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“It’s nothing,” he says, and the cold mask slides neatly back into place. “There’s a gala next week. You will attend it with me.”
“I’ve never been to anything like that,” I protest. “I don’t even own a dress for it. The white one is not exactly ballroom material.”
“Everything is handled,” he says. “You only have to show up. I remember your measurements very clearly.”
He leaves, and the numbers on the page might as well be written in another language. The gala, the dress, and that soft, drunken Lena all swirl together in my head and refuse to settle.
I pinch the soft skin of my stomach and try to picture myself standing next to him in a room full of glittering people. Everything about it clashes at once, our ages, our two separate worlds, my soft round body set beside all those thin, elegant women in their gowns. I already know how the whispers would go.
The white dress already pushes every limit I have, and this occasion will only be worse.
The deeper worry, the one I can barely make myself look at, is that some part of me will treat the gala as a real date, and I won’t be able to stop.
Because the truth I least want to admit is that I’m already looking forward to it. I’ve caught myself wondering what the dress looks like, and whether he’ll offer me his arm, and how his hand would feel resting at the small of my back in front of all those people.
And that, more than the danger or the ledgers or the man himself, is the thing that frightens me most of all.
9
LEV
The camp director trails me across the lawn long after my speech is finished, and she doesn’t stop talking.
She lists the weekend activities, the new cabins, the dining hall, the scholarship fund my money seeded. I catch perhaps one word in ten. Events like this bore me right down to the fucking marrow.
It’s not the charity I object to. I’ve signed away more of my fortune than most men will ever dream of earning, and I’ll sign away more still. What I cannot stand is all the noise stapled around it. The speeches, the fake applause, the endless smug self-congratulation, and all the rest of the bullshit that arrives the moment someone hands me a microphone and points me at a podium full of cameras.
The truth is I only agreed to come today because of Delaney. She has lived behind my eyes for a week now, in my office and out of it, and I needed to stand somewhere she wasn’t and remember how to think straight.
I don’t understand the goddamn hold she has on me. In my own office I could not keep my eyes, or my cock, off the shape of her bent over a ledger. Women stopped meaning a damn thing to me years ago. I went numb to the fawning and flattery so long ago that I forgot the numbness was even there. She’s dragged some old, dangerous current back up to the surface, and I resent how good it feels.
“You have built something worthwhile here,” I tell the director, catching the tail of her sentence. “I look forward to working with you again.”
I mean it, more or less. The camp does really well. It sits out past the edge of the city where the air is clean, and children can put their hands in dirt and river water. I have no love for children, loud and destructive little animals as they are, but their shrieking laughter carries across the grounds and tells me the money landed where it should.
Then the laughter turns ugly.
A knot of boys has cornered a skinny kid at the riverbank, shoving him toward the lip of the water.
“Go on, you little shit,” one of them jeers. “Swim.”
The skinny boy doesn’t beg. He slaps their hands off him, one after another, chin up, refusing to hand them the fear they came for. I note the stubbornness in it. It doesn’t belong on a face that small.
My jaw tightens hard. This is exactly the age I cannot handle, old enough to be cruel and stupid at the same time, little bastards hunting the weakest thing in the pack for sport.
“Enough,” I shout, already moving, but the ground is soft,the distance is long, and a shove lands before I reach them. The boy goes over the edge into the river. He surfaces thrashing, water closing over his mouth, and cries out for help.
The little cowards scatter like roaches under a lifted stone. The director sprints past me and catches two of them by their collars.
I throw off my jacket and go in. The cold takes my breath, and my clothes drink the filthy river in a single second. I can’t allow a child to drown at an event with my name stamped on it, so I close the distance in a few hard strokes, get an arm across his chest, and haul him back to the bank.
The director hovers over us, wringing her hands. “Is he all right? Are you all right?”
“We’re both fine,” I say. “He’s shaken more than he is hurt.”
“I’m so sorry. I have already called his guardian, and I promise you those boys will be dealt with today.” She hurries off toward the culprits.
The boy coughs up a mouthful of river and looks up at me, dripping. “You’re really cool,” he says. “You’re tall, and strong, and you just dove in like it was nothing.”
