Evening Storm (7 page)

“That's how it works,” Ryan said, clinging to his patience. “Three choices: I go to you guys, I don't say anything, or I want a piece of that action. What's in character for me is that I want a piece of the action.”

His brain spun up what he would have done if something, maybe the long-buried memory of the man his father wanted him to be, hadn't made him go to the authorities. He would have gone in just long enough to set aside a few million in numbered accounts, and buy a place somewhere without an extradition treaty. Except . . . even then he would have had the time to face what he'd done.

He'd found his limit. His stomach turned itself inside out, a combination of stress and the smell of gas, rubber, urine, and exhaust fumes steeped in a Manhattan parking garage in the middle of the summer, and this time there was no denying it. He bent over and threw up the Arctic char and a froth of chocolate mousse right on the garage floor.

“Jesus Christ,” the Jock said. Without saying a word, Logan got a bottle of water from the SUV and offered it to Ryan.

Ryan rinsed and spit. “I'm going to stop eating.”

“You're close,” Logan said. “We knew this wouldn't be easy. We're going to do it anyway.”

“There is no ‘we' in this,” Ryan snapped. “
I
knew this wouldn't be easy.
I'm
going to do it anyway.”

Logan nodded, the faintest hint of a smile lifting the corners of his lean mouth. “Stay sober, and don't do any recreational drugs. Prosecuting attorneys hate it, defense attorneys have a field day with it, and juries don't like it.”

“The only drugs I'm interested in right now are the ones that settle my stomach,” Ryan said.

Logan smiled again. “You're doing fine.”

Ryan wondered if whistleblowers ever became friends with their FBI handlers, or if Logan secretly agreed with Ryan's assessment of himself. In the cab on the way home he texted his assistant.
Floral arrangement suitable for bereavement to—

He took a minute to find the stationery store in the West Village. The owner's photograph showed a woman with striking cheekbones, gray eyes, and sleek black curls. Matilda Davies, not Matilda Logan. Lots of women kept their maiden name professionally, especially when they'd built a business on their own. Simone would. The Demarchelier name meant more than Harrison.

Jesus, he needed some sleep. Like she'd go out with him, let alone marry him.

He finished the text to his assistant. Matilda Davies at West Village Stationery.
Card:
Sorry for your loss.
No sig.

The reply came in less than two minutes, at five o'clock in the morning.
Done.

He'd have to do something for his assistant, make sure she landed on her feet as unscathed from this as possible, and soon. In the meantime, he had to tell someone about this, however obliquely. Trust no one, that was the message Logan hammered home every time they met. Tell no one, trust no one, give away nothing. He wouldn't violate that agreement, but he had to let off steam somehow, or the acid in his stomach would eat through the lining and seep into his abdominal cavity. He had to talk to someone about what he was doing to himself, someone who would listen, someone who anchored him in the stormy, churned mess of his life.

That someone was Simone.

***

He went home and slept until after noon, but when he woke up, the urge to see Simone hadn't dissipated. So he went for a run, because maybe exercise would help.

It didn't. He showered, dressed. Ate some dry toast, drank some water. His monklike life only reminded him of the power of confession, so he dug out a pair of shoes from the back of his closet and went for a walk.

Stopping at a bodega to pick up some Saint Rieul Triple was just hedging his bets.

As he swiped his credit card through the reader, an odd thought occurred to him. He'd gotten closer to Simone through one erotically charged conversation than he ever had to Jade, who was absolutely transparent, or to Daria, who was equally opaque. Why?

Because with her, you could let down the walls, let her see inside.
With her, you could remember who you used to be. Who you could be again.

He used to be the kind of guy who sat on stoops and drank beer with pretty girls. He used to be real, not a parody of a human being. If anything was going to get him through the next few months, not to mention the trial and the publicity coming afterwards, he needed to be real. The time for burying his head in the sand passed the moment he sat down at a conference room table with Daniel Logan. Time's up. Game over.

