He and Zane had been roughhousing in their mom’s bedroom one day and accidentally knocked that doll to the floor, leaving a crack across its face. His mother had cried and screamed at them, and only Mike had kept her from doing worse. She’d finally thrown them all out of her room and sobbed for hours . . . then went out and got fucked up on whatever she was using at the moment. Heroin, Mike had told them. He’d tried his best to hide the worst of the ugliness from his little brothers, but at no point had he ever hidden the cold, hard truth.
Damien and Zane had argued over who was at fault, but Damien had been all but certain, both then and now, that he had delivered the blow that knocked it down. He’d only vaguely wondered what was so important about that doll that it had upset her so much. But he never bothered to ask, and he would never find out. She was someone he’d tried to push out of his memory for years. He’d built an entire fucking life around forgetting the dirt he’d sprouted from.
He didn’t need Emma reminding him, either. But it wasn’t her fault.
She answered her door with a smile for him, at least, her eyes flickering over him before settling on his face. And if she’d been stunning in green, purple was an absolute revelation on her. He made a quick mental note of that fact. “I hope I dressed okay,” she said in place of a greeting.
“Perfect,” he assured her. The dress was cut similarly to the green she’d worn the other night, but more conservative, with cap sleeves and a wide swath of silver beads around the neck. Matching silver dangled from her ears; all that red hair was piled softly at the back of her neck while one swath lay across her forehead. “You’re beautiful.”
Even as he watched, color crept into her cheeks. “You don’t look so bad either.”
He grinned, figuring that was as good as he was going to get. He’d opted for his usual head-to-toe black. Easy to go from work to dinner to play. Emma turned around and assured her little dog that she would be back soon, and he wondered if that was meant as much for him as for Bentley. Once she’d closed her door, she took the arm he offered her and let him lead her to his car in the driveway.
“Did you enjoy your day?”
“Most of it,” she said pointedly. “Thanks for that, though. It was greatly needed. I really liked Savannah, too.”
Without comment, he opened the Jag’s passenger door for her and watched her fold her long legs inside. As he got into the driver’s seat, he was met with a stream of her nervous chatter. “I’ve never had a spa day like that. I don’t pamper myself enough, I guess.”
She deserved to be pampered. He would gladly spend all month doing the job if she’d let him. “You should.”
“So your brother is getting married soon?”
“I don’t think they’ve set a date yet.” At least Mike hadn’t told him otherwise.
“She seems really nice.”
“Seems to be.”
She laughed as he pulled out onto her street. “Your brother’s marrying her, and yet you barely know her.”
“Well, she only just moved here. Admittedly, I didn’t make too many trips to New Orleans to hang out with her. I’m glad he’s found happiness, though. She’s been good for him. Mike . . . needs something good for a change.”
“What about you?” she asked. “Sounds like you need something good, too. Offset some of that damn meanness you have in your soul.”
“I’m mean?”
“You’re very mean,” she assured him, and he couldn’t help but feel as if she was flirting. Maybe he should gift her more spa adventures. “When she first came out to get me, I was afraid she might have been one of your girlfriends.”
Damien couldn’t help it; that made him nearly snort with laughter. “I don’t have any girlfriends, Emma.”
“What if I had a boyfriend? You never even asked if was having to leave someone behind to do this.”
“I didn’t care,” he said, and that made her sit in stunned silence . . . for at least a couple of seconds.
“See? Mean.”
He sighed, taking a ramp to enter interstate traffic while his GPS chirped directions. “I’m sure it would have factored into your decision, since obviously you aren’t as mean as I am. But you never mentioned a man in your life, so it’s a moot point, wouldn’t you say?”
“I guess.”
“Would you still have agreed?”
“If I was in love with someone, I could never have done this.”
“You don’t think? Not even to bail out your brother and family? Blood isn’t thicker than water?”
She sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze straight ahead. “Love is hardly water.”
“Have you been in love before?”
“Well, that’s personal.”
“I would think we’re going to get very personal over the next month.”
“No, we’re not,” she protested, and there was the stubborn Emma he knew. “We’re going to get physical for the next month. Big difference.”
She had him there, but he couldn’t resist digging a little into the mystery behind her pretty eyes. Even someone as perfect as she was had some old dead bones in their past. “The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”
“They do now.”
“Ah. All right. I’ll take your word for it.”
“Don’t patronize me. That drives me nuts.”
Fuck, he’d love to spank the sass right out of her. He’d decided even before making his proposal that he wouldn’t make any requirements as to her being his submissive for thirty days; it might have scared her off. But he couldn’t control the need for it. The driving desire to shock that obstinate little mouth into silence. It was going to take all of his might to circumvent his programming. “I wasn’t,” he said, his hands gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles ached. “But is it not fair to predict we’ll come out of this knowing quite a bit more about each other than we do going in?”
“To be honest, that scares me quite a bit,” she said.
“Then we differ there.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “We do?”
“Do you think I would have suggested this if you were someone I didn’t want to get to know?”
“Then ask me to lunch or something, jeez.”
“This seemed way more appealing.”
