Last night was the same.
I want more of the same today, and the next day, and the day after that.
"Got up around six," I tell her as I push away from the laptop and walk over to the stove. I grab the kettle, turn to the sink, and fill it with enough water to make her a cup of tea. Once it's heating, I turn back toward Sela. She's watching me with a soft smile as she sits on one of the barstools on the opposite side of the island.
While her water heats, I move back to the counter and lean forward on it, the bottoms of my forearms pressed against the cold granite. "Do you have a passport?"
She blinks at me slowly, but nods. "I did a semester in London my junior year of college."
"You did?" I ask, slightly amazed she'd do something so far out of her comfort zone. I've come to find out in just a few short days just how fucked up Sela's existence was for a very long time because of what was done to her. "That was pretty brave."
Sela gives me an impish smile and says, "I did come out of my shell as time went on, you know. I tried new things."
"I'm impressed."
"Yeah, well...it's not like I backpacked through the wilds of Kenya or anything," she says in a self-deprecating way, and that causes me to laugh.
"Okay...so let's pack up and catch a flight out of here tonight. We can go wherever you want. Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Prague."
"Are you serious?" she asks with her eyebrows practically touching the ceiling.
"Dead fucking serious. We can go for a few weeks, just bum around Europe if you want. Get away from all this craziness and regroup. Or we can go tropical if you want to, because if you only want to wear nothing but a little bikini, I'm down with that too."
"I can't just take off and leave like that."
"You sure as hell can."
"I have school, Beck. Classes I have to attend, work I have to do," she says with an eye roll.
"Drop the classes. Take a semester off," I tell her simply. I mean...why the fuck not?
"Just drop my classes? Take a semester off?" Her tone is one of astonishment and exasperation with me.
"Okay, two weeks. I'll pay for it," I say smoothly. "You won't be out any money."
I expect that to piss her off--the not-so-subtle reminder that I paid for her education in return for her giving herself to me--but I'll make her see that I'd buy the world for her right now if I could and wouldn't expect a damn thing in return.
Instead, she narrows her eyes at me. "You are the least impulsive person I know. Beck North doesn't just wake up one morning and decide to jet off to Europe. What's really going on here?"
Taking a deep breath, I push off from the counter and walk around the island until I come up to her stool. She swivels it toward me, her eyes filled with concern.
Blowing out the breath, I take her hands and pull them onto my chest, where I hold them tight. "I need to get away, Sela. I can't go into the office because I can't risk a run-in with JT. I just won't be able to hold it together because all of this is so fresh and raw. I'm afraid of what I might do to him, to our business...all of it...if I lose control around him. So I want to just leave for a bit, collect ourselves. Take the pack off. Relax and get to know each other better. I don't know what the future has in store, but if JT is going to pay for this, we need to have our ducks in a row. Things are going to get stressful, and I'd like some time with you and away from all of this shit."
Her eyes soften and her head tilts in understanding. "I can't do two weeks. I can only miss three classes in each course."
"A week then," I counteroffer.
"Where would we go?" she asks.
"Wherever you want. I don't care."
"So we'd leave tonight?"
"I'd leave right now if we could, but unfortunately, two things prevent that. First, I have that investigator coming just after lunch. I'm going to hire him to start digging into JT. And second, and probably most important, I need to do laundry, as I'm out of clean underwear."
Sela laughs, and it fills me with hope that we're going to get through this. She leans forward on the stool, presses her bare feet down into the bottom rung, and pushes up to bring her mouth to mine. Just the softest of kisses and an even bigger smile on her face when she pulls back. "Okay. I'm going to go start laundry, then I'm going to message my professors and let them know the classes I'll be missing. You do whatever work you need to get things cleared away."
"So we're going?"
"I'd like to see Vienna," she says as she pushes up from the stool. I step back to give her room and she slides past me, heading over to the kettle, which is now boiling. "Or Prague. That would be nice."
