Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 34

That mysterious smile spreads across his face. “Pick your language, sladkaya. I just asked how you are.”

“Yeah,” I say, “it was the bit in English that confused me most of all. Since when do you care how I am?”

He lifts a hand. “What kind of host would I be if I didn’t ask?”

“You’re weirdly courteous for a mob boss loan shark.”

Kane just smiles again. “If the shoe fits.” He rakes his fingers through his hair. “If you’d prefer, we can skip past the pleasantries and go straight to business. Unless you like the banter…?”

“Business,” I blurt way too fast. My hands find each other in my lap and start worrying the hem of my cardigan. “Definitely business, please.”

“Pity,” he says. “I was looking forward to it.”

I take a breath and seal my fate before I can talk myself out of it.

“Yes.”

Kane doesn’t move. “Yes to what, specifically?”

I wag a finger at him. “Don’t do that.”

“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m doing it anyway.”

I roll my eyes even as I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. “Yes to your deal. I will spend every holiday until Easter with you. In return, on Easter, you give me back all the rights to my bakery and you never darken my doorstep again.”

He settles back and toys with a bladed letter opener made out of what appears to be solid gold. He rotates it between his fingers again and again.

“Good,” he says at last.

I wrinkle my nose. “That’s it? ‘Good’?”

“What would you like me to say?”

“I don’t know. Something with more paperwork in it.” I shift in the chair. “How does this work? Do I sign something? Do we shake on it? Do you cut my palm with a knife and we press them together? Your guy on the phone was mum about the sacrificial lamb.”

“We don’t do that.”

“What a bummer. I’ve got a great goat guy. Extremely reliable. Pleases the gods every time.”

“Save it for the next full moon,” he jokes. “For now, we shake.”

He holds out his hand across the desk.

I look at it and hesitate.

I have a bad track record with this hand. In the pantry, the first time we ever met, it cuffed my wrist and ordered me to apologize to myself. Ninety seconds ago, it planted me down into this chair and my skin still feels like it’s sizzling all over from that briefest instant of contact.

I eye it suspiciously. Ink skitters along the backs of his knuckles, some of it faded, some of it fresh. Two rings, one plain and heavy, one with a stone so dark it just drinks the light. A shiny seam of scar tissue running along the outside of his thumb. And under all of it, an obvious, unbothered strength.

Hands that have never once been soft or delicate for a living.

Hands that were born to break.

“Don’t leave me hanging, Lilah.”

I don’t.

I reach out and shake.

But before I can let go, I add something else. “I want to make it very clear that this is a business transaction and nothing more, okay?”

Kane’s eyes hood over, but he waits patiently for me to finish.

“This is debt service,” I continue. “That’s all this is. It’s not a date. It’s not a courtship. It’s not you and me getting to know each other. My shithead ex-husband borrowed four million dollars from you and slapped my name on it without asking, and now, I’m paying it back in the only currency I’ve got, which is my time and my company, because I don’t have the money and I don’t have the year it would take to prove in court that I’m right. This is business. Just business. It’ll only ever be just business.”

Still, he waits.

“I’m not saying it to insult you,” I go on. “I’ve just had a real bad couple weeks in the area of finding out what people actually meant while I was busy assuming something nicer. So I’d like to be clear this time. Up front.”

Not a peep.

So I blather on. “You hold every card. You’re the Big Bad Wolf and I’m… I’m not even Little Red Riding Hood. I’m, like, one of the two little piggies that he eats before the story even really gets going. I know that. I know what happens on January 15th if I don’t go along with what you say, so this is me submitting to your whims and desires, okay? But just because I’m going along with it doesn’t mean I have to like it. Whatever this ends up looking like—dinners or parties or wherever it is you take people—I need you to understand that I’m not there because you charmed me into it. I’m there because you’ve got a gun in the room. Metaphorically.”

Finally, Kane’s mouth curves upward. “Who said the gun is only metaphorical?”

I sigh. “I think you have a pathological addiction to scaring people.”

“Oh, sladkaya, you haven’t even scratched the surface of all my pathologies.”

I think it’s a joke, but I’m not certain enough to joke back. Instead, I shudder and wrench my gaze away to look at the snow in his little walled garden for a minute.

“So we’re good then?” I say when I give my attention back to Kane, who’s never once stopped looking at me. “That’s that?”

He’s still toying with the letter opener. “So it would seem.”

I’m halfway out of my seat. But there’s an odd tension in the air that keeps me from getting up altogether. “You know, I still don’t understand how this suits you. What are you getting out of all this?”

“I told you last night: That’s my business, not yours.”

“That’s the answer that keeps me up at night.”

“Then don’t sleep.” He stands up.

He’s very tall and I despise having to look up at him. So I get up, too.

“Fine,” I say. “Keep your secrets. I’m not going to beg. When’s the first one? Valentine’s? That’s in, like⁠—”

“Tonight.”

I gawk at him. “Tonight what?”

“New Year’s Eve is a holiday.” He looks at his watch. “And it starts now.”

My jaw drops. “I have a shop full of people,” I protest.

“I happen to know that you left your very capable head baker, a Mrs. Priyanka Osborne, of 543 46th Street, Apt. 2, in charge.”

I do not, for even one second, want to think about how he knows that. “Okay, fine, but I’m not dressed for anything,” I argue. “Look at me. There’s dye on my arm. I’ve got sanding sugar in my bra. Whatever the plan is here, this isn’t the outfit for it.”

“If you think I don’t have solutions for that, Lilah, then you’re sorely underestimating me.”

“Fine! What if I already have plans, huh?”

He moves in closer, just a few inches away now. His scent flows over me, crowding out the sugary sweetness of the bakery and filling my nostrils with that smoky, woodsy musk of his.

“Do you?” he rasps. “Have you promised your midnight kiss to someone else?”

No, I don’t.

And no, I haven’t.

My mother’s house is closed to me and my husband is in a house I’m never sleeping in again and my sister has probably got a nightclub table booked with a champagne tower and bottomless martinis. Tonight’s ringing in of the New Year was going to involve me on the office cot with a plastic cup of the cheap prosecco we keep for cake tastings, watching the ball drop on a laptop with a cracked corner, listening to the boiler bang.

“I had plans,” I whisper in a voice that no one, especially not Kane, would ever believe.

He bends close enough for his lips to brush my ear when he speaks. “Then consider them canceled,” he says. “Tonight, you belong to me.”

Then he straightens up, leaving me to deal with the full-body waves of heat and cold that follow pretty much everything he’s ever said.

He steps past me and opens the office door. His scary butler is standing in the hall like he’s been there the entire time, which he almost certainly has.

“Tell Stepan to bring the car around,” Kane says. “Ms. Dorsey and I have some errands to run.”

The butler has my coat in his hands before I get halfway down the hall.

I take it and put it on and start doing the buttons. While I’m doing them, I try the last reasonable idea I have left.

“Okay. So here’s what makes the most sense,” I say. “You drop me at the shop. I take a shower in the sink like the raccoon that I am. I put on the one nice dress I own, which is at my house, which I can’t go to, so scratch that, I put on the black one I wore Christmas Eve, which is in my trunk. Then you pick me up at nine and we do whatever this is.”

Kane pulls on his own coat. “No,” he says.

“That’s it? Just no?”

“Did I stutter?”

He holds open the door for me. The cold comes up the steps at us. Outside, I see a car at the curb, sleek and black, engine running. A man in a chauffeur’s uniform is standing at the back door with his hand on the handle. He doesn’t look like any chauffeur I’ve ever seen, though. He’s got a shaved head and a piercing through one eyebrow. When he sees me looking, he inclines his head and says, “Ma’am.”