HADES Page 10

  She was always so pretty with her words. Even when she hated him. He’s not sure how to handle this version of Persy.

  On instinct, he goes as still as possible to keep from trembling with the effort it takes to stay exactly where he is. To not pounce on her like a dog with a bitch’s heat smell in his nose.

  “I can’t give you that,” he reminds her. And himself. “But I’ll make this night one to remember.”

  He backs away from her naked display but vows, “I’ll keep you coming all night long, ma belle. Just let me go take my shower, and I’ll come right back out here and thank you properly for putting together this anniversary night for us.”

  Her face becomes a hard mask. But, in the end, she says, “Fine.”

  Every criminal in New Orleans knows not to cross Hades Fairgood.

  But Galen? That man is a bona fide coward. Her clipped “fine” is good enough for the man he’s pretending to be.

  He rushes to the bathroom, and although the sight of her naked and wanting nearly stripped him of self-control, he finds himself grateful for her display as he steps into the glass shower.

  Beating himself off every night under the water’s spray has become beyond old. It is a rote habit at this point. Like flossing his teeth and rubbing on that moisturizer Persy insists he needs to use up here in dry Ohio, where the entire outside isn’t a natural humidifier. It is something he does to achieve the best outcome. But it isn’t something he necessarily enjoys or looks forward to as of late.

  Tonight is a different story. His cock is already dripping pre-cum by the time he steps in the shower, and it’s straining so hard he knows this won’t take long at all.

  All he has to do is close his eyes and envision Persy naked and telling him all she wants for every milestone is him. Then he fists his cock roughly as he imagines himself actually giving her the gift she requested. Merde, the image of her on her knees, that sweet cunt beckoning him to—

  “What are you doing?”

  The voice stops his hand cold. In an instant, he’s ripped out of the fantasy and back into the real world where he opens his eyes to find….

  Persy.

  Persy is standing on the other side of the glass.

  With a clear view of the man who refuses to fuck her with anything other than his tongue and fingers jerking himself off in the shower.

  She asked him the question. But she doesn’t give him a chance to answer.

  Hurt flashes across her face right before she turns on her heel and dashes away.

  Cajun cusses stream out of his mouth as he turns off the shower and goes to find a towel.

  He needs to explain, but what’s he going to say? I love you. But it’s torture sleeping next to you. I have to beat off in the shower every night just to keep from ravishing you exactly the way you want. The way you’ve been begging me to…

  He doesn’t see her accepting that truth as a good enough explanation for refusing to give her the one thing she asked for on their fake anniversary.

  But it’s all he has, so it will have to do.

  Except he never gets the chance to tell her any of that.

  When he comes out to the room wrapped in a towel, he finds it empty. The blue dress she took off is no longer lying on the floor. She must have gone back to her room. Merde…

  He pulls on some pajama bottoms to go look for her there and give her the apology she deserves. But she’s not in her room either.

  His heart drops, and on instinct, he tears downstairs and goes to the rack where she keeps her car keys first before checking the rest of the house. Sure enough, her Porsche 911 keys are missing from the hook next to his. And so is her leather Tom Ford coat.

  Merde! Merde! Merde!

  He makes several calls after that. First to the phone he got her, then to Tess, and Daphne. Neither Daphne nor Tess have heard from her. And Tess is not at all eager to help with his search.

  “What did you do to make her run away?” she demands, rightly assuming this is all his fault. “Did you hurt her?”

  “It was a disagreement,” he answers. “I just need to find her and explain why—”

  “You are seriously making me rethink my policy to never call the police,” she says. “Oh my God, if you hurt her—”

  “I didn’t. I wouldn’t,” he insists. “I’m hanging up now. If you don’t know where she is, I’m going to keep on trying her phone.”

  But all of his calls continue to go straight to voicemail.

  She must have turned the phone completely off, which means he can’t track her with any of the spyware he installed on it before replacing the burner she lost in the accident.

  He curses himself for not putting a GPS locator on her car too. It had been on his list. But seeing as how he’d already put trackerware on her phone, her work computer, and even paid off one of the assistants at Tess’s shelter to let him know whenever Persy stopped by, he began to think it might be overkill.

  But now…images of her driving too fast and angry and getting into another accident rear in his head.

  Where is she? Where is she?

  This is the Thanksgiving she left him all over again.

  If he ever gets her back, he’ll not only put a tracker on her Porsche, he’ll install a dash camera in it too.

  He’s given up his co-presidentship of the Ruthless Reapers. That means not calling on his faithful band of bikers to do his dirty work anymore. But by the time the next morning rolls around, he’s considering reaching out to Vengeance, the Reapers’ three-man enforcement team, in order to—

  Suddenly, the app he uses to track her devices sends him a notification.

  He snatches up the phone, relieved to finally have some information….only to frown when he sees the location dot on Persy.

  She’s in Louisiana, in the middle of the bayou he’s currently developing into a waterside community. What the hell is she doing there?

  As if in answer to his question, the phone suddenly lights up with a message from the woman he’s labeled MA BELLE, even on his phone.

