The Fidelity World_Decoy Read online

  “Sounds like you had a real handle on where your money was going,” he said with an air of dry sarcasm, not that Guinevere took much notice.

  “But the next thing I knew, after your father had passed away, mind you, was that Maxum had been executing covert operations… of an illegal nature.”

  “Mother, you have to stop dancing around this,” he warned.

  “Dead bodies, dead American soldiers,” she clarified as if the detail left a bitter taste in her mouth, “the fallen of these missions, were being shipped back with drugs in their abdomens.”

  “What?” he breathed, horrified.

  “Heroine,” she confided as tears welled up in her expressive, lagoon-green eyes. Her aged mouth twisted into a grim frown, lower lip quivering, and Nathan placed a warm hand on her frail shoulder. After a few trembling breaths that did little to steady her nerves, she pleaded, “I would never fund such an operation.”

  “That goes without saying,” he assured her, as empathy poured out of him and terror built in his chest. His mother was right. Both of their hands were filthy if it had been Cromwell money behind these operations. Claiming that Maxum had been acting alone and without the Cromwell Corp’s knowledge would hardly be a convincing defense.

  “Drug smuggling out of Afghanistan? Desecrating corpses? Nathan, I’ve been sick.”

  “Shh, shh, shh,” he cooed, taking both of her gloved hands in his. When it seemed the latest swell of emotion had subsided in his mother, he asked, “How long have you known?”

  “Since yesterday morning,” she said as if the short timeline of her having been in-the-know would save her from her son’s scathing. But turning a massive problem over to Nathan required complete honesty, so she was compelled to add, “I got a whiff of the stink off Maxum years ago, if I’m being honest. But I chose to ask less questions, stay out of it, and watch the huge deposits come in like clockwork.”

  “Therein lies our culpability,” he surmised. After another long, tense moment of holding his mother’s hands, he asked, “How did you find out about the truth? Who told you? If we’re being investigated, I need to know everything you know about that. I need names.”

  “Of course.”

  To have said this wouldn’t be a ‘quick or easy conversation’ was the understatement of the century… and as Nathan settled in to learning the grim details of what was shaping up to be one of the largest and most corrupt conspiracies in US, wartime history, he felt—distinctly and without question—that he’d never needed a woman like Portia more in his life than he did right now.

  By the time he left his mother in the breakfast parlor of her wing, he was thoroughly drained. It was barely 10am and he needed a stiff drink. He’d more than missed his conference meeting in Manhattan, but until he hired a private security detail to check every inch of the Cromwell building for more ‘bugs’, it would be best not to conduct any business there whatsoever.

  When he reached his study in the north wing just shy of his private chambers where he’d left Portia alone last night to curl up in his bed while he retired in the vacant guests’ quarters—the idea of her exploring his bedroom and sleeping nude between his silken sheets, a pleasant one—he made the necessary phone calls to reschedule the meeting and rearrange his day, all without apology, of course. Nathan Cromwell didn’t apologize. He informed and often without affect. All the while, he sipped the quenching scotch he’d poured himself.

  As he returned the desk phone to its cradle, having wrapped up the last telephone call, he loosened his necktie and unbuttoned the top of his dress shirt, leaving both cockeyed and unkempt. He topped off his tumbler of scotch and swiveled his chair to stare out the bay windows behind his desk and watch the hardy Atlantic slam against the rocky shore with each crashing wave.

  There was a light dusting of snow across the near side of the shore, the sleet from last night having turned to snow with the dropping temperature. The stark sunlight was now clouded over and the world beyond his windows looked gray and dreary.

  His mother had royally fucked up this time.

  If there was any getting around it, it wouldn’t be by legal means, that was for damn sure.

  Was that what the Cromwell’s had become, elite criminals of the most despicable variety?

