The Rake, page 7
Belle: (IF WE DO THIS, AND I’M NOT SAYING WE WILL).
Devon: we could start this month. I have some business to conduct in England, but I should be free going forward. Just call when it’s time.
Belle: I’ll need to see an STD test to know you’re clean.
Devon: I’ll fax it over.
Fax. The man still used a fax machine. He was so ancient, I was surprised he didn’t send me the results via carrier pigeon.
Devon: I’ll draft a contract in which we settle things such as custody, financials, and so forth. I’d require a certain amount of involvement to ensure the contract is satisfactory to both parties.
Belle: we’re really doing this, aren’t we?
Devon: why not?
Belle: well, let’s see …
Belle: BECAUSE IT’S CRAZY?
Devon: not half as crazy as getting pregnant by a faceless stranger, and yet people do that all the time. Evolution, darling. At the end of the day, we’re nothing but glorified monkeys trying to ensure our footprint in this world is not forgotten.
Belle: did you just call me a monkey? Strong romance game, Whitehall.
He didn’t reply. Maybe Devon wasn’t so old as much as I felt so young in comparison to him.
Belle: one more question.
Devon: yes?
Belle: what’s your favorite animal?
I thought he would for sure say a dolphin or a lion. Something corny and predictable.
Devon: pink handfish.
Oh, awesome. More weird shit.
Belle: why?
Devon: they look like drunk football hooligans trying to pick a fight at a bar. And their hands are eerie. Their flaws demand compassion.
Belle: you’re weird.
Devon: true, but you are interested, darling.
The next day, I stopped at Walgreens on my way to work and got an ovulation kit and chewable prenatal vitamins. Passing by a billboard sign of myself naked, I popped four into my mouth and read the instructions on the kit. I pushed the door open to the back office of Madame Mayhem.
Madame Mayhem was a stone’s throw from Chinatown Gate in downtown Boston. It was tucked between two brownstones, a travel agency, and a produce shop. The price was dirt cheap when I bought it with two other partners and turned it from a failing restaurant into a trendy bar. Two years ago, the guy who owned the launderette next to us went bankrupt, and I convinced him to sell us the lot at a reduced rate. I’d run back and forth to city hall, trying to get approval to knock down the dividing walls between the two properties. By the end of the process, the new and improved Madame Mayhem had been invented—big, bold, and risqué.
Just like me.
Now, I was the proud owner of one of the most infamous establishments in the city. The place wasn’t just a trendy nightclub with an obscenely expensive cocktail menu, but also offered burlesque shows, complete with 50’s-style recreations of New Orleans entertainment, women and men in fine lingerie, as well as an amateur night every Thursday, in which exhibitionists in the making had a chance to flaunt their goods.
On paper, I made a great profit. But since I’d bought out the other two partners, and refurbished the place completely, my personal income was modest. Not too bad, but bad enough that having a baby would put a serious dent in my savings.
Still, I was a hard worker, undeterred by hiccups. I worked in the back office during the day and helped my bartenders by night.
“Belly-Belle,” Ross greeted me as soon as I slipped into my gray shoebox of an office. He slid a coffee cup along my desk and took a seat on the edge of it. My best friend from school had grown up to be my chief bartender and staff manager at Madame Mayhem. He also grew up to be a total hottie. “Boston is not used to seeing you with clothes on. How are you feeling?”
“High on life and low on cash. What’s shaking?” I took a sip of my coffee, my purse still slung on my forearm. I needed to pee on one of the ovulation sticks before I got to work.
Ross hitched a shoulder up. “Just wanted to make sure you were okay after last week’s shit show.”
“There was a shit show last week?” I was kind of busy drinking my own body weight and trying to forget about the news Doctor Bjorn gave me, so my memory was blurry.
“Frank,” he clarified.
“Who the hell is Frank?” I blinked.
Ross gave me a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding me glare.
