The Surrender Gate: A Desire Exchange Novel

  The trailer fills with a clamorous mess. By itself, each sound is relatively pleasant, but thrown together the gentle roar of the surf, the clatter and slam of Emily opening and closing cabinet doors and the caws of two seagulls fighting on the house’s back deck make for enough of a racquet to keep him awake and alert.

  For about five minutes.

  Maybe if she’d pressed down three times on that special ring he gave her the night they met, some kind of alarm would’ve shocked Marcus out of his stupor. But there’s no rousing the guy now.

  She feels like someone in a Pink Panther cartoon, perched outside the trailer door, just inside one of the looming shadows cast by the skeletal, unfinished mansion a few yards away. But after calling out his name over and again inside the house and getting no response through the earpiece, she had to be sure he was down for the count. She’s sure now. He left the door open by about half an inch before he passed out and now she can hear him snoring like her grandfather in a Nicholas Sparks movie.

  She shuts the door gently. The lock makes a small click when it catches, but that’s all. She jogs back toward the house, making a beeline for the gleaming Aston Martin parked in the driveway. Thank God she ditched the sundress she wore that morning. Her previously unworn silk blouse and chinos are the perfect outfit for this fleet-footed escape; it’s too bad the pants are too tight for her to fit a cash-fat envelope in any of the pockets. She has to clutch it in one hand as she runs, then as soon as she’s behind the wheel of the Aston Martin, she shoves the envelope inside the glove compartment as if all of the bills inside are about to take wing.

  It’s a lot of cash. No, it’s a ridiculous amount of cash. No, it’s an absurd, ludicrous, Arthur Benoit-sized amount of cash. And it was waiting for her in the nightstand drawer, just as Arthur promised. Still, she can’t believe it. Did Jonathan get the same envelope? God help every shoe store in Atlanta if so.

  Or maybe Jonathan and ten thousand dollars cash is God’s plan for helping every shoe store in Atlanta.

  There’s no way she could spend that amount of money in the next few days. Not without feeling like some ridiculous, selfish brat.

  She’ll spend some of it, for sure. Just not on herself.

  After a few minutes on the highway, there’s no sign of Marcus’s Navigator. Lily’s cell phone is silent and dark where it rests in the cup holder. She thought about putting the top up to be less conspicuous, but is there any way to make a golden Aston Martin inconspicuous? Besides, she likes having her hair blow all over the place like someone in a car commercial.

  There was no mapping her destination before she left. Given how deeply the house is wired, Marcus would probably be able to pull up any web search she performed on that giant computer in the master bedroom, and that would ruin everything, for sure.

  But she’s got a general idea of where she’s headed and that’s all she needs. The last time she visited this part of the Florida coast, the stakes were lower, but her stress level was about equal.

  It was her last weekend getaway with Charles, the Xbox lover who would roll off of her as soon as he’d come, and then make all sorts of vague inferences that she might have a sexual compulsion when she had the temerity to ask if he might be able to, you know, help her finish too. Charles, the same guy who ran for the hills when she finally gave in to pressure and told him about her most secret sexual fantasy.

  Maybe if the fantasy had involved another woman…

  She wasn’t with Charles now, thank God.

  They’re tangled on the lounger together. The sand is whiter than it should be, the sky a shade halfway between day and night, a deep pink that matches Emily’s flushed skin as she parts her thighs and guides his head to the succulent triangle between. Her juices slather his lips and chin.

  And then some seagull decides to ruin the moment with its cawing.

  “Stupid seagull,” Marcus whispers into Emily’s heaving pussy.

  Then he wakes up face down in his own drool.

  Shit.

  He sits up so fast he sends the chair rolling backward into the wall with a loud crash.

  Fuck fuck fuck. Where is she? Goddammit!

  With a single mouse click, he maximizes each interior camera angle on the center bank of monitors. Sun gleams across marble floors. Barely touched furniture looks ready for its Architectural Digest photo shoot. The beds are still made. One after the other, each feed shows an empty house. The beach is mostly empty too, save for a single family of four, their two kids playing right at the surf’s edge, close to where he stood watch over Emily that morning.

