Burning Offer (Trevor's Harem #1) (17 page)

And only money can fix it.
 

A
LOT
of money. The kind of money that can make good people vanish and bad people go away.
 

“Shit, Jenny. Okay, fine. Devalia. I imagine she can tell anyone who asks that it’s not at all uncommon for people to slip and fall face-first onto bookends.”
 

Jenny is quiet. “You didn’t read the email.”
 

“I’m sorry. No. I just called.”
 

She sighs. I know the sound; she’s wishing the email could have done some of this heavy lifting for her. There’s something difficult on her tongue, and she was hoping I’d be prepped already.
 

“You know how it is down here, Bridge.”
 

“Hot?”
 

Another sigh. “I mean with the … you know, the business.”
 

Meaning crime. Meaning Mafia, for all I know. It’s not something I like to think about.
 

“Well, people all have their hands out. And Genevieve … ” She trails off.
 

“Just spit it out, Jen.”
 

“I guess someone is threatening her. Saying they’ll report her and get her medical license taken away. And … you know … maybe worse.”
 

Worse
. I can only imagine.
 

“She has to pay them off to keep them quiet, Bridge.”
 

“Can’t Nicholas intervene? Isn’t he big shit down there?”

A deeper sigh. “He’s the one who hits, Bridge. He doesn’t give a shit if she sees a doctor. Why would he risk stirring up trouble with someone over getting her treatment?
I’m
the one who keeps pushing for any of this.”

I feel momentarily guilty. It could be me pushing too, if I weren’t stuck up here. I often feel guilty about what’s happening in Miami. Usually because I wish I hadn’t snooped. Because I wish I didn’t know any of this, and feel obligated to help.
 

“So … what? She wants money?”
 

“Yeah.”
 

I suppress a flash of anger. Aren’t doctors supposed to help people no matter what? Jenny hasn’t given me details on what’s broken and bleeding, but I can’t imagine being hit with an iron bookend leaves kisses behind. And now this bitch wants to be paid before she’ll help? It makes me want to scream.
 

“I thought … ” I hear Jenny’s voice break. “I feel like such an ass, but I was thinking about your books, the ones you record I mean, and people are talking about them being made into movies, and I thought … you know … if there was any way you could get an advance … ”
 

I close my eyes.
 

“How much, Jen?”

I say it like venom. Venom for her father, for the doctor, for the hopelessness of the situation.
 

“Twenty-five
fucking
thousand dollars.”
 

Bitter. Covered in bile.

“How could she possibly think we had that much money?”
 

Because I do have that much money. Or will, tomorrow.
 

“I said the same thing. But she said she just can’t do it otherwise. It’s not money for her. It’s money for
them
.”
 

Meaning the criminal who’s extorting the doctor who’s treating the wife of the rival criminal. You’d think there’d be better organized crime etiquette at play, but apparently not.
 

Now I hear her starting to cry. Inches from blubbering, knowing it’s hopeless.
 

“She seems to really want to help, Bridge. I believe her. But if she can’t pay them, then there’s no way she can … she’d be in the middle … ” And then more tears are breaking my heart.
 

I see a small crystal figurine across from me. I’ll bet it would cover the thirty grand.

I bet that’s what it cost to fill the pool I walked by earlier.
 

I’ll bet tonight’s dinner attire is worth double that.
 

Here I am, surrounded by luxury while my only real family burns to ashes. The realization is a knife in my gut.
 

“Or Brandon?” Jenny says. “Could you maybe ask Brandon?”
 

Now she’s grasping. Even if I could tell my foster brother about the mother who gave me up at age fourteen, I wouldn’t. I know him. He protects me like a pit bull, and the first thing he’d use his own money for, his new wife’s father’s company’s money, would be to fly down there and try to settle it the way we learned to growing up. Brandon and I, we learned you don’t settle with bullies. You fight back instead. But if he tries it with these people — or worse, if he calls the corrupt police — what’s a brushfire will burn down the Everglades.
 

 
“You know I can’t.”
 

“If you pretended the money was for something else … ”

“Twenty-five grand
, Jenny?”
 

She cries harder.
 

“Jen. Listen to me. Do you have a piece of paper?”
 

I tell her who to call. What to say. I tell her to make that doctor grow a spine in advance — just enough of a spine to last the days it takes for the first of the money to make its way through the wires.
 

I need to pay my rent and a few other essentials, but the remaining seventeen thousand in my account right now is hers, with the rest to come as soon as I can figure out how to get what I’m owed, and move it into the right hands.

When I hang up, Jen is crying. But this time, it’s with relief and prayers to someone who’s not exactly her older sister.
 

I turn the monitor off and stand in the office, headed for the door, for dinner.
 

Maybe Daniel was right. Maybe I’m finally letting myself want what I want.
 

But even if it’s just a convenient excuse, I guess my decision to stay overnight is now written in stone.
 

Another ten thousand dollars.

It will just be enough.
 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Bridget is on time for dinner, down to the second. Of course. But when she enters, behind the tall redhead and in front of the girl that’s all curves, she glances at me from the corner of her eye as I stand on our small podium at the room’s front, beside Trevor and the chair he’ll sit in that looks a bit like a throne. It’s not a sly look, or defiant like I might expect. It’s a furtive glance. One she probably wishes I won’t see, though of course I do because I can’t stop watching her. I wonder if she’s thinking about how I left things between us. If she thinks what I said was a threat, or maybe an offer.
 

