Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) (32 page)

“It was great,” I said. “It’s just a little late to be eating.”

Hemi took my hand, which had been resting on the black marble, and squeezed it. “Tummy wonky again, eh.”

“I’m fine.” My stomach hadn’t quite settled down since arriving back from New Zealand, which was just as well, given the quality of Inez’s cooking and the fact that when you weighed a hundred pounds, a couple extra ones made themselves known fast. “Besides, there’s that Appearance clause in our contract.”

Karen, of course, looked as curious as a monkey. “What?” she asked, finishing off the last of the flan and licking her spoon. “You guys have a
contract?
Like a prenup?”

Hemi frowned. “What do you know about prenups?”

“Excuse me?” she said. “I go to private school?”

“Well, we don’t have one,” Hemi said. “And we’re not going to be getting one.”

He shut up after that, his face at its most forbidding, so I said, “You know…Karen’s sixteen. You and I are teaching her how to have a relationship, right? Role models. And…open communication. It’s a thing.”

He still didn’t look thrilled, and I said softly, squeezing
his
hand now, “Hey. It couldn’t work any worse than the examples we had, right?”

His expression eased some, and he said, “You may have a point.”

“You mean I’m right?” I asked, widening my eyes at him, and he smiled, said, “Later,” and reached for his own dish of flan.

“Hemi and I worked out an agreement,” I told Karen, “on how we’d…deal with various things. Which included that he can’t grow a beard, for one thing.”

As a sidetracking tactic, it worked. “Beards are hot,” Karen said. “They’re in. Like, sexy lumberjack. Wolverine.”

I said, “Not to me,” and Hemi smiled again and kept eating.

“So is your agreement about, what, money and housework and kids and sex?” Karen asked. “Besides appearance. I’ve never heard of having
that
in your prenup. But that’s what couples fight about, you know. Money, chores, kids, and sex. We learned about it in Family Life last year.”

“Ah…” I said, “what’s family life?”

“Excuse me?” she said again. “You signed the permission slip. Putting condoms on bananas.” Hemi made a choking sound, and Karen went on, “I think it’s a cool idea to have an agreement about that stuff. Probably make you fight less. Did you decide how many kids you’d have, and what their names would be, and all that? You wouldn’t believe all the girls in my class who’ve already picked out their kids’ names and their wedding themes. It’s like their hobby. At least you never did that, Hope.”

“No.” I got up and took my flan dish and Hemi’s plate to the dishwasher.

“So how many?” Karen asked.

Hemi, of course, just sat there. He could outwait anybody, as I’d learned long ago. Finally, I said, “We haven’t discussed that one yet.”

“Really?” Karen asked. “Huh. See, I’d think that would be in your agreement. I’m pretty sure I’d put it in
my
agreement. It’s not like Hemi’s going to become a househusband. Although every rich person I know has nannies, so…”

I grabbed a sponge and was wiping counters, and now, I was the one who wasn’t talking.

You’re wondering why Hemi and I
hadn’t
talked about that. It was a fairly glaring omission. Because Hemi hadn’t brought it up, and I’d figured I knew what that meant. That he wasn’t sure yet whether he wanted kids. And maybe because I’d wanted them too much, but I wanted a life, too, and if he didn’t even want them…

It had all seemed too complicated, too risky, and too soon, so when he hadn’t gone there, I’d stayed away, too. There’d be time for that later, when we’d gotten the rest of it down.

Open communication. It might be a thing, but Hemi and I still had a ways to go to get there.

“Geez,” Karen said, getting up from her stool, “you don’t have to draw me a picture or anything. Awkward. I’m going to watch TV.”

“Straighten up before you go to bed,” I told her. I’d seen Hemi picking up after her in the early mornings when I didn’t get to it first, as if he couldn’t stand to see her clutter even for the short time before he left for the office, and it always made me wince. I still felt like I was tiptoeing, somehow. I knew he wanted us, and yet…

Well. Another thing I hadn’t explored as well as I probably should have. Time enough. For now, we were feeling our way.

Karen sighed and said, “You’d think I was some kind of slob. I’m
neat.
You should see guys’ rooms.”

“What guys’ rooms?” Hemi asked before I could.

“I do
know
people,” she said. “I do have
friends.”

Hemi said, “If you’re going to somebody’s house, you need to ask first. Especially if it’s a male somebody. But anybody.”

“OK,”
Karen said. “I
will. Geez.
I take it back. You guys shouldn’t plan to have kids. It’s like you’re stuck in the fifties.”

She left the room, and I thought,
Open communication. Yeah. We’ll work on that.
I felt too tired to try. It was well past nine, and there was all that new exercise in my life, which was kicking my butt. And never mind that less than a year ago, I’d been coming home at eight myself, with a sleep debt that would have done justice to a small nation. It seemed, though, that all you had to do was get used to something better, and it became your new floor. Which was a very disturbing thought.

Hope

The next day was Friday, the end of my second week in Marketing. The point where you normally start feeling like you’re getting a clue in a new job, except that I didn’t, because there wasn’t much to get a clue about.

I dressed carefully, as usual having a full hour to do that after Hemi left and before Charles showed up to take me to the office. I dressed up not because I was expecting anyone to notice me at work, but because I was going out to dinner afterwards with Hemi—after I’d met Nathan for a drink, the first time we’d had to catch up since I’d been back from vacation.