  A few seconds of fumbling with his headset and then he’s stupidly calling Emily’s name to the empty house, hearing the wacky reverb of his own voice coming back to him through the camera’s microphones. He’s on his feet now, holstering his 9 mm SIG even though it feels like he’s closing the barn door after the horse got out.

  Then he sees the driveway.

  The Aston Martin is gone.

  Images of Emily being gagged and abducted by a team of masked sex freaks start to fade. As the panic and sense of failure drain from him, they’re replaced by a much darker emotion, one that’s much harder to control.

  Jealousy.

  Jonathan. She’s trying to call Jonathan.

  He pops open his laptop and clicks on the app for the tracking device Arthur’s advance team planted on the Aston Martin’s undercarriage.

  Twenty minutes later, he spots her Aston Martin exactly where the tracking device said it would be, parked outside some kind of high-end art gallery just off the coastal highway. The surrounding mini-mall is made up of designer clothing boutiques and stores that sell things like tea and soap for the same prices kidneys fetch on the black market.

  The gallery sits at the juncture of the mall’s two long, sandstone-colored wings. He figures the place has to have a name, but whatever’s emblazoned on the sign looks more like a child’s scrawl than letters of the alphabet; the most he can make of it is a B and an A. In the massive cathedral window over the entrance hangs something that looks to Marcus like a giant squid that’s been bronzed and caked in gold dust. It’s someone’s idea of art, and while it’s pretty enough, it only makes him wonder how much of a nightmare it would be to move into his apartment. Because the closer he gets to it, the more he realizes it’s about the size of his apartment.

  He’s parked the Navigator far from the gallery’s front windows. He’s casing the place, he tells himself. Dropping back so he can make sure Emily didn’t pick up a tail after slipping his grasp. But that’s bull and he knows it.

  He wants to surprise her. He wants to catch her. And that’s wrong, because she doesn’t belong to him, might never belong to him. And if she really did slip off to call Jonathan, he can deal with it like a professional and not some jilted lover; even if he did just wake from a delicious dream of tasting her for the first time only to find the drapes fluttering ghost-like in her sudden absence.

  There’s no entry chime when he steps across the threshold to the gallery. It’s not like they need one for security. Marcus can’t imagine a shoplifter sneaking off with a giant glass coffee table supported by a massive piece of blond driftwood. Now that he’s inside, he realizes the place is more of a furniture store than a gallery. Still, there are plenty of paintings on display throughout the rows of modern, nautical-inspired sculptures, and each one sports a jaw-dropping price tag.

  He can hear Emily’s voice coming from the back of the store. It sounds like she’s talking to a clerk, another woman. And from the casual tone of their conversation, it doesn’t sound like they’re being secretive. But when he spots her through a sudden break in the labyrinth of shelves, Marcus ducks into the nearest hiding place, then starts creeping down the aisle in the direction of the register until he can make out what she’s saying.

  I have literally killed terrorists. Literally. And now, I’m hiding in a Florida gift shop, eavesdropping on a woman who makes me weak in the knees. It reminds him of
something his father used to say. You wanna be in the military, son? Then learn your history. Biggest war the Greeks ever fought was over a woman!

  He’s close enough to make out their chatter.

  “…it’s not the nicest place between here and Destin, but it’s pretty nice,” the clerk is saying while she wraps something in crinkling tissue paper.

  “It was alright, I guess. For just a weekend. I mean, it wasn’t my favorite trip to begin with so…”

  “So I take it you and the guy you were with are…”

  “Yeah, that didn’t work out,” Emily answers.

  “Sorry,” the clerk says.

  “I’m not.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Let’s just say he wasn’t the one,” Emily says too cheerfully.

  Is this Emily or Lily talking? Marcus wonders.

  “I hear yah,” the clerk answers. “But honestly, is there any such thing?”

