The Hate Vow by Nicole French

Four

Imagine my surprise when I walked out of Logan arrivals the next morning to see a tall drink of water in a Tom Ford suit waiting in front of baggage claim. Imagine my further surprise when he presented me with an emerald-cut diamond ring and a blood red rose to go with it. Five different women gasped, and at least one squealed like Babe the pig.

“Get off your knees, you asshole,” I said before his knee even touched the dirty airport floor.

Eric smirked. “That happy to see me, huh?”

“Are you really that desperate for me to say yes? What do I look like, a Hallmark heroine? Stop that, Petri, you’ll ruin your suit.”

Eric rose with a cheeky grin that bewildered our audience. “I’m offended. I came here like a gentleman to give my maybe-fiancée a ride.” He fingered the still-open box in his hand. “You might as well take this.”

I ignored him as we made our way through Logan. “You know I hired a shuttle to take me to Brookline, right?” I held up my phone app, already ready. “You owe me twenty-five dollars. Stopping at ten houses on my way to Skylar’s isn’t cheap, you know.”

“You’re so sentimental,” Eric remarked drily, though he did what I said. He flipped me two twenties, which I snatched.

“I can be sentimental,” I retorted. “Just not with garbage manipulation. Did you really think I was just going to hand you five years of my life with that trite little stunt?”

“If you had, I probably would have taken it back.”

I rolled my eyes. “Games, games. You’re an asshole, you know that?”

Eric just laughed.

“Now, get rid of that,” I told him, waving away the tiny velvet box containing something that sparkled under the fluorescent lights. “And toss that rose in the trash.”

He dropped the rose in a bin as we passed, but tucked the box into his jacket pocket.

“Don’t pretend like you’re not a sap at heart, Petri,” I said as I followed him out to the curb, where a Town Car was waiting for us, rumbling beside a grouchy police officer. “I’ve seen all those poetry books in your bedroom.”

“I’ll never be ashamed of being well-read, pretty girl,” he said with a sideways grin. “Especially considering how much you used to like those books too.”

* * *

Now I am all

One bowl of kisses,

Such as the tall

Slim votaresses

Of Egypt filled

For a God’s excesses.

I lift to you

My bowl of kisses,

And through the temple’s

Blue recesses

Cry out to you

In wild caresses.

And to my lips’

Bright crimson rim

The passion slips,

And down my slim

White body drips

The shining hymn.

And still before

The altar I

Exult the bowl

Brimful, and cry

To you to stoop

And drink, Most High.

Oh drink me up

That I may be

Within your cup

Like a mystery,

Like wine that is still

In ecstasy.

Glimmering still

In ecstasy,

Commingled wines

Of you and me

In one fulfil

The mystery.

Eric clapped the book shut and tossed it to the ground before turning to me with satisfaction. And it was well-earned. I was speechless.

“Lawrence,” he said as he drifted a hand over my collarbone.

“Wow,” I said. “I never knew…I mean, you hear the shit college students write in their creative writing classes—”

“Hey, I was one of those college students once.”

“Of course you were, Eric. Of course you spent your time in college swimming in bullshit verses instead of studying econ like a good boy. What? Playboy wasn’t good enough for you?”

“Poetry,” he said, “is better than porn. It’s nothing if not erotica. The rhythm.” Kiss. “The play.” Kiss. “The tension.” He delivered two slow, deliberate kisses along my collarbone. I couldn’t help it. I arched toward them.

A finger drifted down my sternum, playing between my breasts and down my stomach.

“We make poetry all the time,” he whispered as he watched his finger’s progress. “You and me. You are this bowl of kisses, and look at me. Filling you up.” His hips thrust lightly toward me, reminding me of how many times he had done just that.

I peeked up at him. “You are so gooey.”

He just licked his lips, then leaned down, and with his tongue, followed the path his fingers had started.

“I don’t think so, pretty girl,” he said. “Just ready to fill you with kisses again.”

* * *

A chill slidover the back of my neck as the echo of the verse faded. It felt now, as it had for years, that those kinds of moments had always been for his pleasure, not mine, no matter how much I loved them at the time. At one point, I had thought they were the only way Eric could ever say how he felt, and how I could bear to hear it. But now…well, I knew just what kind of heartless bastard he really was. Cool. Calculated. A complete asshole.

