Owned: A Mafia Menage Romance (49 page)

“Say yes,” he demanded.

“I can’t just say yes,” I said, shaking my head. My thoughts were whirling. “Why can’t we just leave things how they are?”

He chuckled. “Things never stay the same for long,” he said with a finality that made my heart ache.

“Are you… breaking up with me?” I said with as much strength as I could.

He made some kind of sighing, groaning, wishy-washy noise. “I don’t know if breaking up is a word I would use. This has been awesome, truly. But everything has to evolve, doesn’t it? Evolve or perish.”

Fuck. Oh my god. Fuck. He is totally breaking up with me.

I stared at him with my mouth literally hanging open, groping helplessly for something to say. I felt like something I held in my arms was turning to sand and slipping away from me faster than I could gather it back up.

“Declan, I just… I don’t know what to say.”

“Say yes.”

“I don’t want things to change.”

“Everything changes,” he said with a growing coldness. Then he walked toward me and kissed my hair sweetly. “We’re leaving in the morning, babe,” he said, with more tenderness, “and I hope you’re coming with us.”

As he turned away to walk down the hall, I looked out over the pool and toward the bedroom. The water cast light back up to the house and I could see Jackson in the window, his arms crossed over his belly. As I watched, he raised a hand slowly, and held it palm-out in a wave. Then he looked over his shoulder as Declan entered the room, and I couldn’t see him anymore.

###

Billionaire Brothers - Book 4

Meg Watson

I SAT IN THE SAAB in the driveway with the motor idling for way too long, my hands mangling the steering wheel, my heart clawing at the inside of my chest like it wanted to be let out. More than anything, I was desperate to rush back into the house. I wanted everything settled and determined, either way.

What did Declan mean? He seemed so cold. I could feel a door closing, closing, closing in slow motion and there was nothing I could do about it. Or was there? I didn’t know.

And what did Jackson mean?
What about us?
Was there an “us?”

But I couldn’t go back in there. I needed space. Or maybe I thought they needed space to work it out between them. Were they talking about me? Did they know about each other’s plans?

I felt like the little M on the diamond pendant they had given me, only both sides of the chain were being jerked in opposite directions. I could feel myself being torn down the middle.

“Just go, Margot. Go somewhere,” I muttered angrily and threw the car into drive. As I edged down toward the street, I kept an eye on the rearview mirror, just in case. But nobody came after me. I was on my own.

The painting in the back seat was carefully crated so when I stopped at the stop sign, I opened the clips and jerked the convertible top back. The sun came down like a hammer, instantly heating the leather seats to dangerous, flesh-frying levels.

I didn’t mind. A little pain would be good for me, I thought. Singe off the frayed ends.

On a whim, I took the next right and found myself in front of Edna’s house. Raul stood atop a ladder with shears, shaving a precise layer of new growth from the artful hedges. My stomach churned as I remembered her rejection of me.

But she was right,
 I reminded myself sagely.
And look at you now. You’re better for it.

But I couldn’t feel grateful about it. Maybe her blinking, what-can-I-do stare when she called my work “superfluous” had helped me dig through to the bubbling source of what was inspiring my new paintings, the ones I was so in love with, but still. My feelings were hurt and I planned on pouting about that for as long as it took.

***

Bridget was standing behind Melissa sighing and cough-gasping in frustration as the poor, drug-addled assistant tried to hang a porcelain bas-relief sculpture single-handedly on hooks suspended on wires. Melissa’s hair stuck out like an old stuffed animal and she grunted and whimpered as Bridget asked her to make minute, probably irrelevant adjustments.

“It’s crooked,” I called out as I walked up. Well, what can I say? Sometimes I like to throw blood in the water too.

“Wha…?” Melissa gasped, reaching out to the far end to push it up.

“To the left,” Bridget insisted for no real reason.

“That thing weighs like sixty pounds, doesn’t it?” I muttered, below Melissa’s hearing.

Bridget nodded and sucked her teeth.

“Oh yeah, at least,” she agreed. “And it actually goes on the other wall, over there.”

I turned my back so only Bridget could see my face.

“So she’s not off punishment yet?”

She shrugged. “Practice makes perfect. Did you bring me goodies?”

“Yes,” I nodded. “Can we, uh… Go to the front?”

“Sure. Hey, Melissa? You know what…. I’m thinking this should really go over
there
.”

Melissa let her forehead thump against the wall, her upper arms visibly jiggling from the strain of holding the piece up.

“OK, Bridget,” she called out meekly as we walked to the front gallery.

“I’m surprised you’re still torturing her,” I said.

“Yeah… It’s losing its zing, but whatever. So what’s in the box?”

“Hornets,” I answered.

“Ooooh!” she cooed, clapping her hands together under her chin. “Let’s see them!”

I snapped open the clips on the crate and pulled out the piece, handling it carefully because it was nowhere near dry.

“OK, OK…” she breathed excitedly, walking carefully toward it on her too-high lucite platform heels and bending at the waist. She peered at it and nodded vigorously, shaking loose a fistful of amethyst curls that looked like they had been candy-coated.

“I like your hair, by the way,” I offered.

“Shh!” she hissed, waving me back with her thickly lacquered nails. “I’m absorbing!”

“OK, OK, absorb all you want,” I muttered and backed away, taking in the whole wall of other works. Though they were mostly highly textured abstracts with some twigs and chicken wire and crap embedded in the troweled surfaces, there was a collection of highly detailed portraits of imaginary monsters to the left, painted in monochrome like Victorian photographs. It was a clever and compelling sort of humanity: the weepy cyclops, the overly excited ghost no one could hear, the grotesquely grinning troll with the lopsided horns sprouting from his forehead. Each character smiled from behind the domed glass as though proudly sitting for a school portrait. They made me wistful. Did they even know they were monsters?

