MATTHIAS
hank you.”
“T
Her words halt me just as I’m about to open the door, and I feel my hand freeze on the door
handle, my foot rooting to the spot.
“Pardon?” I say, as I face her. I can’t have heard her right.
Her face, in turn, blazes red, a marked change from how pale she was upstairs. Even as we sparred, she still looked scared. It’s why I’m still standing here when normally I would’ve run from Clarissa Masters’s company a long time ago.
She was scared. She is scared.
A frown flashes across her forehead and she bites down on her lower lip.
Fire streaks down my body.
My mid-region threatens to harden and I hold my breath pushing the urge back.
“I said ‘thank you’. For helping me before. I… I don’t know what would’ve happened if you’d hadn’t been there.”
There’s a tiny peek of enamel as she bites down on her lower lip.
I just nod, burning the picture of her standing there, a thank you on her lips, into my mind.
And leave.
***
Four hours later, I’m back.
Freshly showered, changed into a charcoal pair of Brunello Cucinelli slacks and a light blue Dolce & Gabbana button-down shirt, with an iPad in my hands.
I have work to do, but if the way Clarissa had acted before was any indication, I can’t trust her to not leave the club before I come pick her up and get her checked out. And she needs it.
I saw how hard Patrick slapped her.
I felt it reverberate through my whole body, and I am at least a good foot taller and have a good seventy pounds on her. At the very least, she is probably suffering from a splitting headache, and who knows what else.
I tell myself that I would do it for anybody, for perfect strangers on the street. And yes, absolutely, I would have dropped them off at the hospital, made sure they could pay their bill, and that they had someone to come and pick them up. But I probably wouldn’t replay the way her head had jerked backward, banging against the couch, and the pure look of pain that had flashed across her face. The way tears had instantly flooded her eyes.
I’ve known Clarissa since I was thirteen years old and she was only six. A perfect porcelain English rose.
Damien was the one to whom she attached herself, and they were thick as thieves until high school graduation. After he left for college though, she never quite found her way. When Damien turned thirty and was still single by choice, she’d approached him with a deal, that they marry each other for convenience. He would gain a trophy wife, one who could schmooze the hardest, stuffiest of business adversaries, charm the men, and befriend the women. And Clarissa would be taken care of for the rest of her life.
Damien, never having the tiniest interest in romance, had more or less found this a palatable enough deal. But Clarissa, being Clarissa, had pushed his patience and Damien had called off the wedding.
Through it all, all the summers spent together, all the family dinners, all the late nights with my brothers when she’d loiter in the background, hoping we’d let her play with us, she was only there because Damien made sure to include her.
Even now, I remember her cheating at games; I remember her fiercely arguing her position on everything; I remember her storming off if we teased her and coming back with insults she’d practiced until they became second nature to her.
But never with tears in her eyes.
Never.
Until now; and it’s a memory I wish I could burn from my brain.
I knock on the front door of Malt until she appears, a look of annoyance on her perfect features.
“What are you doing here?” That’s her greeting when she sees me through the closed door, peering at me over the closed sign.
“I heard there’s a good performance here tonight?”
She scowls and points to the painted opening hours on the glass. “Club opens at nine. Come back then. ”
I glance at my watch although I know perfectly well what time it is. “It’s 8:39 now.”
She blinks and just points again to a sign on the door. “You can spend the next twenty minutes learning how to follow simple instructions.”
I can’t help but grin. This is a little more like the Clarissa I know. “Save me a table?”
“Can’t. All reserved. So sorry and all that.”
I adopt a pleading look, clasping my hands together. “Please? We’re old friends. You were engaged to my brother, remember?”
She definitely doesn’t like that. Even through the door, I see her eyes flash red before she walks away.
I laugh out loud as I tap on the glass door. “Rissie. Rissie. Rissie. Open the door. Rissie. Rissie.”
I’m too busy knocking and singing her name to notice someone approaching the door and pull it open. I lurch forward as I reach forward to knock again, and end up rapping my fist on the forehead of a short woman wearing the cigar girl uniform.
“Oh. Shit. Sorry. I didn’t see you.” A weak excuse but it’s true.
She blinks, stunned that I’d basically just used my knuckles against her forehead like a door knocker.
“Um. Is Clarissa here?” I ask.
She blinks again, and then just points inside the club. “She said you could sit at the bar. All the tables are booked up.”
“I’m really sorry again. I was just trying to get Clarissa to come out. Is your forehead okay?”
She frowns and rubs it.
“Matthias. Leave her alone. She has a boyfriend.” Clarissa stands in the entrance into the main room, matching the woman’s glare. She’s dressed in the same white silk shirt and skirt I’d seen her wear last night. That was a first. Seeing her wearing the same clothes.
“I’m not doing anything. I was just making sure she’s okay!” I reply defensively.
“Why? What did you do?” She looks at the cigar girl. “Amelia?”