Owned: A Mafia Menage Romance (51 page)

“Well… wait, don’t just go,” I stammered as he stood up. “I thought you’d be happy or something. We’ll all still be together… Nothing has to change.”

“Right,” he said quietly, and kissed me chastely on my forehead, then walked away.

I watched him stride across the patio and through the sliding door to the living room, wondering if he expected me to chase him. But suddenly I was tired, way too tired to start a new conversation about the same thing.

I stared into the velvety dark sky for a while longer then dragged myself to my room and dumped everything that seemed appropriate into a few pieces of luggage. Without knowing how long we would be there or what I needed, I just grabbed one of everything.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of Declan shuffling through my bedroom in the dark.

“What time is it? Are we going?”

“No, no. Hush,” he whispered as fell heavily onto the other side of the bed, still dressed and smelling of bourbon. “You have hours. Go back to sleep.”

“OK,” I mumbled groggily. “You’ll wake me?”

“Of course,” he said softly.

“I don’t want to miss it,” I said, mostly to myself.

“Oh, you won’t miss it. I knew you were coming,” he said, patting my hand. “I knew you’d do it my way.”

“OK,” I sighed, letting exhaustion drag me under again as his words echoed across the dark, inky water of sleep.

I knew you’d do it my way.

JACKSON CAME IN the room with a tray full of espresso and small biscuits and muffins, a playful smile on his lips. I squinted at him from under the tangled curtain of hair that had somehow arranged itself in front of my face overnight as Declan pushed himself up on one elbow beside me.

“Car’s here in thirty minutes,” Jackson informed us with a smirk.

“Ugh,” Declan replied. I wasn’t quite as literate.

Jackson set the tray down on the mattress and sighed judgmentally before leaving Declan and me to slowly crawl toward the steaming cups of life-giving elixir. I forced my hands to cradle one and brought it to my face, knowing that was probably my only chance for a day with some kind of lucid forebrain activity.

The dark, sweet liquid curled over my tongue. I swear I could feel it flipping every cell to the On position like an infinite row of light switches. In a couple minutes, I had the strength to push back my matted hair and open my eyes all the way.

“He seems happy,” I remarked into my cup.

“You’re surprised?” Declan said, reaching for a white-frosted scone and popping it in his mouth whole.

“No… I guess yeah. Last night he didn’t seem too thrilled with me. Not too happy I was coming,” I admitted. I cut my eyes toward Declan to gauge his reaction but he didn’t offer any new insights, just shrugged and poked through the plate of fruit until he found the blackberry he wanted.

“Jackson never gets riled up,” he replied, distracted by another pour of dark, rich coffee.

“Never?” I asked carefully.

“Nope.”

“Huh.”

I swirled another mouthful of coffee over my tongue and watched Declan’s long, heavy muscles working under his skin as he reached across the tray.

“How about you?”

“How about I what?” he teased, quirking an eyebrow at me. I searched his face for remainders of our previous conversation and found nothing. No sign.

I thought he broke up with me,
 I mused.
Maybe not.

Maybe Amsterdam was my best idea ever.

Carefully, I got up and knee-walked across the mattress, watching his eyes following the pink triangle of silk that covered my sweet bits. I pushed him lightly with my fingers to roll him on his back and then straddled his hips, letting my hair sweep across his bare chest.

“You wanna take a shower?” he murmured in a low voice, his fingers playing in the string of my bikinis as I brushed my crotch across the bulge of his cock.

“Yeah,” I whispered, ducking my head and mouthing his nipple playfully. He still smelled like the sharp caramel of bourbon.

“OK, you go first,” he offered suavely, pushing me up and off him. I stared in surprise and then tried to cover my expression with my hair, but he was already turning away anyway.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” he continued, “but if you’re fast I can still hop in before we go.”

“Yeah, OK,” I muttered, sliding off the end of the bed with my gaze carefully averted. My belly roiled with embarrassment. “I’ll be quick.”

I heard him make some kind of affirmative grunt and walked into the bath, reaching for a clip to hold my hair. My reflection in the triple mirror caught my eye and I winced at the sight of the cartoonish rings of smudged eyeliner, the yellowing bruises on my thigh and wrist, and the fading hickie on my neck.

Geez, girl, you gotta eat,
 I scolded myself as I stared at the too-prominent jut of my hipbones.
You look like half a junkie.

I turned the shower on full steam and stepped in gingerly, setting right to work on a proper scrub of all my planes. I was leaning into a new life, new opportunities, I reminded myself. Anything could happen.

As I inhaled the fragrant, lemon and spice-flavored steam, I began to get excited all over again. A new world of people would see my work, without the prejudice of the whole LA art market working against it. I had never really felt like Bridget was entirely on my side, not that her cynicism allowed her to be on anybody’s side, really. But with Declan’s endorsement, anything could happen, right?

It was a strange way of getting to the career I dreamed of, I knew, but that wouldn’t matter for long. I had always imagined Bridget and I cracking open the critics’ opinions like soft-boiled eggs under a hard spoon. I’d make them love me. She would help. But was it really that different if the help came from Declan, and the critics’ opinions were uttered in Dutch? Probably not that different, I consoled myself as the old dream evaporated in the steam. It was still my own work, and I was eager to see what a fresh perspective could do.

The whole future was just moments away. I couldn’t wait.

***

This time, I had worn some sensible wedges with an ankle strap. As we walked to the Gulfstream, waiting with its door and stairs open and welcoming, I remembered that first trip in the private jet. The broken shoe, Jackson’s weirdly sweet paperback fetish, and Declan’s fingers on my ankle. It seemed so far away now that I could hardly believe it was real.

