Exit Strategy (4 page)

Tristan eyes the gauze already soaked through on the hand Nate squeezed. “I knew I should’ve called Angel to do this. You don’t have a goddamned clue about ‘first do no harm.’ ”

Nate looks at the sad, deflated speed ball and the heavy bag still dripping sand. “This from a guy who just took out his frustration on his gym equipment? Dude, you better get Keisha back because I don’t think your gym, or a new submissive, can survive you going back to being the asshole you were after Aimee.”

As Tristan stands and stalks away, he throws as much vitriol as he can into the three parting words he utters over his shoulder. “Fuck you, Nathan.”

~*~

“I’m going to marry Denise Huxtable one day,” ten-year-old Tristan says as he lies on the antique Aubusson rug in the White family room.

“Are not,” Nathan says from the armchair, one lanky leg thrown across the arm of it while he deftly manipulates the game control on his Nintendo Game Boy.

“Am, too.”

“Are not!”

Tristan stands and gets in front of Nathan. “Am, too!”

Nathan drops his game on the chair and stands so he’s eye level with his brother. “You can’t marry Denise Huxtable.”

“Why not?”

“Because she probably doesn’t like little white boys anyway, and besides, she’s a movie star.”

Tristan wrinkles his forehead. “Those aren’t good reasons. When I grow up and get a real job like Dad has, I’m going to go to Hollywood and find her and ask her to marry me.”

“She’ll be an old lady by the time you grow up.”

“No she won’t!”

“Yes she will!”

Alyssa White strides purposefully into the family room. “Hey, hey, hey. What’s all the fuss about?” she asks and insinuates herself between them.

“Mom, Tristan says he’s going to marry Denise Huxtable when he grows up, and I said he can’t.”

Before she can answer, Tristan says, “You said one day we’d be handsome and charming enough to marry any girl we want.”

His mom crosses her arms and looks at Tristan with narrowed eyes. “When did I say that?”

“I heard you say it to Grandma White last time they came to visit.”

“Oh, did you now?” She wipes at the corner of Nathan’s mouth with her thumb. “Someone didn’t use their napkin after dessert.”

“Sorry.”

“I could marry Denise Huxtable even though she’s different and older than me, right, Mom?” Tristan says.

“Well,” his mom says with a smile, “you most certainly can. But don’t get your hopes up too much. That young actress might be taken by the time you grow up.”

Tristan frowns.

“Then I think I’m going to marry Denise Huxtable, too,” Nathan says.

“Are not.”

“Am, too.” 

“Boys.” Their mom puts a hand on each of their chests. They were thin but, at ten, were already almost as tall as she was. “You’ve got a good eleven years before you’re old enough to marry and then another decade before you’ll want to. And Nathan, you may be twins and like a lot of the same stuff, but you can’t marry the same girl as your brother. I’d like to have two daughters-in-law.”

Nathan says, “Oh, all right. Maybe I can marry Vanessa.”

The commercial ends and the show comes back on. Their mother leads them to the sofa where they sit, flanking her.

“Look at her, Mom,” Tristan says. “Isn’t she beautiful?” When he looks again, instead of Lisa Bonet, Keisha Beale is on the screen.

His mother flashes him a brilliant smile. “She is, indeed, son.”

Tristan awakes with a start and bolts upright. The soreness of his knuckles feels foreign as he uses his hands to balance himself on the bed.

“Keisha?” Eyes adjusted, he looks to his right, but she’s not there. Then he remembers. She left, and she’s not coming back. He feels the telltale heaviness that took up residence in his chest immediately after he’d realized there was no changing her mind, and he groans.

“Well, that was a fucked-up dream.” He remembers how much he and Nate liked
The Cosby Show
. They made a deal with their mom that if they completed their daily extracurriculars and finished their homework before the show aired, they could stay up a little later and watch it. And it’s true he had a whopper of crush on Lisa Bonet back then; he only shared that information with his mother and brother.

The clock on his nightstand reads 4:17 a.m., but Tristan is wide awake. He gets up and slides into a pair of flip-flops. Every muscle and joint in his body aches from the pummeling he gave it. His balls also ache, but for an entirely different reason. He slips on a T-shirt and ambles into the bathroom to take another round of pain medication then strolls down the stairs.

After making a pot of organic coffee, he figures he might as well work. He sets up his three iPads on the breakfast bar and proceeds to slide, touch, and click until he opens all the financial pages and accesses all the indexes around the world. As he is studying the various markets, a photo on the Yahoo! homepage catches his attention. It’s Nathan and Lavender, photographed together in an L.A. nightclub the previous weekend when the Buffaloes played an away game against the Lakers.

“You’d better hope Ms. Jameson doesn’t read the gossip rags or surf the net anytime soon, you self-righteous prick,” he mumbles.

As Dominants, he and Nathan always practiced exclusivity, not because they were necessarily committed to a romantic relationship with their subs, but for the simple fact that it was cleaner, both health-wise and socially. He wonders how the hell his brother let himself be photographed with a former sub. Jada is going to be none too pleased by this turn of events.

Thinking of Jada makes him think of Keisha. Is she sleeping like a baby, as he observed on more occasions than he cared to count, or is she up like he is, tooling around in the wee hours of a Monday morning because their routine has changed midstream?

He toys with the idea of texting her but decides against it. That would smack too much of pining after her as if they’d been in a real relationship, which they had not. He should just get off his ass and find another submissive soon, because he’ll either have to engage his hand to take care of his needs, or go to Hong Kong with a tender case of blue balls. He doesn’t like the sound of either scenario.

“Fuck,” he mutters. “I’m regressing back to adolescence.”

He thinks again to his dream. In it, he was back in his family’s Barrington Hills house. The place they called home before they learned of his mother’s diagnosis. His fondest childhood memories were made in that house. Back then, he and Nate had been in an exclusive day school and were home every night with their parents.

