“It’s extra,” Scarlett tells me, looking pleased. “But for you, I’ll throw in a discount.”
We go inside the private room, and Scarlett pushes me onto a small couch, crawling into my lap and tugging at my tie, and I breathe a sigh of relief that has nothing to do with the fact that my neglected cock will soon be getting the attention it needs. (Well, almost nothing to do with it.)
No, I’m relieved because things are back to normal now, after this crazy day. I’ve figured out a way to avoid Zenny, to keep Valdman happy, to keep my promise to Elijah, and now I’m exactly where I should be—relaxing with a glass of scotch and waiting for a warm mouth to make me feel better.
I’m a fixer. I fixed the problem, and now I’m done and I can stop thinking about it.
About her.
Chapter 7
Except I can’t stop thinking about her.
I can’t stop thinking about her as Scarlett kneels between my legs and makes me feel good. I can’t stop thinking about her as I go back to my penthouse and clean up the dishes Aiden left in my sink. I can’t stop thinking about her as I shower and fall asleep, and then the next day when I go into the office and after, when I help my mom get discharged from the hospital. And the day after that.
And I especially can’t stop thinking about her as I sit in my mother’s infusion room, reading aloud the most recent Wakefield Saga novel, In the Arms of the Disgraced Duke.
“‘And what about my dowry?’” I read. “‘I suppose that means nothing to you?’”
“‘It’s meant nothing since the day I first laid eyes on you,’” I continue, adopting the disgraced duke’s deep baritone. Or at least the deep baritone I presume a disgraced duke would have.
“‘Which day would that be, my grace?’” I say in the young Eleanor Wakefield’s voice. “‘The day I was born and my father promised me to you in order to satisfy his debts with your family? Or the night you first saw me as a grown woman at my coming out?’”
“‘I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I told you both?’” I read as the duke.
“He’s lying,” the oncology nurse says. “He didn’t think of her as anything but a cash cow until the party at Almack’s.”
“No, no,” Emmett says from the recliner next to Mom. He adjusts the blanket around his legs and sticks up a pale, knobby finger to emphasize his raspy words. “His feelings about her were always complicated, because here was this girl he was betrothed to, but she was too young to do anything but ignore for so many years. But then he lost everything and saw her again in the same week—”
“I think he always felt like he could love her, money aside,” my mom interrupts, waving her bottle of Mountain Dew, “but he didn’t want to fuck her until the party.”
“Mom.”
“What? It’s true.”
“I know it’s true, but—” I make a gesture around the infusion room, where the ten or so people inside are all my mom’s age or older. “We’re in public. And you know…” I lower my voice to a discreet whisper “…the aged.”
“Son, I fought in Vietnam,” Emmett rumbled. “You think I haven’t heard the word fuck before?”
“It’s in the book,” the nurse adds. “I think the duke even says something along the lines of, ‘I want to fuck her right here on the balcony, dowry be damned.’”
“Sean, look at me,” my mother says, and I look at Carolyn Bell. At her slightly-too-wide mouth and her dimples—just like all of my brothers and I have. At the smooth, barely wrinkled lines of her face, rendered unearthly and strange by her lack of eyebrows and eyelashes. At the silk scarf wrapped around what used to be thick chestnut hair and now is nothing but scalp.
“Yes, Mom?”
She tilts her head and very deliberately pronounces, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—”
I put both hands over my face and mumble into my palms. “Oh my Godddddd.”
“Keep reading, son, I haven’t got all day,” Emmett says, and Rosalie on the other side of Mom grunts her agreement, even though I know for a fact she usually naps through most of Sean Bell Story Time.
For the last three months, the Thursday morning infusion crew has been listening to me work my way through the last two Wakefield Saga books. Mom and I have been buddy-reading romance novels since she caught me sneaking In the Bed of the Pirate back to college with me after Lizzy’s funeral, and instead of teasing me, she loaded me up with the next two paperbacks in the series. Ever since then, we’ve been devouring books together in our little Bells-only book club, and while we like some romance novels set in the here and now, we really prefer our books with rogues and roués and castles and shit. And when Mom was diagnosed with cancer, we both knew we needed some mental comfort food, so back to the Wakefield Saga we went, to the very books that founded the informal Bells-only Book Club.
Plus it makes the chemotherapy sessions go by faster.
I wonder if Zenny knows what she started with that pirate book all those years ago.
I keep reading, ignoring the protests from literally every patient in the room and the nurse when I skip over the sex scene.
“Oh come on,” Rosalie groans, her eyes still closed. “We’ve been waiting weeks for this.”
“Guys,” I sputter. “I can’t read this in front of my mom.”
“Pretend I can’t hear you,” Mom says. “You were really good at pretending I couldn’t hear you when you were a teenager sneaking girls into your room.”
“I’m going to leave. I swear to all that’s holy, I’ll do it. I’ll leave you here to watch Ellen all day.”
“If you leave, make sure you leave the book,” Mom says crisply, my threats as useless as they were when I was a boy. “And then I’ll read the sex scene out loud.”
Somehow that is much more mortifying to imagine, and after the patients threaten to revolt and physically take the book out of my hands, I relent and read aloud the scene of the disgraced duke finally claiming Eleanor’s maidenhead.
There is applause throughout the room as Eleanor climaxes and the duke finally unleashes his torrents of passion into Eleanor’s womb.
“‘It was everything I dreamed of,’” I read in Eleanor’s voice.
“‘But the duke winced at this,” I read, and my own conscience prickles uncomfortably as I speak the words. “‘He immediately felt the guilt of what he’d done, the terrible weight of it. He’d vowed once upon a time to protect this girl, and here he was tumbling her without the slightest hint of what she deserved from him. She deserved a wedding, a future, a promise of love. And all he’d given her were a few moments of pleasure and a lifetime of regret.’”
“Sean, my boy.”
I look up to see the one person that I would happily see castrated and then dragged behind a team of wild horses and then maybe castrated again for good measure. (Okay, maybe not, but I’d definitely draw a dick on his face if I ever found him passed out.)
“Don’t come in,” I tell the man standing in my doorway.