The Dangerous Seduction (17 page)

“Y
OU
REALLY
fucked up, dude. Everybody’s taking her side,” Tim says.

Ryan takes a pull on his beer. “Yeah, well, I kinda expected that.”

“Marie was pissed when I told her I was meeting you tonight. She said I shouldn’t go. But dude, c’mon, you and me have been friends for freaking years. If I’ve gotta pick sides then I’m with you, Ryan. I told her that.”

Ryan huffs out a wan smile. “Thanks, man.”

In truth, he would’ve preferred for Tim to have made up an excuse not to come out, just like Marie wanted. He’s really not in the mood for shooting the shit with Tim tonight, but then again, it’s not like he’s got anything better to do except work. Joseph is—God—wherever he is right now. Besides, there’s an itchy, perverse part of him that’s curious to know what their friends are saying about the break-up. Tim at least will not hold back on that front.

“Yeah, so give me the skinny on this new chick, then. I want to hear everything, man.”

He resists the urge to roll his eyes.
Skinny? Chick?
Tim is the only guy he knows who can speak like that and keep a straight face. It was a habit he’d picked up back when they were in law school together, and he’s never realized how much it makes him sound like a jackass. “Nothing much to tell,” he says.

“Dude, c’mon. Don’t hold out on me here! Is she a blonde, brunette, redhead? What’s she do? You met her at work, right? That’s what Marie said.”

He blinks, a little taken aback. On the other hand, it’s the obvious assumption. Ever since he got this job, he’s been putting in long hours. Of course Daisy (and Marie) would assume that this mysterious other woman was someone at work. And Tim, after all, works in a big law firm. Tim knows exactly what kind of effects the long hours, confined spaces, and tight deadlines can have on inter-office relationships.

“Yeah, but no one knows. No one in the office knows and it’s complicated,” he says.

Tim watches him for a moment then his mouth splits into a wide, corny grin. “Oh man, complicated. She’s married, right? You’ve been messing around with a married woman?”

He shrugs, but doesn’t say anything, letting Tim believe what he wants. He wonders what Tim would say if he did tell him the truth; if he told him that the mystery girl was in fact none other than Joseph Van Aardt. Knowing Tim, he’d be delighted, possibly even jealous. He’d definitely be trying to figure out how he can leverage it to his advantage, how he can finally get that job at Chase Mackey Van Aardt. He suggests another round of drinks before Tim has the chance to ask him any more questions.

“So, have you seen her? Daisy, I mean?” Ryan asks when he gets back to the table with their beers. “Do you know how she’s doing?”

Tim slides his attention away from the basketball game playing on the TV screen in the corner of the bar. “I haven’t seen her, but Marie says she’s broken up.”

“Marie says she’s broken up?” he repeats quietly.

“Well, yeah, man. You didn’t expect her to be all sunshine and puppies. I mean, you know me, dude, that happy-ever-after bullshit isn’t my thing, but you and Daisy, I thought you two were the real deal. You both seemed to buy into all that crap. Tell me you at least let her keep that fucking huge sparkler.”

He blinks. “The ring? I haven’t thought about that. It’s hers. She can do what she likes with it.”

“If she’s got any sense, she’ll hold onto it for a while. Commodities are the one sure thing these days,” Tim says with a shrug. He shakes his head at Ryan. “Dude, Marie told me about that little stunt she pulled at your place. I was cringing inside for you when she told me.” He doesn’t look like he’s cringing now, though. He looks like he’s enjoying it, trying his best not to gloat in front of Ryan.

Ryan grits his teeth. “Oh, yeah, that. Well, you know Marie.”

“Fuck, yeah.”

“And I guess I kinda deserved it.”

Tim shrugs, takes a pull on his beer. “Guess so. I mean,
dude,
dumping her like that—it was pretty cold of you.”

He swallows, flicks out a wan smile as he finishes his beer. He doesn’t think about what it means if even Tim thinks he acted badly with Daisy, because
—
God
—
he
knows
he acted badly with her. He knows that. He doesn’t need Marie and Tim and his parents and anybody else who wants to put in their two cents worth to tell him that.

He doesn’t suggest they get another round and neither does Tim. Instead he makes his excuses and heads back to the office.

