The Beautiful Bait
"Shall I make you an offer? There's a way to wipe out what you owe me in a single stroke. It all depends on whether you've got the nerve."
Liam drew a thumb along his lower lip and leaned in until his face was close to hers. Zena stared at him, plainly lost, and between her slightly parted lips he caught white teeth and the tip of a small, pretty tongue.
"What a job is worth is for the one who pays to decide. Suppose I gave you a task I judged to be worth that ten million."
She still didn't understand what he was driving at, but a faint hope flickered across her face.
"What... would that be?"
"Seduce a man for me."
Silence followed his answer. Zena blinked, the look of someone who had not understood a word.
"...I'm sorry. What do you mean?"
Liam smiled, eyes curving, plainly pleased with the offer he had just set down.
He's insane. The proposal had come out of nowhere, and the color drained from Zena's face until she was ashen. Become a sugar baby to a man she didn't even know? She had never heard anything so outrageous. And yet the sum moving between them was so vast that a refusal would not come.
"That doesn't even— Are you serious?"
"I'd call it a very generous offer. Do you need time to think?"
The smile had left him entirely. What remained was a hard, immovable determination to have what he wanted. What do I do? What am I supposed to say? For a split second her mind raced.
She knew it was an absurd proposal, the kind she ought to refuse in the same breath. But Ryan locked in a detention center, and ten million dollars of debt, gave her a different answer. Her lips parted and closed, parted and closed, until at last a small voice slipped free.
"Why would you want me to do something like that?"
"Letting Ryan O'Connor rot in a cell doesn't repay the damage he did me. And you look rather useful as a gift—something to put a little life back into my partner. Does that explain it?"
Dane Hunter, co-owner of Hunter & Carlson, had gone with Liam from mathematics at the Spence School all the way through the architecture program at MIT. He was Liam's closest friend, and the only rival in the industry who still managed to push him.
Dane had never liked the private life Liam led, moving from one sugarship to the next with woman after woman. For Dane, work always came first, and he was severe about his own privacy. He looked on men who used their fortunes to buy the bodies of young women with something close to contempt, and a friend was no exception.
Watching the woman seated in front of him, Liam realized he had found rather good bait. Even at a glance she belonged to that innocent kind who didn't seem to know her own beauty drew a man's eye. Her hands didn't match the loveliness of her face. They were rough, callused in places, the nails short and not even kept.
She didn't smell of heavy perfume or cosmetics. What rose off her was the scent of skin itself, the kind that quickened a man's blood. None of the calculated allure other women slipped on in his presence clung to her at all. Where they gave off greed and vanity, she gave off innocence.
She was nothing like the women who circled them. Not a brilliant butterfly—a cocoon, curled stubbornly in on itself.
There was a straitlaced quality to her, as if she wouldn't so much as glance at anything above her station. The plainness of a woman who gave no thought whatever to appearances felt, somehow, new.
A woman like this might catch Dane Hunter's interest. Two proud creatures, each the instrument of the other's fall.
To make a man that thorough, that ascetic, surrender to the hunger inside him. To hand the very person who condemned him the same decadence, the same transgression—there was a thrill in that.
With an arrogant flick of his eyes, he glanced at the watch on his wrist.
"The time I promised you is up. We'll say the offer was never made."
He rose at his leisure, leaving Zena frozen where she sat. She jerked up the head she had dropped toward the floor.
"Couldn't you give me just a little more time?"
"It's just... such a sudden offer..."
Head tilted, Liam looked down at her and drew up one corner of his mouth. A rising thrill itched beneath his ribs. Yes. That's it. My beautiful bait.
"If you're going to talk about time to think, forget it. You're the one who needs help. Not me. Sweet girl."
From that clean, handsome face came a voice as hushed and tempting as the serpent offering the forbidden fruit.
"There's a sugar party soon, at the sky bar in Blatz Tower. Leave an address on your way out, and I'll send an invitation."
"A chance to settle, easily, a debt you couldn't pay if you lived two lives."
Dane had been staring through the glass wall of the suite, tipping back a glass of water, when he turned. He set the empty glass on the table, and ice that had not yet melted knocked against it with a thin clink. With measured movements he loosened the tie at his throat, then undid his cuff buttons, one and then the other.
Lately every ounce of his attention had been fixed on a project in Dubai: a 160-story ultra-luxury hotel rising on a newly reclaimed artificial island. Before that, he had taken on the design of a massive development meant to turn abandoned land in the Caribbean into a resort district. His life had been nothing but one trip after another, and nights that ran long.
Brilliant planning and meticulous preparation had carried the Dubai build forward without a hitch. Turning the concept he had drawn and presented into something real was now in other hands. It was time to stop sprinting, and rest.
"We've grown distant lately, haven't we? Have a drink with me. It's been too long."
He had only just found room to breathe, and so Dane agreed to Liam's suggestion without hesitation. Liam led him to a newly opened lounge. They caught up on everything they had left unsaid, laughing, and drank one glass after another.
Two hours after they arrived, Dane was considerably drunker than usual, and Liam stood, proposing they change venues. Dane was exhausted, but time with an old friend was rare enough that he went along. That was how they ended up at the rooftop sky bar of the Blatz Hotel.
"You tricked me."
The moment he stepped off the elevator, Dane understood. Liam had known a direct invitation to a sugar party would be refused, and had resorted to a cheap little scheme.
"What's a friend for? Isn't it better if we enjoy ourselves together?"
