The Hate Vow by Nicole French

Two

Icouldn’t help it. I kept sneaking glances at him as we walked the few blocks down to the Red Rose Cafe. He just looked…shit, he looked so good. My mojo wasn’t just back, she was slamming her foot down on the gas of a 1960s Mustang so she could stock up on post-sex cigarettes. This was a problem.

Eric still had the talent of making the most normal clothes look like he’d walked off the cover of GQ. In the mid-May sun, he wore a simple white button-up shirt and perfectly tailored gray slacks that would be dad pants on anyone else, but looked indecently good on his long, muscular legs and what right now appeared to be the tightest, most grabbable ass this side of the Rockies. Jesus. Men in suits were Skylar’s thing. I preferred joysticks in jeans, the kind that were wrinkled from two days on the floor, not perfectly ironed slacks. Slacks. Ugh. Just the stupid word was a total boner-killer. And yet, here was Eric, making me want to tackle him down the next alley just to see what he wore underneath them.

I needed to stop immediately. I did not need to go down that rabbit hole again, since the last time I got involved with this man, he broke my heart into a million pieces. Once a player, always a player. A wolf in sheep’s dad pants.

I tripped again.

“Everything all right?” Eric asked. His stupid gray eyes twinkled. Like a fucking Disney character.

“Ah, yeah,” I said as I stared at the sidewalk. “Just clumsy. You remember.”

Eric shrugged—that nonplussed shrug that always made me want to throttle him—and we continued down the street and into the cafe.

By the time we ordered our drinks—black coffee for me, a “bone-dry” cappuccino for Eric, because he was clearly still a particular, pretentious bastard in the most random little ways—the unperturbed facade had evaporated again. In fact, Eric looked more nervous than I’d ever seen him, and that included the weeks before we took the bar exam and we were boinking like bunnies to get rid of the tension. He didn’t even notice when the barista wrote her number on his cup sleeve.

“Don’t tell me you’re taken,” I said. “She was hot to trot for you, Casanova. She’d probably give you a blow job in the stock room if you asked nicely.”

Eric just smiled grimly—no teeth—but didn’t give the number a second look. Always the well-trained gentleman, he held the door for me to walk outside. It was a gorgeous spring day in the Windy City, and I wanted to take advantage of it. It wasn’t because being outside gave me more things to look at than Eric’s soul-deep eyes or the wall behind them. No, that had nothing to do with it.

“All right,” I said after we sat at a sidewalk table. “Spill.”

Eric surveyed the street. “Couldn’t we go someplace more private? This is kind of personal. What about your place?”

I snorted. “My place currently consists of the couch in my mother’s condo. If you would like to meet Yu Na Lee Lefferts, be my guest. But beware, she is the equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle for boyfriends. Once you go in, you may never escape.”

He just blinked. “We could go to my hotel room…”

Me and Eric. Alone in a hotel room? With the way I was feeling, there was absolutely no way I could trust myself alone with the man. And by the doubt in his voice, I was guessing he felt the same way.

“Hey, you came to me, Don Draper,” I pointed out. “What’s the big deal? You worried you’re going to get caught? Got a wife at home who wouldn’t appreciate you sitting with the town whore?”

The words spilled out before I could help them. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but maybe he had taken it off. I didn’t know why the idea bothered me so much. Although I’d had my share of accusations thrown at me for my, uh, extracurricular activities, I didn’t usually internalize them that way. The world was a shitty place for women like me—women who wanted to have just as much fun as men. I tried not to let it bother me, but apparently, sometimes it did.

“Don’t talk about yourself like that, Jane.” Eric’s voice didn’t raise a decibel, but the authority was clear. He didn’t move, just stared at me for a long time across the table, daring me to challenge him.