“I love it,” Bridget was saying over and over.

“I’m glad,” I said loudly, trying to see the portrait of the troll a little closer, but my reflection in the glass kept getting in the way. The mid-afternoon sun was bouncing all around the gallery like a rubber ball.

“You see how you interlock now?” she said, squinting at me then back to the painting with her head cocked. I tilted my head to the side and backed up. Taken altogether, yes, I thought I could see what she meant. Though my work was different, it “worked” with the others. We were all distinct, clearly singing out notes that seemed to harmonize in a group.

“Huh,” I responded. “And I didn’t interlock before?”

“No, not really. There wasn’t enough
there
, there. If you know what I mean.”

“I’m sure I don’t,” I lied. Actually I knew exactly. I was just a little tired of hearing it.

She reached out and poked a corner, flicking at a barely-there hornet that seemed to hover above the painting’s surface.

“There’s something really...
menacing
 about this, Mar,” she breathed.

“Well, hornets are fucking scary,” I responded.

“Yeah, but… Whew. You know?”

She looked at me, her kohl-black eyes blinking meaningfully. I shrugged.

“Like,” she continued, searching for more words, “like a goddamn
threat
, you know? Like a warning.”

“I guess,” I said, but inside I was both thrilled and a little put off. Was it so easy to read me now? On the one hand, that would be amazing: to assemble seemingly unrelated images to create a clear emotional message. On the other hand, those were my private thoughts and I couldn’t help feeling a little invaded.

“Where did it come from?” she asked, knuckling her chin, careful not to disturb her thick layer of purple lip gloss.

“A dream, I guess.”

“Aw fuck, please, god no,” she drawled.

I winced. “What?”

“Please don’t give me any art-school
I saw it in a dream
 crap…”

“Well, it’s a dream of a real thing though,” I sulked, offended that she would conflate me with those wanna-be imposters. “I think it is, anyway. I don’t know. I sort of remember a party, like a cookout. My mom was there, so I must have been pretty young. Everything seemed totally fine. Everybody was laughing, you know. And at first I remember seeing one or two hornets, no big deal… The party just kept going.”

“Yeah, OK,” she said. “Go on…”

“Well, I don’t know. It doesn’t all make sense, and probably the details like the wind and the noises is just dream stuff, not really real. But suddenly there were hornets, like,
everywhere…
 Like, they were in the food, under the patio umbrella, so close you could feel their wings. Dozens of them… Hundreds. Like they were smart. Like they hated us.”

“Fuck.”

“Everybody went running, and that was it. The whole day just came down to that crazy, random thing. Everything was ruined. And it started with just a couple bugs, like you might see any day of the week. Like at any time, everything could go just that way. Crazy.”

“I see,” she said, nodding, staring into the painting. “So these are like the fucking
harbingers
. They’re the
premonition
.”

“Right.”

“It’s all there, Mar. I can totally feel it. I don’t know how you did it.”

“Man, that was such a shitty day, you know? I mean, I only really remember my mom in little bits and pieces, but this one day that was supposed to just be normal, nice… It just went sideways in such a hurry. I felt so cheated,” I said, my hand fluttering up to cover my face. My chin had started to quiver.

What are you doing? Get a grip!

“Wow,” Bridget said in a low, careful voice, looking me over like I was some kind of disturbing museum specimen. “Are you, uh, OK?”

“Yeah, fuck… I don’t know, sorry,” I apologized, trying to smile as my eyes burned.

Seriously, you’re not going to cry are you? Seriously?

“Well, you’re just a tiny little powder keg, now aren’t you?” she cooed sympathetically, her hand hovering just over my arm but not touching me. “You’re like inches away from going nuclear, huh?”

“Aw, fuck you, gawd.”

“No I think this is awesome,” she nodded. “Seriously. You have tapped the fucking mother vein. Don’t stop. I mean… well, you may need to be medicated or electro-shocked or whatever, eventually… but before that happens, get as much work done as you can, OK?”

“Spoken like the true remora you are, Bridge,” I sighed, breathing deeply and trying to pull myself together. “Gawd, I am a mess, huh? Wow.”

She wrinkled her nose affectionately at me as I sniffled back a mucous-sodden cleansing breath.

“You are! A truly adorable mess. And I may be a remora, but that’s only because you are a motherfuckin
shark
, Mar. You really are. Just going for blood. And it’s great!”

“OK,” I sighed, nodding. “OK. Well, that’s good.”

“It is!”

“Yeah, OK. It is. It’s hard, though,” I whined.

“Of course it’s hard.”

“No I mean… Like seriously hard. Like pulling teeth, digging out scabs, pulling out stitches hard.”

She nodded avidly. Her eyes glittered with something like lust. I leaned back.

“You know... You freak me out when you look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re gonna eat me or something.”

“Pssht,” she waved her hands. “You’re too skinny to eat. And getting skinnier all the time, by the look of you. You need a sammich or something? No… Nevermind that. Just keep pulling out your stitches and stuff, Margot. You have a whole lifetime of repressed emotion that’s dying to come out, and it’s going to make us both very wealthy women, sweetcakes.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. I felt her head turn toward me and cringed. Her breath puffed out of her nostrils, suddenly hot and sweaty. She knew something was up, but there was no turning back. I had to tell her.

“About that,” I continued. “I’m going to be out of town for a bit?”

“Um. No.”

“Yeah, Amsterdam?” I pressed on, trying to act like this was all going to be fine even as all my statements came out like questions. “The Burkes are going to Amsterdam and Declan has some people I should meet? So I am going? Shouldn’t be too long?”