  “As what?”

  “Oh, you know. The one.”

  “I’m starting to think there might be…” Emily says distantly.

  Marcus tries to will his heart to slow down, but it’s no use.

  “Really?” the clerk asks. Marcus can hear her smile in her tone.

  “Yeah, I just…if there is such a thing as the one, I think they crash into you when you’re least expecting it. And it’s not always clear in that moment, you know, that they’re the right one for you, but then they do something totally unexpected that changes the way you see them and you’re like, well, maybe. Maybe if there is such a thing as the one…it could be them, you know?”

  Like one minute he’s your gay best friend, and the next he’s…he’s… Marcus doesn’t realize how tightly he’s gripping the shelf next to his head until a bolt of pain shoots up his forearm.

  “That’s lovely,” the clerk says. “So is that who you’re getting this for? The guy who crashed into you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, it’s a beautiful piece. So romantic. I hope he likes it.”

  “Me too. You take cash?”

  “Uhm…wow. For that price? Yeah, sure. I guess.”

  None of the degradations he went through during SEAL training can hold a candle to the humiliation he feels now.

  He stalks back to the store’s entrance, trying not to curse under his breath.

  He’s a goddamn idiot, is what he is, thinking he could be anything other than her hired gun. She wanted him last night, at four in the morning. But she doesn’t want him today and she won’t want him tomorrow, and she sure as hell won’t want him when she becomes one of the richest women in the country.

  Sure, maybe she’ll eventually ask him to ride her in the guardhouse late at night, but only after her new hubby Jonathan gives into temptation and starts dipping into the dude pond again. Because one thing’s clear for sure—Jonathan Claiborne is going to be Mr. Emily Blaine. Not some spec-ops has-been whose war wounds will probably get the best of him as he enters old age.

  “Marcus!”

  He’s positioned himself outside the entrance, as if he’s just tracked her down, as if he hasn’t heard her say words that have cut him to his soul. Under her right arm she’s holding something the size of a small surfboard; it’s been bundled in a mix of butcher paper and tissue paper. He steps back inside the store, closing the distance between them even though he knows the proximity alone might show her how deeply he's feeling her rejection.

  “What are you doing, Emily?” He shouldn’t have spoken because now she’s heard the frog in his throat. He sounds a lot angrier than a bodyguard who’s been successfully evaded thanks to his stupid unwillingness to take a fucking nap.

  “Don’t you mean Miss Conran?” she whispers.

  “What are you doing, Miss Conran?”

  “Well…it was supposed to be a surprise…”

  “A surprise?” he asks, his voice a rasp.

  “Yeah. Arthur left me some cash in an envelope. A ridiculous amount of cash in an envelope so I thought…”

  An envelope full of cash just like the one Jonathan went shoe shopping with. She’d had it the whole the time but she was keeping it a secret because she was going to spend it on a surprise.

  His head is spinning now. He tries to remember the exact words she’d told the clerk. Something about how the one crashes into you at first and then…

  “Here,” Emily says, jerking one shoulder in his direction. “Take it. Since the surprise is ruined anyway… Also, I’m about to drop it. It’s really frickin’ heavy.”

  Marcus rushes to her and takes whatever the hell this surprise is out from under her right arm. Emily guides him to the nearest shelf, rests the top edge of the piece against it, then she begins to carefully peel back the wrapping.

  It’s a painting, a painting on the side of a large piece of driftwood that’s been polished and varnished and turned into a kind of canvas. The colors are all bright pastels, not exactly the type he’d hang in his apartment, but he couldn’t care less about the colors or the wood they’re painted on. What he cares about is the couple at the center of the frame, the two black silhouettes standing at the edge of the surf line on a beach just like the one where he watched over her that morning. The surf shoots up around them, but it doesn’t look like they’re about to be consumed by the waves. Rather, it looks as if the couple’s embrace has the power to split the surf in two. He can’t breathe and he can’t speak, because it feels like Emily somehow conjured a painting of the two of them from early that morning, only she moved herself off of the beach lounger and into his arms.