  * * *

  MA BELLE: Got all your messages. Don’t worry about me. I’m better than fine. I found my ex-boyfriend, and we’re back together now. See you when I see you.

  CHAPTER 13

  BENJAMIN

  Ironically, when he returned to Boston the summer after he ruined things with Tess, Benjamin’s brother Keane and his cousin Finnegan started calling him Bono.

  Because he had the same black Irish coloring as the lead singer of U2, the same lineage—even if “American” had to be tacked on to it—and the same propensity toward charity work in his spare time.

  At the time, Benjamin felt too dejected and guilty about Tess to respond to anything they called him. If he’d known their nickname would stick and follow him into his work life, he might’ve protested, though.

  Forget Brady. Even though Donovan had gone on the same mission trip, when the guys on the hockey team heard that the new starter for the Boston Hawks called his brother Bono, they started doing it too. And when he transferred schools to Beaumont in Connecticut, the name somehow followed him there.

  Then came Keane’s accident. It took half of one leg and ended his promising hockey career early, but not before his older brother had the chance to invest in a bunch of real estate at just the right time in the rapidly gentrifying Southside neighborhood they grew up in together.

  By the time Benjamin graduated from college, his brother was a multi-millionaire, and Benjamin had a job all lined up in the newly established charity wing of DGK Acquisitions, Keane’s otherwise ruthless real estate business.

  Not because he was particularly altruistic. Keane prided himself on being an unrepentant asshole, in fact. But…

  “I’m getting hosed on taxes here. See if you can do something about that with your charity stuff,” he told Benjamin, before handing his little brother the keys to a corner office.

  Benjamin couldn’t complain, though. He liked overseeing their grants and e
nsuring that all of DGK’s development projects were mixed-use and included affordable housing.

  He passed most of his twenties pretty happy with his job and in two long-term relationships with women who were the opposite of puck bunnies.

  Both his college girlfriend, Samantha, and Noreen, the woman he dated after they broke up, came from well-adjusted, upper-middle-class families. They were smart and charitable-minded. Perfect for him. At least on paper.

  Samantha got tired of waiting for a ring by the time they turned twenty-three, and Noreen left him for pretty much the same reason shortly after his twenty-seventh birthday.

  As appealing as both women were, something kept Benjamin from sealing the long-term deal with a proposal. Even Keane ended up in a happy marriage before he did. Keane!

  It never occurred to Benjamin that the “something” holding him back might have been the sixteen-year-old girl he’d kissed all summer before ending things terribly with her in Ohio.

  For thirteen years, Tess was just a lesson he’d learned. A memory he squashed down when Noreen and Samantha told him he was the nicest guy they ever dated.

  No, he didn’t blame Tess for the end of both his multi-year monogamous relationships.

  Not until he was in the middle of a meeting with the DGK team about a development project in Worchester and his assistant, Garth, texted that someone named Tess Malloy was on line three and asking to talk to him.

  * * *

  GARTH: I tried to tell her to call back after your meeting. But she says it’s important, so I wanted to check, just in case she was someone not included in your contact list.

  * * *

  Benjamin didn’t realize he’d jumped up and headed toward the door until his brother called out behind him, “Hey, Bono, where ya going?”

  Benjamin didn’t answer.

  Tess! Tess was on the phone, asking for him, after all these years.

  There was a chance this was just a donation call. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t indulged himself in a bit of internet stalking where Tess was involved.

  He knew that she’d graduated from Ohio University, that her mother/grandmother had died, that she’d replaced her box braids with dreadlocks, and that she’d worked at a few nonprofits before raising the funds to begin one of her own: a shelter for teenage mothers.

  She truly was a good person. Still.

  And now she was calling him. He didn’t care if it was just to ask for money for her shelter.

  Whatever amount she asked for, he’d double it—no, quadruple it! Out of his own pocket, if that was what it took.

  He knew how these things worked. Big donors got special treatment and were put on lists for follow-up calls from the founder of the nonprofit herself. He’d used that special call to sincerely apologize for being such a coward when he was sixteen and take it from there.

  His heartbeat thundered in his chest as he crossed the short distance from the conference room to his assistant’s desk. Benjamin snatched the phone out of the older vet’s hand just as Garth was telling the person on the other line, “He’s in a meeting. He’ll have to call you back—”

  “This is Benjamin speaking,” he panted. “Tess? Tess? Are you still there?”

  A short silence, then someone with a soft Southern accent answered, “No, this isn’t Tess. Sorry for the confusion. I just used her name because it was maybe one you would recognize.”

  Benjamin’s heart sank with disappointment, then iced over with rage.

  “Who is this?” he demanded, his voice going stony. Moreover, how did she know that using Tess’s name would get him to the phone.

  “This is Stephanie Malloy. I’m…a relative of Tess’s. And something’s come up that you should…uh…know, I guess.”

  And that was how Benjamin found out he had a secret baby—now a twelve-year-old around the same age as the son his brother had found out about when his ex-girlfriend Lena unexpectedly walked back into his life.

  Keane had found the situation explosively funny. And Lena, who had improbably married his brother and gotten pregnant two more times after that, laughed even harder when she found out the mother was also Black.