“So you aren’t concerned that tonight I might, like, display some horribly revolting habit that turns you off so badly you couldn’t even dream of sleeping with me? Maybe I chew with my mouth open.”
“Do you?”
“I could.”
“Don’t.”
She giggled. It was such a girlish, disarming sound coming from his determined, straight-laced little accountant. “Fine,” she conceded. “I’ll try not to. But Damien . . . what if we run into people we know?”
“You’re so damn worried about other people. What if we do?”
“You know how people talk.”
“Let them talk, Emma. You don’t owe anyone an explanation.”
“My reputation is important to me. I know someone like you can’t understand that. No one really knows what’s going on here, but I don’t want people thinking I’m sleeping with the boss to get ahead.”
“There’s nothing wrong with colleagues spending time together.”
“I’m not wearing a ‘colleague’ kind of dress.”
At the mention of it, he couldn’t help but glance down at the creamy expanse of thigh the short dress revealed. No, she definitely wasn’t. It was the kind of dress she might expect his hands to be under by the end of the night. If she was thinking that, though, he had a surprise in store for her.
“So you never said where we’re going,” she ventured after a moment of watching the Houston lights whiz past.
“Brenner’s on the Bayou.”
“Oh, I’ve always wanted to go there.”
“Good.”
It was a prime time of year to sit outside and enjoy the nice weather before Houston became the seventh level of summer hell
, and he found that after they were seated he became a little transfixed by the way the wind lifted loose tendrils of Emma’s hair. She had a glass of red wine while surveying the flower gardens and gazebo appreciatively; he had an Inversion IPA while surveying her.
“This is so beautiful,” she said, excitement brightening her hazel eyes. He’d known she would like it. One could forget amid the tranquil sounds of the waterfall that they were in the middle of the city here. One could even almost forget she was here because she felt she had no other options.
The thought, sudden and unwelcome as it was, made him pause with his glass halfway to his mouth, but he shook it off with little effort and took a long drink. Emma was the one in a moral quagmire here. If he added in his own misgivings—admittedly few—this could turn into a disaster. He didn’t want that. Not for her, not for himself.
“Do you come here often?” she asked once their succulent, buttery Gulf oysters were served.
He smiled. “Getting personal with me?”
She smirked, a gesture that was out of place given her elegant appearance, but that was completely Emma. “Well, there’s personal, and then there’s personal.”
“Ah. So I can assume there wasn’t a ‘with whom’ following that question.”
“Maybe there was,” she said, her smirk softening into a mysterious smile. The wine had brought color into her cheeks. He couldn’t wait to taste that heat.
“It’s been awhile,” he told her, selecting another oyster. “I stay busy with the nightclub.”
“Who’s holding down the fort tonight?”
“Stacia is as capable as I am. She’ll call if there’s a problem.”
“Hmm.” She cast her eyes down at her wineglass, and he detected a hint of resentment there. Interesting.
“You don’t like her?” he asked, and suddenly she met his gaze dead-on.
“I always assumed you were sleeping with her.”
“Why? Because she’s attractive? Like you don’t want people assuming I’m sleeping with you?”
She waved a delicate hand. “All right, touché. It’s a fair assumption. You two are always so joined at the hip while . . .” She shook her head. “Never mind. If I’m wrong, I apologize.”
He wondered what she’d left unsaid. “I have a lot of trust in her. She hasn’t let me down yet. But no, I’m not and have never slept with her.”
“I wouldn’t even care if you had,” she insisted. “It isn’t as if it matters. She’s the main one I was worried about knowing what’s going on. If I’m gone for a month, and then you’re gone for the same amount of time, she’s going to figure something out.”
“She probably will. But let me assure you, Stacia knowing is the same as no one knowing.”
“I’m surprised you trust someone that much.”
“It’s rare. But once that trust gets tested time and again and proves solid, then I relent.”
Her perfectly arched brows drew together. He could see the full meaning behind his words soaking into her, but he hadn’t expected her to catch on so quickly. “Wait a second. Were you testing me? All that business with the bartender skimming cash?”
Damien had carefully trained his expression at some of the most high-stakes poker tables in the world, but she might have caught a falter in it right then. He hid it with a grin and a sip of his drink. Clever, clever girl. “Maybe I was.”
“Holy shit, Damien. I worked for days on that. Overtime, away from my dog. And it was all a setup? God!”
Sitting back in a huff, she crossed her arms, her dismay nothing short of adorable. He was enjoying himself immensely. “This might very well be the first time I’ve ever seen you speechless.”
“Because of you! Because you are a terrible, awful, bad, awful person!”
“You said awful twice.”
“I meant it twice. You’re two times as awful as the most awful person.”
“But you passed, Emma.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
He burst out laughing, as rare a sound to his own ears as it must have been to hers. She actually smiled, dropping her forehead to one hand as if to hide it from him. “Don’t feel bad,” he said, feeling lighter with her than he had for ages. “It’s imperative that I know who I’m dealing with. I once had an employee rip me off for thousands. I wish experience hadn’t made me this way, but it has. I have to be cautious. And it’s very volatile territory, considering what I have going on upstairs.”