  Maybe he should’ve seen it coming. The beast within the beauty that was his mother had always been painfully apparent to him. He’d been raised with the cold back of his mother’s cruel hand stinging across his cheek, hadn’t he? His formative years scarred with her lashing sense of love. And she’d done worse to him in his teenaged years, hadn’t she… delivering the kind of twisted affection that no mother should force upon her own flesh and blood.

  As rage ripped through his chest, he forced the dark thought—those crippling memories—out of his racing mind, thrust himself out of his desk chair, and bolted from his study as though if he walked fast enough, he could leave that sudden flash of his upbringing behind him.

  He found Portia in his private chambers, seated at the breakfast nook that encompassed the glass roundel overlooking the stormy bluff outside. She was watching the rough weather, her blonde hair mussed, her big blue eyes intense-looking with what appeared to be deep, untouchable loneliness. She was wearing a thin sweatshirt and a little pair of shorts, her bare knee under her chin, the length of her other leg tucked femininely underneath her. Perched, she was, on the chair like some kind of regal bird, made all the more beautiful by the ruffled state she’d woken in.

  It gave him pause, but not much, and as he advanced on her, she cut her pained blue eyes at him.

  “Good morning,” she offered.

  “Don’t speak.”

  Her eyes widened as he urged her off the chair and, gently as he could considering the rage of emotions that had overcome him, he pulled her across the grand bedroom and into his private playroom.

  She only began resisting when he flipped on the lowest light setting, having closed the cavernous door behind them, to illuminate the roomful of whips, chains, and black-leather benches that spanned the chilled, windowless space.

  Now more than ever he needed her.

  ‘If you knew what I really wanted, you’d kill me.’

  Her willingness to die by his erotic hand was the only hope keeping his racing mind from splitting in two.

  “Wait,” she breathed, so quietly he almost hadn’t caught it. He was too busy roughly bringing her to the set of leather-wrapped handcuffs that were dangling from sterling silver chains fixed to the vaulted ceiling. “What’s this?”

  “Don’t talk,” he warned as he took the flimsy material of her sweatshirt by the hem and yanked it up and over her head, leaving her to stand, bare-breasted and in black, sleeping shorts that left little to the imagination. He stripped those off as well and didn’t bother helping her to step out of them.

  “But—” she protested.

  He grabbed her pretty face with one large hand and she gasped.

  “I said—”

  “Don’t talk,” she supplied, though to his ears, the obedience of her words came with a hard edge of defiance. He searched her eyes as tears welled up. He didn’t loosen his grip of her face. He took the defiance of her tone as a challenge. How quickly could he break her?

  But little did Nathan know, she was already broken.

  Chapter Four

  PORTIA

  Manhattan was dark in the late afternoon, such was the power of winter. It had frosted across the twinkling city, quieting the commotion and turning the streets to ice. In some ways, it felt too cold to snow—a theory Portia had developed about weather in the coastal northeast. Frigid temperatures could kill all trace of humidity, suck the air dry in a sense, and leave the skies gray and depleted. At least the sleeting rain had stopped.

  She kept moving down Fifth Avenue, ignoring the dazzled-up window displays of the stores she briskly passed. She didn’t have much time. With Nathan otherwise disposed in a meeting at the Cromwell Corp, she’d estimated she had an hour a
t best. But factoring in the time spent walking, that would cut her own timetable down to less than half that. She didn’t want him to know she’d snuck off. She was already formulating the excuse she’d offer if she returned after him—that she needed to mail a personal letter. Why would he question her further? He wouldn’t. It was a good plan, yet she hoped she wouldn’t have to use it.

  One thing she gave the frigid air credit for: she could no longer feel the burning of her bruised wrists. Damn, Karen Flores hadn’t been kidding when she’d described Nathan Cromwell as a ‘stormy’ man. Portia had known going into this that the Cromwell’s were dangerous, and assumed Nathan would be no exception, but if she had been prepared for what was going to unfold in that secret chamber, she never would’ve shown up—not to the Winter Ball and not to Manhattan—the latter having been her first destination after learning about the truth of why her late brother’s body had ended up cremated six years ago.

