Page 102 of Sweet Ruin

My mother’s house is closed to me and my husband is in a house I’m never sleeping in again and my sister has probably got a nightclub table booked with a champagne tower and bottomless martinis. Tonight’s ringing in of the New Year was going to involve me on the office cot with a plastic cup of the cheap prosecco we keep for cake tastings, watching the ball drop on a laptop with a cracked corner, listening to the boiler bang.

“I had plans,” I whisper in a voice that no one, especially not Kane, would ever believe.

He bends close enough for his lips to brush my ear when he speaks. “Then consider them canceled,” he says. “Tonight, you belong to me.”

Then he straightens up, leaving me to deal with the full-body waves of heat and cold that follow pretty much everything he’s ever said.

He steps past me and opens the office door. His scary butler is standing in the hall like he’s been there the entire time, which he almost certainly has.

“Tell Stepan to bring the car around,” Kane says. “Ms. Dorsey and I have some errands to run.”

20

DELILAH

The butler has my coat in his hands before I get halfway down the hall.

I take it and put it on and start doing the buttons. While I’m doing them, I try the last reasonable idea I have left.

“Okay. So here’s what makes the most sense,” I say. “You drop me at the shop. I take a shower in the sink like the raccoon that I am. I put on the one nice dress I own, which is at my house, which I can’t go to, so scratch that, I put on the black one I wore Christmas Eve, which is in my trunk. Then you pick me up at nine and we do whatever this is.”

Kane pulls on his own coat. “No,” he says.

“That’s it? Just no?”

“Did I stutter?”

He holds open the door for me. The cold comes up the steps at us. Outside, I see a car at the curb, sleek and black, engine running. A man in a chauffeur’s uniform is standing at the back door with his hand on the handle. He doesn’t look like any chauffeur I’ve ever seen, though. He’s got a shaved head and a piercing through one eyebrow. When he sees me looking, he inclines his head and says, “Ma’am.”

“That’s Stepan,” Kane says.

I wave meekly. “Hi, Stepan.”

“Ma’am.”

Kane escorts me down the steps and then helps me into the backseat. It’s so warm and cozy in here, and— My God, are those built-in massagers?

Shut up, idiot, I snap at myself. This is business, remember? Nothing more. It’s basically a hostage situation.

But my body and my brain are not on the same page. My body wants to live here.

Kane gets in on the other side. The door shuts behind him with that expensive thunk and hiss that luxury cars do best. It’s the sound of money closing around you.

Stepan pulls out. I look out the window at the doorman still salting his stretch of sidewalk. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“You know, I don’t think it would kill you to provide just one—only one!—piece of information in advance. Try it! You might like it.”

“I’ll pass.”

I fold my arms. The stupid, magical seat keeps kneading my lower back with its stupid, magical hands. Nineteen-hour days spent standing on rubber mats have given me a spine that pops like a glowstick when I sneeze, and this dumb Bond villain car is doing more for me in four minutes than the heating pad I bought off a pharmacy clearance rack ever has.

I wonder what Priya is doing. She’s at the shop right now, worried sick about me but probably working hard nonetheless. I bet she’s pulling the last of the Chelsea buns and keeping a careful eye on Zara, who I’m sure is parked on the office cot with her tablet and a broken snowman cookie.

Before I left, I promised her we’d be okay. All of us.

I don’t know if I’m “okay,” in the technical sense of the word. I guess I am right this second. I’m in a car that’s gotta be worth half a million dollars, getting my lumbar knots rubbed out and on my way to who knows where for who knows why.