U
NLIKE
T
IM
,
nobody at work mentions the scene with Marie, though Ryan can’t stop thinking about it. He cringes every time he thinks of Marie standing in the middle of the office and calling him a slimy piece of shit, Estelle chasing her out of there with the force of her regal disdain. Luckily, everybody seems to have forgotten already, like the entire scene took place in a twenty-first century version of the Mos Eisley cantina from the first
Star Wars
movie. He decides that the only thing to do is to bring it up himself, to confront it and laugh it off, because otherwise, he’s not going to be able to stop torturing himself, and that stupid hot curl of humiliation will refuse to die down every time he brushes past any of his coworkers.

He brings it up with Fiona a couple of nights after his drinks with Tim. He likes Fiona, and they’ve been thrown together a lot over the past few weeks, working through the boxes of documents from Phil Cartwright’s and all the crap McNeil’s counsel delivered last week.

“So, the other day, about that woman, Marie, who came here to see me, the one that Estelle scared away?”

“What about her?” Fiona says, not bothering to look up from her laptop.

“In my old place, people would be talking about something like that for weeks, but here,” he breaks off, shrugs. “It’s like nothing happened.”

Fiona looks up, blinks at him, a furrow between her eyebrows. “You
want
people to talk about it?”

“No, God, no, of course not. But I just don’t get why people aren’t talking about it more, like it’s not more of a big deal?”

Fiona shrugs. “Joseph’s gotten death-threats before. Some guy he defeated, another of those tycoon types like Jack McNeil, Joseph totally wiped the floor with him, and I guess the guy’s ego couldn’t stand him being defeated by someone years younger than him. Well, he got into the lobby downstairs and threatened to kill Joseph to his face. He got arrested for it. And sentenced I think.”

“Jesus, really?”

“Uh-huh. And that’s not even the worst. Did you know that Joseph was shot once too?”

Instantly his blood runs cold, and a frisson of gooseflesh runs up and down his arms. “You, uh, what? He—what?”

“It was before my time, before Joseph became a senior partner. It was a similar situation; the losing guy didn’t like losing, except he was even more screwed in the head. He shot Joseph on the steps of the courthouse. Lucky for Joseph, the guy was a lousy shot. The bullet just grazed him, but he lost a lot of blood. It was pretty scary, by all accounts.”

“Shit,” he breathes. He swallows hard; his hands have clenched together without him realizing it, fingers knotted into a fist. He slowly unclenches them, forcing his body to relax. He thinks about Joseph’s body; he does have a scar, just above his hipbone. It’s barely noticeable to the eye; nobody would know it was even there, unless they were as intimately acquainted with Joseph’s body as Ryan is, of course. He’s kissed that scar, felt the rough, mottled knot of it under his tongue, and all that time…. He hadn’t even thought about where it came from, just assumed it was some childhood accident, not a fucking bullet wound.

He clears his throat. “Who told you that? If it was before your time?”

“Oh, old Mr. Mackey at last year’s Christmas party. He was drunk,
very
drunk, you know, like old people get sometimes. I was on his table for the dinner, and he started telling all these old horror stories. He had everybody hanging onto his every word.” She reaches for her coffee, takes a sip. “So, yeah, Ryan, compared with that, what happened with you and your ex’s BFF or whoever she was, doesn’t really make the radar. Be grateful for it. I would.”

He nods, forcing out a brief, fake smile. “Yeah, yeah, I guess. You’re right.”

He watches her slide another CD into her laptop. They’ve got about forty-five of the things to work through, forty-five CDs and about fifty legal files. It’s just like Ryan’s first week all over again—the massive towers of paperwork, the tracing and retracing of every single line, the dull methodical grind of it all. At least now that Joseph has moved him onto the McNeil case full time, Paul has stopped coming around his office and leaving him even more work. Paul understands the chain of command, and Ryan is off-limits for the moment. Ryan is living and breathing Jack McNeil, the bastard’s genial, smiling face haunting him every time he closes his eyes. And he can’t slack up on anything. He can’t drift off halfway through reading yet another log or report or contract or testimony. He can’t indulge in delicious daydreams about Joseph’s face or Joseph’s body or Joseph’s hands. He has to concentrate on every damn word in front of him because, who knows, there might be something Carson’s lackeys have overlooked, some glimmering silver needle among the shit heap of a haystack.

