Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) (26 page)

Besides, she’d had only a few orgasms, and she needed more than that to feel truly satisfied. We’d be alone until late afternoon, and I
had
promised to give her everything she needed. After this workout, I’d take a shower with her, take her to bed, and give her my full attention until she was well and truly worn out. After which she could take a nap, and I could get some work done. It sounded like a good plan to me, though I wouldn’t be sharing it. That need-to-know basis again.

The third reason? I wouldn’t be admitting that to her, either. That looking at her like that, and imagining how I’d be looking at her as soon as we were alone, made me more determined than ever that she wasn’t joining the Y. She was working out here, she was taking her swim lessons here, and that was that. I wasn’t the only bloke with an imagination, and Hope was too tiny and much too deliciously pretty. If I wanted her here with me, it was no more than any man would have felt. But I didn’t tell her that, of course. I wasn’t stupid. I’d focus on Reason One. Much safer.

And all the while, the thoughts prowled around the edge of my brain like predators in the dark. Ever since I’d seen Anika again, I’d kept remembering what it had been like to be with her. I’d shoved her from my memory long ago, but now, she kept coming back, and I couldn’t rid myself of her. It was what was still hanging there between us, the divorce, the settlement I was going to be fighting with everything in me. And everything it brought up. The darkness and the undercurrents of her, exciting and sickening all at once.

She’d been my opium: my seductive, dangerous, impossibly addictive drug. With her, I’d been no better than my useless dad. She’d nearly been my downfall, and I still sweated sometimes to think how close I’d come to not pursuing my dreams and goals, how desperate I’d been to drug myself with her instead.

Being with Hope, though…that was exactly as addictive, and nothing like the same. I needed her the way I needed oxygen. I craved her even when I’d just had her, and somehow, it wasn’t just her body I needed. And I wanted her here with me.

When Eugene walked through my front door, he looked at her before he looked at me. “Well, well, well,” he said. “How about that.”

“Hope,” I said with resignation, “this is my trainer, Eugene Watkins. And this is my fiancée, Hope Sinclair.”

Eugene smiled some more, showing off his missing teeth. “Fiancée, huh? Now, that’s what we call
good
news. Debra’s going to be tickled. Yes, she is. And Karen, too? She does like Karen.”

“Karen, too,” I said. “Karen, definitely. We may surprise Debra at last, eh.”

“Nah. She’ll say ‘Told you so,’ like always.” He looked Hope over. “So. Dressed to work out, which means I’m charging Hemi double, and that’s more good news. You’re going to be a challenge, though, ain’t you?”

She made a rueful face. “I’m not that strong, if that’s what you mean. I’ll probably whine, too.”

“Nah,” he said. “Not you. And if you’re a little bit weak right now—well, we can do something about that. Least you ain’t been off gettin’ fat like Mr. Big here.” He looked me up and down, and not as if he appreciated what he saw. “Strip off and let’s see the damage.”

I sighed and pulled my shirt over my head, and he stood back, eyed me hard, then poked a finger into my side and shook his head. “Now, that’s just sad. You ain’t been workin’ out at all. ‘Vacation’ don’t mean ‘Go wild,’ you know. You eat like a pig over there or what?”

I glanced at Hope. Naturally, she was biting her lip, clearly trying not to giggle. “He still looks good to me,” she said. Points for loyalty, anyway, if not for honesty.

“It ain’t about the decoration,” Eugene said. “It’s about the function.” Which had Hope biting her lip some more.

I tugged my shirt back over my chest. I’d gained two kilos. Maybe
.
“If you’re done slagging off my fitness,” I said, “maybe you’d like to start earning your money.”

“Hey,” he said, “don’t be takin’ it out on me. I ain’t the one been lazing around eatin’ everything that ain’t actually on the hoof. Let’s go. Gym.”

When we got in there, he tossed his bag into the corner and told me, “Get on the rower and warm up while I see what we got here with Miss Little Bit.”

I obeyed, keeping an eye on him all the same, and he put a hand on Hope’s upper arm, squeezed gently, and said, “We thinking boxing, maybe? We got a ways to go to build up your upper body, ‘cause you’re just too little.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t want to fight. I thought I could ride the bike or something. I wasn’t really thinking about…”

“You don’t have to hit nobody,” Eugene said. “We can keep it with the bag. You won’t have to worry about getting your nose broke, not like you’re thinking.”

Hope actually shuddered, and I may have done the same inside as well. Hope getting her nose broken wasn’t an image I needed to visualize. I said, “She’s not what you’d call aggressive. Stick to the weights, eh.”

Eugene turned and gave me a glare. “Was I talkin’ to you?” he asked. “I don’t think so.” Then he was back with Hope again. “Time you learned how to be aggressive, then. It ain’t safe not to be able to defend yourself, not the size you are.”

“She doesn’t have to defend herself,” I said.

“Now, what did I just say?” he asked. “You need to shut up when I ain’t talking to you.” My mouth opened, then closed again. Hope had lost the battle not to smile, and as ideas went, this one wasn’t looking like one of my best. “I got some gloves in the car,” he told Hope. “Light ones I use with the kids. We’ll start you there. I’m thinking kickboxing. Get you feeling fierce, walking that way, making anybody think twice about messing with you. Plus get you strong for you, so you can know it. For now, get yourself on the bike and warm up.” He looked at me again, which was good of him, and said, “Five more minutes on that, then get out the jump rope and go. And if you’re thinking I can’t tell that you ate a big breakfast this morning, exactly like you shouldn’t have done, you’re wrong. So pick it up and work it out. One way or another, that breakfast is gonna be gone.”

He left the room, I heard the front door of the apartment close, and Hope, who’d climbed onto the bike and was adjusting the pedals, looked at me and burst out laughing.

