Nightcap

3

THE DRIVER DROPPED HER OFF at the address that Sean had given her, and Cleo stepped out of the Town Car.

“You need me to wait?” he asked. A congenial man, Thomas, Tommy, Stewart, Eric, something…

“No need.” In a few hours the transit workers would be drifting back to work and, worst case at this time of night, she could take a cab. The November wind was kicking up and Cleo pulled her black leather coat tight. Soon she would have to move from leather to wool, but she really liked her black leather. There was probably something subliminal in that, but Cleo chose not to analyze it.

Right now, she was here to listen to Sean O’Sullivan, try to fix his problem and sneak in a six-minute orgasm as a personal aside. She had forty-five minutes before she had to be home, so time was of the essence. As a master in productivity, Cleo could get to full climax in one hundred and forty seconds. Forty-five minutes was positively utopian.

With her schedule and her life, tonight was pretty much it for the next three months, and she was pinning all her hopes on Sean O’Sullivan. Hopefully in the full forty-five minutes he would give her enough memories to get her through the winter. She smiled to herself because she suspected he would.

Gingerly Cleo stepped up to the old wooden door of the bar and then stopped, shaking her head in disbelief. The city’s closure notice was nailed there prominently, and she realized exactly where he had directed her.

Prime.

She should have figured it out immediately and maybe if she was operating on more sleep, she would have.

Was it worth it to go above and beyond the call of duty, all for lust? Did she really need sex? Her womanly parts protested that it wasn’t merely a rhetorical question.

Ruthlessly she ignored them, studying the fine print on the notice on the door. It was by the book, offering no clues as to who was directing this little vendetta. People thought that bureaucracy was all cut and dried, computerized and inhumane, but that was a far cry from the sordid truth. Every single employee knew the exact steps to make someone’s life miserable. And that was the beauty of city government. So many opportunities for mayhem and havoc.

Not that Cleo spent her time working on petty schemes. No, she had a city that needed her 24/7. A city, and right now—a bar.

The place was definitely from another era. A green awning on the outside, a smoked glass window with oldfashioned beveling around the edges. She was admiring that beveling when Sean walked up behind her, still in the same suit that he’d been in earlier. This time, the trendy black tie had worked its way loose.

“Come on in,” he invited, his eyes skimming over her, and the black leather coat wasn’t enough to stop the shiver down her back. Anticipation. Ruthlessly she ignored that, too. This was business, at least for now. She stepped inside and it was as if she’d gone back in time. Three separate mahogany bars formed a U shape. The floor was oak, pockmocked from years of abuse. Even with all the imperfections it was still shiny and polished to a sparkling gleam. Pictures and even more pictures lined the wall, tacked together with tape, staples, nails and pins, and they were all pictures of people in the bar. New Yorkers over the years.

Oh, she didn’t want to like this. She didn’t want to like him too much. All she wanted was one orgasm, and to go back home to her nicely frantic life.

“Like it?” he asked, watching her face for clues.

Too much. “It’s nice. Like a thousand bars in the city. So, tell me what’s been happening.” Cleo frowned, a trademarked frown that had been known far and wide to strike fear in the hearts of city workers, and sometimes even her boss.

Sean didn’t even look fazed. He gestured for her to take a seat and then pulled up a stool next to her. “Two years ago, my brother Gabe bought up the space next door, and then started having some problems with the bar. Gabe, myself and my brother Daniel are on the deed, and we help out some, but it’s really Gabe’s bar. When it was a speakeasy back in the twenties, they called it O’Sullivans. Our great-grandfather opened the place, and over the years an O’Sullivan always ran it. It faded out and nobody really cared, and an uncle or cousin, somebody, I don’t know who, split it in two, and sold off the half next door. Gabe, he wanted to get it back, to restore the place to the way it was. Anyway, the problems started when he filed the building permit. They held it up until I got a friend in the building department to give us a pass, and then after that it was a health inspection, but then I had a friend in the health department, and she helped me straighten out that mess, although it wasn’t pretty. Then the pipes under the sidewalk outside needed work and they had to tear up the concrete and that lasted a month, and now we’re fighting the historical building designation, and somewhere along the way, the building department took back the building permit, so we’re stuck with a half-renovated bar.”