“I take it this isn’t the first time you’ve pulled something like this.”
“Not the first.” He eyed her cautiously. Probably not the last.
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game?”
“Something like that.”
“Let’s keep in mind that you created this game, though. You are the game master.”
“I have to be.”
“I guess I don’t understand why you take the risk.”
Sometimes he wondered that himself. His love of poker had hatched at an early age, after one of his mother’s boyfriends had taught him how to play at eleven years old. Rich had been the only guy Damien wished she’d kept around. Big and gruff and burly, he’d drunk a lot, and hosted raucous poker nights, but he hadn’t been abusive and he hadn’t minded the eager kid hounding his steps, wanting to learn every tip and trick of the game. The two of them had played innumerable games late into the night, at least until his mother would wake up from her drug coma (if she woke up at all until the next day) and scream that he had school the next day. Many mornings he’d shown up to class without any sleep at all. When he was playing, time got away from him, and sometimes the sun was breaking the horizon before he realized the hour.
How Rich put up with his mother as long as he had, Damien didn’t know. Sometimes he thought maybe it was because of the kids caught in a terrible situation, but in the end even that hadn’t been enough to make him stay. The drugs, loud fights, slammed doors, broken dishes, and holes punched in walls proved to be too much, and Rich had stalked out with all his belongings and nothing but a “See ya around, kid,” tossed at Damien as he walked out the door.
He hadn’t seen him since.
As much as Damien loved and appreciated his older brother for all Mike had done for him, keeping the boys together and afloat after their mother died of a drug overdose when Damien was fourteen, it was Rich who’d instilled in him the skill to make it in the world. The game was all he had, but it was enough.
“It keeps my skills sharp,” he told Emma now, only half joking.
“Yeah, but do you think it’s wise to have it at the club?”
“Probably not. I never intended it to be that way. It began with a few of us and grew from there. I wouldn’t mind moving it, but it’s convenient for me, and I haven’t found anywhere I like better.”
“I wish you would. I hate knowing it’s there.”
They fell silent while the waiter brought their food—dry-aged filet mignon for him, lemon pepper chicken for her—and he digested what she’d said. Once they were alone again, he said, “But yet you stay.”
“I love my job,” she said sincerely. “I like it there. I guess I . . . try to pretend it doesn’t exist. Which was working out really well until Benjamin showed up.” Her mouth twisted bitterly as she picked up her fork, not meeting his eyes. “He really ruined a good thing.”
“Ruined?” Damien took a drink of his ale, and only then did she glance up at him.
“Things will never be the same for me after this. Maybe they will be for you, but they won’t for me.”
“I really don’t see how they’re any different for you than they are for me.”
“I’m the one compromising myself. If you can’t see that—”
“I see how you think that. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
“Damien, I can’t just rewire myself to suit your needs. Or my own. Yes, I agreed. Yes, I’m doing it. No, things won’t ever be the same. I know that. I accept it. I’m trying to be practical about the
whole thing, but it’s hard.”
She was so beautiful when she was struggling internally. He wondered if she knew how expressive her eyes were; they concealed nothing, gave away everything. Maybe he could teach her a few things about controlling that.
Reaching across the table, he gently took her hand, and she looked up at him in surprise. “I want you to know something,” he said, absorbing the softness of her skin through his fingertips, letting it warm places that had long been cold. “When I was playing your brother, and he went all-in while I already knew he was doomed, I thought my fucking heart would burst right there.”
“You looked carved from stone,” she murmured, not looking away. “I thought he’d won. And, Damien, for a second I thought I felt . . .”
Disappointed. Jesus Christ, her eyes showed him that too. “What?”
“Well, I’d gotten so drunk and—”
“No. Tell me what you felt.” His thumb stroked over her skin, and he saw the hitch in her breath, the renewed color rising up her swanlike throat. He wanted to smell her there, where her pulse beat so strongly he could see it. He would. In time.
She pulled away from him, and the fragile moment splintered and vanished. “I can’t,” she said, visibly shivering while he felt an almost desperate need to recapture that moment, reshape it from thin air. She’d been about to let him in, but he’d pushed and lost her.
Still, he’d seen what he needed to see: a little glimpse into the deepest, darkest core of her that wanted at least some part of this.
Chapter Eight
To Emma’s profound surprise, he took her on a stroll through the gardens at the restaurant before taking her home. She’d assumed she would be whisked away to his house for the next month, and she didn’t understand. Confusion lay heavy on her the moment she realized where he was going, but she sat silently, not wanting to ask, not wanting to presume. Would he spend the night with her? Her bedroom was a disaster after Liz’s visit earlier this evening to get her ready, as she’d never dreamed they would end up here.
“Can I walk you inside?” he asked, the same as he had the night he’d brought her home, the night he’d won her. She wanted to flippantly remind him that it was his dime, but something stopped her short. It didn’t make sense to keep antagonizing him about something she’d agreed to. He’d won. Fair and square . . . at least as far as she knew.