“Riiiight, that bag of bullshit.” Frank was a former bartender. Last week, I’d caught him sexually harassing one of the burlesque girls in the backroom. I fired him on the spot. Frank had agreed to walk away, but not before giving me a piece of his own mind about what a train wreck of a drunk bitch I was. Luckily for me, I was always ready for a fight, especially with a man. So when he screamed at me, I screamed louder. And when he tried to throw a lamp at me … well, I threw a chair at him, then deducted the cost to replace the broken chair from his last paycheck.
“There you go, you oxygen-wasting piece of crap. Now make sure you skip town, because this town sure is going to skip you after I fill in all my club-owner friends about what you did!”
I didn’t stop there. I also sent his employee picture to local newspapers and told them what he did.
Too harsh? Too bad. Next time, he shouldn’t get handsy with the staff.
“It’s all forgotten now.” I waved my hand in the air dismissively. I didn’t have time to talk about Frank. I needed to check and see if my eggs were doing their goddamn job.
“We’ll need to fill his spot.” Ross was still perched on my desk. I resumed my stride toward the bathroom.
“Yeah, well, just make sure they’re fully vetted.”
I got into the bathroom, crouched down, and peed on the ovulation stick. Rather than put it aside and wait for the results like an actual adult, I glowered at the stick, praying to see two strong pink lines rather than one dull one.
When two lines indeed appeared on the stick, I snapped a picture of it with my phone and sent it to Devon with the caption: it’s a go.
I went outside, sat at my desk, and tried concentrating on the Excel sheets in front of me. My eyes kept darting sideways, to my phone, waiting for Devon to reply. When he didn’t send anything back for an entire hour, I flipped the phone over so the screen wasn’t visible.
Time to calm your tits, I scolded myself internally. The man had a career. Every hour of his working day was billable. Of course he couldn’t just drop everything and run to Madame Mayhem to put a baby in me.
About two hours after I sent the text message, Ross strode into my office again. He slammed an expensive-looking bottle of champagne on my desk. It had a little golden card dangling from its neck.
“Dom Perignon?” I raised a skeptic eyebrow. This specific edition went for about a grand a pop. “We don’t carry it here. Where’d you get it?”
“Ah, that’s the question of the hour. Open the damn envelope and we’ll find out.” Ross jerked his chin toward the card, which, upon a second examination, looked like a miniature envelope. Dread filled my guts. This looked a lot like romance, and I didn’t do romance. I liked it better when Devon was comparing us to monkeys.
“How do you know it’s for me?” I eyed him suspiciously.
“Bitch, please. The only drink my dates buy for me is a fountain soda. Go on. Who’s it from?”
My fingers worked quickly to unwrap the mysterious envelope. Two tickets spilled out of its mouth. I picked one up, noticing my fingers were trembling.
“Tickets to the opera?” Ross’s voice asked in wonder. “What kind of lies are you feeding these poor men on Tinder? This dude obviously doesn’t know you.”
This is taunting my ass. He knows damn well I don’t do dates.
“I said I loved Oprah, not opera. He obviously misheard.” I let a provocative yawn loose. There was no way I was telling Ross about Devon. It was soul-crushing enough to admit my infertility to my girlfriends. I was a woman of great pride.
“How come men never take me anywhere nice?” Ross pouted.
“You give away the goods too quickly,” I murmured, still staring at the ticket in my hand like it was a dead body I needed to get rid of.
“You do too. And you don’t even one-date them.”
“You can have my ticket, if you want it.”
I was not going to watch an opera today. I had work to do. We were one bartender short.
I reminded myself that Devon did this for the same reason he did everything else—to manipulate, play, and throw people off-kilter. He probably thought it was hilarious to make me feel like we were dating. I had to set the record straight.
Belle: hello, you snail-eating, gilet-wearing, regatta-attending posh bloke, you. I won’t be able to join you at the opera today, but you may stop at my apartment any time after midnight and I promise to hit those high notes. – B.
That message, too, remained unanswered.
I worked into the evening, manning the bar along with six more bartenders, clad in a ruffled lace overbust corset dress. The scent of my own sweat had become so familiar to me over the years I’d built my career, I relished it.
