Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 61

“Because if we do it that way, it stops being mine and turns into a whole big move.” I get my hair pinned back up. “It becomes something I did to her. And then she’s in it. I want her to know it had nothing at all to do with them. With any of them.”

Kane’s jaw grinds, but he acknowledges my point with a brief nod.

“I’m not giving her that,” I say. “She’s had enough of my things.”

“Alright,” he concedes. “Go. I’ll follow in a minute.”

I go down first. I stop in the powder room, which Aunt Sherry has vacated, and put my face back together with what’s in my purse. Then I come out, take my chair, and chug half a glass of water.

Kane comes in two minutes later. He sits down beside me, puts his hand back on my thigh, where it was before, and takes up his fork.

Nobody says anything.

But my cousin Jenna looks at me and then at him and then very quickly back down at her plate. Her ears go red.

Vivian doesn’t take long to chime in. “Well!” she says brightly. “Dee, we should talk about the wedding. Because obviously I have to ask you about cake.”

Everybody looks at her. Then back at me.

I take a bite of potato. “No.”

“No, what?”

“No, we shouldn’t talk about the wedding.” I chew and swallow. “The potatoes really are good, Mom. Did you use butter or the margarine?”

“Um… butter,” my mother says faintly, every bit as confused as her youngest daughter.

“You can tell.”

Vivian sits there with her mouth open, waiting, but I give her absolutely nothing, and my God, it feels so good to do that.

Under the table, Kane’s thumb strokes once across my knee. “There’s one more thing for you,” he says, near my ear. “After dinner. Outside.”

“A gift?”

“Mm.”

“You have got to stop doing that.”

“Never.”

Dinner breaks up around eight. There’s no dessert, as promised, so people drift toward coffee and the freezer-burned Entenmann’s that Uncle Bub chiseled out and defrosted in the microwave. It comes out with a cold middle.

I get my coat out of the hall closet myself.

Kane holds the storm door and we go out onto the stoop into the cold. He takes a folded sheet from his inside pocket.

“For you,” he says.

I unfold it under the porch light. It’s a printout.

One column contains the names of casinos. Atlantic City. Foxwoods. Mohegan Sun. Bethlehem. A block of them in Vegas. Places I’ve never heard of in Connecticut and upstate and Louisiana and Mississippi.

And in the last column, beside every single one: BARRED — SUBJECT: BOYD, CONNOR J.

“This is—” My breath comes out white. “Kane. This is every casino in the country. You…”

“Got Connor 86’d from every one of them, yes.”

I’m in shock. “How?”

“A phone call to a man who owes me. Then a phone call from him to a man who owes him.” He looks out at the street. “His name is on a list now. He will not get through a door with a card table behind it. Not in Atlantic City, not in Nevada, not in a basement in Marine Park.”

“Why?”

“Because he sat at that table tonight with his hand on the back of your sister’s chair,” Kane says, “and he thought that the worst of it was over. I intend to show him just how wrong he is.”

I fold the printout up. “You keep taking things off him.”

“Yes.”

“Are you doing that for me, or for him?”

Before he can answer, the storm door bangs behind us. Connor comes out onto the top step with his jacket half on and his keys in his fist. He looks at Kane, then at the printout in my hand.

“So you know,” he says.

“I just found out.”

“Great.” He laughs miserably. “That’s great, Dee.”

He comes down two steps. He stops on the one above me, which puts him at Kane’s shoulder height, though he keeps his eyes on me and only on me.

“You think this is you winning,” he says, bending close and speaking fast. “You think he’s doing all this for you.”

“Connor—”

“Ask him why me.” His jaw is trembling. “Four million dollars, Dee. To me. A guy who plays forty-dollar hands in a basement. You never asked yourself why he ever said yes?”

Beside me, Kane is silent.

Connor looks up at him and then away, fast. He looks more terrified of Kane than ever.

“You still don’t know why he picked me,” he whispers. “You still don’t f*****g know.”

Then he turns around and goes back inside.

A week goes by, and I do not ask.