  “Oh my God, you guys might have a secret baby type,” she cackled, wiping tears out of her eyes.

  But Keane and Lena were more than happy to welcome their new niece into the family with open arms.

  Daphne turned out to be a sweet, chubby preteen, who seemed just as stunned to find out her birth father was a rich White man from Boston as he was to find out she existed.

  But he got over his shock quickly and flew out to Ohio to meet her, with his brother’s happy ending playing on a loop in his head.

  However, he soon found out that Stephanie wasn’t just a kind relative who had agreed to make the call to Daphne’s birth father while Tess dealt with Daphne herself. She was his only point of contact with Tess.

  It had been thirteen years since he saw her last. Thirteen years and a whole daughter. But Tess still refused to speak to him or to answer any of his texts. Well, all except one.

  After three days in Ohio, he asked…

  * * *

  Are you really not ever going to talk with me again?

  * * *

  Her answer came back immediately.

  * * *

  TESS: There’s nothing to talk about. I stupidly gave it up to you. And I stupidly got pregnant. The baby was given up for adoption without my consent. And now she’s come home. If you want to be a part of her life, have your lawyer send over a custody agreement. But that’s all the contact you’re going to get from me.

  * * *

  Of course, he had followed that text up with several of his own. Including a few threats about full custody.

  But in the end, he couldn’t be that asshole—plus, Daphne’s life had already been filled with enough upheaval. So he moved to Ohio to work remotely during Daphne’s school year and tried to adjust co-parenting a child with an aggressively silent partner.

  The main point was that Tess and he had created a life—a bright young lady who was easy to talk to and got along well with her cousins when she spent summers with him in Boston.

  According to Daphne, Tess was great. Friendly and easy to love. No-nonsense, yet affectionate.

  “Other than being poor, she’s the best mother I could’ve asked for,” Daphne told him matter-of-factly. She started calling Tess Mom right away, and after about a year or so, she began calling Benjamin Dad.

  He established a new status quo for his life. But it remained in a state of weird limbo. That’s why he did something—hindsight being 20/20—he shouldn’t have.

  Something that led to a huge fight with Stephanie that he knew he’d have to deal with when he and Daphne got back to Ohio the summer after she turned fifteen.

  Except he didn’t have to deal with the consequences of that fight.

  The next time he saw Stephanie Malloy, she had a new last name. The bulky hoodies she always wore had been replaced with smart silk blouses and pencil skirts. Her messy dry curls took on a new, well-defined luster. And when she greeted him, her dull brown eyes were filled with a bright happiness he wouldn’t have thought his terse point of contact capable of before the moment she came to pick Daphne up from his place.

  She also seemed confused about why Tess was still refusing to talk to him.

  When she showed up early for one pickup, she even semi-apologized for Tess’s cold front. “The women in my family can be stubborn and unforgiving. Ask Galen. We were estranged for three years, and I still can’t figure out why. He’s basically perfect.”

  And that was how he somehow ended up inviting her in to wait for Daphne to finish getting ready and confessing everything that happened that summer—including the fact he’d never gotten over Tess.

  “Wow,” Stephanie said after he was done. But then she nodded in commiseration. “I get it, though. I fell in love with my husband when I was barely sixteen, and those teenage feelings can be really powerful. I hav
e no idea how I’m going to advise Daphne when she reaches that age.”

  “Me either,” Benjamin admits with a self-deprecating chuckle. “Hopefully her mom will do most of the heavy lifting for us.”

  Stephanie laughs too but points out, “If this weird situation with my memory has taught me anything, it’s that you can make up for a lot of things by doing the opposite of what you did before. Galen said he took me for granted, that we argued and he didn’t listen to me. Now he doesn’t take me for granted. He cherishes me, and he listens to everything I have to say.”

  Stephanie gives him a thoughtful look over her coffee cup. “I know Tess isn’t dating anybody either. She has a lot of love in her life, but she deserves to get some of that love back. If you honestly think you can be the man to do that, maybe try showing her you’re the exact opposite of the guy she thought you were. The guy she thinks kept her a secret because he was ashamed of her.”

  Wow…Benjamin had to shake his head.

  Stephanie really was just a whole ‘nother person from the woman who'd solemnly handed off Daphne at every visit as if he were a Russian KGB agent she didn’t trust.

  “I hope you get your memory back,” he tells her sincerely. “But this version of you is really great.”

  She smiles. “I hope I do too. But the truth is, I like this version of me too. I’ve never felt this free and wonderful in my life—even the part of it I remember."

  He and Stephanie parted with a hug that day, and Benjamin got to noodling over the problem of how to prove himself to Tess.

  Even though she hasn't said or texted a single word to him.

  In three years.

  That’s why he nearly drops dead of shock when his smart doorbell sounds the first evening in spring and he sees the person on the other side of his downstairs door camera.

  “Tess!” he says, his heart freezing with fear in his chest. “Is Daphne okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Tess assures him quickly. “She’s at the mall with her friends, blowing that ridiculous allowance you give her."