"I'll get Linda to book us flights and make hotel reservations," I say, admiring her ass in some tiny white panties that look virginally sweet.
Then I walk back around the counter to my laptop, and start putting things in order.
--
Dennis Flaherty sits across from my desk in my home office, looking nothing like what I thought a sleazy investigator would look like. I was expecting short and portly with perhaps a bad Hawaiian print shirt with mustard stains. He's tall and built solidly, wearing a tailored navy blue suit with a sedate yellow tie. His hair is fiery red but cropped close to his head in a military-style cut. The only other thing I notice is a wedding ring on his left fourth finger.
"You're sizing me up," Dennis says with a smirk.
"That obvious?" I ask him with a laugh.
"I get paid to observe," he says dryly.
"Well, what I'm getting ready to ask you to do might cross some ethical lines. I need some dirty stuff. You look like a financial advisor or banker or something."
Dennis nods in understanding. "Don't let my love of fine Italian silk suits throw you off. I've had plenty of dirt under my nails before."
I glance past Dennis to my open office door. Sela's in our room packing. I asked her if she wanted to sit in on this meeting, but she just shook her head and said, "I'd rather not. I know in painstaking detail what you're going to be talking to him about. I'll let you take this one for the team."
Team.
I liked the sound of that.
"I want you to investigate my partner, Jonathon Townsend. I assume you've done some background research on me?"
"I have. Your partner too. Quite an interesting business you have."
"Well, I want the business for myself and I can't seem to dislodge him. I need something that will convince him to leave."
"How far do you want to go with this?"
"All the way isn't far enough," I tell him smoothly. "I don't care what the cost or what it takes to get me what I need."
"It's personal to you," Dennis observes as he pulls his phone out of the inside breast pocket. I watch as he taps a few times, presumably pulling up an app or something, then his thumbs race across the screen as he types.
"Just making some notes," he says without looking up at me. "I need to know why it's personal so I know which direction you want me looking."
His face tips back up and he pins me with a direct stare. I know he needs to know this, because I want him also looking into fraternity brothers as possible suspects, but it still burns to have someone know what Sela went through. But I have her permission to disclose this sordidness to him, and he came highly recommended, so I press forward.
"Ten years ago, three men raped my girlfriend," I say, and Dennis makes a sound of disgust deep in his throat. "She was drugged and couldn't identify her attackers, but she did remember tiny bits and pieces. One was a distinctive tattoo of a red phoenix on one of her attackers' rib cage."
"She later saw that tattoo and was able to identify him," Dennis surmises, his face now dipped again so he can type into his phone.
"It belongs to my partner, JT...otherwise known as Jonathon Townsend," I say, and Dennis' head snaps upward, his eyes wide with surprise.
"You're fucking kidding me?" he practically chokes out.
"I wish I were," I respond grimly. "But it was him, and on
e of the things I want you to do is look for one of the other suspects that had a matching tattoo on his wrist. It belongs to an inner ring of fraternity brothers."
"I'll need her to give me a drawing or something to go by," Dennis says, still typing.
"No need. I have a matching one on the back of my shoulder."
Again, Dennis' head snaps up, but this time his eyes are angry. "What the fuck is going on here?"
"I was in the same fraternity as JT but three years behind him. Still in prep school when the rape happened, so you can get that look off your face. I'm not sure the tattoo has anything to do with the rape, but clearly at least two of my fraternity brothers were there. I want you to try to identify at least one of the others by the wrist tat. Sela doesn't remember anything other than he was tan and had dark hair."
And that he raped her ass, but I don't tell him that.
"Understood," he says. "What else?"
"I want you to dig deep into JT. Find out what crap he's involved with outside of the business. I know he does drugs and still gets off on spiking women's drinks to rape them, so I'm guessing he's elbow deep in some dirty shit. I want anything I can use to ruin him."
"Why don't you just report the rape to the police?" Dennis asks.