He pointed to the back wall, which wasn’t wood, but a canvas tarp.

Either the O’Sullivans were the unluckiest building owners in the tristate area, or else something dirty was going on—which was always a distinct possibility.

“You think this is all coming from the mayor’s office?” she asked.

“It’s the only place that has ties to all the agencies that have caused us problems.” He sat forward, his hands pressing on his thighs and she noticed a subtle shift in him. The eyes weren’t so sure anymore, not so cocky. Family. Nothing like family to shatter a normal person into little emotional pieces. “Can you do something?”

“Yes,” she promised, and she would. This was her job; this was what she lived for. Okay, the perks were nice, but fixing the city? That was even nicer. Tomorrow, Cleo would talk to the mayor’s secretary. It’d be a start.

“Then we toast,” he said, pulling out a bottle of champagne from behind the counter and pouring two flutes of bubbling, fizzing champagne that hurt just to look at it. “It’s my brother’s best. If you don’t tell him, I’ll replace it before he notices it.”

She lifted her glass, took the obligatory inhale, but it was him that kept drawing her senses. Champagne was for sissies.

Sean O’Sullivan was like a cauldron of steamy magic, calling her name. The intense heat warming her skin, the strong emotions tickling her nose and the taste…she couldn’t imagine the taste, but her mouth was watering for a taste.

“You’re being very nice about helping me out,” he told her, sounding disgustingly surprised.

Cleo sighed. “I should have known you’d be a chauvinist.”

The dark brows rose. “I thought I was giving you a compliment.”

“If there was no surprise in your voice, it’d be a compliment. With that tone, it’s a backhanded one at best. If I yell at people, if I make someone do their job, if I put huge demands on people, I’m, well…you know the word. It’s not my favorite. Put a man in my shoes, with my mouth, and he’d be a hero.”

“I read the article about you. Fascinating. The Wicked Witch of Murray Street. Is that why you got the nickname?”

It wasn’t a story that she told often, it definitely wasn’t the story she’d told the reporter, but she was tired, and she liked the way Sean’s eyes focused on her with such intensity, as if she was the only woman who existed. “Right out of college, I got a job in the city’s public housing office. It’s a total zoo there. When I started, I was a complete greenhorn. I said please and thank-you and told people how great they were doing. Management 101. Nothing ever got done, and my performance reviews sucked eggs. Finally, after eighteen months, one of my superiors—a woman—took me aside and told me that this was New York, not Buckingham Palace, and I needed to grow a pair and that people were going to walk all over me if I kept acting nice. So I stopped, and you know what? She was right. I yelled, I got problems solved. I perfected my snarl, and people did things outside the job description for the first time in their careers. I embraced my inner dictator, and lo and behold, I got noticed. Why do you think I’m the only female Deputy Mayor on his staff?”

“I heard he likes the ladies,” he remarked casually, those intense eyes focused on her mouth.

Quickly Cleo downed her champagne, feeling the buzz, but not from the alcohol. “Is that your not so subtle way of asking if I’m sleeping with him?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“I bet he’s disappointed,” he murmured, piercing eyes full of questions.

“I make him look good, he deals with the disappointment.”

“So is there somebody?” he asked, refilling her glass.

“Is there somebody I’m sleeping with?” she clarified, wondering if that would deter him. She didn’t think so. He looked like a man with one driving goal.

Her.

“Sleeping, not sleeping, dating, involved with, living with, etc. Any of the above.”

“There’s no one,” she told him, because she didn’t have space in her life for anyone.

“Good. Then who’s Mark?”

Cleo felt something warm her cheeks. Some people referred to it as ‘curl up and die’ embarrassment. There were things she would confess, but a ludicrous sexual fantasy where she was the ruler of the world was not one of them. “He’s nobody.”

“You can tell me,” Sean coaxed, his voice dripping with innuendo, like a man who knew she had sexual fantasies and wanted to hear them all—in explicit, step-by-step, nerve-shattering detail.