Eric de Vries was about as sentimental as a colonoscopy. I needed to remember that.

“Where to?” he asked as he shut the car door behind us.

My thigh tingled when his hand brushed it.

“Where else?” I asked as I stared out the window, dearly needing the grounding of the blasé gray exterior of the airport. “Your office. I need to see Skylar.”

* * *

“This is insane.”

An hour and a half later, Eric and I sat in front of Skylar Crosby’s desk, looking at each other like a pair of naughty teenagers who had been sent to the principal’s office.

Skylar had a way of making people feel like idiots. Imperious—I’d heard more than one person call her that when she was out of earshot, and it served her very well as a family law specialist. After we finished law school, she began as a divorce attorney and soon after started her own shop with Eric and another shark, Kieran Beckford. Skylar didn’t put up with anyone’s shit. Ever.

“But—but—you hate each other!” she exploded like a sputtering, redheaded teapot. “I’ve barely been able to get the two of you in the same room for five fucking years! Eric, anytime I bring up Jane’s name, you change the subject. You say you have plans. Last time we invited you both to dinner, you literally booked a trip to London for the weekend just to get out of it.”

Eric raised a finger, but Skylar cut him off. “Eric, I heard your assistant making the travel reservations, you idiot. It was after I asked!”

I snorted, but she immediately swiveled to me.

“And you! You still call him Petri dish because you think he’s such a manwhore! How many variations on that nickname do you have for him, Jane? Ten? Twenty?”

“Thirty-four,” I whispered, earning a curious look from Eric.

“Exactly!” Skylar practically shouted. She took some deep breaths while the color of her face faded from a tomato-red to a more normal flesh tone.

“I don’t hate her, Crosby,” Eric said mildly. “I’d hardly have asked her to marry me if I did.”

“Sky, I’d probably marry an actual Petri dish for twenty million dollars, and so would you, so wipe that judgmental smirk off your face,” I added. Her indignance made me want to grab that ring out of Eric’s pocket and shove it on just to piss her off again.

“I’m not judging—”

“You’re totally judging,” I snapped. “You’re Judge Judy. I feel like I’m on an episode of Night Court with a very special message at the end. And I’m over it. Eric and I are grown adults who both think the institution of marriage is an antiquated sham.” I turned to find Eric fighting a smirk. “Right, test tube?”

He shrugged as if I hadn’t addressed him like another lab experiment. “Sure.”

“So, then. He’s asked me a question. I just have to decide if I want to help him game the system for a few years.” Again, his face flickered to mine mischievously. It made me want to smack him and kiss him at the same time. “Lab rat, can I screw who I want?”

Infuriatingly, his jaw didn’t drop. In fact, he showed no signs that the question—or the name—bothered him at all. Fucker.

“So long as we keep it on the down-low, sure, why not? We can sleep with whomever we want,” he replied, though that half grin reappeared. The subtext was clear: including each other. Well, Eric had another thing coming. That smug sonofabitch wasn’t getting anywhere near my magic garden.

“And at the end?” I prodded. “It’s done? We both walk away, clean and simple?”

Eric nodded. “We’ll be like roommates,” he said. “And at the end of a five-year lease, you’ll be free.”

“Except you’ll have a baby to take care of,” Skylar inserted. “Did you ever think of that?”

“She just said I have to stay married long enough to procreate,” Eric said. “She never said it had to happen.”

“And you think your grandmother is going to be okay with that?” she asked.

“Honestly, Cros, she’ll probably be dead before it’s an issue,” Eric said, and it was hard not to flinch at the chill in his voice.

I swallowed. “What the prodigal son here is trying to say, is that no one is having any babies. So, let’s not count chickens, all right?”

“It sounds like you’ve already talked yourself into this,” Skylar huffed.

Eric turned to me, victorious. I just glared at him.

“Not at all,” I said, enjoying the way his triumph faded. If he thought he had me wrapped up, he could think again. “I’m just trying to get my bases covered. Know what I’m really deciding to do.”