"Sela's considering it, but she's afraid her memory is too spotty for them to investigate him. Also afraid he won't roll on the others. We'd like to see if we can find out the identities of the others first and if there's any other dirt on JT. The police are a last resort."
"When do you want me to start?" he asks, flipping back through his phone...presumably for his calendar.
"The minute you walk out that door. And I want you on this exclusively. Turn down your other work or farm it out," I say firmly.
"That'll cost you big," he warns.
I open my middle drawer and pull out my checkbook. It burns like acid deep in my gut knowing that I share DNA with my monster of a half brother, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to make him suffer. It's a good thing I'm fucking rich, and I'd spend every dime I have to help Sela. After pulling a check off, I scratch my signature on the bottom line and hand it to him across the desk. "There's a blank check. Fill in the amount."
My move doesn't seem to surprise Dennis, but he takes the check from me and tucks it into his pocket.
Standing up from his chair, he taps a finger on his phone and says, "Let me get a picture of that tattoo."
Pulling my T-shirt up and over my head, I turn to give my back to Dennis. I hear the sound of his snapping shots before he says, "Got it. Give me two hours to get my desk cleared and I'm all yours until we find what we need."
"Good deal," I tell him with a relieved smile after I tug my shirt back on. I extend a hand to him and he gives it a firm shake.
I've got Dennis digging deep, a week away from the office, and a beautiful girl who wants to hop around Europe with me. For the first time in days, I feel like I can breathe.
I gently tap my spoon against the shell of the soft-boiled egg, which is perched in a white porcelain egg cup. When it was set before me, I didn't have a clue what to do with it. I looked across the table at Beck, who eyed his just as suspiciously. The waitress, however, was not immune to our helpless looks and had clearly encountered her share of ignorant American tourists, and showed Beck how to tap through the top quarter of the shell and twist it off so he could get to the egg inside.
We're sitting at a coveted window table in the Cafe Schwarzenberg, one of the first true Viennese coffeehouses, which was built in 1861. We missed our connecting flight from Zurich to Vienna, which precipitated a four-hour delay whereby we had to hang out in the airport, only to learn when we arrived at the Grand Hotel Wein early this morning that our room wasn't ready. Apparently some Arab sheik was also staying at the hotel and our room had been mistakenly given to one of his security detail. We were assured they would ready another room for us immediately and suggested we have some breakfast at Cafe Schwarzenberg, which was just down the block off the Karntner Ring. I was skeptical about the sheik story, but just as we were making our way out the front double doors, we were astounded to see about twenty reporters spring up from chairs all around the lobby and scurry toward the bank of elevators. Sure enough, a man dressed in full Lawrence of Arabia style stepped out surrounded by five bodyguards dressed in black suits, black sunglasses, and wire mics in their ears. They pushed their way through the crowd and Beck took my elbow, pulling me backward to give them passage. The sheik walked right out the door and into an awaiting nondescript black car, with two identical cars behind that carried his bodyguards.
With a sharp whack against my egg, which causes a piece of shell to shoot across the table, I blow off the top of my egg, causing yellow yolk to leak all over the place. I give a disgruntled sigh as Beck laughs at me and push the egg cup away. Instead, I pull a croissant off the side plate and break off a piece.
And oh God...I'm not sure anything more delicious has ever been in my mouth. I stifle a moan and put a larger piece between my lips before chewing on it slowly so I can savor.
"What do you think we should do today?" Beck asks as he takes the tiny egg spoon and pulls out some of the white flesh covered in warm yolk from the inside of the shell.
"I'm tired as hell," I say after swallowing, and then punctuate it with a yawn. "But I'm excited to get out and explore. Maybe just walk around the city a bit. Nap in the afternoon so we can get our inner clocks adjusted."
"We should definitely take it easy today," Beck says with a nod, and takes another perfect scoop of egg from his waitress-cracked shell. "You have us booked solid with stuff over the next four days, so this might be our only day to relax."
