50_shades_ultimate Read online

  Westford was as I remembered it, too small, too cozy, too chatty, the streets lined with old fashioned gooseneck lamps and mom and pop stores. The lawns were all manicured and properly divided by white picket fences. Children cluttered the town square, playing Frisbee with their dogs. Moms pushed strollers down the streets. It made me think of Stepford, Connecticut, or Castle Rock, Maine, the small town with a lot of dirty laundry. I knew that wasn’t true of Westford, exactly. It was just small-town America, doing what small-town America did.

  I slowed down as I passed my aunt’s successful shoe boutique, Puss ‘N Boots. I used to work there when I was a kid. It was my first job in high school. It was dark now, and there was a closed sign on the door. I felt a pang at the sight.

  As I pulled into the old courthouse where the reading of Aunt Gigi’s will would take place, I recognized a few of the vehicles in the parking lot. My very hetero-centric uncle and his family and a few of my cousins were already here, circling like vultures. But that was to be expected; most of my family lived in Westford.

  I spent the next ten minutes dodging family members as we settled down in Mr. Boyd’s office for the reading. Most of them gave me sidelong looks, either surprised I would be here or angry that Aunt Gigi would include me in her will. Kit, Aunt Gigi’s adopted son, gave me a brief, sad smile, which I returned with an even briefer wave. I tried to avoid meeting his eyes after that. Most of the trouble I’d had with my family had originated with Kit.

  He’d changed so much since I’d last seen him over ten years ago, during an ill-fated New Year’s bash that my Aunt Gigi had thrown. Back then, he’d been young and model-thin and redheaded ugly-cute, inclined to grunge jeans, concert T-shirts, and long, straggly hair that half-covered his face. He’d wanted to be the next Layne Staley or Kurt Cobain. He’d played Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten so many times that every house on the block knew where he lived.

  I’d always been a lightweight drinker, and during the party, I’d gotten pretty wasted on tequila shooters. Kit had dragged me upstairs and helped me lie down in my aunt’s guest bedroom. Most of the details of that night were a blur, but somehow or other, I’d ended up pantsless and moaning with Kit’s head between my legs. My uncle caught us when he stumbled into the room while looking for the bathroom to throw up in, and since that night, I’d become the family pariah, not that I could really blame them, I suppose. I blamed myself more. I’d never understood why I had let it happen. Kit and I were cousins, even if he was adopted, and anyway, he wasn’t my type.

  The man sitting there in the fine, black Gucci suit looked like my cousin, but he wasn’t the Kit I remembered. He’d put on some serious muscle, but it was the sleek muscle of a runner or swimmer, not the bench-pressing type. He wore the suit well, molded perfectly to his wide upper body and narrow hips. He wore a lily-of-the-valley boutonniere pinned to his suit jacket, my aunt’s favorite flower. His face was pale and smooth like milk. He’d grown out his one-grungy hair and now wore it slicked back in a shining, dark mahogany queue, noticeable when he turned his head. Aunt Gigi had said he’d spent a few years down in New York, walking the runways as she had, but he’d given it up when she started getting too frail to run the shop. I’d found that hard to believe back then, that Kit, the skinny redhead, was a model, but now, looking on his slick good looks and lively green eyes, it didn’t seem so unlikely.

  Mr. Boyd quickly ran through the minor things—Aunt Gigi’s silver and her antique collection of pens and picture frames. Most of that went to my mother’s brother and his children. She left a sizable donation to the local Human Society. Finally, we came to Puss ‘N Boots. It had been her baby, her one joy in life after she quit modeling—at least until she adopted Kit. And it was nothing if not successful. Everyone in the room naturally assumed that Kit would inherit his mother’s most lucrative asset, but Mr. Boyd surprised them all by saying, “The remainder of my estate, including the shop and house, will be evenly divided up between my beloved son Kit Miller and my equally beloved nephew Henry Miller, both of whom will be expected to maintain the establishment as a lucrative form of employment for a minimum of six months if they wish to inherit the balance of my estate—eight million dollars.”

  Ten minutes later, I was still sitting alone in my seat, trying to figure out how it was I now owned a house in Westford and a shoe store on Main Street. Kit sauntered over and said, “Good to see you again, partner.” He winked and stalked out into the attached banquet room.

