“Whipped, huh?” he repeated, as if the word amused him greatly. “Whipped, whipped, whipped.” He turned it over on his tongue a few more times and smiled. “I’ll have to remember that.”
Yep, I’m in big trouble.
“So... What are we going to do about your father?” I asked quickly, trying to change the subject. It was a question we were going to have to answer sooner or later, and I figured it was probably better to get it out of the way ASAP. “I mean, I don’t even know what happened after I left. Did you end up going to the party?”
A sudden chill seemed to hang in the air, as if the driver had turned the air conditioning on full blast.
“No, I didn’t,” Nick said after a sigh, stiffening. “I assumed it’d look less conspicuous if we were both no-shows. I’m sure my father will appreciate that logic.”
He spoke quickl
y, as if eager to be done with it, but I’d known his family long enough to understand the extreme sacrifice in those words. For him, “less conspicuous” might have been a valid excuse, but there was obviously a bit more to it than that: He was purposely giving Mitchell Hunter another target on which to center his rage. If only I had gone AWOL, he would have called out the bloodhounds and had me offed right then and there. On the other hand, with both of us absent, he wouldn’t know where to place the blame, and he’d have to cut his disappointment in two equal shares anyway.
As I pondered that, I felt a slight tightening in my chest, and my eyes misted over with tears. Even when Nick thought I was completely fucking him over, he still did all he could to protect me. That’s the father of my child...and that’s why I have to tell him!
“We’re here.”
For the second time that evening, the confession died on my lips. My head snapped up, and I gazed curiously at the classic New York brownstone. It was really no different than the ten or twelve others on the block, pricy but not prohibitively so. It was an unfamiliar place to me, because even during our two years of working together, I’d never seen it.
He glanced up at the smooth, ivy-covered stone before offering me his arm. I took it without a word, and together, the two of us proceeded inside.
“What is this place?” I murmured, crawling out of the car behind him.
“It’s my hideaway,” he said softly, “the place I go when I wanna stay in the city but prefer to have some time to myself, away from all the hustle and bustle. The deed’s in someone else’s name, so no one knows about it. I paid for this pad in cash when I was seventeen.”
He rifled around in his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. A second later, the two of us stepped into a shadowy living room that smelled inexplicably of cinnamon.
“This whole place belongs to Eric Silverton,” he continued. “No press, no cameras, and no chance that we’ll be disturbed if...” he said, trailing off suddenly when the lights flicked on.
Two men, sitting in opposing armchairs in front of a roaring fire, stared at us, and another paced restlessly in the background. Not one member of the trio looked remotely pleased to see us.
“Dad?” Nick froze and paled, to a complexion lighter than I’d ever seen him. “What are you—”
“No, Nicholas,” Mitchell Hunter interrupted unnervingly calmly, leaning forward in his chair, like a big jungle cat prepared to pounce, with an empty scotch bottle sitting beside him. His eyes gleamed in the flickering light, making him look even more sinister. “Tonight, son, I’ll be the one asking the questions...and I expect answers from both of you.”
Chapter 4
Mitchell sat in one chair, and Harold occupied the other. Nick and I huddled together on the sofa across from them, like two frightened children dragged into the office of an especially volatile principal. It wasn’t lost on me that Nick’s eyes flickered nervously to the empty bottle of scotch more than once; he knew the effects of liquor on his father, and he wasn’t too keen on seeing those effects again. It wasn’t until the third man paced out of the shadows, that his mouth fell open in surprise.
“James?”
Mitchell smiled, although he didn’t turn around.
“Yes, James was kind enough to join us.”
The pacing stopped, and James’s dark eyes flashed murderously, burning a hole in the back of Mitchell’s head. “So kind that your father only had to physically pull me out of a limousine trying to flee the city. Sure, I was real kind.”
Judging by the overnight bag on the counter behind him, he had obviously been forced to stay in the brownstone, and he was none too happy about it. Nick winced apologetically, and I met his eyes from across the room.
“Trying to flee the city?” I mouthed, tremendously comforted by his presence, even if it was the last place he wanted to be.
James’s face flushed and the pacing began anew.
“It would have been easier with my plane,” he mumbled. Then he glanced at Mitchell and said, a bit more loudly, “You should know that if you and I are in the same country, my staff has instructions to start a search whenever I don’t check in every forty-eight hours.”
Mitchell’s lips curled into a smile as he glanced at a clock mounted on the wall. “Is that right? Forty-eight hours?”
James glanced at the clock, too, counting swiftly in his head. “Actually, a bit less than that.” He gave up with a shrug and resumed his pacing, silently cursing Nick, me, and the ill-timed loss of his beloved plane, a plane that was fresh on Mitchell’s mind as well.