And I couldn’t. Not just because he was right, but because that dark expression whisked me right back to other times when he made that authority even more…known. Five years ago, when one steely look had me running for the bedroom to enjoy the many talented things he could do with that mouth. Particularly when I said and did things he told me explicitly not to say and do. Things that had me on my knees. Or tied up to the—

I shook my head. Stop it, you horn ball. So what if I’d never been able to recreate anything like it since (and not for want of trying)? Eric and I were bad news together. Drove each other crazy. We were either fucking or fighting—there was no in between. Neither of us were relationship material. It was as simple as that.

“Fine,” Eric said, pulling me out of my X-rated visions. “It’s like this. I’m in a bind, and I need some help.”

He then proceeded to tell me the craziest story I’d ever heard about his grandmother, his dead father, and a plan to blackmail him and his kin out of a whole lot of money if he didn’t get married within six months and try to produce an heir within five years.

“Produce an heir?” I repeated loudly when he was done. “Who are you, Prince William of the shipping industry? You have to protect your family’s divine right to trade routes?”

“Shhhh!” Eric sat up straight with a glare that had me squirming all over again. “The whole fucking city doesn’t need to hear this, Jane.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said, setting my hands on the table. The cluster of rubber bracelets on my wrist fell forward, their silver clasps clinking lightly. “You’re not just Eric de Vries, generically wealthy Harvard graduate. You’re Eric de Vries, as in De Vries Shipping, heir to one of the largest companies on the planet. Have I got that right?”

Again, that shrug. A tacit denial of my utter shock. It was a nonverbal form of gaslighting, and it had never ceased to infuriate me.

“It’s just a name,” he said.

I scowled. “You don’t need to act like I only found out you drink whole milk instead of two percent, Mr. First-in-Line. It’s not just a name. And we’re not talking a few measly million, are we? We’re talking, shit, we’re talking Jackson Anderson-levels of cash, aren’t we? As much as Brandon, even?”

Again, that stupid shrug. Now I wanted to punch him on that razor-cut jaw of his.

“More?” I demanded, though the word was faint. “How—how much?”

Eric expelled a long sigh. “Jane, you can look up this information easily on Forbes or WSJ.”

“Yeah, but I want to hear it from the super-rich horse’s mouth. How much does it cost to buy eternal playboy Eric de Vries with a sweet church wedding?”

His eyes shot up, nearly black—whether from the insinuation or the challenge, I wasn’t sure. “Seventeen billion dollars.” The words escaped between clenched teeth.

What? I tried to speak, but all that came out was a choked squawk like a dying turkey and a spray of coffee. Eric dabbed at the mess with distaste, but relaxed once he was sure nothing had marred his pristine clothes. Then he just sat there, a solid statue next to my quivering ball of shock, waiting patiently for me to process the magnitude of the numbers. All seventeen billion of them.

“Good God, you’re really not just a random rich kid,” I finally managed after coughing twice more. “You’re a fucking dynasty.” I looked up in alarm. “But who requires a marriage contract to grant an inheritance? The Tudors? Is your grandmother completely batshit or only beginning her decline into dementia?”

“She’s an old, rich, dying sociopath,” Eric said dryly. “So, it pretty much amounts to the same thing. But it’s not about the money. The firm’s doing fine with Skylar and Kieran, it really is. I don’t need or want to chair the board of directors of DVS.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then why do it? You already told your family where to stick it once before, though for what, I don’t know. Why pander to this medieval bullshit? You don’t even like these people.”

It wasn’t a story I knew a lot about, but I knew some. Something had happened that Eric couldn’t forgive. He had lost someone, somehow. One of the many little pieces that had broken off his stalwart personality in the dead of night.

* * *

“I never thought I’d feel like this again,” he said as he traced a finger around my cheek. “I never thought I’d ever have this again…”

We lay together in his bed, streams of moonlight through the blinds striping our bodies. Both of us glistened in the wake of pleasure, but my heartbeat picked up all over again. I didn’t dare ask more. He never mentioned anything about his past. Ever.

“And I really never—” His hand dropped, but before he could pull it away, I captured it and pressed his palm against my cheek.

“Never what?” I asked. My voice was a breath. I was almost afraid to hear the answer.

Eric’s eyes glossed, but they speared right through me. “Never thought it could be so much more.”

