being right sometimes, hated his infallible gut instinct. He hadn’t wanted to be right about Portia. He wanted to repeat last night, over and over again, for the next year, maybe even for the rest of his life. “You’re telling me that a twenty-five year old, midwestern transplant is the ‘head of the snake’ that’s aiming to take down Cromwell and imprison us all?”
Their silence was unbelievable confirmation enough, but still Sergeant explained, “We discovered elevator surveillance footage of her handling a bug.”
“You’re welcome to watch it, see for yourself,” offered Guinevere when Nathan paced off across the snowy rooftop in need of air, desperate to distance himself from this thing.
He turned on his heel and, charging back towards Sergeant, asked the man, “How would you ‘cut off the head of the snake’? What does that mean?”
Sergeant deferred to Guinevere, as if unwilling to state any incriminating tactics out loud.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Nathan balked in astonishment. “She’s a pawn at best.”
“She’s a distraction,” his mother corrected.
“A ‘decoy’,” Sergeant clarified as though this wasn’t his first encountered with the battlefield ploy.
“I’ll deal with her,” Nathan told them.
“I don’t think you understand,” said his mother.
“No, I do. You’re going to have her killed,” he shot back. “As if doing such a thing will stop the Feds or whoever the hell’s investigating us. Do you even know?” he challenged Sergeant. “No, you’re too busy plotting an innocent girl’s murder.”
“She’s far from innocent,” said Guinevere.
“Yeah? So are we.”
“Her brother was one of the soldiers that Maxum hired,” Sergeant began explaining. “One of the casualties.”
“You mean ‘mules’,” Nathan spat, thoroughly disgusted with this mess, though deep down he was stunned and saddened to learn that Portia’s brother had been used in this sick manner. No wonder she wanted revenge. “His corpse was used as a vessel to transport—”
“Let’s watch what we say,” his mother warned. “Even up here.”
“My point holds,” Nathan barked. “Removing Portia from the picture doesn’t solve the problem, and you both know it.”
“That’s not what I meant when I said I could ‘cut off the head of the snake’,” said Sergeant, which caused Guinevere to suffer a little eyeroll.
Why was Nathan not surprised his mother would prefer Portia be killed?
“Elaborate,” he demanded, locking eyes with Sergeant and ignoring Guinevere’s scoffing utterances.
“We’ll need to lure her away from the truth, supply her with a story to relay to the Feds, in essence neutralize her as a threat and start using her to our advantage,” he explained.
To which Guinevere added, “Control the narrative.”
Nathan looked from Sergeant to his mother and back again, reading both their faces, then concluded, “You want me to become a ‘decoy’ myself.”
Guinevere’s dark expression lifted with a diabolical smile.
It was all Nathan had to know, and as the bitter wind whipped snow at them sideways, Nathan listened to their plan and told himself that the spark that had ignited in the coldest corner of his heart last night for Portia had nothing to do with love.
Was he lying to himself?
All he knew was that he refused to go down for crimes he hadn’t known were being committed.
He hadn’t steered this ship into an iceberg, but he was still on it.
He would do anything not to sink into icy waters.
Anything…
…or so he told himself.