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“Don’t get all Darwin on me, Sheldon. Keep the clothes on. Keep the box closed.”
Her mouth snapped together in a tight line. “You think I’m a slut, don’t you? You don’t approve. Are you a virgin, Jeff?”
He shot her a look. “You know I’m not. Don’t you?” he reminded her, because the absentee memory of the night had eaten at him over the last few weeks. He didn’t forget sex. Ever. Even in the deepest lapses of alcohol. Ever.
And with the one woman who had kept his cock throbbing in painful agony for what seemed like forever?
No way.
“Why does it matter if I have some fun?” she asked, which on the surface was a perfectly logical, rational question. However, Sheldon was neither logical, nor rational.
“I have a job to do, sweetheart. Your father is paying my firm large amounts of cash to keep you out of the papers. Nothing more. I’m going to do it, too.”
She crossed her arms around her chest, not that he looked, and slumped back in the seat. “It always comes down to money, doesn’t it?”
“Not always.”
“Ha.”
There was an edge in her voice, a pain that he’d never heard before. “What happened to you, Sheldon?”
“I use whatever I can to fight whoever I need to,” she said, studying her nails.
The car slid to a screeching halt, smack in front of her building. Jeff paid the cabbie and told him to wait, he wasn’t done with the lecture. He still had a good hour of diatribe left inside him.
They walked to the awning of her building, mere inches separating them, but the huge chasm loomed like an eroding fault line in the earth, just waiting to be split asunder.
“Why don’t you stop fighting?” he asked, rubbing a hand over tired eyes. Playing bad-cop chaperone was exhausting and completely unrewarding.
She waved to her doorman, but stopped far enough away from the public eye. An unexpected moment of discretion. He was surprised. And pleased. “You want me. Why don’t you stop fighting it?”
“I don’t want you.”
“Lying, much?”
“Keep the sex out of it.”
Her eyes warmed, and then heated. “Kiss me, then. Just kiss me. No tongues, no bodies. Just two mouths touching.”
He didn’t want to kiss her, but she had laid down the challenge, and he would look spineless if he didn’t comply.
So he kissed her. No tongues. No bodies. Just two mouths touching. Her lips were soft and pliable, and so was the look in her eyes. There wasn’t the usual vacancy in her gaze. Shockingly, there was innocence there. Vulnerability. Qualities he couldn’t pin on Sheldon if he tried. But there they were. Staring him in the face.
His first instinct was to run. He even turned to go.
“You shouldn’t fight it,” she whispered.
“Go inside.”
She started to argue, but maybe she saw the pleading in his eyes, maybe she saw the battered animal that lurked inside him, maybe she was just tired. It didn’t matter, she smiled at the doorman, and blithely went on her way.
And Jeff felt himself breathe again.
He returned to the curb, only to find his cabbie had disappeared, probably hoping to find an even bigger sucker than Jeff.
Even cabbies had their dreams.
COLUMBIA-STARR COMMUNICATIONS OCCUPIED a sophisticated floor of offices near Midtown. Lots of red and black and polka dots and flash. It was the hottest PR firm in New York—at least it was right now, and Jeff considered it quite the achievement that he’d landed the job all on his own.
He pulled open the glass doors and was immediately greeted by a strange man sitting behind what used to be his secretary’s desk.
“Mr. Summerville called. He’ll be here in ten.”
“Who are you?” asked Jeff.
“Phil Carter. Rent-a-temp. Nice tie, by the way,” he said, a glint in his eye.
Oh, joy. Jeff had a very modern attitude toward alternative lifestyles, but it was nine-thirty in the morning, and he didn’t like men who dressed better than he did. “Let me begin with, you’re fired.”
“Hello, Mr. Ego has arrived! They warned me about you.”
“Are you always like this?”
Phil balanced his face on his hands, smiling like an imp. A very gay imp, but an imp. Then he began to sing. “I gotta be me. I gotta be me.”
“Enough. You know the software we use?”
“You betcha.”
“Good speller, impeccable grammar?”
“Philistine. P-h-i-l-i-s-t-i-n-e. Participle phrases are used chiefly to modify nouns, but a dangling participle is confusing to the reader. For example, ‘Sitting on his ass, the bird flew by the window.’”
Just then the phone rang.
“Phone manners?” barked Jeff.
Phil pushed a button on the phone and started speaking into his headset. “Columbia-Starr Communications. Mr. Jeff Brooks’s office. How may I help you?” Phil frowned ominously. “Mr. Brooks did what? And then the cops told him what? And now the Smoking Gun wrote what? No comment. And that’s my final comment. Thank you for calling Columbia-Starr Communications. Shaping The World, A Million Minds At A Time. Have a nice day.”
Phil hung up and gave Jeff an expectant look.
Okay, the guy was good, better than the last four temps he’d had. Jeff looked down at the phone. “Who was that?”
“Your mother. Baked ziti at her apartment Wednesday at eight.”
It was too much to comprehend after four hours of restless sleep, and a hard-on that was now mummified permanently. “What about all the other stuff you were saying? With the cops?” The last thing he needed was more Sheldon-fodder for the rags.
Phil wiggled his index finger. “Fastest mute finger in the West.”
Jeff nodded. “Okay, you pass. I like my coffee black,” he ordered, taking off for the zen-like quiet of his office.
“No sugar?” yelled Phil.
Jeff slammed the door.
“Savage!”
JEFF’S HEADACHE WAS JUST beginning to recede when the intercom buzzed.
“A Mr. Summerville is waiting for you, Mr. Brooks. Should I show him in?”
Sheldon’s dad. Quickly, Jeff flipped through the morning trade rags to see what sort of lies, half truths and full truths were being written about her.