I could feel their eyes on my backside as I walked confidently across the tarmac, my dress drawn snug around my thighs by the breeze. Hopefully, whatever starry-eyed dork impression I had given them the first time would be obliterated by the new Margot: the non-stumbling, non-bankrupt, non-Kevin-addicted version they saw before them now. I was different. I hoped they knew it.

Still, I held tight to the railing as I climbed the stairs. No sense in tempting fate. Falling backwards, ass over ankles to lie unconscious on the concrete would just be
so Margot
.

A new flight attendant nodded her head at me as I walked into the cabin. I could hear the captain’s competent murmur from the cockpit. Jackson slipped his hand over my waist as he entered and gave me an encouraging squeeze and a peck on the forehead.

The Burkes slid in behind me and took the captain’s chairs next to the dining table. Declan watched me with a smirk and pulled his sunglasses off, folding the arms in and sliding them into the leather case.

“Make yourself at home,” he said, grinning suavely.

I nodded, momentarily dazzled by the circumstance again. They fixed me in their sky-blue gazes and waited: Naughty and Nice, all set up in their private jet. The jet I was on. The jet we were taking to Amsterdam. The three of us. Like we belonged together.

If this is a dream, I would like to never wake up, thank you.

“How long is the flight?” I asked as I settled on the sofa, arranging my silk dress over my hip to show just a flash of the pointelle, side-tie panties I’d worn. The leather felt warm and soft on the back of my thighs, like a lover’s hand.

“About eleven hours,” Jackson answered. “You can sleep most of the way if you want.”

“No she can’t,” Declan growled, his eyes hungrily skirting the hem of my dress. My heart jumped in my chest to see the desire in his face.

Yes, Amsterdam was my best idea ever!

The cabin door closed with a hydraulic sigh and a solid thud, and the cabin hissed as it pressurized. The hangar slid by the windows as we edged out onto the tarmac and I bit my lip, watching the LA skyline going by next to us, wondering when I would see it again.

“You nervous?” Jackson asked, his head cocked adorably to one side.

“Am I?”

“Well, you look nervous,” he said.

“I feel…
outstanding
,” I replied with a grin.

He winked at me and nodded. His smile was affectionate and earnest, and I saw the pride in his eyes as his gaze flitted over my earlobes. I had worn the diamond earrings he gave me and was happy to watch him notice them. He looked pleased, and my inner puppy wriggled happily as he smiled at me with unconcealed delight.

“Prepare for takeoff,” the flight attendant called out politely from the front of the cabin, and we all dutifully snapped the seatbelts over our laps.

The jet sped down the runway like a predator hurtling after some unseen prey. In seconds, I felt the cabin lunging into the sky, the sound of the tires silenced, the whine and clunk of the landing gear being tucked away into the machine’s belly. We were in the sky already, and the whole trip was really underway. I bit my lips closed, trying to control my kid-at-Disney expression.

Declan and Jackson chatted seriously as we ascended, leaning across the table toward each other while I watched LA sliding away below us. The jet banked hard to the right, filling up the small window with the sight of neighborhoods, one after the other, all arranged in neat symmetries.

Everything flowed beneath us, silently slipping under our wings and away, the landscape changing almost faster than I could understand it. First the houses got closer together, then farther apart, gradually taken over by the great circles of fields all set together, knitted together like a patchwork quilt.

Clouds shot by outside my window, cotton-candy puffs of white. We ascended into a blinding fog and I peered into the grey, trying to see individual shapes. Then suddenly we were above it, and a bumpy sea of white froth stretched out farther than I could see to the horizon. I remembered a story about Georgia O’Keeffe going up in an airplane for the first time, and how seeing the tops of the clouds had changed her forever. For years after that, she was obsessed with painting these huge, thirty-foot-wide canvases showing rows upon rows of orderly, overwhelming masses of white. I knew exactly the feeling she was trying to convey.

 “Margot,” Declan said suddenly from across the aisle, “why don't you come over here?”

He opened an envelope and spread out three sets of papers before him. Each was stapled together. Jackson held his chin in his fist and looked out the window.

“What’s all this?” I asked as I slid into the seat next to Jackson.

Declan took a pen from the front of his Hermes bag and worked it between his fingers.

“Well since we’re going to be working together,” he said with a brilliant smile, “I’d like to get everything laid out.”

“Oh this is for me?” I blurted and instantly wished I hadn’t.
God, you still sound like a bumpkin,
 I scolded myself. I felt Jackson wince beside me but he kept his gaze out the window.

“This is for all of us,” Declan said simply. “It’s really just a formality, but I like to have a paper trail. Feels so official,” he added with a wink.

“Are you buying me?” I chuckled, half-believing that was true.

“Ha, no not exactly. You probably know we make it our business to find undervalued assets, small businesses, things like that… And then we bring them to buyers who will assess them properly. We create value... for everybody involved.”

“For everybody,” I repeated.

“Yes,” he nodded. “Everybody wins.”

“OK,” I said slowly, unsure if I should read the papers or act like I was so accustomed to this situation that I didn’t even need to do that.

“You’re very much an undervalued resource.”

“Oh really? I never thought of it that way, that’s funny…. Like an undeveloped lot?”

“You could say that.”

“And you’re going to fix all that?”

“It’s my job,” he replied.

I nodded. “That’s what Edna said.”

Declan drew himself up slightly, his eyes narrowing for just the briefest moment. “Oh she did, did she?”

“She said you’re a collector, like her,” I responded, watching his posture relax again. “And she said you’re ruthless.”

Declan snorted in irritation, looking away and then back to me, his composure miraculously reassembled just like that.

“That’s not a word I would use,” he said, scowling.