  And it’s for him, this gift, this surprise. Not Jonathan, him.

  Her breath tickles the inside of his ear as they both look down at his present.

  “I was in here a few months ago,” she whispers. “The whole trip was kind of a last-ditch effort with this guy I was seeing, and I saw this and thought, ‘Gosh, I wish that could be the two of us…”

  “You and the guy you were seeing, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  So it wasn’t a cover. The story she told the clerk was true…

  “But you didn’t feel that way about him?” Marcus asks. It feels like he’s breathing through a straw.

  “No.”

  He pushes the painting back so that it’s resting fully on the shelf. It feels like it takes all the courage he has in the world, but he turns and looks into her eyes.

  But you feel that way about me…

  Her eyes are so wide it’s as if she’s taking in every inch of him. And it’s taking all of his strength not to lift his hand to the side of her face, to bring their lips together. But the longer he doesn’t ask the question, the harder the struggle gets. If he pressed his body to hers right now, would there be enough of an answer in the flex of her muscles, in her willingness to accept his embrace?

  No. That’s how he went down the last time, by listening to a woman’s body and not her words. That’s how he ended up hearing things that hadn’t been said. That’s how he ended up mistaking his cock for his heart and getting used and thrown away by someone who was counting on him to confuse the two.

  Her lips haven’t moved, but her eyes haven’t left his either. Over the sounds of his own heavy, hungry breaths, he hears Jonathan’s words. Whenever there’s an opportunity, whenever there’s a new man, she thinks it to death and by the time she’s done thinking, it’s gone. Or he’s gone.

  “And then they do something unexpected and suddenly you see them in a different way,” Marcus whispers.

  “Oh my… That’s what I just— Were you eavesdropping?”

  “I thought you were talking about Jonathan.”

  “Well, I wasn’t,” she says, a trace of offense in her voice, but her eyes search his face hungrily and her chest is rising and falling visibly. “I wasn’t talking about Jonathan.”

  “You were talking about me, this morning. On the beach.”

  Her cheeks are crimson and she’s biting her lower lip the way he usually does when he
’s nervous. He’s never seen her do that before. Maybe it’s something she’s picked up from him, and maybe she picked it up by studying him as intently as he’s been studying her.

  “Anyway,” she says too quickly. “I figured since you're so big on waiting, this would tide you over.”

  “Tide me over, huh? Is that…an ocean joke.”

  “Very funny, you big…” And her eyes flutter closed before she can finish the sentence. She draws a deep breath, as if what she wants to call him has sent her into a trance, a trance that causes her lips to part and her breath to come in a long sigh, a trance in which she’s thinking about him the way he was just dreaming of her a half hour before.

  He can hear his pulse in his ears, and to his mind’s eye, he’s already got one arm around her waist. Then she catches sight of something behind him and fear makes her body go rigid.

  Marcus spins, follows her frightened gaze to the Aston Martin outside.

  After a few seconds, he sees it too, something large and white clamped under the car’s windshield wiper. If it were just a sheet of paper, it would be rustling in the wind. But whatever it is, it’s heavier and shinier.

  “Go,” Marcus whispers. “I’ll watch…”

  He steps back into the shelves, scanning their surroundings. No lurkers visible in the nearby pine trees, no cars idling suspiciously anywhere in the parking lot.

  Emily lifts the windshield wiper.

  Marcus hikes the hem of his T-shirt up a few inches and poises his hand next to the SIG’s holster.

  Now that she’s holding it in both hands, he can see what it is; a huge, shiny white envelope that folds out from the center into four leaves, the kind used for graduation and wedding invitations.

  Emily reads it, her expression fixed, and then she looks in both directions before stepping back inside the store.

  When she hands it to Marcus, it’s trembling in her grip.

  The outside bears Lily’s initials and nothing more.

  Inside, in cursive so elegant he can barely read it, are the words.

  Tonight, after sundown, your desire will be tested.