The Post mentioned her makeout session with the goalie. The Daily News listed a Sheldon-sighting at Crobar, but it wasn’t too bad. All in all, they’d written tons worse about Sheldon before.
Only two items today. Maybe her father would be happy.
Thirty seconds later, Wayne Summerville was in his office.
“What the hell am I paying you for, boy?”
Okay, not happy. Jeff forced a smile. “There’s the blind item on Page Six about the wayward socialite that’s been giving large amounts of cash to the homeless.”
“That’s not my daughter,” he said, leaning over Jeff’s desk, probably so Jeff could feel the full force of his anger.
Check. Anger felt.
“It might not be, Wayne, but people could assume it is. That’s the beauty of blind items. We can plant something with the Daily Dish tomorrow.”
“Jeff, now listen. I like you, boy. Really do. But your firm is charging me an obscene amount of money to transform my daughter’s image into something more palatable to our stockholders. And do you know what’s happened to my daughter’s image since I hired you?”
Jeff stared into the dark dredges of his Columbia-Starr Communications coffee cup. “What, sir?”
“I didn’t think it could happen. Truly didn’t believe it could happen, but her image has gotten worse. Gone right in the toilet.”
“Your daughter’s a rather headstrong young lady.” It was an understatement from a man well-versed in overstatements.
“Then get tough, Jeff. I want to announce her engagement in three months, and when she’s off swapping spit and who knows what other bodily fluids with a bartender at some newfangled club in the Meatpacking District, it’s not going to happen.”
Jeff lifted his head and backtracked for a moment. “What engagement? A marriage engagement?”
“Sure. Sheldon’s marrying the heir to Con-Mason U.S.A. We’re signing all the papers in a few weeks.” Wayne rubbed his hands together. “It’ll be the biggest merger this side of the Mississip since Exxon-Mobil. Course that’d be west of the Mississip. Damn, it’d be the biggest merger in this whole gosh-darned country.”
“She knows this?”
“The merger?”
“The marriage?” asked Jeff, frowning.
“Sure. Joshua’s a presentable boy, Harvard grad, one of the cities most eligible bachelors, and we’ve had a long talk. Right proud of my little girl.”
“An engagement,” muttered Jeff. This wasn’t the Dark Ages where women were forced to submit to the whims of men. At least, in most cases.
“It’s a win-win for everybody. Sheldon gets more money than God and the devil combined. Summerville CP gets expansion into the Chinese markets that Con-Mason’s already has such a lock on. And best of all, there’ll be no taxes to pay on the stock swap because of the laws of this fine country that protect the sacred union between a man and his wife. God bless the USA.”
Jeff felt the urge to cross himself but refrained because he didn’t think Wayne would see the humor.
“I’ll do better, sir. Now that I have a full understanding of the situation, I’m sure Sheldon and I can work something out,” he said earnestly, all while subversive ideas were buzzing around in his head.
Yeah, he’d talk to her. He could rescue her. Explain to her the options she had. Jeff choreographed the entire scene, heroic orchestration playing in the background. Close up to her sea-blue eyes as she stared at him worshipfully.
Jeff smiled to himself.
“And I’ve got an incentive for you, Jeff. Sort of my way of insuring that we all succeed. When the merger happens between Con-Mason U.S.A. and Summerville CP, we’re going to need a firm to do all our public relations work. Never believed in trying to do that sort of thing in-house, better to let the pros handle it. And I think Columbia-Starr Communications would be right perfect. Course, then they’d have to call it Columbia-Starr-Brooks Communications. Sounds nice, don’t you think? Just like heavenly bells to a man’s ear.”
Then Wayne grinned at Jeff, his sea-blue eyes long faded to dollar-sign green.
And thus, Jeff was slapped back into the coffee-cup dregs of his reality. The world of Sheldon Summerville was a gold-studded planet, a monied universe. Wayne Summerville bought companies over breakfast and Jeff Brooks saved up eight long years for a boat. Tomorrow’s disillusions were today’s grand illusions. In his business, Jeff had to be careful not to believe his own spin.
He examined the Columbia-Starr logo, thinking that maybe there was a place for Brooks on the coffee cup, too.
The heroic orchestrations playing in his head screeched to a full stop, and the picture of Sheldon’s sea-blue eyes, once lit with heroic worship, faded to black.
Like that would ever happen anyway.
2
THERE WAS ONLY ONE PERSON that Jeff depended on for advice. Himself. However, when gazillion-dollar financial matters were involved, he was out of his league, although he’d never admit it to anybody, especially his older brother, Andrew.
And it was for this reason that, when he called Andrew to meet him for happy hour, he told his brother that he needed to hit him up for money for a charitable donation.
Andrew was a successful hedge-fund manager—a hugely successful hedge-fund manager.
Jeff tried not to compare his successes to Andrew’s, because he’d always come up short—several billion short, in case anyone was counting. Of course even God couldn’t really compare to Andrew’s successes. But to be fair, God took a day off once a week, and Andrew never did. Jeff was a firm believer in a day off.
“So, what’s this cause of yours?” asked Andrew, sitting at the bar, sipping on his beer.
“Heart disease in kids. We’re doing a campaign to raise awareness. There’s some great breakthroughs in the medical community, new drugs that are entering trials and we’re putting together a complete media package, kicking off with this Their Hearts On The Line campaign. Great stuff. Really hits you right here,” said Jeff, laying a hand over his chest.
“How much do you need?”
“What’s the life of a child worth to you, Andrew? Then multiply that by fifty.”
“That’s serious cash.”
“Heart disease is serious business.”
“All right,” said Andrew, who then wrote one very large check.
