“Kipling.”
“Mother.” He dutifully leaned down for a kiss that never reached his cheek—his mother could never bear to smear her lipstick. Her perfume nearly choked him as he caught a particularly unlucky lungful.
When they both stood upright again, she patted a hand near, but not on, her silver hair and took a moment to peruse him. Kip braced himself as her blue eyes took on a sharp glint.
“Is your shirt pink?”
“Intentionally so.”
“Hmm.” She pursed her lips, and Kip marked the time down as three seconds—only three seconds since he’d arrived, and he’d already managed to earn her disapproval.
A personal best.
“Where’s Dad?”
She turned from him, already losing interest. “I’m sure I don’t know.”
Which meant he was probably in the game room watching television for entertainment and not research—a pastime his mother hated and therefore pretended didn’t exist.
He started that direction but hadn’t made it two steps before his mother said, “Don’t get too comfortable. Dinner will be ready any moment.”
“There’s no danger of me getting comfortable,” he muttered beneath his breath.
God, he hated Sundays. But he still showed up every week, because if he started thinking about why he came, he’d have to face some of the feelings he’d been avoiding for years.
He straightened the cuffs on his pink button-down shirt as he rounded the corner and found his father just where he knew he’d be: watching golf from the leather lounge chair that was permanently conformed to his shape.
Kip took the empty lounger next to his father, who grunted by way of greeting. A commercial came on, which was when his mother would have focused, but Kip’s dad turned his way. His brown eyes took on a merry glint as he scanned Kip’s attire. “Bet your mother loved that shirt.”
“For Christ’s sake.” Kip tugged at his collar. “It’s just a shirt.”
“Nothing is just anything in this house.”
He took a page out of his dad’s book and grunted. No kidding.
There was a squawk from behind them, and neither of them turned toward the intercom system that had been in the house since his childhood—the house his mother optimistically referred to as the mansion.
“Dinner is served,” said a tinny, compressed version of his mother’s voice.
With a heavy sigh, his dad pushed from his chair and clicked the television off before dropping the remote on the side table. Kip eyed his father’s browbeaten expression. Does my face look anything like that? There was a definite tugging at his eyebrows. He intentionally tried to straighten them just in case.
“Let’s go to supper,” his father said in the same tone someone might say Let’s go to the DMV.
“Right behind you.”
They walked through the house silently until they arrived at the formal dining room where his mother was already seated at the head of the table. Father took the other end of the table, and Kip took the place setting in his usual spot halfway between the two.
And so it begins.
He tipped his wrist so he could snag a peek at his watch. Two more hours. A person could do anything for two hours, and he often had.
He smiled, thinking of one particular time when a client had been very generous with more than just her money—
“And how was your week, Kipling?” His mother cut into the lobster tail Mary, their cook, had prepared. “That smile you’re wearing looks promising.”
Kip cleared his throat and reached for his own silverware. “It was a good week,” he said carefully. He always said everything carefully. Too much cheer would make his mother suspicious—happiness was always questioned in this house. Too much gloom, and his mother would remind him that he had only himself to blame.
“Anything in particular stand out?”
He chewed thoughtfully and then swallowed. “No.”
It was the same conversation they had each Sunday, and so far so good. It was the Sundays during which they deviated from the script that made him cringe.
“Any luck on the job front?”
Annnnd, we’re deviating from the script. Kip set his knife and fork down, what little appetite he’d had vanishing into the lush carpet beneath his feet.
“Oh, Georgiana, leave the boy alone.”
She sipped from her wine before saying, “I believe we have. It hasn’t helped.”
“I’m still looking.” Kip rubbed his finger over a water spot on his fork, one that—had his mother seen it—would have been taken out of someone’s hide in the kitchen staff.
“Hmm.”
God save him from his mother’s hmms. He sighed and placed his hands in his lap. His parents didn’t know he had a job, and he certainly wasn’t going to correct that impression, as the knowledge that he made thousands of dollars a week selling sex would only turn up the heat in the hot seat.
Luckily, they hadn’t paid close enough attention to his life—except in this one area of employment—to notice that he was able to support himself nominally well since they’d cut him off without any aid about a year ago when he had refused to follow Georgiana’s footsteps and join her firm after college graduation. He knew they expected him to come crawling back any moment, unable to make it on his own. That was not going to happen. In fact, earlier today, Kip had secured a brand-new client for tomorrow evening. His client list was increasing, not decreasing.
“Your charm can only get you so far, Kipling.”
Ah, yes. Now they were back on script. It wasn’t a Sunday Dinner if his mother didn’t remind him that all he had going for him was his looks and personability.
It had always been Kip’s opinion that those two things counted for a lot in this world, but it wasn’t an opinion his mother shared. Little did they know his charm had made him a successful man—well, semi-successful. Okay, no one else would define prostitution as success, but give him a break.
He’d probably stroke out if his mother looked at him during one of these Sunday Dinners and simply accepted him for who he was. Loved him. Put him above her ambition for one second—
And, he shoved those thoughts aside—the very ones he’d be trying to avoid by not thinking about why he showed up at this house every week like clockwork, seeking approval from his family like some sap whipping boy who hadn’t learned better by now.
He didn’t need approval or acceptance. He’d make it on his own. Hell, was already halfway to making it.
Technically, Kip knew, the money he’d already managed to save was enough to open a business. A small one, but one that belonged all to him, and one in which he would have to answer to no one. The problem was, he didn’t know what kind of business he wanted to open. Which would be worse: working a little longer while he saved more and figured out his path or starting a business now only to find out his mother was right? That he didn’t have anything going for him but his charm?
And because Kip was good at fucking everyone, including himself, he’d managed to raise his money in the one way that would keep him from being able to go legit if word of it ever got out. Georgiana was far too well known in this town. That her son was a gigolo would spread far and wide if anyone found out, and then no one would do business with him and he wouldn’t be able to join her firm—the backup plan that still made him shiver.
“He knows all of this, Georgiana.”
Kip pressed his lips together as his mother turned her attention fully on her husband. “Does he, Avery?” she said softly.
They both knew that tone. His father broke eye contact and reached for his own glass of wine. Had his father dared to challenge Mother as she presided over Sunday Dinner? When was the last time that had happened?
Dear old dad was a kept man. Georgiana had come from money; Avery had married into it. At one point they’d probably been in love, but that point was far, far behind them. Avery didn’t work, and, as far as Georgiana was concerned, that meant he didn’t get a say in running the home.
Kip was a feminist—a gigolo kind of had to be; his mother was something else altogether. Equality? Nope. She wanted everyone in the world beneath her boot, and for some reason, his father had volunteered to be at the bottom of the pile.
“I do know,” he said softly, hoping to deflect his mother’s attention back to himself—something he usually did everything in his power to avoid. His dad owed him. Big.
It worked. Her attention nearly audibly snapped his way, and as she set down her own silverware, he knew he was in for it now. He tucked his chin into his chest and pretended to listen as she launched into a lecture on how he was wasting his life and blah, blah, blah.
He kept his father in his peripheral vision as Avery turned back to his meal, suitably cowed by his wife’s dominance. The fuck I’ll ever end up with a woman like that.
No other woman would ever strong-arm him. Boss him around. Make him live a certain way.
Look at him like he was a waste.
Because if he had to live the rest of his life like he’d lived under Mother’s thumb for the first eighteen years, either under her roof or under her dominance at the firm . . .
I’d rather turn tricks for the rest of my life.