Watching Dane's face harden, Liam shrugged, a slick smile in place.
Disgust rose in Dane's eyes. There was nothing pleasant about standing among men who scanned young women with gleaming eyes and drew their prey in with the smell of money. Across the rims of their glasses they traded talk of deals in which vast sums changed hands, and the hopeful faces of the women listening made his own twist of its own accord.
The younger the woman, the weaker she was before the temptation in front of her. A handsome company name and a title printed on a business card had the power to make even the man look like someone else. Behavior that anywhere else would have been called sexual harassment passed, at a sugar party, as perfectly natural. The women hoping to be chosen as sugar babies were generous with the pawing of men plated in money.
A glance from him was enough. Women who would come running, already expecting a contract, were everywhere. But he would not break his own iron rule for the sake of a temporary release and do something he would regret.
Displeasure, fatigue, and the liquor piled on together. Less than thirty minutes after he stepped into the rooftop lounge, he lost all interest. When he stood, unwilling to hold his place any longer, Liam looked unmistakably disappointed.
"Couldn't you pretend to give in, and just play along?"
"I don't appreciate you deciding this on your own."
The blunt words left Dane on a breath thick with whiskey. As if there were nothing else for it, Liam held out a room key. Dane glared from the key thrust in front of him to Liam's face and back again, the question plain.
"You're drunk. And you hate letting anyone else take the wheel. Go back at this hour and there won't be anyone glad to see you—why not rest here and leave in the morning? We'll have breakfast."
Dane's brow tightened. Shameless, after blindsiding me like that. But he couldn't argue with what Liam had just said. He was very drunk, and he needed rest.
Every time the number above the elevator doors changed, Zena's heart picked up speed.
The woman in the interior mirror looked wrong on her. She couldn't show up to a party bare-faced, so she had bought a single lipstick and let the clerk at the cosmetics counter do her makeup for free. The clothes, the heels, and the clutch she had worn here were all borrowed from her roommate, Rachel. Rachel, thrilled at the notion that Zena might actually be going on a date, had handed her things over without a second thought.
Zena dragged in a long breath. She was barely holding down the urge to ride this car all the way to the lobby and walk out of the place.
But if I do that, Ryan...
Zena's mother, Jeong Seon-yeong, died of a cerebral hemorrhage. All that was left to a girl of sixteen was a sum too small to call an inheritance, and a few household things worn dark by years of hands.
She went to live in the home her father, James Lee, had made after remarrying, and she did her best to erase her own presence so she wouldn't be a burden on the new family. Even that wasn't enough to let her ignore the way the house, warm and easy before she arrived, went cold the moment she stepped through the door.
The day she graduated high school, Zena announced she was moving out on her own, and they did not ask her to stay—not even for show. From then on, she stood alone.
Through the worst of those storm-tossed years, her first boyfriend, Ryan, remained at her side. To a girl who had lost every line she might have held, he was as good as the last pillar left to her. It was an age when people met and parted easily. Sadly, the shy love of two young people did not last forever, any more than most first loves do. What still tied them, all these years later, was neither love nor friendship, but an emotional debt.
A driver lost consciousness to a heart attack. Two pedestrians died. Three more were critically injured. It was the day the future of nineteen-year-old Ryan, who had dreamed of a life in professional baseball, was ground to nothing.
When the car jumped the curb and bore down on them, Ryan shoved Zena clear. The sight of him collapsing in front of her, soaked in blood because he had saved her, sank into her eyelids like a brand that would not fade.
The aftermath left him limping on his right leg, and he suffered a brutal depression and a rage he could not control. At last he shut himself away from the world and lived on a disability allowance and welfare payments for the poor.
As if that floor had not been low enough, Ryan fell into gambling. It began as a game, a way out of his life, but the bets came more often and grew larger, until the habit curdled into a vicious circle—stake more, to win back what was already lost. She had worried it was becoming more than a pastime. In the end he sank to stealing someone else's information and selling it, just to scrape the money together.
The elevator stopped while she was still lost in it. Zena pressed her sweat-damp hands together and stepped out. What do I even say? Walk into a stranger's suite and beg him, at first sight, to become her sugar daddy, and he would only take her for a madwoman. Her feet, carrying her toward the room where Dane Hunter was staying, felt as heavy as if weights had been tied to them.
She had never once been on so much as a blind date. Waitressing, kitchen prep, washing dishes, cleaning buildings, delivering a weekly paper, running a register at a convenience store, babysitting—her life had been a string of part-time jobs too long to put on a résumé without shame.
Owners, coworkers, even customers: plenty of men had shown an interest in her. But she was good at putting up walls, not at being the one to step forward and seduce. She had never learned how.
She stopped in front of the enormous suite door, let out a long, unsteady breath, and slowly drew another. No matter how she ransacked her mind, the right words would not come. Standing here for hours didn't seem likely to produce them either.
I can do this. This is for Ryan.
She repeated it to herself and knocked, two soft taps. Her eyes wouldn't stay still, and she couldn't breathe easily. From inside, there was no answer at all.
Her gaze, shaking with nerves, slid toward the elevator.
A part of her hoped Dane Hunter simply wasn't there, for whatever reason. At least then she could avoid having to face him in that room tonight. She swallowed, trying to ease a throat that kept closing tight.
Right. If he isn't here, and I can't meet him, then there's nothing I can—
The lock clicked, and the door opened.
"What is it."