At first, my mouth tips up into a smile, but then it fades.
 

Something has changed. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but it’s definitely there. It’s like Bridget’s been drained of her attitude. All the things I can’t stand about her and all the things I want to hate-fuck away, are already gone. What’s left, as she files into the dining room, is almost meek without it. I find myself reluctantly liking all that remains.
 

I suppose I scared her. Maybe, finally, she gets that I mean business.

But shit. Back in the arboretum, there was a moment where I felt scared, too, and I don’t even know why. I guess that’s why I lost my shit. I guess that’s why I objected to the idea of Bridget quitting. She’s not in control here; I am. It’s true that kicking her out would mean admitting my mistake to Trevor and possibly getting my ass in some serious trouble — as much trouble, perhaps, as admitting that I broke the rules and tested that particular piece of merchandise. But I wasn’t about to sit back and let her patronize me.
 

You don’t quit on me, bitch.
 

You stay until I say you can go.
 

That’s why I snapped. Her take-charge, I’ll-handle-this-so-you-don’t-have-to attitude.
 

Not because I happen to know she needs the money much more than anyone here.
 

Because again, fuck Bridget and her needs.

She sneaks another peek at me. It’s as if she knows what I’m thinking. It’s absurd, but still that glance is like a thorn in the soft flesh of my gut.
 

What’s different about her? The fire is gone, and all I see now, as she settles down at one of the long, opulent tables set with silver and crystal, is obedience.
 

The women sit where Tony, Richard, and Logan direct them. There are two tables of six girls, and the men all sit up front. It’s like a wedding reception in miniature, with us at the front table. Elevated a foot off the ground so we can look down on all that’s ours to partake. At least that’s the idea, but I’ve run profiles on every one of them and really,
partaking
is laying it on a bit thick. The contestants must all suspect what this is about, but once I spell out the stakes and the rules, they’ll come to us. We’ll be lucky if we can get through this meal without a few of them crawling up to Trevor’s chair on their hands and knees to blow him for favor.
 

Once the girls are seated, all of us at the front table sit. They’re in two small oblongs, slightly facing us and slightly facing each other. We’re in a straight line, all on one side of the table. Like a king and his court. Given the ornamentation on Trevor’s chair, the impression is only magnified.
 

Lucky bastard. I’ve handpicked a dozen of the most beautiful, most sexually open and adventurous girls I could find, even if a few of them need a nudge to be who they truly are beneath a lifetime of conditioning and pretense. They’re all med-screened, all on birth control. And the rules say I’m off limits so I can be objective — but before this is over, the guy beside me will surely fuck them all.
 

But then my eyes stray back to Bridget. That last thought caught in me like a fishbone in the throat, and there’s no reason.

Trevor is right. Bridget is wrong for this. She has a horrible history — first with her upbringing then with one horrible, abusive boyfriend followed by another, and now this thing with her birth mother. I don’t know all the details, but I know it’s bad. I know it’s complicated. And I know that there’s no way Bridget could possibly get Linda out of her situation without a mountain of cash. Without doing a bunch of things she’d rather not do.
 

She’s here
because
she’s wrong.
 

Because given Bridget’s history, this place will break her in half.
 

And that’s what I’ve always wanted.
 

She looks at me with her soft blue-green eyes, the fight all gone. I feel my breath and sense of purpose leave me.

“Dan.”
 

Trevor is elbowing me. Urging me, now that waiters are filling wine and water glasses, to stand and offer my welcome.
 

“Sorry.” I snap myself away from Bridget and look around the room at the rest of them. Watching porn isn’t nearly as good as having sex for real, but at least I’ll have that much in the coming weeks. At least I’ll get to watch what happens with all these beauties.
 

I stand. The girls see the movement and turn their immaculately styled heads to see, and hear, what I’m about to say.
 

All but Bridget, who’s looking down at her hands.

I was wrong about this contest breaking her.
 

By the looks of things, she’s already broken, and things haven’t even begun.
 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The girl to my right is about five-foot-two with a compact body, elfin features, and a Russian accent that doesn’t match her at all. It’s husky, like my voice, but full of Slavic vowels. I heard someone call her Kat on the way in; she’s radiating sexual readiness and seems to have all the delicacy of a jackhammer.
 

She kicks me under the table now, making me jump and look up from my short nails, which had suddenly seemed so interesting. A thousand questions tromp through my head — about this place and these people, but mostly about Linda and Jenny and the doctor we seem to like even as she extorts us — and almost none of them have answers.
 

“Pay attention,”
Kat says. With her accent, “pay” comes out closer to “pee.”
 

I see the backs of heads across from me. Then my eyes lift and I’m looking at Daniel again, but this time it’s not just me he’s watching. He’s stood from his chair beside the man in the throne, who I assume is Trevor Ross. There are photos of Trevor out there on the Internet, but he looks different in person. Probably because I’ve only seen candids. Between Caspian White and Parker Altman making the magazine covers lately, I guess Trevor’s been squeezed out.
We’re fascinated with these other billionaires right now, thank you very much
.