I served drinks, cut limes, and hurried to the storage room to fetch more cocktail umbrellas. I danced on the bar, flirted with men and women, and rang the bell several times, signaling a tip-a-thon.
The burgundy curtain had ascended over the front stage, revealing a live band in tuxes. Their jazzy tune soaked into the tall walls. The burlesque dancers prowled slowly across the stage in high heels and sage-colored sequined dresses. People hooted, clapped, and whistled. I stopped, a crate of cocktail umbrellas in my arms, sweat dripping from my forehead, and watched them with a grin.
My decision to buy Madame Mayhem wasn’t accidental or offhanded. It stemmed from my wanting to promote the idea that being a sexual creature wasn’t sinful. Sex didn’t mean dirt. It could be casual and still be beautiful. My dancers weren’t strippers. You couldn’t touch them—you couldn’t even breathe in their direction without getting kicked out of the venue—but they took control of their sexuality and did whatever they goddamn pleased.
This, in my opinion, was true strength.
When I got back behind the bar, it was almost eleven. I knew I needed to wrap things up soon if I wanted to make it back home before midnight, with sufficient time to take a shower, shave my legs, and look the part of Devon Whitehall’s sexual partner.
“Ross,” I roared over the music, gliding across the sticky floor behind the bar and aiming a soda gun into a glass, making a vodka diet coke for a gentleman in a suit. “I’m off in ten.”
Ross’s thumb rose up in the air to signal he’d heard me. His other hand plucked a fifty-dollar bill from a woman leaning against the bar, her breasts spilling out of a neon-yellow sports bra.
I was about to take an order from a bunch of women wearing bachelorette party sashes (Maid of Dishonor, Bad Influence, and Designated Drunk). When I propped forward to do so, a hand shot toward me from the dark, gripping my forearm and giving it a painful squeeze.
I spun my head in the hand’s direction and was about to yank my arm away when I noticed the person attached to said hand was staring at me with death in his eyes.
His face was so scarred that I couldn’t guess his age even if I’d wanted to. A large portion of it was tattooed. He was swathed head-to-toe in black and looked nothing like the usual clientele we had here.
He gave me Lucifer vibes … and he wasn’t letting go of me.
“I suggest you remove your hand from my arm right now, unless you’re not feeling particularly attached to it,” I hissed out through gritted teeth, my blood boiling over.
The man smiled an awful, rotten smile. It wasn’t that his teeth were bad. On the contrary, they were big, white, and shiny, like he’d recently had dental work. It was what was behind him that made me uneasy.
“I have a message to deliver to you.”
“If it’s from Satan, tell him to come to me personally if he’s got the balls,” I spat out, yanking my arm away with force. His hand dropped, and I used every ounce of my self-control not to stick the lemon knife in it.
“I suggest you listen carefully, Emmabelle, unless you want very bad things to happen to you.”
“Says who?” I chuckled.
“If you don’t—”
Just as he began to speak, a tall, elegant form materialized from the shadows of the club, tossing the man away like he weighed no more than a straw. My scarred offender collapsed on the floor. Devon appeared in my line of vision, clad in a full-blown designer tux, his hair gelled back, his cheekbones as sharp as blades. He stepped onto the man—deliberately—scowling down at his loafers like he needed to clean dirt off of them.
“I was in the middle of something.” I flashed him my teeth.
“Allow me not to sympathize.”
“Are you capable of sympathy?”
“Generally? Yes. With women who leave me waiting? Not so much.”
Devon leaned over the bar in one swift movement and hurled me across his shoulder, turning away and marching toward the entrance doors. I looked up, catching Ross’s deer-in-the-headlights expression, frozen with a bottle of beer in one hand and a bottle opener in the other.
“Should I call security? The police? Sam Brennan?” Ross crowed from the depths of the bar, over the music. Devon didn’t slow down.
“No, it’s okay, I’ll kill him myself. But get this creeper’s details.” I was about to point at Scarface where I last saw him on the floor, only to find him gone.
