Under Contract Read online

  This was wrong, no matter how Black spun it. You could debate whether wives exchanged sex with their husbands for security or if all sexual interactions involved transfer of more than mutual pleasure—it all came down to that she would never condone Carly and Josie entering into such an arrangement. And she would be ashamed for them to know that she had. She owed it to Ara to take care of them.

  That was the line in the sand.

  “I can’t,” she whispered, too faintly, because he leaned in to hear her over the steady beat of traffic. “I can’t do that.” There, loud and firm.

  His eyes darkened with irritated disappointment, though his expression remained calm as he nodded. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a silver card case and one of those pens that people pay thousands for, writing something on the back. Handing it to her, he said, “That’s my personal cell number. If you change your mind—about any of it—or if you just need a friendly ear, call me. Anytime.”

  She held on to the creamy cardstock dumbly, taken aback that he hadn’t argued further. But his gaze fell again to her mouth, brushing against her lips in that way that felt as palpable as a kiss, in a way that made her think he hadn’t given up at all.

  Because she recklessly wanted to lean in, find out how an actual kiss would feel, she stood and made a show of putting the card in the special compartment of her phone wallet reserved for important clients. How call girls referred to their customers, too, right? Don’t think about that. “Thank you.”

  She started to go. Felt bad about the chilly goodbye, despite everything. Turned back. “I’m sorry that things aren’t different. That my life hadn’t gone another way and you could have taken me to lunch and...”...work our way around to sex...kinkier possibilities...investing in the possibility of getting the kind of sex with you I’d most like to have. Other women had sexual adventures. Maybe she could have done that. If she’d become a different person.

  He watched her intently, as if reading the direction of her thoughts, a small smile curving his mouth. “It’s a standing offer, Celestina. It’s never too late to make your life go another direction.”

  “Experience has taught me otherwise.”

  “Maybe serendipity guided us together to change that.”

  Yeah. Right. “Goodbye.” She said it crisply and strode off, toward the parking lot and her car, without indulging in any backward glances. She’d meant that, because it had certainly proved true.

  Though his words made her wonder.

  * * *

  She wondered even more as the world and its realities came back. Sitting there with Ryan Black, of all people, had been like a bubble out of time where only the two of them existed, when she’d thought only about the ramifications of his extraordinary offer—and the illicit thrill of it. When she’d felt irritation and desire, bright emotions compared to the dusty fog of grief and despair.

  That’s the only reason she’d even pretended to entertain his outrageous proposal—because she’d been drawn in by the illicit and shocking intrigue of it all. By her reluctant fascination for the sensually cloaked savagery he’d let her glimpse. Sometimes being wicked is reason enough to do something. She’d always been the good girl, done the right thing, the expected thing—and look how her life had turned out. Some reward for good behavior.

  Logically she knew that it wasn’t about cause and effect, bad things happened to good people, correlation wasn’t causation and yadda yadda yadda. Just because her life had turned out for shit despite doing the right thing didn’t mean she should do bad things instead. Still, the part of her that had roused during her conversation with Black spun dark fantasies of what would have happened if she’d agreed. Along with it, unexpected emotions flooded her. Sexual yearning, yes. Regret. A certain deep frustration that felt like...

  Anger.

  So much anger.

  Wow—how hadn’t she known she carried this around? Odd that, when the numbing fog of grief and despair thinned, she mainly felt blinding rage. Initially she’d thought Black’s insulting offer drew her ire—an obvious target.

  But, driving home, she really began to wonder. Burning wrath kept bubbling up, popping and reforming like the twins’ lava lamp, going acid green to angry orange to seething crimson.

  Her parents, taking out that insane second mortgage.

  Ara, dying like that, as if they didn’t share the same life, the same heart.

  Noah, after all the shit she’d put up with from him, bailing on her when things got bad. We agreed we’d never have children. He’d had the gall to say that when their nieces, the daughters of the people who’d treated him as family, had been orphaned. He’d accused her, more than once, of loving her twin more than him. When he left, she’d told him he was right, because Ara would never have left her on purpose.

  Besides all of that, though, she raged at what she’d missed. That she’d somehow be turning thirty-three and had less than nothing to show for it. A hell not of your own making. Black had summed that up a little too succinctly—and too neatly. Everyone made their own hells, didn’t they? And she’d contributed to this one sure enough. She wasn’t letting herself off that hook.

  She stopped at the store and spent Linda’s forty dollars—all but a dollar twenty-three—on food that would last the three of them probably a day and a half, the way the girls ate. Sending a mental apology to Ara, who’d always fed her babies organic food and whole grains, Tina picked out the cheapest turkey meat and tried not to think about what all might be in it. She passed the liquor section and gazed longingly at the wine she couldn’t afford, briefly indulging in the thought of drinking a bottle before the girls came home from school and soaking in her sorrows.

  Except she wasn’t sad. She was pissed. A pity party might turn into one of those deals where a person inexplicably decides to douse their house in gasoline and set fire to it, then drives off down the San Bernardino Freeway cackling madly.

  Compared to that scenario, Black’s salacious offer sounded quite sane.