  That had been the catalyst of her family’s ruin—Trystan’s death. Portia had only been sixteen, her parents in their early fifties. The house had felt empty for years without her older brother stomping around, but that had been when he was still alive, just ‘out there’. After they’d gotten word of his passing, the house hadn’t felt empty; it had felt hollow. Spiritless. Hope having evaporated like any chance of snow on a frigid night. It had felt like a dark frost had swept through the Rothschild household, and that feeling hadn’t been the worst of it.

  After the cremation, the service that had felt all wrong, after a little more than a month when their midwestern friends and extended family had moved on, when life was supposed to go back to normal… that’s when things had gone from bad to worse. The pretending. The showing the small-town how ‘fine’ they were. Portia’s father hadn’t been able to do it.

  It wasn’t Portia who had found him swinging—lifelessly—from a rope in the barn, but that was the image that had surged to her mind and stayed there when her mother, having gone outside to feed the chickens and tend to the horses, had uttered the darkest words of both their lives…

  ‘He’s left us for the Lord.’

  It had been a stoic moment, but that was what had been so disturbing about it. ‘Hung himself,’ her mother had concluded as she’d held an arm around Portia while they waited on the front porch for the police to arrive.

  Her mother hadn’t lasted much longer after that, but her particular brand of suicide was slow and devastating. She’d chosen to drink herself to death, and though, four years later, it had been falling asleep with a lit cigarette between her fingers that had technically caused her life to end—death by raging flames that took with it the Rothschild farmhouse—Portia knew as she’d dragged herself across the wet lawn, having narrowly escaped the same fate, that her mother had meant to end it this way, to leave Portia and all of life in order to be with the same cruel lord who had allowed Trystan to wind up in a body bag.

  If her gloved hands hadn’t felt so numb they’d be balled in angry fists by now. Her cheeks were too stiff with the cold to express the grimace she felt. She’d loved her family, but God damn them all for having collapsed so easily. She knew it was low, but she blamed Trystan most of all. Maybe it was easier that way, to hold the dead responsible.

  She pushed the callous thought from her rage-clouded mind and took note of the building numbers once she realized she’d just crossed 28th Street. The coffee shop should be right around here. She slowed her step as pedestrians, bundled-up and hunching against the harsh weather, streamed past her in all directions.

  There it was.

  The Coffee Bean, one of probably thirty in this city, but this was definitely the correct location.

  She glanced over her shoulder as the claw of her freezing hand scooped at the entrance door handle. It wouldn’t be easy to tell if she was being followed given the low light and sea of pedestrians, but she’d checked over her shoulder and across the street time and again during the long walk. She hadn’t seen any of the same faces, certainly none from the Cromwell building; that was all that mattered.

  Inside the warm coffee shop, she stripped off her gloves and blew on her hands, eyeing the three cramped tables that spanned the storefront windows. All were occupied by customers with laptop computers, each showing no signs of leaving. She could use the overcrowded setting to her advantage.

  It was the middle table.

  She eyed it and its occupant for a careful beat. The man at the table was middle-aged, bald, his glasses pushed so far up his nose that his eyelashes were probably brushing glass. He wasn’t typing away, but his computer had clearly caused the bustling room to disappear all around him. The chair opposite him was empty.

  Portia sat.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she apologized when he glanced up, all the while her thawing fingers grazed along the underside of the table.

  Searching. Feeling. There!

  The small package was taped securely. Damn, she wouldn’t be able to tear it off without rocking the whole table.

  “Not at all,” he said, his eyes brightening with an idea. “Do you mind watching my computer while I run to the bathroom?”

  Perfect.

  “Of course not. Go ahead,” she encouraged.

  The second he started off for the back of the coffee shop, she slid her eyes across the room. No one was looking at her.