I didn’t fight Devon. Being carried after working on one’s feet for six hours straight wasn’t the worst punishment in the world. Instead, I launched a verbal attack on him. “Why are you dressed up like a fancy waiter?”
“It’s called a suit. It’s an appropriate form of dress. Though, I gather the men you enjoy often sport orange jumpsuits.”
“Who told you? Persy?” I shrieked. “I only slept with one ex-con. And it was for a Ponzi scheme. It’s pretty much like screwing a politician.”
“I waited for you,” he said flatly, his voice turning icy.
“Why?” I huffed, resisting the urge to pinch his butt. “I already told you I’m not going to the opera.”
“No, you did not,” he said dryly, his fingers curling deeper to the curve of my ass. “My champagne and tickets arrived safe and sound, and since I hadn’t heard back from you, I assumed the plan was to meet tonight.”
That was impossible. I sent him a message.
Oh. Oh. The message must’ve not gone through. My cellular company had very poor reception. Especially when I was in the underground bunker called my office.
“I sent you a message. It didn’t go through. You think this whole alpha-male charade turns me on or something?” I let out a snort. Because, let me tell you, it absolutely did. Not that I would ever admit it out loud. But holy hell. It had been a hot minute since I’d been handled with such brash confidence.
“Not all of us engage in theatrics to survive, my dear Emmabelle. What you think of me is absolutely none of my business.” Devon burst out of my club into the cool, crisp night, striding toward his car. “You say you want a child, but you also go prancing around, drinking and working yourself to the bone. One of us knows how to get you pregnant, and I’m afraid that person is not you.”
The nerve of this asshole. He was mansplaining sex to me. I could stab him if I wasn’t, indeed, a little drunk and a lot exhausted from the day’s work.
Devon threw open the passenger door to his dark green Bentley, tucking me inside and buckling me up. “Now tell me who that man was. The one who held your arm.”
He shut the door and rounded the car before I could answer then slipped beside me. A waft of his irresistible, rich scent drifted into me.
“I have no idea. I was about to find out when you thundered in, giving me your best Straight Outta’ Savior Complex impression.”
“Is it an ordinary occurrence? Men grabbing you at work?” He started the car, zipping through the ice-crusted streets toward my apartment. My heart had no business skipping a beat because he remembered my address. What was happening in my chest better be a goddamn heart murmur.
“What do you think?” I sassed.
“I think certain men feel they can touch you because of your line of work,” he answered honestly.
It happened often, actually. Especially when I danced on the bar or got onstage with my dancers. But I knew how to set boundaries and put people in their place.
“It’s true.” I grinned. “I constantly need to fight men off. How do you think I developed these babies?” I kissed my biceps.
When he said nothing, I opened his glove compartment and began sifting through his shit. I often did things like that. Goaded people into a reaction. You could learn a lot about humans by the way they carried themselves when angry. I found a small engraved fossil and pulled it out.
“I’m not impressed with what I’ve seen tonight.” Devon, as calm as the Dalai Lama jerked the fossil from my hands and dumped it between us.
“My goodness, you’re not!” I slapped a hand over my cleavage, exhibiting my best fake British accent. “Heavens above. I must quit right this minute and become a governess or a nun. Whatever suits your taste, milord.”
“You’re infuriating.” He scrubbed at his perfect cheekbone, exasperated.
“And you were in my way,” I concluded, taking the small fossil again and messing with it. “I can fight my own battles, Devon.”
“You’re barely capable of keeping yourself alive.” His glacial expression told me he wasn’t being funny. He truly thought that.
At my building, Devon took the flight of stairs to my apartment, rather than use the elevator, still carrying me in his arms. More weirdness. How come none of his super-fans in this city ever picked on how odd he was?
“There’s an elevator right here. Put me down, Mr. Caveman.”
“I don’t do those.” His voice was clipped.
“You don’t do elevators?” I asked, relishing the feeling of his abs and pecs against my body.
“Correct. Or any sort of confined space I can’t get out of with ease.”