  Which went to prove how unstable she really was.

  She pulled into the driveway and glared at the house. Like an old lover who’d betrayed her, she hated it as much as she’d once loved the place. Their starter house, she’d thought. A charming bungalow in a pretty neighborhood, made far too expensive by proximity to the beach. She’d had to have that, pretty dreams of jogging on the beach every morning. When was the last time she’d taken that walk? Years. When the twins went to hang with their friends, she drove and dropped them off with their coolers, umbrellas and beach blankets. Exercise had gone the way of everything else nonessential in her life.

  Like decent grooming. Black had noticed her Super Cheap Cuts hairstyle. A man like him would and his gaze had brushed over it. She hadn’t imagined that. She should have kept her hair long. Then she could have trimmed the ends herself and put it in a bun every day. But that day she’d caught her reflection in the mirror and thought with a wild stab of hope that Ara had walked into the room...well, she hadn’t been thinking at all clearly. She’d just been deranged in her desperation to never make that error again, sawing through the thick mass with her grandmother’s sewing shears.

  Making herself get out of the car, she retrieved her paltry bags and carried them into the house. It, too, had gone downhill, with its dead lawn and chaos of clutter. The girls were supposed to clean as part of their chores, but they usually blew it off and she rarely mustered the energy to nag them about it. Especially when it felt like putting brass polish on a turd, as her grandmother would have said, since she’d deferred all the big maintenance, even before everything had happened.

  Of course she’d thought about setting fire to it.

  Probably everyone in her position did. All those movies where the arson detectives investigate. The damning evidence of a desperate bid for insurance to end the eternal cycle of dealin
g with creditors, the endless messages and accusations.

  Speaking of which, oh joy, bills in the pile of mail scattered inside the door. And an envelope with the insignia of the private school the girls attended. Her gut clenched and she stepped over it, carrying the bags into the kitchen. She’d missed the deadline for their tuition payment. The dean had been polite, understanding—to a point—and, unlike the others dunning her for payments, the dean could trap her in person. They’d be making decisions soon for fall enrollment and anyone not paid up would relinquish their legacy position.

  The school cost way too much, but she’d managed the past two years by putting the tuition payments on credit cards. Ungodly interest, of course—Black would no doubt be aghast. But the girls had attended that school since first grade and she couldn’t bear to wrest that, too, away from them. It had been their one constant in the chaos of being orphaned and moving in with their aunt. At least they’d had the same friends, same teachers, the same excellent counselor who knew their heads inside and out, from way back.

  If she couldn’t find a way to pay, they’d have to enter the public school system as eighth graders, with all the social pressures that entailed. Innocent and lovely lambs to be fleeced by the street-savvy boys, the gangs and drug dealers. Because she and Noah never intended to have children, she hadn’t looked at the schools local to the neighborhood. They hadn’t been great to begin with and had only gotten worse with the rampant foreclosures and squatters living in empty houses. Even if Steve’s family hadn’t convinced her that taking a short-sale on Ara and Steve’s house made more sense, their public schools hadn’t been much better. She might as well move cross-country as send her nieces to the local high school—it wouldn’t be any less wrenching for them.

  She put the groceries away, decided to skip lunch as a cost-saving measure and since her stomach hurt too much to eat anyway. Instead she made herself open the latest round of bills and look at them instead of just shoving them in the box in her closet. Black had been so matter-of-fact about the numbers. He wouldn’t hide away unopened bills as she had, hoping they’d somehow vanish. How can you not know? Maybe, just maybe, she could find a card with enough credit, or consolidate a couple to free up room on another to eke out one more year of school. They’d be getting the financial aid check and she had the severance money, which was—God! Not much at all. Was Black right about every damned thing?

  Hours later, she faced the dire reality that, even if she ignored all her other bills, she simply could not pay the tuition.

  Maybe burning down the house and driving with the twins to some low-cost-of-living town in New England wasn’t such a bad idea after all. They could change their names and live in a rustic farmhouse. It had a certain appeal, the fresh start. Not like she had any family left to lecture her about failing their legacy.

  After a Google search for “landscape design jobs New England”—the Pacific Northwest would be way too expensive—she settled into surveying the various job postings. Several asked for experience with the harsh weather and wide temperature changes, making her shiver reflexively. Frozen fountains—how did that work? But she could learn. She had to do something.

  The thud of the front door and the high pitch of voices startled her. Dusk had fallen, so she turned on the desk lamp, listening for the twins’ mood. As usual, Josie and Carly were arguing with each other. On one hand she didn’t get it, as Ara had always been like the other side of herself. They’d fought occasionally, but not the near-constant sparring Carly and Josie engaged in, as if they’d taken all their initial shock and grief and turned it on each other. Reflexively, she closed the laptop and shoved the tuition letter and other bills under some junk mail.

  “Antina!” Carly yelled, feet pounding down the short hall. “Stop it, Jo! Antina, I need a new cell phone. This battery won’t hold a charge and it’s so old it doesn’t even have Siri. Everybody has Siri!”

  “You don’t get a new phone unless I get one,” Josie insisted, turning to her aunt to back her up. “Besides, I get new shoes, first. It’s my turn. We agreed, right? I’ve been waiting a whole month.”