  * * *

  “Mr. Miller, do you have these in a size seven-and-a-half?” the middle-aged blonde woman asked, holding up a pair of sequined red heels that I felt were much too young for her.

  Aunt Gigi was insane.

  I pushed away from the desk in the storeroom where my laptop was set up and sauntered out onto the floor of the shop. The blonde woman waggled the shoes like I was supposed to hurry up when I didn’t want to be here at all.

  Forty years old, and I’m working my old high school job. Yep, Aunt Gig was insane.

  I took the appropriate box off the ledge and looked at the retail code. Supposedly, Kit had this great big, flawless system in effect. You matched the code and color on the floor with the code and color in the storeroom. Simple, right? “Just a moment,” I said and took the box into the back room.

  My computer IM pinged irritably as I passed. One of my agents in New York was with a fairly large, bestselling author, working up an enormously important blanket contract, and she kept pinging me about the details. But, of course, I couldn’t do the job I had actually gone to college for because this stupid broad wanted a size seven-and-a-half in her shiny, tacky heels.

  I started rummaging through the endless shelves of stock, trying not to get increasingly irritated—nearly impossible when I realized I was trapped in my hometown like a rat in a maze, courtesy of my supposed favorite aunt. For the first two weeks after the reading of Aunt Gigi’s will, I had tried tirelessly to find a way out of my obligations, but Aunt Gigi’s legal savvy knew no bounds. The sub-clauses stated that if I left the premises for any more than forty-eight hours or didn’t keep up the bottom line that she had set for us, we would forfeit the eight million dollars, the house, and the business.

  I could have gotten by, of course, I hadn’t been counting on any of her money anyway, but the house and business was all Kit had. Thus, a month later, I found myself living in the tiny, perpetually cold flat above the shop and doing all my important business on the internet just to try and meet the basic requirements for an inheritance I didn’t really need and a kid I didn’t really like.

  When I failed to find the shoes ten minutes later, I started pulling random boxes off the shelves, knocking off the tops and looking through mountains of tissue paper. I’d scalped a shelf and a half and had made a mess all over the floor when I saw Kit step into the room. He was dressed in an adult version of his old getup—a silk shirt open at the throat that moved like a metallic second skin over his muscles and painted on blue jeans with fashionable slashes across the upper thighs. He’d developed a strange affection for knee-high leather buccaneer boots during his modeling days. He thought they were sexy. I thought they made him look like a pirate.

  He blinked and said, “Henry, what the hell are you doing?”

  “This system of yours makes no sense!”

  “My system makes perfect sense,” he snorted. “I designed it with Gigi.”

  “Well, maybe we can hold a séance and asked Gigi how the hell it works, because you sure as hell don’t know!”

  Glaring at me angrily, he stepped forward and snatched the shoebox away from me. He looked at the code I had scribbled on a pad nearby and said, pointing, “Color, then style. Why is this so difficult for you to follow?”

  “That doesn’t make sense! It should be style, then color.”

  Kit gave me an exasperated look. “Color is determined by season, Henry, get it? Summer—whites, lights and beiges, winter—blacks, browns and navies.” He pointed
at different parts of the shelves as he explained. “Seasonal, which is what you’re looking for, is over there.” He pointed at the last shelf near the end and gave me a hostile look. “You’re gay and you have no idea what color goes with what season?”

  I shot the hostile look back at him. “Excuse me. I’m a literary agent, not a drag queen.”

  “How the hell did you dress yourself in the morning?”

  I didn’t answer that. When I’d first gotten to the city, I’d been something of a noob all the way around, and a mess. All told, I would still have been a mess had I not met Leo, who was ten years older than me, ten years smarter, and could dress me in under five minutes flat. I’d learned pretty much every important life skill from him. The sudden memory put me in a bad place. I still woke up in the morning in the apartment upstairs, looking for him. Leo had walked out on me and I still wanted him. I would have taken him back in five minutes flat, if he asked me. How stupid was that?

  I threw the box down on the floor, angrier with myself than Kit, and said, “I’m taking a break.”

  I passed my laptop, which was still pinging, and pushed out the emergency exit door and into the alley behind the shop. The clear, smog-free, small-town air helped cool my thoughts, if not my boiling emotions. Five minutes later, Kit joined me. He had two cups of coffee in Styrofoam cups. “I got rid of her for you. But can you help me clean the storeroom?”