* * *

“I don’t even know mostof them,” Eric agreed, yanking me out of the memory. “They are terrible people, all of them. But I don’t think that means they should lose everything they have. No one deserves that.”

He shrugged. Again. I wanted to smack him. Feigned nonchalance about something that arguably deserved more “chalance” than anything. He should have been the chalantest of chalant people right then. And yet he sat here, acting like his grandmother’s ridiculous request was on par with taking out the trash or doing an extra load of dishes.

“Okay. I mean, it’s your choice to sacrifice five years of your life, I guess. But…how come you never told me before that you were the crown prince of New York City? Jesus Christ, Eric. You once invited me home to meet these people. Were you ever going to tell me who they really were?”

One more shrug. I scowled.

“I would have gotten around to it,” he replied. “But who they are didn’t matter then. It matters now.”

“Honestly, Petri. I feel like I never even knew you.” It was meant as a joke, but the words didn’t hit as lightly as I wanted. Maybe because they echoed the moment when things really ended before.

* * *

“I feel like I never knew you at all.”

I stared at the red panties dangling from my index finger. They were thin, polyester. Lined with lace that had a few threads of overstretched elastic fraying off the edges.

“Jane. It’s not—it’s not what you think. Those were from before you and I—”

“You and I what, huh? Before you and I split up for the nineteenth time this summer? Or got back together for the twentieth? Before what, Petri dish?”

Eric’s face clouded with a look that normally would have portended me on my knees, arms tied behind my back, within the next five seconds. But my face must have said something very different, because the ferocity disappeared, leaving only irritation.

“I said, don’t call me that,” was all he replied.

“If the shoe fits again, might as well put it back on, don’t you think?”

“I don’t even know what that means, Jane.”

“It means you’ve been a whore since I met you. A tiger doesn’t change his stripes. A rose is still a rose by any other name. Pick your fucking cliché; it all means the same thing. People don’t change.”

I hurled the underwear at him, and the stupid ass didn’t even move, just let the cheap, faux-satin smack him in the face before it fell back from whence it came: Eric’s immaculate white sheets. He stared at the lingerie for a long time, but when he looked up, that mask had resumed its place. The mask that made him look like he didn’t care. Like nothing mattered. Like everything wrong in the world could slide right off his golden shoulders.

I turned around so he couldn’t see the sheen covering my eyes.

“Well, how’s this for another cliché?” he asked as I shoved my things back into my overnight bag. “Takes one to know one. Right, pretty girl? After all, it was maybe one week ago that I found you with another man. How long had we been broken up, Jane? Five minutes?”

I straightened and pulled my bag over my shoulder, willing myself not to cry as he invoked the name. That name. The one that meant, in no uncertain terms, that I belonged to him.

Except right now, it went the other way. Right now, it meant I belonged to…no one? Everyone?

I swiped under my eyes before turning back around. No man had ever been worth my tears before—this one certainly wasn’t.

I stared at the panties: gauche, bright, plasticine. Eric was as tall and stolid as ever, arms crossed and head tipped with that subtle superiority that made me want to punch him in his stoic, straight nose. My heart turned to stone.

“Key words: broken up,” I said as calmly as I could. “I never did this to you. I never did it, and I never would.”

His condescension dropped along with his arms, and apologies flew from his mouth, a tumble of anger and sorrow and frustration that were so unlike his normal collected self. But I didn’t stop to listen. My heart was already out the door.

* * *

I sighed.I didn’t really want to think about that pair of red panties in his bed. God, I really hated that word. It was worse than slacks. Panties. Panties were different than underwear. Underwear was what I wore. It was cotton, comfortable, made for normal people who didn’t want to pick fabric floss out of their ass every ten seconds. Panties came in all the colors of the rainbow—or my hair. They came in lace, satin, polyblend spiderwebs that itched and pinched so you could look the perfect picture of a male fantasy. Trussed and tied up for his pleasure—certainly not yours.

