One for the Money

Or maybe I was made to stand by hers.

Which is all just my body’s way of telling me I’m down to fuck.

I don’t think that’s in the cards for me tonight, but I find I don’t mind that much. The challenge is more appealing. The challenge to make Eva Morelli have fun. I escort her out of the room. We’re all the way down the hall when she starts second-guessing herself. I feel it enter her limbs like stiffness. Like fear, even if she’d never admit it.

“We don’t actually have to go anywhere,” she murmurs, as if she’s letting me off the hook. As if I should be relieved that I don’t get to take her on a date.

“Chickening out already?” I ask.

Her glance is sharp. “Excuse me?”

“That’s what this is, right? You’re afraid I might actually make good on my promise. That you’d actually have a good time, while your family has to fend for themselves.”

Rose blooms on her cheeks. A deep breath draws my attention to the shadowed space between her breasts. Indignation looks sexy on her. “Unlike my mother, I know that there weren’t any real plans. You only said that to shock her. This is a game for you.”

“A game?”

“A game,” she says, “like everything else in your life. You have money and women and cars, and not a single problem that can’t be solved by a check.”

Anger blisters through my veins. Followed by grief. “If you say so.”

“My mother’s going to expect me to come up with fantastical tales of this surprise date I somehow managed to land with the charming and handsome Finn Hughes.”

“You think I’m handsome?”

An exasperated laugh. “She thinks you’re handsome. I think you’re annoying.”

“You think I’m charming, for sure.”

“And full of yourself.”

I grin. “Come on, Morelli. Have a good time. I double-dog dare you.”

She throws up her hands in the middle of the large, darkened hallway. “I can’t even imagine leaving in the middle of a gala. What if something goes wrong?”

“Let it burn. We’ve got plans.”

She shakes her head, a half-smile on her face. It’s not refusal. It’s the look of a woman who’s going to let me show her a good time. I take her hand and lead her away from the bright lights. We leave through a side exit. Gargoyles watch us from the crown of the house as we go down. My Bugatti is already waiting there. I texted the valet before I even entered the drawing room. She’s already purring in the gravel drive.

“Your car is already waiting?” Eva says, a laugh in her voice.

“What? I don’t do half-assed promises. I stole you away for the night. You’re mine for the next five hours. What will I do with you? I have ideas, of course. Hundreds of them.” I sweep open the door and hold it for her.

Eva hesitates for a heartbeat. Then she lets me hand her into the deep seat.

“Where are we really going?” she says. “Somewhere in the city?”

“No, somewhere here.”

“Here as in Bishop’s Landing?” she says. Because, of course, Eva grew up here.

She should know the places a person would go to have fun in Bishop’s Landing. And I don’t mean champagne fun, I mean alcohol fun. I mean blackout-and-forget fun. Or at least the possibility of it. The possibility of bliss.

“Yes,” I tell her.

“Will you take me home afterward?”

“Back to your parents’ house?” I ask.

“I don’t live in the Morelli mansion,” she says.

No, of course she doesn’t. She lives in the city, but you wouldn’t know it by how often she’s here. Eva is always at her mother’s society events.

She’s always everywhere her family is.

“I’ll take you home,” I promise, knowing, even as I say it, that I’m never going to be able to drop her off at some ritzy loft in the city and drive away. I’ll be thinking of her straight through the next year, and maybe even after that. I’ll keep thinking and thinking and thinking until the thoughts turn into something filthy and rough, because I felt her body against mine.

It’s a short drive to the small downtown of Bishop’s Landing. I hook a right at an Italian restaurant that serves thin-crust pizzas as big as their tables. I keep driving down the alley. Cars gleam in a neat row behind closed businesses. Only one door has sound behind it.

During the day it’s an art gallery. Right now it’s something else entirely.

“Where are we?” she asks, whispering.

“The gallery. Don’t you recognize it?”

“Are we going to steal a painting?”

“No, but I like the way you think. We can do that another night.” I make a tsking sound when she tries to object. “But never fear. What we’re about to do is also illegal.”

Her eyes go wide in the dark. “Finn.”

I like her saying my name in that urgent, breathy way.