They lived an idyllic life while his mother was alive. Tristan never quarreled with his father more than he did after she was gone, particularly when he and Nate were shipped off to the Academy. His mother’s death had left his father bereft, and for the first time Charles White had not been in control. He had not known what to do with his own sons. Nate seemed to handle it much better, but it wasn’t until they were heading to college that Tristan learned his brother had suffered just as much as he had—he’d just chosen to internalize his emotion.

Mrs. Naven opens the door from her quarters and enters the kitchen. She tut-tuts like a mother hen. “I see you’ve made your own coffee. You could’ve buzzed me if you wanted an early breakfast.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Naven. Coffee will suffice.”

She narrows her eyes. “Are you sure?”

“Quite.” He heaves his sore carcass off the bar stool and ambles out of the kitchen.

~*~

“Your... stepbrother?... is here, Mr. White,” Darryl says tentatively through the intercom.

Tristan rolls his eyes. Though his father is married to Bryce Paulson’s mother, they are not related by blood in any way, and he resents Bryce’s liberal use of the term considering they have nothing but a vague business relationship.

He hopes like hell Bryce isn’t about to piss him off before he even has a chance to throw him the biggest proverbial bone ever since they’ve been doing business together. Over the past several years, Tristan has sent Bryce a few investments he wasn’t inclined to take on and manage personally. These have been small projects, but he had to admit, the guy had a true head for business, and each project thrived.

It’s the only reason Tristan is considering him to take on KSR. Well, that and he needs someone he can trust to handle Keisha and Jada’s brainchild. Who better than someone who considers himself a stepbrother?

The abrupt end to his and Keisha’s arrangement has thrown Tristan for a loop, and he’s not going to make that mistake again. In the past, mixing business and pleasure caused him to change the dynamic of his personnel. He should’ve known a clause in the contract wouldn’t be enough. He plans to remedy it and move on, but he hadn’t bargained on Bryce’s eagerness. It’s barely been a half hour since Tristan called and pitched it to him.

He pushes the intercom button. “Send Mr. Paulson in, Darryl.” He hopes the use of his surname sends Bryce a clear message.

Tristan has barely stood and buttoned his jacket before Bryce barrels through the door Darryl holds for him. Bryce’s face is split in a shit-eating grin, his hand out to shake Tristan’s profusely as they meet in the middle of his office.

“Tristan! I’d begun to wonder if I’d done something to offend you. We haven’t crossed paths at Mother’s or collaborated on any projects in ages. Say it ain’t so.”

Tristan forces a smile and exposes the tops of his hands to Bryce in lieu of a handshake. “It ain’t so. Excuse me, but a handshake’s out of the question right now.”

He ignores how Paulson refers to the Gold Coast mansion Tristan’s parents purchased together before his mother died as
his
mother’s. It was the home where Alyssa White fought the hardest battle of her life—and lost. The place Tristan and Nathan returned to whenever they were vacationing from the Academy and college. Where they feel closest to their mother when they miss her.

His father’s new wife, Lydia Paulson-Stubblefield, has been in their lives only half a decade and began calling that house her home four years ago. She wasted no time putting her signature on it, thereby erasing every trace of Alyssa White. Even now as men in their thirties, that action didn’t sit well with him and Nathan.

“What’d you do, man? Punch a wall repeatedly?”

“Something like that.”

Bryce winces. “Looks like it smarts.”

Not as much as the ache in his chest right now, but Tristan isn’t about to over-share with Paulson. “I don’t even feel it, unless I try to do something idiotic like shake hands.”

Bryce pats Tristan’s shoulder, and from his three-inch height advantage, Tristan stares down at the hand on his shoulder with a look of revulsion. Bryce jerks it away, and things are awkward for a moment. Then Tristan smiles to put him at ease.

“Well, Bryce, I think I’m about to change the dynamic of our business relationship. Here, have a seat.” He gestures to one of the chairs in front of his desk and takes one opposite.

“I’m not complaining about what you’ve thrown my way in the past, but please tell me this project has significant heft to it. Papa needs a new G6.”

This is why Tristan didn’t personally care for Bryce. He behaves like a
nouveau riche
asswipe most of the time. Certain their father wasn’t thinking clearly when he became engaged to Lydia Paulson-Stubblefield, Tristan and Nate ran an extensive background check on her. While they didn’t find anything incriminating, it was clear Bryce Paulson’s family had only come into its wealth when his mother lucked out and married the owner of Stubblefield Rubber, a regional tire company that was now defunct.

Upon Stubblefield’s death, the company’s sale bought Bryce a Yale degree and gave him the bulk of the seed money for his own investment firm. Unlike Tristan’s maternal ancestors, whose wealth went back almost as many generations as the Whites, Bryce’s mother has just managed to marry well. Twice.

“Nathan and I have put three quarters of a million dollars into this project to shore up the quarter of a million seed money they brought to the table. Despite a less than stellar alpha coefficient on paper, they broke even in nine months. Next year, they could easily quadruple that. One partner, the CFO, is on board for expansion and has a keen business head. The COO is a musician first and the mastermind of the project. Convince her to expand, and this investment could be that cash cow you’ve been looking for.”

Tristan slides a binder off his desk and hands it to Bryce, who scans the financials quickly. His eyes bulge.

“You’re asking me to front your girlfriend’s business?”

“Ex-girlfriend.” Like everyone else, Bryce assumes Keisha was his girlfriend, so he supports the charade.

“Huh!” Bryce curls his tongue in that annoying habit Tristan abhors. “This is interesting. It’s going to be a tough sell, but I’m up for the challenge. Those artistic types are always a fucking pain. So... what? Were you too principled to use pillow talk to get what you wanted?”