I knew we weren’t technically together at the time. We weren’t official like that ever, just people who fucked on weekends. And talked a lot. And maybe even considered moving back to Boston to be together. But that shit still hurt, and at the time, I didn’t really care that it made me a hypocrite. It hurt that it wasn’t my underwear I found. It hurt that I was no longer the only girl he had ever brought back to his place. And it hurt even more because the other girl he did bring back wore fucking panties.

I realized, in that moment, just how easily Eric de Vries could hurt me. And I promised he would never, ever do it again.

“You knew me better than anyone, Jane.” Eric’s words were frank and open. Disarming.

I blinked. “Did I?”

He nodded. “By a long shot.”

I sipped my coffee, looking for something beneath his words. But there was nothing but honesty in those deep gray eyes.

“Which is why,” he continued, “I’m hoping you’ll be the one to do it.”

I frowned. “The one to do what?”

Carefully, he set down his cup, folded his hands on the table, and looked straight at me. “The one who’ll marry me.”

I sat back, suddenly confused. Okay, not just confused. Fucking bewildered. Flabbergasted. Bamboozled. And every other weird, old-fashioned word that would explain just how crazy disorienting it was to hear those words coming out of his mouth. After that entire story, somehow, I’d missed one central piece. That he was actually sitting there, wanting my help to fulfill the terms of this ridiculous contract. Eric de Vries was asking me to marry him.

“It was five years ago,” Eric continued. “We were stupid twentysomethings. The timing was off. Now, we’ve grown up, become more accomplished, and there’s nothing keeping you from coming back to Boston and marrying me.”

“Wait, wait, wait…you’re asking me to be your…bride?”

The statement was so preposterous that I immediately burst out laughing and collapsed on the table so loudly that a number of passersby startled. Eric just sat like a statue, rubbing his brow, which only made me laugh harder.

“Me?” I repeated between gulps of breath, though I was nowhere near done laughing. “Marry you? Playboy, consummate-bachelor, super-bro lawyer, and soon-to-be shipping magnate you? You don’t even believe in marriage!”

It was the one thing we’d always had in common. I believed in marriage. Just not for me. And Eric felt the same. We were birds of a feather that way. We knew ourselves well enough to know that regardless of what others did, neither of us was ever going to be the type that could be with someone forever.

Eric checked his watch. “We’ve been over this. I do now. I have to.”

“Still, even if you wanted to have a sham marriage and fuck around like other men of your ‘station,’ those men don’t marry women like me. They marry the ‘ee’-girls.”

He quirked a brow. “‘Ee’-girls?”

I snarked. “Yeah. Future Stepford wives. The ones whose names all end with the sound ‘ee.’ Lindsay. Katie. Sherry. Laurie. They have black Amex cards and love their pearl necklaces—and I don’t mean the dirty kind. Well, not unless you give them some Tiffany’s first. Then you’ll get a nice, prim BJ before they let you come all over their surgically perfected tits.”

Eric didn’t reply, just crossed his arms and listened. I ignored the way the movement made his forearms flex under his rolled sleeves. What did he do, bicep curls while he gave his opening statements? No lawyers were that fit.

“And you…you want to take me, confrontational, unfiltered, half-Korean, candy-haired me, home to marry?” Now I was crying, and I had to take off my glasses to wipe away the tears and keep them from spoiling my eyeliner. “Oh, God,” I creaked. “Oh, God, that’s good. Can you imagine it? They’ll think I’m a mail-order bride. I’d be the end of your poor grandmother. Your uptight family would freak!”

When I finally stopped crying-laughing, Eric had a very satisfied look on his face. He leaned over the table, bending down so we were eye to eye, then reached out and twirled a strand of my newly dyed locks around his finger. The tug pinched slightly, sending a current of something other than mirth down my spine.

“That’s kind of the point…pretty girl.”

That shut me up. “What?”

Eric smiled, and it was the first time I had seen that panty-kryptonite in five years. Good God, I’d nearly forgotten that curious, bright smile that transformed his face from someone average and almost plain into someone who could get into any girl’s pants in a matter of minutes. Sweet and full, but with an impish edge that let you know he was completely capable of trouble. It had worked on me plenty of times in the past. Hell, it was working on me right then. Shit.