  “It’s a stupid rule. Why can’t we get new shoes at the same time?” Carly demanded, hands on hips. “Mom never did that.”

  No, Ara had never had to. The fire of anger burned anew.

  “Antina.” Carly turned on her with a stern expression. “There’s no way around it, I have to have a new phone. This dinosaur is practically dead.”

  “Because you text too much.” Josie wrinkled her nose. “Maybe you killed its techno-brain with your bad spelling.”

  Carly grabbed one of Josie’s blond curls and yanked viciously. “Shut up!”

  “You shut up,” Josie sneered, “whiny little beyatch.”

  Not a straw. Not a camel’s back breaking, but gasoline to the fire burning in her stomach, the anger Black had somehow awakened now blazed without restraint. She found herself standing slowly, her face hot. Something in it alerted the twins, because they ceased all sound and motion, pretty brown eyes going wide, mouths staying open on the insults that dried in their mouths.

  “Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Both. Of. You.”

  Chapter Five

  Under other circumstances, it might have been funny. Maybe someday she’d look back on this moment—the image would surely be forever etched in her brain—of the almost cartoonish way they gaped at her.

  She’d never spoken to them in anger. Not once, before or after Ara died. Before that she hadn’t needed to, had been the indulgent auntie. After...well, who would yell at girls who’d suffered what they had?

  In the clarity of her rage, however, this mistake also made itself clear. Always so lovely, having won the genetic jackpot with their father’s blondness but their mother’s thick hair, and the bitter-chocolate brown eyes exactly like Ara’s and her own, the girls had left the gangly preteens behind and glowed with the early bloom unique to adolescent girls.

  Not to mention the bitchy selfishness of it.

  “Antina?” Josie ventured.

  Tina wrestled down the words that wanted to rage at them, horrified at herself, yet also desperate to say more and worse. It wasn’t their fault that she’d hidden the worst of the financial situation from them. That not only would Carly not get a new phone or Josie new shoes, but that it wouldn’t matter because they faced true, disastrous poverty.

  Hell, she’d be lucky if they had a roof over their heads by summer.

  “C’mon, Carly,” a much quieter Josie said. “Let’s go make supper.”

  “But—”

  “Come on.” Josie tugged her sister out of the room and they went down the hall, whispering furiously at each other. For once on the same team.

  Tina stood rigid, replaying the scene in her mind, their aghast faces superimposed over the afterimages of the huge numbers on the bills. Her anger ebbed in the face of grinding shame. The twins hadn’t deserved that. They were selfish and self-absorbed—and so was every other twelve-year-old on the face of the earth. They deserved a real mother to help them through these years. Never mind an actual father. Even-keeled parents, who kept track of the bills and didn’t lose their only source of income.

  People who weren’t failures.

  Like admitting defeat.

  She sank back into the chair, her legs abruptly weak. What the hell was she going to do?

  A tapping on the door, Josie poked her head in, followed by a bowl of instant macaroni and cheese. Of course that’s what they’d made, of the things she’d bought. Absurdly it made her sad, the faux neon orange of the zero-nutrition sauce coating the cardboard noodles. She’d meant to make them turkey burgers, before her little meltdown.

  “Hungry?” Josie asked, taking her measure, then slid into the room before she responded, closing the door behind her and setting the bowl on the desk. Hitching her butt onto the de
sk, Josie cocked her head. “Bad day, huh.”

  Tina’s laugh came out watery and she shoved a spoonful of the mac and cheese into her mouth to keep it from turning into a sob. “I’m sorry,” she said, once she’d swallowed. The stuff felt warm in her stomach. Maybe not eating all day had contributed to her upset, the “hangry” the twins always joked about. “I shouldn’t have yelled like that.”

  Josie lifted a shoulder and stuck out her lower lip. “I dunno about that. Sure shut Carly up.”

  “I’ll apologize to her, too.”

  “Don’t. She deserved it.” Josie gave a self-deprecating smile. “I probably did, too. We dump our shiz on you and never ask how your day was. So—” she raised her eyebrows expectantly “—how was your day, Antina?”

  “I lost my job today.” She hadn’t expected to confess it so soon, but it was a relief to say so. “You, Carly and I need to talk about what we can do.”

  “Wow.” Instead of looking like a flower about to bloom, Josie abruptly seemed six again and afraid of the monster under the bed. “Can you find another one?”

  “I’m going to look, but...” She poked a noodle with her spoon. How much to tell them?

  “Eat your dinner. Don’t play with it,” Josie said, and grinned when Tina coughed out a laugh. “Remember how Mom used to say that?”

  “Yes.” It hurt to remember that, but in an oddly good way. “Your grandmother used to say it to us, too. And your great-grandmother.”

  “You know, I’ve been thinking.” Josie kicked her feet back and forth, eyes on her ragged sneakers. She really did need new ones. “Mom was your twin sister like Carly is mine. We were talking about genetics in school, and how twins run in families and funky stuff about identicals. Some of the kids were asking me and Carly if we were like that—had twinspeak and psychic connections and stuff.”