No.

“What if there is another man?” she shot back, deciding his ego was entirely too big.

He shrugged. “It’s a challenge. But not impossible.”

“You think you’re that good?” She arched a brow in what she hoped was patent disbelief, rather than hopeful enthusiasm.

“See, that’s a trap that a lot of people fall into. They think there’s some silver bullet to sex. But the truth is that every woman is unique and most men are too lazy to discover that all-important fact. Every woman has that one place on her skin that aches to be touched, and it’s a man’s job to find it. The one way of kissing her that makes her mouth hum. That one thing that she’s dying to do, but would never confess to anyone. Everything comes down to that moment when her eyes get hot and wild, and she’s not seeing anyone else but you.”

“And you know all that about me?” she asked, both terrified and aroused, her breath quickening with each slow and seductive word.

“Not yet,” he said, and he took her right hand, turned it over, and stroked his index finger over her palm. “A woman’s body is like a map. You start at one place. Then another. Then another and eventually you discover what she wants.”

Cleo struggled to breathe. That sounded like a helluva lot longer than forty-five minutes.

Discreetly she sneaked a look at her watch before she remembered. She didn’t have a lot longer than thirty minutes. She didn’t even have a little longer. All she had was what she had, and she knew that thirty minutes was never going to cut it.

He wasn’t the kind of man who did quickies, she recalled, cutting off the disappointment before it could start.

Time to leave. Time to cut her losses and scram. She kept telling herself that, but instead she sat, foolishly glued to the bar stool. Her hand was clutching his, as she fell into the dark, dangerous eyes.

“I have to leave,” she said, her voice weak with what sounded like longing.

Before she could move, before she could leave, before she could come to her senses, he had pulled her into his lap. His mouth came down on hers, and longing started in earnest.

Until now, Cleo had never been a fan of kissing. When your schedule was tight, foreplay was a waste of time, but Sean O’Sullivan’s kiss wasn’t foreplay. This was pure, electric sex. Mouth sex.

Her wayward hands crept up his chest, not wasting the time to explore. Instead, she locked him to her, fusing one powerful male chest to her two aching female breasts. Cleo’s world fell away, focusing on the feel of man-body surrounding her. A man’s mouth making love to her.

This was definite longing.

Hard thighs cradled her, deliciously hard thighs, but that wasn’t the best part. The best part was burning thick, throbbingly stiff against her rear, reminding her that no matter how she yelled, no matter how she swore, she was no man. At this exact moment, she’d never been happier of that fact in her life.

His hand gripped her jaw, his tongue stroking inside her mouth, so seductive, so coaxing, and she felt her mouth hum with pleasure, and her hips matched the rhythm of his tongue. Perfect, perfect rhythm. Cleo was hypnotized by the rhythm, caught up in a non-orgasmic orgasm of bliss.

A woman could get used to this bliss. A woman could turn all soft and yielding from all this bliss.

The rhythm had a sound, she could hear it in her head. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

The sound stopped.

The bliss stopped.

Cleo raised her head, stared at the ticking clock on the wall and swore.

She was late.

Sean was breathing fast, his eyes hot, filled with frustration.

“I have to go,” she said, struggling in his grasp.

For a moment, his arm wouldn’t let her go. “I’ll take you out tomorrow.”

“I can’t.”

“Mark?” he asked carelessly, and she blinked, wondering who the heck Mark was, and then she remembered and got furious at Sean because he’d made her forget. A figment of Mark Anthony was much more controllable than a living, breathing Sean O’Sullivan who made her blood steam, made her mouth hum and made her body ache for things that she didn’t have time for.

Anger was so much more comfortable for her than regret and she started to snap at him until she saw the mischief in his eyes. He was going to make this difficult, and here she was really beginning to like him. “It’s not that simple.”

