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I draw my hand up to my face to smell her, breathing deeply that secret musk she shared with a complete stranger, just like that.
What an incredible creature.
Chapter 4
Royce
Sully appears in the doorway, blocking it out almost entirely. He’s enormous, practically doorway-sized himself. He even fought MMA for a time until our attorneys talked him out of it. It would just be too easy for him to brain some poor guy and end up on the other end of a lawsuit. We are always being targeted like that. We can’t ever afford to do what we want, it seems.
“What’s up? I was about to go down for a swim. You want to race laps?”
I hop off the treadmill, wiping the back of my neck with a towel. Sully glances over the free weights, obviously tempted. There are few things he likes more than a challenge.
“Actually, I don’t really have time,” he admits sadly. “I need to be in Detroit in a couple hours.”
“I thought the deal was done?” I ask absentmindedly, punching in directions to the elliptical. Out of the corner of my eye I can see us both in the full-length mirrors along one wall. He may be younger than me, but I’m still holding together pretty well. I could take him in the swimming pool. Maybe only by half a second or two, but I’m pretty sure I could still beat him.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But now there’s something about views across the river toward Windsor… the casino… all that crap. I gotta go make sure everybody knows who’s in charge.”
“You’re in charge,” I remind him. “Don’t let those Canadians boss you around. They seem polite but… you know.”
He holds his hands out helplessly. For all his size and strength, he is always legitimately surprised when people want to take advantage of him. He takes it a little too personally, I think.
“Right? I mean, how far does that politeness thing go? They’re not going to take me for another half a million, I can tell you that.”
I snap the heart rate monitor onto my ear lobe and start pumping against the highest level of resistance. I know I am supposed to start out slow, but why bother? I like to just go right for it, start right in.
“So, can you take care of the nanny?”
He’s not looking at me, so I’m not entirely sure what the hell he is talking about.
“Nanny?” I repeat.
“She should be here around eleven. I told her to just come up here. I hope that’s okay. So you have, like, ten minutes.”
“Wait, are you fucking kidding me?”
I jump off the elliptical, and the foot pads keep circling from the momentum for a couple of seconds as though there’s a ghost on the machine.
“Yeah, August vouched for her. She’s cool. She’s just here to do interviews.”
I look at myself again in the mirror. I can’t interview anybody right now. I look like a gym rat with this sweat staining my shirt in a V. But even that is beside the point.
“It’s great that August vouched for her… but I thought we were done with this. Aren’t we? Didn’t we all decide to be done with this?”
“No, we didn’t. The last real decision we made—you made—was that we couldn’t all be taking on girlfriends and wives and diluting the family name. The legacy. Right? Isn’t that what you told us?”
I wave the air dismissively. I don’t like his tone.
“We can talk about it again. We can come up with a new arrangement, bring it to a vote. I don’t feel comfortable deciding this on the fly.”
“You’re not deciding on the fly,” he insists. “You’re just staying the course. We’re just trying again.”
I scrub my hand over my face. “Well, maybe Nina was a lesson we need to take to heart. Maybe mother and lover is too much to ask of one woman. Know what I mean? We should consider that a possibility.”
Sully shrugs helplessly. “We’ve got to have a nanny, Royce. We don’t have a lot of other options.”
“We do have options!” I object, and come to think of it, I don’t like my tone either. I sound too desperate, too emotional.