When he rounded the corner from Sixth Avenue, he saw Simone sitting on her stoop. Her posture sharpened when she saw him, made him aware of his slow pace, not the unhurried or leisurely pace of a man satisfied with life, the city, the heat of the summer, but somehow heavy, as if he were dragging a Jersey barricade behind him. He straightened his shoulders under his open collar shirt. He wore shorts, not long, not short, just shorts, but it wasn't the kind of outfit that would attract the daughter of a French fashion house.

You're done pretending, remember? This is who you are.

An empty bottle of the same beer he carried dripped condensation at her hip. He stood in front of her without saying a word, waiting for some sign. Her rising gracefully to her feet and going inside. A tip of her head to indicate he should move on. Instead she looked at him, then at the six-pack he carried.

“Did you bring me beer?”

It was certainly no hothouse flower, coaxed into bloom and carried through the streets of Manhattan by a dedicated bike messenger, but at least she hadn't asked him if he'd thought very carefully about coming to see her again. Because he hadn't. There was no thinking in this. Just need.

He shrugged. “I bought the brand of beer you drink. I didn't go so far as to presume that you'd drink some with me.”

“I could drink another,” she said finally.

He sat down, kicked off the boat shoes, and braced his elbows on his knees. He would follow her lead. She twisted the tops off two beers, and tapped his shoulder to indicate he should take one.

“Thanks,” he said.

She made a halfhearted little noise he interpreted to mean she had heard him, but not really. He looked at her to find her staring at his feet in the boat shoes.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, looking away quickly. “Things strike me oddly. Those shoes, for some reason.”

She'd noticed. He smiled, let his eyes focus on the intersection in the distance. This was a truth he could tell her, a truth he'd rediscovered when he found the shoes at the back of his closet. “Let me tell you a story—”

“No more stories.”

“—about these shoes,” he said, eyebrows lifted. When she nodded, he continued. “I bought them the summer I interned at Goldman. Some of the guys in my internship cohort were like me—smart, hungry, working their way through school—but some of them were from families that built the original houses in the Hamptons, families that married into the Rockefellers and the Carnegies. That summer I got invited to do things I'd never seen or done before, sailing to Newport for the weekend, that sort of thing. My dad sold plumbing supplies. My mother taught school until she took early retirement a couple years ago. For vacations we went camping in a fifth wheel, hiked the Appalachian Trail. Not sailing. Not to the Hamptons. Those guys all had these shoes,” he said, and nudged his with his big toe. “I didn't. I had sneakers. Cheap sneakers, at that.”

“So you bought those shoes.”

“I bought these shoes. And wore them, and the Wayfarers, even though I looked like a total poser in them and couldn't tell aft from bow, until they had enough saltwater and sand and sweat in them to pass for a resident's shoes. I still remember the day someone asked me for directions because I looked like a local. By then I knew I was going to make it. I was going to fucking own Wall Street. But I'd made it on a totally different level the day a tourist in the Hamptons asked me for directions.”

She didn't laugh at him. “They gave you confidence.”

“Yup.”

“Why are you wearing them today?”

She wasn't going to let him off the hook. Not Simone, with her redhead's temper and her deft fingers and her eye for precision. He tipped back the bottle, savored the slide of liquid down his throat. “I wanted to remember that kid. He seems like a stranger, a kid from a story.
Philly boy takes the city by storm
. That kind of story.”

“Those are the stories we tell most frequently,” she said. “But I don't know that they're the best stories. I like stories of failures, of reinventions, of second chances.”

He seized the opening like he used to storm a margin call. “Tell me why you left France. Why the Fashion District? Who are you?” he asked.

“You tell me about me,” she said.

He liked the way she nudged him with her knee, like they were friends, flirting friends, touching friends. “What makes you think I know anything about you?”

“A big component of investment banking is research. You are a successful investment banker. Therefore you are a competent researcher, or you employ them.”

