The William Street house was a “fixer.” With the prices in the South Dartmouth neighborhood inflated by its status-inducing proximity to the ocean and its distance from the crime of north New Bedford, a beat-up mid-1800s place had been the entry-level home. Its wooden floors were uneven, none of its old three-panel doors shut properly, and the cobweb-filled unfinished basement still flooded when it rained; their plastic bins of high school yearbooks and family photos were stacked on pallets to keep them off the wet floor.
Katherine crept down the narrow basement steps. She hated going down, but there hadn’t been enough room in their smallish kitchen refrigerator to hide the birthday party food. In her brown suede wedge heels she carefully stepped over a puddle toward their spare tag sale fridge. Then she filled her outstretched arms with plates of hors d’oeuvres, the way she had when she was slogging through college with her miserable job at the Silver Spoon restaurant. She kicked the fridge door shut with her foot, and when she turned around with her arms loaded, Clay Buchanan was standing on the third step up, blocking her way.
He wore a tight smile and a button-down shirt tucked into equally tight jeans. The top and second buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a hairless chest. Katherine found his lack of fur strange; at his age he should have at least a little patch. Perhaps he waxed it. His jeans carefully defined every contour of his lower half. Katherine thought she would appear vulgar if he caught her staring, so she didn’t let her eyes linger. The snug ensemble might have been tacky on a man with the standard middle-aged tummy, but Clay was trim, muscular, and wore it well. He seemed to know it too.
“Ah, there you are,” he said pleasantly.
“Here I am.”
“I need to ask a favor of you.”
“If it involves food, I’m your man.”
“You’re definitely not a man, nor does this involve food. It involves a potential client. Dugan.”
Reginald Dugan. Katherine recalled the large land developer. Big guy. Lots of money. She’d met him while volunteering at the Veterans KIA charity auction, a good place to mingle with movers and shakers, and he was definitely a mover. No college education, but he’d elbowed his way to wealth and power. The story was that his family had lived in the New Bedford area for generations. He’d taken over their ailing Bristol County farm and somehow turned it into a multimillion-dollar development, which was quickly annexed by the city council, upon which his cousin sat. It wasn’t as tidy as that, but those were the basics Katherine heard while she was on the treadmill at the SAC.
Clay had heard a more recent rumor—that Dugan was dissatisfied with his current attorneys—and Clay had called Katherine that very morning to insist she invite the man to her next event. It made no difference to Clay that a birthday party was an inappropriately personal gathering for a stranger.
“I mentioned the party to him,” Katherine said coolly, “against my better judgment.”
“Well, he’s here,” Clay said, wiggling his thick eyebrows, “against your better judgment.”
Katherine was surprised but tried not to show it.
“Favor done then,” she said curtly. “You’re welcome.”
“No. Not done. I’ve already taken a run at him tonight, but he needs more persuasion. A different sort than I can provide.”
“What sort?”
“He likes beer and beautiful women. And he’s already got a beer.”
Katherine’s heartbeat quickened. She glanced down at her form-fitting cocktail dress, self-conscious and proud at the same time. It pushed her modest breasts into reasonably pert mounds and showed off her firm legs. When she looked back, Clay was grinning, his dark eyes boring into her. Her husband’s handsome partner was the last person she’d expected to call her beautiful. Her neck felt warm. This is what those thousands of reverse crunches and glute kickbacks are for, she told herself. But it was a compliment with a catch.
“You want me to flirt with Reggie Dugan?”
“I learned something today,” Clay said. “Had a bit of a revelation, really. Success isn’t going to drop into our laps, not real success. People who trap themselves with rules and propriety are rats in a maze. They work late into the night for scraps, they walk on an endless wheel, and they earn themselves a ratty little life. I don’t want that for us anymore. We need to up our ante to play with the big boys. And Dugan is a big boy—easily worth two hundred grand in fees. Annually.”
“And you want me to flirt with him,” she confirmed, annoyed. “He’s fifty and fat.”