Gently his hands pushed the hair from her face, his gaze luxuriously warm, and she wanted the predator back, she needed the predator back. Sean was much easier to deal with when they were quick-tempered peers. This tempting security made her long to relax and give in, if only for a few minutes. A few hours. “It is that simple,” he told her in a wonderfully soothing voice. “You say yes. I take you out for a drink. Dinner. Movie. Many options are available in Manhattan.”

Cleo averted her eyes because she couldn’t look at him and do this. “I’m booked up until spring.”

“Was that a joke?”

“Honestly—no.”

This time, her cell phone rang, reminding her that she was late.

“I have to go,” she said again, not willing to commit to anything.

“Monday,” he told her, pushing her out the door. “You can tell me what you’ve discovered about the bar.”

“Maybe nothing,” she answered, resisting the urge to touch her own mouth, feel the hum once again.

“Maybe something.”

“I have to go,” she repeated stupidly.

“I’ll see you on Monday.”

“What?” she asked, looking at him, puzzled.

“Go home. Sleep.”

And Cleo walked two blocks south before she realized that she was headed the wrong way.

CLEO LIVED IN A TOWN HOUSE on the Upper West Side. It was one of the old stone town houses that had been built in the 1800s with the pipes from the 1800s that clanked when hot water ran through them. In the 1970s, the air-conditioning units had been added through the wall so as to not block the light. In the process, they had to knock out some of the wood trim, but when the sweltering summer came, it was worth it. The floors were the originals, extravagantly polished parquet that always smelled like lemon. Flocked wallpaper, vaguely Kennedy-esque, covered the walls and the delicate antique furniture had been in the Hollings family for four generations.

Cleo had lived here for almost her entire life.

Almost. There had been three and half years at the dorm at Rutgers and then two years after college when she’d lived with three other roommates. Life had been one long, fun party. But when she was twenty-three, that all changed, and she moved back into her mother’s home.

“Mom?” she yelled, as she opened the door. Immediately she noticed the gray smoke and the burned smell in the air.

“Mom?” she asked again, feeling the panic inside her. She rushed inside and found the cause of the smells in the kitchen. A pan sat in the sink. The copper bottom burned black, steam still billowing into the room.

Cleo put a hand on the counter and calmed her breathing. Okay, not a disaster.

“Mrs. Cagle?” she called.

It wasn’t Mrs. Cagle who appeared, but Elliott Macguire, Cleo’s uncle, who lived on the floor below them and managed the apartments on the bottom two floors below that. “Elliott? Is Mom okay?”

“She’s sleeping.”

Cleo looked around and swore silently. Why was it that New York was so much easier to run than her own life? “What happened?”

“Rachel decided she wanted to cook, but she forgot.”

“Where’s Mrs. Cagle? She was supposed to be here. She’s supposed to watch for these things. I warned her. How hard is this?” Mrs. Cagle usually covered the late afternoon and evening shift until Cleo returned from work.

“She called me after she put out the fire. I told her to go home and I’d stay with Rachel.”

Cleo stared at the pan, helpless fear and anger battling inside her. Anger won. “I’m talking to the agency first thing in the morning. She’s not coming back here. Mom could have been hurt. I should have been here, Elliott. This sort of thing doesn’t happen when I’m here.”

“You can’t be here twenty-four hours a day. You’ve already fired four sitters, Cleo. Maybe it’s time to stop and think.”

No. She didn’t need to think. She should have been here earlier tonight. Cleo tried to speak, but guilt clogged her throat.

“We need to talk, Cleo.” Her uncle resembled his sister, a masculine, wiser version. The same blue eyes as Rachel Hollings and the red hair that had long faded to gray. He was the oldest sibling, the sensible one. Cleo shook her head.

“No. I don’t need to talk, Elliott. I’ve barely slept for the past four days, I’ve been trying to get the subways and the buses and the trains moving again. I can’t think very well at the moment.”

Actually, most of that was true, but the last part was a flat-out lie. She could think very well at the moment. She could think too well. She knew exactly what her choices were, and she wasn’t going to go there, but Elliott had a soft heart for his sister, and if she needed to take shameless advantage of it to keep up the status quo, then she’d do it, with no regrets.

