Sugar Rush
Page 28

This will be my first Christmas with a girlfriend.
It’s Sela’s first with a boyfriend.
Two souls who have preferred to be alone for holidays past, now bonded through circumstance, passion, and a focused need for revenge. I’m not sure if that’s the stuff that love is built upon, but I know that watching Sela set out her mom’s nutcrackers with a fond smile on her face, or helping her cut out sugar cookies that we later burned and still ate anyway, filled me with a satisfaction and warm happiness I’ve never felt before.
For the entire weekend we transformed the condo into a Christmas wonderland, ate takeout and burned cookies, and fucked—or maybe we made love, I’m not sure—like two people starving for a connection.
We didn’t discuss JT or our plan to bring him down once.
Until this Monday morning after I showered and dressed, drank my cup of coffee, and Sela walked with me to the condo door to kiss me goodbye.
“Why the worried look?” I asked her after our lips parted.
“You’re going to be seeing JT for the first time since you found out what happened to me,” she said with a furrowed brow. “I’m nervous.”
“Don’t worry,” I told her with a confident smile. “I can keep it together.”
She knew what I meant by that. Our best chances of getting JT out of The Sugar Bowl all hinged on him coming to me for bailout money. For him to do that, he has to have trust in me. For him to have trust in me, I cannot appear to be anything to him other than a devoted friend and concerned business partner.
In other words, I’m going to have to not only act as if I don’t hate the son of a bitch, I’m going to have to pour on a little extra charm to keep him tied to me emotionally over the next two weeks until the fight.
It will require a great deal of acting and a hell of a lot of luck so I don’t lose my temper around him. But I’m not worried the way Sela was this morning. I have a driving motivation to make sure this all works. I can see the finish line and Sela is waiting there for me, and nothing is going to stand in my way to get there. If that means I have to sleep with the enemy so to speak for a few weeks, it’s a sacrifice I’ll gladly make to get what we deserve, and give JT what he most assuredly deserves.
As I pull open the glass front door to the Townsend-North lobby, I take stock of the fact my heartbeat is steady and my palms are cool and dry. Not an ounce of nervousness or worry on my part, and that’s because my motivation and need to make this work outweighs any need to let my temper get out of control around JT.
In fact, I’m almost looking forward to seeing the fuckwad. I’ll be setting out the bait that will help compel him to come to me when he gets in trouble, and that thought makes me giddy with excitement. Hell…I can practically taste the justice on my tongue as I smile at the receptionist when I walk by.
Linda welcomes me back with a wide grin as I approach her desk. “I trust Vienna was to your liking?”
“It was fabulous,” I tell her as she hands me a stack of message slips. “You totally are getting a bonus for scoring those tickets to the Vienna State Opera.”
“I bet the performance was marvelous,” she says wistfully, but I just smile silently on the inside because I was actually thinking about the amazing sex I had with Sela in the private box.
“Is JT in yet?” I ask as I flip through the messages.
“He is,” she says as I look back to her. “And he asked that you go see him as soon as you got in. I think you made him anxious with your spontaneous trip away with your girlfriend.”
Laughing as I turn toward JT’s office, I tell her, “I’ll smooth out his ruffled feathers, no worries.”
Smooth them out, ease his worries, invite him further into my web.
“Good morning, Mr. North,” Karla says in a flat voice as she sees me approaching. His secretary doesn’t like me very much, and I’m guessing it’s because Linda gets more perks than she does. I reward those who do great work, and sometimes it causes some animosity toward me and my own. Why she just doesn’t hate JT because of her poor work environment is beyond me, but apparently it’s all my fault he’s a douche.
“Good morning, Karla,” I say jovially, leveling her my most charming grin. It bounces right off her face set in stone and falls flat between us. “Is JT with anyone?”
“No, sir, but he does have a meeting in fifteen minutes.”
“I won’t keep him long,” I say as I turn toward JT’s closed office door. I give two sharp raps with my knuckles and then turn the knob before he even can respond.
JT sits behind his desk, leaning back casually in his office chair. He has one leg propped over the other and is perusing a document in his hand. His face lifts slightly to look at me and then drops back down to the papers in his hand.
“Glad you could come in to work,” he says dryly, with an unmistakable hint of censure.
I flop down in the seat opposite him and kick my feet up onto his desk. “Well, hello, JT. It’s nice to see you too.”
He snorts but keeps reading his document. I take the moment to study him carefully and unobtrusively. JT had been my long-standing friend, and even though I often wanted to throttle him, deep down I always loved him. But now he’s an evil monster in my eyes. I find it utterly fascinating that I’m sitting here looking at him with detachment, apparently fully capable of keeping my rage toward him compartmentalized. I think that I have such a sense of moral high ground cushioning me right now, sprinkled with a bit of vigilante justice, that I’m able to view him as a mouse in my game.
I’m the cat, by the way.
“Come on, man,” I say with amused affection that tastes slightly bitter on my tongue. “You’re not mad I took a week off from work with a gorgeous woman, are you?”
JT doesn’t look up at me, but I see the corner of his mouth tip up. “No,” he drawls. “I’m mad you wouldn’t answer any of my fucking calls or emails.”
“Seriously dude…have you seen Sela?” I ask with a laugh that I’m pleased sounds genuine. “I was a little preoccupied.”
He doesn’t respond or look up at me, and I find the sullen silence to suit the egotistical child-man I know him to be.
“JT,” I say softly, and because he can hear the seriousness in my voice, he raises his gaze to mine. “I think I love her, man.”