I told myself, as I finished pulling on one fragile, barely-there stocking and clipped it to the garter belt, that lots of people thought of “life” as “what happens outside of work,” which made my situation exactly normal, and never mind that I’d hoped for more. Nobody got everything they wanted, and maybe nobody else would complain if they were in my situation.

On the other hand—so what? I wasn’t anybody else, and I was allowed to have an opinion, wasn’t I?

For now, I fastened the side tie on a full-skirted, sunny yellow cotton dress, then buckled on a pair of nude pumps in embossed leather that was so pearlized it was almost gold, with a delicate ankle strap and a three-inch heel Not over the top for the office, but pretty enough for that Friday-night drink and dinner, and glamorizing the casual dress very satisfactorily indeed.

And all right—maybe they whispered, “Do me hard against the door” like no footwear I’d ever seen. Or maybe that was just my unruly imagination, to say nothing of my insistent body, which seemed to think that I ought to be catching up on years of self-denial with one prolonged, breathless orgy of sexual experimentation. I wasn’t sure you could have an orgy with one man, but if you could, that man would be Hemi.

Josh had come through with the store cards within a day of Hemi asking him, because Josh was like that, and…well, that had been a
lot
of temptation, and I may have succumbed to a different kind of orgy. I might have gotten a little freaky with those cards over the past weekend, in fact, which had resulted in some sweaty palms and a pounding heart when I’d had to sign the receipts. But now…well…I wanted Hemi to see my new shoes.

Confession time. They were Jimmy Choo, they’d cost six hundred dollars, they represented about six months’ worth of clothing budget in my not-too-distant past, and we’ll just gloss over everything else I’d bought that day and what it had cost, except to say that I was wearing it.

The shoes were gorgeous, though, and Hemi was going to appreciate them. If my life
were
going to be about what happened after work, at least I’d be ready for that part of it. And if I ended up having to talk to him about my job status, I’d be dressed for battle. Deceptively innocent right up until the moment I sucker-punched him.

A few hours later, I wasn’t thinking about dinner, and I wasn’t thinking about Hemi. At least I wasn’t thinking happy thoughts about him.

I’d finished updating the spreadsheet Simon had left for me that morning and sent it back to him, and as usual, I was out of things to do. I sat for a few minutes, debated, and finally got to my feet and went to his office.

He was at his desk, frowning intently at his computer, looking as harassed as everybody in the department but me. In the past, that would have fazed me, but I’d grown accustomed to intimidating male frowns. Or maybe I was just fed up enough not to care. I tapped on the door and, when he looked up, asked, “May I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure. Please.” He gestured to his visitor’s chair and waited, looking attentive and polite, if extra-twitchy.

I sat down, swallowing down the nausea and ignoring the racing heartbeat that seemed destined to accompany my attempts at assertiveness. I didn’t touch the jade pendant at my throat, but I felt it there, resting in the fragile spot between my collarbones. Worn on purpose today as a reminder of what Hemi had told me, what I still struggled at times to believe.

When you need to remember that you have a power and a light inside you that nothing and nobody can ever put out.

I said, “I don’t have enough to do.”

Simon laughed, the sound bitter. “Ha. That’s one I don’t hear every day.”

“Come on, Simon,” I said, and saw him sit up straighter and twitch a little more at my tone. “You know what I’m talking about. You’re giving me work a high school intern could do for you, and meanwhile, everybody else here is running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Why? Are you afraid that if you assign me something remotely challenging, you’ll have to correct me, and I’ll run to Hemi and whine that you’re being mean? Or do you really think this little of me? Because this isn’t working for me, and I can’t believe it’s helping you.”

I watched his eyes slide away from mine and said, “See? You’re doing it right now. You’re thinking, ‘Is she going to Hemi? What does she want from me? I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.’ I’m
telling
you what I want from you. I want you to treat me like everybody else. I want to feel like I can’t get it all done, like I’m pushing hard. I want to wonder if I’ve done it well enough, and to have you tell me where I’ve gone wrong, so I can learn. I want a job. A
real
job.”

“Then you should go get it somewhere else,” he snapped, then looked like he wished he could swallow the words again. He picked a folder up off his desk, opened it, then set it down again. “I mean,” he said, “you’re right. I’m in a tough spot here.”

He snapped his mouth shut, looking like a turtle determined not to swallow that fly, or whatever it was turtles ate, and I sighed and said, “So do you have something else for me?”

“I’ll find something. Go take a break.”

I didn’t.

I hadn’t been in Henry’s office since that first interview. I’d barely seen him, in fact. But now, I marched straight there and knocked.

He frowned, too. A lot less scared and a lot more annoyed than Simon. Fine. I was annoyed, too.

I walked in and sat down before he could invite me. And, yes, that probably wasn’t the best way to announce that I was here as a lowly peon, but I was fed up.

“Yes?” he asked, nothing in the least warm about his manner.

I didn’t talk to bosses like this. Except I did. “When I told you I was here to work,” I said, “what part of that wasn’t clear?”

“Are you dissatisfied with your job?” he asked, his tone icy, his blue eyes boring into mine.

“You bet I am. And I’ll tell you why. I’m taking money for nothing. I’m bored. I’m underworked. I’m being condescended to.”

The silent seconds ticked past, and I lifted my chin and waited him out. Finally, he said, “I told Hemi it wouldn’t work.”

“Well,” I said sweetly, “maybe you’d better assign me to somebody with…spine instead. Somebody who’ll tell me the truth.”