“Forty-eight. Not a lot older than your husband … and he’s a big strong contractor guy, not fat.”
“Contractors have dirty fingernails,” Katherine said with a tone of finality. “Not my type.”
“So if I get him to clean his fingernails, you would flirt with him?”
“I didn’t say that. Look, my arms are getting tired holding all this. I need to go upstairs.”
“No, you don’t. You used to wait tables, didn’t you? And you exercise every day. Your bis and tris are seriously cut. I know you can hold up a few baby carrots and snap peas a bit longer while we discuss this.”
Another compliment. He’d noticed that she kept her thirty-six-year-old body in top shape.
“It’s no longer a discussion,” she said. “I won’t flirt with the grungy construction guy. And you’re being an asshole.”
Clay chuckled, and then shook his head as though disappointed in her. “My, my, Kate. What does Stuart do with you when you won’t behave?”
She cocked her head, bewildered. “Nothing.”
He nodded. “That’s what I figured.”
Clay stepped down from the stairs to face her and moved close, inside her personal space. His eyes never left hers. They were narrow and buried beneath low brows, dark brown, almost black. Katherine backed up against the old fridge, but he inched even closer, near enough that she could smell him—a clean male scent with a hint of something lavender, a body wash, perhaps. Her eyes flickered to the door at the top of the stairs. He’d closed it behind him. They were completely cut off from the party. He spoke slowly and deliberately, the cadence of his voice almost soothing.
“Kate, you are going to go up there and talk to him. You are going to smile. And you are going to make him want to be around you and around our firm. This isn’t just for me. It’s for your own good too.”
“I don’t like the way—”
He reached up suddenly and grabbed her by the hair. He grasped it in the rear, behind her neck where it was thickest, and he pulled her head back firmly. Her words caught in her throat, unsaid, and the carefully prepared food on her arms teetered.
“And I don’t like the way you’re defying me, Kate.” His tone did not change. “Stuart might put up with it, but not me.”
She couldn’t push him away with her arms loaded—she didn’t dare; it had taken an hour to prep the veggie tray alone. And when she tried to speak, he tugged her hair again, not hard enough to dump the plates, but hard enough to silence her.
He was still talking at a low volume with an even rhythm, and smiling sympathetically as though delivering a lesson to a child.
“This isn’t a game, Kate. This is life, our livelihood. Mine, Stuart’s, yours. This isn’t about your reputation or your sense of honor, which I’m guessing you surrendered to some college bad boy who broke your cherry and your heart before you met Steady Stu. We’re not kids anymore. You’re not a little nerd guarding your virginity. This is about success. If you’re going to stay home and play the society wife, you’re going to need to grow up a bit and contribute with the tools you have at your disposal. You don’t get a home overlooking the water by being a nice girl.”
Katherine’s heart beat madly, but she wasn’t sure what the emotion was. Confusion? Anger, perhaps? Stu would never do this to her. He wouldn’t dare. Even her father had never disciplined her; he’d concentrated on her delinquent older brother. Katie will be fine, she’d overheard him say when she was ten. I don’t need to spend my time on her.
“I’m going to let go now, Kate,” Clay was saying gently. “I’m not asking for much. Stu and I will do the heavy lifting. We just need a small effort from you. But if you’d like to tell me that you don’t want to help us earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, just say so.”
His body was against hers now, his hand still tangled in her hair, his chest flattening her smallish breasts between them, his pelvis pressed into her.
Is he turned on?
He was right about Dugan, she realized. He was right about the college bad boy too. She was a little nerd girl. And she did want a house with a view. The trays of food needed to be served, her husband’s partner smelled terrific, and he was an asshole with amazing eyes that never looked away.
When he let go, she calmly handed him one of the trays to carry upstairs. When he took it, she slapped him. He blinked, but didn’t move. Instead he simply stood, waiting for her to refuse him. But in the end she couldn’t.