His eyes looked at her sadly, and she didn’t want him to look at her sadly, but again—whatever it took. However, she did raise her head and inched back her shoulders.

“Thank you. I owe you for this.”

“I can’t do this, Cleo. Not anymore.”

She pinched two fingers against her forehead, closing her eyes, the perfect picture of a headache. Elliott took the hint.

“She’s my mother. She’s your sister. We’re all the family she has left. We do what we have to do.”

His face said he wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t going to argue, and Cleo would take whatever victories she could.

“I can take over from here, Elliott. Go home and get some sleep.”

“We’ll talk about this later, Cleo?”

“Of course,” she lied, and then closed the door behind him.

Before she took off her shoes, before she took off her watch, before she removed her makeup, she went in to check on her mother. She’d learned to do that one cold winter night a few years ago, when Cleo had come home, and immediately changed into her pajamas, only to discover that her mother wasn’t in her room where she was supposed to be. Precious seconds were lost when she had to change back into clothes and shoes in order to go outside in twenty degree weather to track down her lost mother. Cleo never made that mistake again.

Her mother’s room was the same way it had been when Cleo’s father was alive. The double bed with the old color television set sitting on the dresser, and a picture of the three members of the Hollings family in their Christmas best (Cleo had been eight, and still had freckles—the curse of red hair and milk-white skin).

Rachel Hollings had been a beautiful woman in 1983, with the red hair that Cleo had inherited from her, and glorious blue eyes that lit up when she was happy, which she usually was around Christmas time.

Cleo stood there for a moment, watching her sleep. And then her mother’s eyes opened, exposing gloriously happy blue eyes. “Margaret?”

“No, Mom. It’s Cleo. I’m your daughter. Aunt Margaret is your sister.” Aunt Margaret had died eight years ago, but Cleo didn’t tell her mother that.

Rachel Hollings blinked, some of the happiness fading. “I could have sworn that you were Margaret. You look just like her. Are you sure you’re not playing a trick on me? Margaret plays tricks on me.”

Cleo sat down on her mother’s bed, tucking the duvet around her. “No, Mom. Get some sleep.”

“Could I have some hot tea? And maybe some cookies? Sugar cookies.”

“I’m not sure that we have any.”

Then Rachel Hollings mouth pursed into a tight line, and Cleo shook her head in defeat.

“Give me a little bit of time, Mom, and I’ll make some for you,” she said. “Do you want to watch a movie while I make them for you?”

“That would be nice. Something cheery. Maybe Doris Day or Lauren Bacall. Did you know that Lauren Bacall lives down the block from me? Nice, nice, woman, always says hello when she gets her meat from the butcher.”

Cleo put on a DVD and went to the kitchen and made some cookies and tea for her mother. An hour and half later, they were done, her mother deeply engrossed in The Philadelphia Story.

While Katherine Hepburn was laughing it up onscreen, Cleo climbed in next to her mother and watched her drink her tea and happily munch on the sugar cookies, which Cleo had made exactly like her mother had taught her. One extra teaspoon of almond extract. The Hollings’s secret sugar cookie recipe.

At the end of the day, these few moments were what counted most to Cleo. When she sat here, in the faded shadow of her mother, it felt right and warm, and she wouldn’t let anyone take that away from her. Here, time was the enemy. No one could live forever. Gradually, her mother’s eyes turned drowsy.

“I love you, Cleo,” her mother told her, and Cleo felt her heart clutch, just like it always had from the time she was a little girl. Not many people loved Cleo, but her mother did, even when she couldn’t recognize her. Cleo had always been a little too focused, a little too hard, a little too strong, but her mother’s love was unconditional, even under the strain of Alzheimer’s. The heart always recognized what the head refused to acknowledge.

“I love you, Mom,” she told her, kissing her on the forehead. Finally, she changed into pajamas and set her alarm clock for seven. Five hours of sleep.

Five brief hours of dream-filled sleep, drifting in and out of consciousness. Cleo promised herself that when her eyes were closed and the moon was waxing low on the Hudson, they counted as dreams, uncontrollable dreams that couldn’t be prevented.