He stifles a yawn and blinks at his blurring screen. He’s feeling tired today. He didn’t get much sleep the night before. Joseph hadn’t come back to the apartment and so he’d lain awake all night, thinking about Daisy, remembering how happy she’d been the day they’d moved into the new apartment that Joseph had helped them get, remembering how he’d made up an excuse that very day to go meet Joseph. The entire apartment had been covered in unpacked boxes and cases, and he was making excuses to get out of there to fuck around with his boss.

He’s thinking about Joseph again before he can help himself
—
not that he ever can help himself
—
Joseph seems to be the default setting for his brain these days. But he hasn’t spoken to Joseph since Marie made that scene in the office. Joseph hasn’t even said anything to him about his plans for the evening, if he’s sleeping at the uptown apartment with Ryan or if he’s spending the night at his downtown apartment with someone else, or even if he’s going out of town. In fact, Joseph has only spent one night with Ryan this week. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Ryan that he wasn’t at his place that often.

“
Oh….
”

Fiona’s quiet little intake of breath makes him look up from his computer screen. She’s staring down at her laptop with her fingers hovering somewhere between the screen and her mouth.

“You find something?” he asks.

She flinches and jerks her gaze his way. “Uh, what? Sorry, what?”

“You sounded like you found something.”

“Did I?” She cuts her eyes away, sliding her attention back to the laptop screen.

“Yes. So you didn’t find anything?” he asks, frowning.

“No! I mean—no, yes, maybe. I don’t know, I just….” She hesitates, her hand hovering over the lid to her laptop. Then suddenly and decisively, she shuts her laptop with a soft click. “I need a break. God, yes, that’s what I need,” she says, her voice gaining strength. “And so should you, Ryan. You look exhausted.” She gets up from her chair and stumbles a little over the pile of box files by her feet. She slides her laptop under her arm and gathers up the power cable. “I should go now anyway. It’s getting late and I’m really tired and I promised Mark I wouldn’t be late tonight….” She trails off and looks about her distractedly before she gives him an awkward half wave and leaves his office.

“Okaaay,” he says slowly, speaking mostly to himself as he watches her walk away, heading for the elevators, her laptop crammed into a sports backpack slung across one shoulder, her winter coat and purse over her other arm.

He doesn’t stay much longer after Fiona leaves. Everything’s started to blur in front of his eyes, which probably is a good sign that he needs a break. He takes the subway back to Joseph’s apartment, unlocking the door with the key Joseph gave him. The apartment’s empty of course—no Joseph in evidence. Ryan drops the key into the bowl in the hall and toes off his dress shoes. Joseph gave him that key the day after they came back from interviewing his dad in Houston. He’s been trying hard not to read too much into it, though at the time he’d been hopeful, thinking that it meant that Joseph actually wanted him around. Now he’s thinking that it might just be because Joseph wants a house sitter.

Despite the tiredness, he’s still feeling wired and not ready for bed, so he spends a couple of hours working out on the impressive array of home gym equipment Joseph keeps in the third bedroom: thirty minutes on the treadmill, thirty minutes on the bike, and an hour on the various weight machines. He showers when he’s done and thinks about the last time the two of them showered together. He closes his eyes and soaps up his cock and jacks off, thinking of how Joseph had looked under the falling spray, how the droplets had caught in his eyelashes and how his skin had been pink and pruney and flushed, and how he’d tasted of water and soap and heat when Ryan kissed him.

He pulls on some clean sweats and a T-shirt when he’s done. He orders pizza, drinks the beer he left in the refrigerator, and decides to watch one of Joseph’s many still-in-the-cellophane-DVDs. He chooses
Dangerous Liaisons
because it’s Daisy’s favorite movie and he’s in the mood for some self-flagellation and guilt-wallowing. It kind of backfires when he finds himself enjoying it; he can’t deny that Daisy has good taste in movies, if not in boyfriends.

He’s almost up to the
It’s beyond my control
scene when he hears the sound of the key in the lock, and Joseph walks in. He’s dressed in a tuxedo, and naturally, he looks incredible in it.

“Interesting choice of movie for a moping session,” Joseph says, his gaze running over the piles of empty pizza boxes and bottles of beer decorating his precious hardwood floor.