Jealousy burned as badly as his irritated stomach lining. “Did you learn that from Stéphane?” he asked, because she had him dead to rights. He'd researched her, and knew all about Stéphane Roussel, the French finance genius who helped her start up Irresistible.

She lifted one eyebrow, calling him on his bullshit, and the confidence radiating from her nearly blew all his circuits. He had a sudden image of her taking her life by the hand and giving it a sharp spin, like a weighted globe, just to see what shook out.

“You are Simone Demarchelier, part of the fifth generation of Demarchelier House, designing clothes for over a hundred and fifty years. You took a degree at the Sorbonne, then joined your family's house, starting in the ready-to-wear collection and moving on to couture design. You stayed for almost a decade until you suddenly split from the family business, moved to New York, and opened Irresistible. You've not gone out of your way to hide your connections, nor have you played them up. You bought this building with a down payment from your own money, and Stéphane arranged the financing for the rest of it. How did I do?”

“Very well,” she said. “But it's all public knowledge.”

“The next step is the insider information we're not supposed to use.”

“Ah. And to whom did you speak for the juicy gossip?”

“No one.”

“Thank you.”

“I want to learn you for myself.” He hoped, somewhere inside, that she'd extend the same courtesy when the shit hit the fan. “Why did you leave your family's house? Most designers would sell their mothers to work for Demarchelier.”

“They were increasingly focused on the brand. I know that's part of the business now, but I'm a bit of a purist. I wanted to control the process from beginning to end, every element from fabric to design to showroom space, and I wanted to do it on my own.”

“Some people call this your vanity project.”

She shrugged, clearly unconcerned with what people thought. “I answer to myself, which is easy enough to say when I have Demarchelier as a fallback option. Perhaps that is a vanity project.”

“But you don't give a damn what people think.”

“I don't,” she said. “I stopped asking for permission. Life got shockingly simple when I did.”

He shifted so he faced her, leaning back against the wrought iron railing. “Stéphane helped you get there?”

“He did,” she said as she turned her head to gaze at him. The setting sun burnished her hair and brought out the copper highlights, reminding him of a Caribbean sunset full of reds and oranges and golds. Her eyes were the blue of a morning sky, her freckles smudges of color down her cheeks and throat, disappearing into the open collar of her shirt, reappearing at her forearms. Ryan suddenly, and rather irrationally, hated knowing that Stéphane was intimately acquainted with the patterns of her freckles.

“You really shouldn't look at me like that.”

He didn't say
like what
? He knew how he was looking at her, knew it was totally and completely obvious that he wanted to know each curve and swell of her body, that simply thinking about it sent blood thumping to his cock. Instead he tipped back the bottle of beer and finished it. Without saying a word she twisted the top off a second bottle and handed it to him.

“Are you going to tell me a story?” she said.

From the tone of her voice he couldn't tell if she wanted him to say yes or no. What popped out of his mouth was a question he wasn't even aware he was thinking. “Do you want to hear one?”

“No, but I think you want to tell me one.”

She was too perceptive by half. He waited. She'd said she didn't want to hear it. He would respect that.

“Perhaps the lingerie didn't facilitate your mood. She chose the full coverage panties, not bikinis or a thong. You probably prefer thongs,” she said knowingly.

He actually didn't have a preference one way or the other. The thought cheered him, as if there was still a little bit of ground left between him and rock bottom. At least he wasn't the kind of man who felt insulted when a woman let him touch her and he discovered plain cotton briefs rather than cheeky lace panties, a garter belt, or a barely there thong. “It's actually about the body inside the underwear. No, that's wrong. It's actually about the woman inside the body inside the underwear inside the clothes.”

She tilted her head and gave him a little grin. “Really? I've had gentlemen in my dressing rooms who complain at length of the horror of getting a hand up a girl's skirt and discovering a pair of saggy cotton panties.”

“They weren't gentlemen.” It was only after the words came out of his mouth that he realized the hypocrisy.