In my defense, I’m busy. Valentine’s Day is the Super Bowl of bakeries like mine, if that Super Bowl was also mixed with the Kentucky Derby and the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. It’s war, and a race, and you also have to look good while you’re doing it.

Or at least the cakes and cookies do.

But as of 3:45 A.M. on the morning of Valentine’s Day, I’m losing the war, I’m behind in the race, and neither I nor the heart-shaped cannolis I’m currently piping look particularly pretty.

I pause for a second to let the carpal tunnel in my hand recede. While I shake out my wrists, I look around to see how far we’ve come and how far we have left to go.

Unfortunately, the latter category is much, much bigger than the former.

We have nine hundred heart cookies to flood, four hundred of which have to say something in cursive, and my carpal tunnel isn’t getting any better.

Priya is at the mixer with two pounds of freeze-dried raspberry powder going into buttercream, which turns the whole kitchen the color of a really gory crime scene.

Cameron is running boxes and sweating profusely.

Jolene is on the phone telling a customer that no, we cannot fit a message longer than eleven characters on a three-inch heart, and that “I’M SORRY FOR EVERYTHING I DID IN JANUARY” is, generously, thirty-six.

The upside of working like a dog is I don’t have time to think about anything else.

I don’t want to think about my mom’s demand that I give a speech. Or the glistening engagement ring on Vivian’s finger.

I don’t want to think about Connor hissing, Ask him why he choose me.

And I especially, most of all, do not want to think about Kane’s sinful mouth sinking between my thighs and forever ruining that bathroom sink for me. I’ll never be able to wash my hands there again without getting a little weak in the knees.

This is mine to give and yours to receive.

That sentence is probably going to live rent-free in my head for the rest of my life.

I shudder, shake it all off, and get back to work.

A little while later, I’ve piped custom phrases on sixty-eight red velvet cakes, filled one hundred and twelve heart-shaped tart shelves, and I look up to see Kane Makov standing at my back door.

One of those things was not on the production schedule.

I unlock the door and let him inside.

“What are you doing here?” I ask in confusion.

He steps in and shuts the door behind him. He’s got no coat on over his sweater, which means he came from a car that’s parked close.

“Josef called me,” he says.

I frown. “As in Stalin? I thought he was dead.”

“The man standing guard on your back door in the mornings.” He looks past me at the kitchen, eyes passing over the trays stacked four high on every rack, Priya’s crime-scene mixer, and Cameron wobbling by with a tower of boxes hugged to his chest. “He said you looked overwhelmed. I think he might’ve undersold it.”

“We’re fine.”

Right on cue, Cameron drops half the boxes. Frosting goes everywhere. He sinks to his knees and starts to sob.

Priya, who has been pretending to work while clearly eavesdropping on this entire conversation, rushes over to help poor Cam. She mouths to me, Ignore us! and flaps her hands to turn me back toward Kane.

Kane, obviously, sees all of that. “I don’t think you and I have the same definition of ‘fine.’“

“Okay,” I confess, cheeks reddening, “we’re a little behind. But it’s nothing we haven’t dealt with before.”

Behind Kane, Priya coughs into her hand with obvious fakeness and adds, “Please help, dear God!”

I roll my eyes. What a drama queen.

“Fine. Maybe some extra hands would be useful.”

He spreads those delectable, tattooed hands of his wide, rings glinting in the light. “Just tell me where to put them, then.”

I get a feeling in my chest that I have neither the time nor the space nor the mental-emotional bandwidth to process right now.

“Take off your rings, wash your hands, and roll up your sleeves.” I point toward the hook beside the pantry. “And put on that apron.”

Kane obeys.

He sets four dark rings beside my phone, washes his hands, and folds his cuffs back. The black ink on his forearms is revealed, inch by inch. Then he ties on a white apron printed with tiny strawberries. It’s a bit big on me, which means it’s barely enough to cover his crotch.

“That apron has never looked so good,” Priya mutters as she passes me with fresh boxes for Cameron.