It's true. I picked up a guidebook about Vienna in the San Francisco airport and I'm trying to pack in as much sightseeing as I can. We're going to tour the Hofburg and Schonbrunn imperial palaces; watch the world-renowned Lipizzan horses perform at the Spanische Hofreitschule Winter Riding School; and take in a performance at the famous Vienna State Opera. We've got the concierge trying to get us tickets to tomorrow night's performance of the Vienna Boys Choir performing at Hofburg Chapel in the Imperial Palace, and I plan to gorge myself on stunning architecture wherever we walk, Wiener schnitzel, and Viennese coffee in between. Because this coffee--I put my croissant down in favor of a sip of the creamy, sweet goodness--is fucking phenomenal. I could totally drink this in place of tea if I could figure out how to make it when we get back home.
"Thank you for doing this," Beck says as he puts his egg spoon down and picks up his coffee. He went with regular black.
I smile at him over the edge of my cup. "Like it was so hard to accept an offer to jet off to Europe with you."
"You had school obligations," he points out.
"Still have them when I go back," I say matter-of-factly. "But you were right...you needed a break from the craziness that I laid on your doorstep."
"You needed a break too, Sela. We've got to tread carefully when we go after JT, so we need our wits about us."
"You think Dennis will find something?" I ask before taking another sip. Beck had filled me in on their meeting and right now he was supposedly digging into JT's life.
"I guarantee you there's something," Beck snarls with hatred for his partner. "His soul is black."
"I'm sorry this is hurting you," I say quietly before placing my cup down. "Especially since he's...you know...your brother and all."
"Hey," Beck says as he puts his own coffee down so his hand can take mine. He squeezes and my eyes lift to his. "He's not my brother. We might share my father's DNA, but he's otherwise dead to me. Don't worry about my feelings on that matter, because the only ones I have now are disgust and hate toward him."
"Still," I say as my head turns to the left and I look out over the sidewalk, which is becoming increasingly busier as the morning wears on. "You probably would have been better off never knowing this. You know...the sweetness of ignorance and all that."
"I'd rather have
you, even if this shit comes with it," he assures me. "You're more than worth it."
I smile, trying to blink back the stinging in my eyes caused by his words. "By the way, how is it that you're related and you know about it but he doesn't?"
I've been curious about this, as well as other things we haven't been able to discuss. An airplane isn't a very conducive place to talk about such sordid details.
Beck releases my hand and picks his coffee back up. He takes a sip and swallows with a grimace. "My parents and JT's parents have been friends long before any of us kids were ever conceived. When I was about nine, I was playing in my dad's office, under his desk. They had a fancy dinner party going on and I was bored. At any rate, my dad and JT's mom came in and I didn't come out of hiding. Knew my dad would be pissed to find me in there. So I hid under that desk while he fucked her right on the other side, and then later, I listened as they talked about JT."
My hand rises involuntarily to cover my mouth in shock. He was just a kid...listening to that. Did he even understand what they were doing?
"What did they say?" I whispered.
"His mom was telling my dad about JT getting in trouble at school. I wasn't half paying attention at first because they'd just had sex five feet from me and I wasn't sure what the fuck that was all about."
I can't help the snort that comes out, but then I clear my throat and look at him with serious eyes.
"At any rate, they started fighting about JT. My dad suggested moving him to another school, and his mom didn't want that, and then Dad got really angry and said, 'Well...he's my son, so I should have a say-so.' "
"Oh my God."
"Right? I suddenly started paying attention to what they were saying. They kept arguing about my dad's role in JT's life, and it was clear that JT's dad--the man who raised him, that is--had no clue he wasn't his son. It was clear that no one knew about it except those two."
"So you've held on to this secret since then?" I ask, amazed that someone so young would carry such a terrible weight.
Beck shakes his head. "I told my dad I knew a few years ago. We'd gotten into an argument about Caroline actually. The lengths my family will go to keep their precious secrets. I got pissed and just confronted him about it."