“What?” I tried to growl, but Eugene had been right. That breakfast
hadn’t
been any kind of good idea. I was already feeling slightly sick, and I’d be feeling worse soon.

“I think you still look very handsome, even though you’re fat,” she said in her most soothing tone, and when I scowled at her, she laughed some more.

“You just keep laughing,” I said. “Wait until Eugene gets done with you. You think I’m hard on you? You haven’t seen anything yet.”

Of course, I was wrong. Eugene wasn’t nearly as hard on her as he was on me. And whenever I lost my concentration, because I was watching Hope hit the bag Eugene held for her, or because she
was
on a hand and knee on that bench doing her triceps extensions, he seemed to see it from the back of his head and would be snapping at me, “Focus, man. You getting lazy
and
fat?”

“Who’s paying who here?” I managed to grit out over the breakfast that was threatening to come up again.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s what you need. Another guy kissing your ass. Quit looking and get going.”

After barely forty minutes, he told Hope, who was panting by now, her T-shirt clinging to her, “You go on. That’s enough for the first day. Besides, I got to whip Hemi into shape. Got to get him concentrating, too.”

She nodded and put up a shaking hand to push the hair back from her face. “I’m going to take a shower and go for a walk, Hemi. It’s either that or lie down and never get up again.”

“Wait a bit,” I said, “and I’ll go with you.”

“No, thanks.” Her breath was still coming hard. “I know you still have work to do, and besides, I need some time alone. I want to look around and get my bearings before tomorrow,”

“I said ‘Wait.’”

“And I said ‘No,’ she answered sweetly. “Have a good workout.” While I was still coming up with a response to that, she told Eugene, “Very nice to meet you. Give Debra my best, please—and thank you. Even though I think you killed me.”

“Nah,” he said. “You might not be too strong yet, but you got some guts.” He barely looked at me when he said it, but I got it. “We’ll keep on going, and it’ll get easier. See you Wednesday.”

I watched her leaving the room in those tiny black shorts, and Eugene looked at me and grinned. “I do love a woman with some sass,” he said. “It ain’t the size, it’s what you do with it, and she’s doin’ plenty, ain’t she? Tough little thing, sweet as she looks. I got to hand it to you, man—you did good.”

When I didn’t answer, just kept on with my lunges, he said, “Now, what you pouting about? That she told you no? Get used to it. That woman’s got a whole lot of push-back in her. And straighten your back and suck in that gut. Use your core.”

“You’re wrong,” I said, doing a final lunge on each side that had my legs threatening to shake, then dropping into my first squat.

“Nope,” Eugene said. “I’m right. And what? She can’t be walkin’ around by herself, because why?”

“You just saw why,” I growled. “You just
said
why.”

“Why, that she looks like a man could just eat her up?” He laughed, the bastard. “Yeah, she does. And did she fall in your lap the way you wanted her to? Nope, she didn’t, and she sure ain’t going to be doing it for nobody else. You got to have some faith. That’s the problem with you. You just never had any faith.”

Hope

I hadn’t been exaggerating. Even after a shower, my legs still felt like rubber, threatening to shake just from holding me up. Ever since we’d come back from New Zealand, I’d felt incredibly tired and overemotional, the last state I ought to be in right now. But then, a lot had happened since then.

It seemed like Hemi’s workout was just getting started, too. Eugene might have seen something wrong with Hemi’s fitness, but I had absolutely no complaints. The sight of him, his palms on the floor, his toes on an exercise ball, shoving off into an endless series of pushups—that wasn’t something I’d be forgetting anytime soon. I’d discovered that lifting weights was bizarrely arousing, too. Something about the blood flow, maybe, or just my deplorable weakness. In any case, I’d known that if I’d done any more of it, and watched Hemi in boxing gloves to boot, going after the punching bag I’d barely managed to hit, I might just have had a spontaneous orgasm, been tempted into rocking on that exercise ball myself when I’d been supposed to be doing situps. That would have been one impossible thing to hide, right there in front of Eugene. Much better to take a walk.

Especially, of course, after Hemi told me not to.

Eventually, he was going to figure out that ordering me around outside of bed didn’t work. Or you might say that eventually, I was going to teach him. I hoped.

I kept the walk short, because it was hot and humid out, and while I wandered my sweaty way through Central Park, avoiding the joggers and dog walkers and thinking how different it was from the quiet, cool, green solitude of New Zealand, I wondered how Karen was doing with her job search.

Maybe I should text her. I actually pulled out my phone, then hesitated with my hand hovering over the button. How did I feel when Hemi acted like I needed to be checked up on? It felt stifling, that was what. Karen was sixteen, she was spreading her wings a little, and I needed to let her do it. So I bought myself a smoothie with protein powder and tried to feel like a weightlifter instead of a shaky mess, and after an hour, I went home, heard the shower running, and caught Hemi leaning against the granite tile, his palms against the wall, his head bent beneath the spray.

“Hey,” I said.

He turned his head and looked at me, and I smiled and asked, “He’s tough, huh?”

I got a shadow of a grin for that. “Yeh. Good walk?”

“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe I missed you.”

“Well, then,” he said, getting his fierce back fast, “get that kit off and come show me how much. I’ve got a point or two to make with you.”

He should have looked vulnerable, exhausted and naked, the water pouring over him. Instead, he looked formidable. His muscles were pumped from the exercise, and my treacherous body was already responding to him as if it had never heard of words like “self-determination” and “independence” and “autonomy.” I pulled my dress over my head, stripped off the thong that was the only other thing I was wearing, stepped under the spray, and surrendered to the need that was pulling me. And then to Hemi.