He leaned even closer so I could smell again that intoxicating combination of cologne and fresh linen. Like a magnet, I couldn’t help but mirror the action until we were almost nose to nose. Pretty girl. How long since I had heard that?

“It’ll be mutually beneficial,” he said as he dropped my hair and took my hand. “Jane, you’re the only one who could make it bearable.”

His fingers were long, and a few more memories flashed through my head of the things I knew he could do with them. He curled two into my palm and applied just a bit of pressure like he used to somewhere…else. Hot damn, Batman.

“I can save my family’s fortune and stick it to my grandmother at the same time,” he said. “What’s not to like about that?”

“Right. Well. As funny as the Christmas cards will be, I’m not sure I want to be a tool for you to engage in some delayed teenage revenge,” I said, transfixed by the way his thumb pressed into my finger pads, one at a time. “What’s—what’s in it for me?”

“Twenty million dollars.”

I froze. “Come again?”

Eric replaced my hand on the tabletop and sat back, crossing his arms once more with a satisfied half smile. The action made his biceps bulge. Lord above.

“Twenty million dollars,” he enunciated. “You move back to the East Coast. We get married. You live with me for five years. That’s it.”

I grimaced. “How romantic.”

“None of this is romantic. That’s also the point. I don’t need someone who is going to get attached, Jane, who thinks I’m her knight in shining armor. I need someone who knows the score. Who knows exactly what kind of person I am.”

“You mean the fact that you’re a heartless bastard?” I shook my head. I really had no filter around the man, for better or for worse.

But his face remained immovable. “I wouldn’t call it that,” he said softly. “But…sure. Someone who knows what I’m capable of and what I’m not.” He nodded, agreeing with his own words. “And at the end of five years, you walk away with twenty million to do whatever the fuck you want. Practice law or don’t. Design clothes. Open up that shop you used to dream about.”

My jaw dropped. I hadn’t thought about that pipe dream for a very long time. I was honestly shocked he even remembered.

Eric took a drink of his coffee, scowled, and set it back down. Clearly it was not up to Mr. Fresh-Roasted Beans’s impeccable standards. Then he folded his hands on the table and fixed me with another one of those deep gray, infuriatingly unreadable stares.

“Come on, Jane…say what you want, but you and I always did have a good time.”

For once in my life, I was speechless. I had literally nothing to say. It was ridiculous. I couldn’t just up and move my life. I had friends. Family. Familywho drive you crazy, my subconscious reminded me. Since my father had died, my mother was close to sending me to the funny farm.

The fact that Chicago never really seemed to fit, even though I grew up and went to college here, wasn’t helping. My best friends lived in Boston. Who were my friends here? A hairdresser I saw every six weeks and some work acquaintances I no longer worked with? I’d been too focused on my career to be that social beyond a one-night stand. Or twenty.

And now…what career? You just got canned, you idiot, and you owe hundreds of thousands of dollars that you have no idea how to pay off.

“Jane?” Eric said, pulling me out of my sudden panic.

I looked up, filled with surprise at my own conclusions. This was crazy. I couldn’t really be considering this. Could I?

“Well?” Eric looking more nervous than I’d ever seen him. And that was counting when, ironically, he also asked me to meet his family as his then-girlfriend. Talk about blowing us both out of the water. “What do you think?”

I downed the rest of my coffee, wishing that it were laced with something stronger. Then I opened my mouth, prepared to say, “Absolutely not, you can take your weird fake-marriage and go fuck yourself.” That even if I could use that money to pay off my loans and so much more, nothing was worth sacrificing my dignity and driving myself crazy by being married to Eric for five whole years. Petri dish. A penis in a suit. No.

But sometimes, we surprise even ourselves.

“I’ll think about it,” I said instead of “hell fucking no.” “I’m due for a trip to Boston anyway. Give me a week, and I’ll tell you then.”