“Well, I think you’re both idiots. Getting married for twenty million dollars. Who does that?”

“Give me a break,” I retorted. “Don’t pretend like you didn’t win the jackpot with Brandon.”

Eric snorted. Brandon Sterling was worth at least a few billion and adamantly refused any sort of prenup when he married Skylar. The hilarious thing was that he married the one person who would probably hurl all his money to the bottom of Boston Harbor if she could. I had a front-row seat to that shitshow when it first started. Skylar slapped him exactly three separate times—once because he tried to surprise her with a trip to Paris. My friend was amazing, but she had some serious issues with money, despite now having gobs of it.

“You know that Brandon’s money had nothing to do with why I married him,” she snapped, understandably defensive. That was an accusation she’d never totally be rid of. You don’t go from being a garbage collector’s daughter to the wife of one of the richest men in New England without people throwing around the term “gold digger” behind your back.

I shrank, feeling appropriately guilty. “Sorry, Sky. You’re right.”

Part of me wondered if I should insist again that Eric do this with one of the unnamable girls who would probably drop everything in their silicone-lifted lives to pretend to be his wife. This wasn’t me. I had watched my friend struggle to adapt to the world of the ultra-rich. It had made her a target, and it was really only after she and Brandon had both withdrawn from it that they found calm and happiness together.

But she had also never worried about where she was going to live. She had coasted through school on the money her mother had left in a trust. Skylar had been raised by humble people, but she’d never been in a situation like mine where she had to make a choice out of real necessity, not just personal desire.

The student loan statements in my purse suddenly felt like they weighed several pounds. So did the very low balance of my mother’s bank account.

A large hand landed over mine on the chair arm. Eric didn’t say anything, his face as unreadable as ever. But his thumb stroked lightly over my knuckles, offering a smidge of…what? Comfort? Foreplay? Manipulation?

I pulled my hand away.

“Look, Sky,” I said, with an edge I couldn’t quite hide. We’d been in this office for over an hour now, going round and round while Skylar poked and prodded and cross-examined everything about the arrangement. I was done. “We didn’t come here to ask your permission, and I haven’t made a decision. I just wanted your advice on the prenup, all right?”

“My advice is that you need to walk the fuck away.” Skylar shook her head, sending a few strands of bright orange hair into her face. “Do you…Janey, I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Do you really think this is appropriate given everything you’ve been through this year?”

I stiffened. God, if it wasn’t my mother bringing up his memory, it was my best friend. What happened to letting the dead rest?

The dead are never gone, Jane Brain.

Eric turned. “What is she talking about?”

I couldn’t meet his eyes. “My dad passed. About nine months ago.”

All levity vanished. “Ah, shit. Jane, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“No, you wouldn’t have, so really, don’t worry about it.” My words were fast. Too fast. And because I had no desire to see anything resembling kindness on Eric’s smug face, I glared at Skylar. “And it was nine months ago, so it’s not like I’m wearing black out of mourning, Sky. This isn’t a snap decision out of grief.”

“But—”

“Goddammit, Mr. Rooney, are you going to be my lawyer or not?”

Skylar’s green eyes blazed. “What did you just call me?”

Eric snorted, but passed it off as a cough. I smirked. With her red hair, bullet-sharp gaze, and sanctimonious attitude, Skylar totally resembled the principal from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It was one of my better nicknames, especially since she was lecturing us like we were errant teenagers.

“We could go with Principal McGee,” Eric suggested. “I think she had red hair too, Cros.”

“Oh, Grease. Yeah, I see it,” I said as we both appraised Skylar, who was starting to resemble a tomato again. “I could get you your own xylophone to play on your voicemail too, Sky.”

“Is going back to Anne of Green Gables too easy?” Eric offered. “You mentioned that the other day, but I don’t think she was ever a principal. Was she?”

“Why, Eric,” I said as he turned to me. I tugged on my thick, multi-colored braid. “I didn’t know you were so well-read in tween girls’ fiction.”

“I have a cousin. We were bored stiff at the Vineyard one summer.”

