“Shut up.” I push off of him and struggle to put distance between us. Before I can, he grabs my hands and laughs again. I realize there are tears streaming down my face when I see the puddles of drips they make on his silk shirt. I won’t look up at him and give him the satisfaction of seeing he’s made me cry. I cry a lot nowadays. He shouldn’t get credit for it.
“Let me go,” I growl.
His voice is light, amused, but his grip is steel. “I don’t think I will.”
I jerk my hands back, but he doesn’t let me go.
He clenches his jaw and pulls me an inch closer. “In fact, I think you’re a danger to yourself and others.” His breath is hot on my hair. “I’m going to help you out by doing something you should have done a long time ago.”
He lets up his grip on my wrists, and for a second I’m relieved, thinking that he’s only trying to scare me. Then he wiggles out from under me and gets smoothly to his feet. I keep my face turned away, anxious for him to leave so I can give in to my tears in peace.
Instead of exiting, he bends down, picks me up, and throws me over his shoulder like a fifty-pound sack of flour at a warehouse store.
I pummel his back with my fists. “Let me down, you son of a bitch!”
He hoots like his usual charming self, but underneath, he’s fuming, the most angry I’ve ever seen him. “Now, Marissa, that’s not nice. You need to cool off while you’re performing that public service I talked about.” He stomps down the hallway and even though I’m mad as hell, I still marvel at his strength, carrying me with such ease. He opens the door to my bathroom and turns on the light. I pound on his back as hard as I can.
“Well, now, that there’s starting to tickle!” He laughs and turns on the water in the shower. He pulls me forward by the waistband of my yoga pants and drops me on the shower floor.
I bounce hard on my butt, and pain radiates from my backside. Cold water sprays in my face and all over my clothes. Shock immobilizes me. Tarek slams the clear shower door with a bang.
“Clean yourself up and get back out there, Duchess. Love is a lie,” he yells.
Through the water trails on the shower glass I watch him stride out of my bathroom. Five seconds later I hear the front door slam behind him.
Really, Tarek? Really? Love is a lie?
Okay, then.
Guess what, Tarek?
Karma’s a bitch.
My backside is sore, but I pull myself up and endure the freezing water. I throw my sodden clothing over the shower door and turn the dial until the water is so hot I lose visibility in the steam. As I soap myself up, my anger at Tarek wars with my hurt over Liam to be the emotion buckling my knees and twisting my stomach into knots.
It’s so easy for Tarek to say love doesn’t exist because he’s never been in love. He uses women to stroke his ego, and then he throws them away. He’s never had a long-term relationship. I don’t think he’s ever dated the same girl twice.
He’s been that way for years, but it’s none of my business. Why would it be? He’s never gone after Kya’s or my friends—despite Blaire’s being vocal about lining up to get used by him—but overall his womanizing doesn’t hit us close to home.
That was the case, of course, until he inducted Liam into his little club and ruined my life.
What Tarek needs is to fall in love. To experience what it’s like to really love another person. To feel like he isn’t whole without her. That his utter happiness is wrapped up in someone else’s existence and not his own.
And then he needs to lose that love like he made me lose mine.
Tarek takes great pride in never having been in love. He has even boasted about not having feelings at all. The woman who’d be capable of capturing his heart would have to be someone really, really special.
So special, in fact, she couldn’t even be real.
And that’s when I get my idea.
Chapter Five
I hold auditions Monday morning.
Showered and dressed in my best suit, I’m sitting in the front row of the local theater I rented. It was surprisingly inexpensive. Turns out there’s not a lot of demand for theater space at ten in the morning. Using my connections with my job at the paper, I was able to get an ad into both the print and online editions advertising the job opening.
It’s an odd job.
In the end, I decide to call it “acting for an avant-garde live theater production on film.” The ad mentions that promotional photos will be taken and the actress should be available to be on call to film future scenes in accordance with audience demands as needed over the next several months.
It won’t take longer than that to make Tarek fall in love, will it?
I instruct the women in line outside to come in one at a time—one in for every one that goes out—and tell them I’ll contact them later if they get a callback. An assistant would make this easier—Kya or Blaire or anyone—and could help me organize the candidates and answer their questions, but I don’t want to tell anyone about my plan for taking Tarek down a notch. Or all the notches.
Number one, it’s a secret and a secret can be kept only if no one knows about it. And number two, I’m not a hundred percent sure that Kya would choose my side. Sure, she knows her brother is the biggest player out there, but she may not blame him for Liam leaving like she should, and blood is thicker than best-friendship. And she loves him. She has never given him the beatdown he needs.
The first actress hands me her résumé and headshot before climbing the three steps to the stage.
“Whenever you’re ready,” I tell her. The pretty brunette launches into Ophelia’s monologue from Hamlet. She’s not bad. But Hamlet’s a little heavy for Tarek’s ADD-riddled attention span. Not that he’d ever know this was her audition choice—though I think it says something about who she is that she chose this piece. But she’s also brunette. Tarek prefers blondes.
“Thank you. I’ll give you a call by Friday if you make callbacks.” I ask her to send in the next hopeful, and I’m off and running.
After two hours, three more Ophelias, five Noras from A Doll’s House, and seven Midsummer Night’s Dreams, I’ve seen a lot of beautiful women. But it’s not until a striking blonde performing one of Rosalind’s monologues from As You Like It—why all the Shakespeare? Did the paper run my ad next to the one for Shakespeare’s Tavern?—that I feel I’ve found the woman who will make Tarek fall in love and begin to believe in the value of commitment, fidelity, and marriage. And hopefully stomp his heart.
“Excellent!” I call out to her, interrupting her midsentence.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to go on? I’m just warming up.”
“No, that’s great, thanks. Can you come down here? Let’s chat a bit.”
She scurries down the short steps and stands in front of me. She’s about five feet nine, maybe an inch taller than I am but still well shy of Tarek’s six feet two so her height is good. Her hair is long and golden, longer than my shoulder-length hair and blonder than my honey blonde, which are both deep within the parameters of ideal Tarek-territory. Her eyes are big and blue and conspicuously sexy in the way of Gigi Hadid or Brigitte Bardot.