  Yanking hard, she freed the package and discretely slipped it into the deep pocket of her winter coat. She could open it in the elevator of the Cromwell building. She needed to get back. There were mailboxes on nearly every street corner in Manhattan and though she’d set her mind on the excuse should Nathan or anyone ask, she didn’t feel like coming off like some kind of moron who couldn’t find a mailbox to save her life—which would be the drawn conclusion if she returned a full hour after having set off into the night.

  When the man returned after taking advantage of the situation by standing in line to buy himself another cup of coffee which seemed to take an eternity, Portia sprang to her feet and barely heard him thanking her as she hustled out of The Coffee Bean and up Fifth Avenue.

  Nathan was a dark man. She’d known that going into this thing. But she hadn’t expected to be attracted to him.

  She knew what it meant to sign a contract with The Infidelity Corporation. She knew it had been her only option in order to get close to him, get inside Cromwell, and play her part in righting the serious wrongs of the past. No one had sugarcoated it. Signing a year of her life away to Nathan Cromwell meant she was interested in exploring the same sexual proclivities that made him tick—proclivities that she’d been warned about. But she’d gone into this calculated. She’d been informed about how picky Nathan was even before she set foot in Infidelity. She’d been matched with Nathan, as planned, because she’d convinced all involved that she got off on ‘being anyone a man wants her to be’.

  Still, nothing could have prepared her for that room.

  And even more shocking, nothing could have prepared Portia for how much she liked it.

  He had only tied her up—wrapped her wrists in leather-clad handcuffs, leaving her feet free.

  Yes, he’d stripped off her sweatshirt, and yes, he’d left her nude from the waist up. But like last night in the wing of his Long Island estate, he’d only looked at her.

  He hadn’t touched.

  That was what was so puzzling about it all.

  She had gone into this thing wanting or needing or expecting to hate him.

  But so far, the greatest emotion she felt while in his presence was ‘yearning’.

  She wanted him to put his hands on her.

  Why?

  As soon as she reached the Cromwell building, the blustery wind at her back, the glass doors slid open and one of the guards at the far side of the grand lobby where a line of turn-styles slowed employee foot-traffic down waved her over.

  It seemed all the Cromwell staff in the security department had been made aware of Portia’s importance. The uniformed guar
d invited her through the turn-style he was overseeing and barked at the long line of disgruntled people who didn’t appreciate being ‘cut’. She thanked him and as she set off for the elevator banks, another security guard met her immediately and wasted no time helping her into an open and vacant elevator he’d apparently been holding just for her.

  “May I ride alone?” she asked then quickly confided, “I’d like to powder my nose.”

  Without a word, he nodded and barred anyone else from stepping inside. There were more complaints from the cluster of impatient employees who had been waiting, but Portia didn’t feel so much as a twinge of guilt. She needed every moment of privacy she could get to open the package.

  The elevator was fast and she felt her stomach drop, as she tore the little cardboard box open and pulled the device out—a flat, round microphone with a wire poking out, otherwise known as a ‘bug’.

  Shoving the empty, torn box into one pocket, she scrutinized the bug until she determined which flat side of the microphone was adhesive, as indicated by a thin piece of plastic. Having figured that out, she stripped away the plastic and, cupping the bug in her balled hand, tucked it into her other pocket. It might be awkward to walk around with one hand hidden deep in her winter coat, but she had no choice at this point.

  The elevator dinged open on the thirty-seventh floor and she stepped into the handsome anteroom where Nathan had left her. As she neared the lounge area, she cut her eyes to his office door—still closed—good.

  “May I take your coat?” she heard a woman ask from behind her.

  She was just about to round into the lounge area and take a seat, but she turned to see who was addressing her.

  The doe-eyed receptionist had left her post and was smiling up at Portia.

  “Thank you,” she said, shrugging off her winter coat, her right hand remaining balled around the bug. This felt risky, but she couldn’t very well get inside Nathan’s office all bundled up for the freezing outdoors.