Eric’s eyes twinkled with each traded barb. This kind of back-and-forth was never our problem—we always had it in spades, even if he ended up the butt of my jokes. And then he’d repay me, tenfold.

I couldn’t lie. I’d been thinking about it since the second I ran into him outside the salon. The strange thing about Eric and me wasn’t just that neither of us seemed to have a problem coming back for more (when we were easily bored with other partners). It was also the way certain…tastes…came out when we were together.

He said he wasn’t a dom, but he sure acted like one sometimes. And I’d never call myself a submissive, but something about Eric made me want to prostrate myself on the floor. Like it or not, Eric was the closest thing I’d ever had to a real relationship. Otherwise, sex was a long series of one-night stands. Men who wanted to believe I loved them for a night before they took what they wanted and let me take mine too. Fun, sure, but shallow, and not exactly the stuff dreams were made of.

It took exactly one night after a long day of studying before Eric and I were doing things together neither of us had ever done before. Maybe it was the stress of the bar exam. Maybe it was three years of tension between us. But the second he called me pretty girl, it was like a direct line to my G-spot. I wanted him to gag me. Bind me. Fill my mouth with something besides insults. He knew it too, and more than that, he liked it.

You don’t get to that point with a one-night stand. Though I’d tried a few times, I’d never been able to find it again. Someone who knew how to bring that out of me. Who knew how to take what he wanted and take care of mine too.

Eric winked. That gleam was back, though not as bright as I remembered. I shifted in my seat—my thighs were getting a little damp and tight underneath my black mini skirt. This was supposed to be strictly business. Purely platonic. A marriage of convenience.

Except. Eric crossed his legs, and the fabric of his Italian-cut pants pressed over powerful thighs and a bulge that looked a little bigger than was strictly decent. Shit. He was feeling it too.

I shook my head. Get a hold of yourself, you idiot. Eric and I blurred the lines between love and hate too many times—that was, at its core, our biggest problem. It was a mistake I wasn’t going to make again.

“I think I liked it better when you hated each other,” Skylar grumbled, still annoyed by the mean principal comments and completely oblivious to the sexual tension that had just bloomed in her office.

“Cheese and rice, Sky, you’re not talking us out of this!” I cried, more loudly than necessary, conveniently ignoring that I hadn’t decided to do anything yet anyway. Hadn’t I flown here for her honest opinion?

“Janey, I’m not. And obviously I’m going to serve as your legal counsel, so give me a dollar now so this conversation counts, all right? I’m going to make sure your prenup is iron clad so Grande Dame de Vries doesn’t try to weasel out. If for some reason—and I think we know there are many—things don’t last five years, you both need to have your dumb asses covered for even trying. A stepped payout scale, maybe.”

I sighed. Yes, this is what I needed. Skylar’s disturbingly practical mind. “I’m not deciding anything, so do what you think is right. I’m not sure I want to be judged for my poor decisions every step of the way. Otherwise, I’d hire my mother.” Suddenly, I was exhausted by this conversation. By the idea of any of it.

Skylar just shook her head virulently. “I’m doing it, or else Kieran is.” She shot Eric a knowing look. “Your choice, hot shot.”

Eric blanched. I sympathized. Kieran was one of the scariest people on the planet.

“Fine, John Grisham,” I said wearily. “You. Just try not to lord it over me too much, all right?”

“Good.” Skylar held out her hand for the crumpled dollar I fished out of my purse. “I happily accept you as my client. Now please take my advice, and don’t do this.”

“Skylar!”

“Fine, fine.” Skylar sat back, her hands held up in surrender. “I had to try. Now, two more things. If you do actually go through with this idiotic plan and don’t make Jenny your flower girl, I’m going to throttle you both. And, Eric, I’m going to need to take Jane for lunch to harass her some more. Actually, I’m going to need the rest of the afternoon, so you get to take my appointment with George Barrett.”

Eric groaned. “Skylar, come on. I took Kieran’s meeting with him last month, and I had him the month before. I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” Skylar said as she grabbed her purse off the back of her chair. “You want me to get your messy marriage scheme figured out? I get to take the bride-to-be to lunch.”