“Well if it ain’t the devil himself,” she says. She throws her arms around my neck and hugs me. Thank fuck my hard-on’s vanished is all I’m thinking as I hug her back.
“Looking good, little Leah.” She does look good. When I first brought her here, her bruises had healed and she was clean of the heroin she’d been addicted to, but she was still thin. Still quiet and withdrawn. Still broken on the inside. Now, with her hair a natural blonde and tied back in a neat ponytail, the dark purple circles under her eyes gone without a trace, she looks healthy. More importantly, she’s smiling. “Feelin’ good, big brother,” she replies, elbowing me in the ribs. I’m not her brother, of course. It’s just what she’s called me ever since Cade and I dragged her out of that dingy brothel in Seattle.
“You staying long?”
“Not if I can fucking help it.”
She pouts, hitting me lightly on the arm with the dying flowers she’s holding. “Carl says you got a girl here. Is that true?”
“For the moment. She’s not staying, though. I’ll be driving her back into town as soon as I’ve suffered through breakfast.”
“You pissed her off already?”
“Of course I have,” I say, laughing. I start walking, heading in the direction of the dining room, and Leah walks along with me. I throw an arm over her shoulder, making her chuckle.
“Why don’t you go up there and apologize. Maybe she’ll stay.”
“I doubt that very much.”
“Fucker.”
“Bitch.”
My father’s eyes nearly bulge straight out of his head when he sees me walking in with my arm around one of his employees. “What the hell are you doing now? For fuck’s sake, James.” He tosses his napkin on the table, releasing an exasperated breath, and I see that Soph was right; he does have a split lip. I let Leah go, giving her an apologetic smile. She returns it, and then hurries out of the room. I’ll need to talk business with her later, when the old man has his back turned.
“You realize I should fire her for that,” Louis says. “She has to know her place around here. I must have been out of my mind the day I agreed to hire her.”
“Must have been,” I agree, slumping down in the chair at the opposite end of the table, the furthest from him that I can possibly sit. “I doubt it could have been a moment of compassion.”
“Why should I show compassion to someone who can’t administrate their lives effectively? It’s not my fault the girl involved herself with an abusive partner.” This is the story I told him—that she was hiding from an ex who liked to raise his fists to her. The reality of her situation—that she was kidnapped, hooked on drugs and used for sex by countless men against her will? That would have made good ol’ Louis squeamish. In his eyes, that, too, would somehow have been Leah’s fault. “I take it you won’t be staying long?” he says.
“I’ll leave in the morning, once your little soiree is over. I think that’s just about my limit as far as maintaining this charade goes.”
Louis grunts, forking some scrambled egg into his mouth. “In all honesty, I’m surprised you even came. Having not heard from you in four years, I’d assumed my invitation would go unanswered. It’s not as though you’ve felt the need to uphold any of your other familial responsibilities.”
I don’t bite. He wants to bait me into an argument, but I won’t give him the satisfaction. He narrows his eyes, looking first at me and then out of the window. “You know, I’m not as clueless to the life you lead as you might think, son. I know you’re not living in New York.”
“So you’ve been checking up on me. How fatherly.”
“I need to know what you’ve been involving yourself in, James. With this re-election on the horizon, the last thing I need are skeletons being dragged out of the closet. No surprises.” He points his knife at me, his expression severe. “Tell me right now and I can bury all of your dirty secrets in time, before my competitors have the chance to discover them.”
“All right, Pop. Let’s see. Where shall we start? Oh, yeah. Okay, since we’re talking about burying things, you should know I have a plot of land out in the desert where I’ve been hiding the bodies of all the people my friends and I have been murdering. Rapists. Drug dealers. Child abusers. You name it, we got it. There are even some crooked government officials out there, actually. Men after your own heart.” I lift the glass of orange juice in front of me, toasting him before taking a sip. He just stares at me, his knife and fork gripped in his hands like he’s about ready to launch them across the table at me.