  I felt like an ass. I’d messed everything up and he was asking me? I sipped the coffee, which was too hot, and said, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to melt down.”

  “No biggie.” He shrugged. “I understand. Retail hell.”

  “It is a big deal,” I told him. “You shouldn’t be so forgiving.”

  “Why?”

  I looked over at him staring up at me. He was three inches shorter than my six feet even, slender and still somehow childlike, or, at least, that’s how I’d always perceived him. The young punk, the kid my aunt took care of who’d been in trouble, been in juvie, been on the streets. But he was a man now, thirty years old, at least. “You just shouldn’t. You shouldn’t put up with people’s bullshit. You shouldn’t let anyone push you around.”

  “No one’s pushing me around.”

  “Kit…”

  He held a hand up for silence. “When I was a kid I was in a lot of trouble, Henry. I ran with bad people. I lifted cars and ripped off convenience stores. Before Gigi took me in, I did drugs. I’m not that stupid kid anymore, you know?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said, feeling defensive.

  “But it’s what you think.”

  I know he remembered those times I let him tag along with me and my friends, but always not quite with my friends. He was my skinny, annoying, punk-rock cousin with a bad past, the one I was kind of embarrassed to have. “When Gigi adopted me, she told me that that life was behind me, and she forgave me all the bullshit I’d done in the past. She trusted me, and no one had ever trusted me before. I’d never been trustworthy before her. So if I want to forgive you because she forgave me, I will, all right?”

  “Okay,” I said with a spike of annoyance. Aside from Leo, most folks just cowed away from my bluster, both at work and in relationships.

  “Are you really so unhappy here?” Kit asked me, indicating the surrounding town. “Because if you want to go, go.”

  I crumpled up my empty coffee cup and tossed it into the big blue dumpster. I hooked my fingers in my business trousers. “I’m not messing this up for you, Kit.”

  “I’ll get by. I always do.”

  I glared at him. “I’m not leaving. You’ll just have to put up with me and my temper.” I brushed past him and ducked into the storeroom to clean up.

  I’d gotten everything just about sorted by the time we were closing up shop. Kit finished locking up and stepped into the storeroom to help me with the dozen or so remaining shoeboxes. “Do you want to rearrange the stock?” he asked. “If you want to, if it helps you, then do it.”

  I thought about it as I slid a shoebox into place according to his and Aunt Gigi’s insane system. “I’ll think about it. But, you know, you shouldn’t just give in that easily.”

  “Don’t let anyone push you around. Don’t give in that easily,” Kit laughed as he leaned against the shelves and gave me an arch look. “You sure do bitch a lot, Henry.”

  “Sorry,” I said with a shrug. “I can be pushy.”

  “You are, but why are you sorry?”

  I looked at him and felt my heart tick away in my chest too loudly, like some time bomb ready to go off. “I guess I don’t like pushing you around like that,” I said in a voice softer than I had intended. “Like you’re some pet that’s in my way.”

  “Why? I don’t mind.”

  I glared at him in surprise. His sleek green eyes glittered in the dimness of the room. I just couldn’t figure him. On one hand, he seemed confident enough, and gorgeous enough, and I could easily imagine him making legions of men and women swoon at his feet, but he always gave in so easily where I was concerned. I couldn’t imagine what pleasure he got from that and it made me uneasy. Leo had told me once that anyone who gives in too easily is up to something.

  “You just shouldn’t,” I said.

  “I trust you,” he told me. “You helped me pass algebra.”

  “I tutored you in high school and you automatically trust me?” I guffawed. “Really?”

  He nodded. “You were nice to me.”

  I had different memories. Memories of being annoyed by Kit, of sending him to the drugstore to buy snacks because I wanted to play video games with my friends alone, of making fun of his clothes and hair and music. But I didn’t say those things. They made me feel cruel and insipid. “You don’t really get me,” I told him. “I’m not a nice guy. I’m a jerk. I pushed my boyfriend Leo around until he couldn’t take it anymore and ran away. That’s the kind of guy I am.”

  Kit reached out and rubbed his thumb across the back of my hand. Little sparks seemed to jump off my skin. “You’re not a jerk. You’re an alpha. There’s a difference.”

  I almost laughed at that. “I throw things when I get upset. I have the patience of a gnat. I’m not an alpha. I’m a child.”

  “You’re an alpha,” he assured me as he continued to rub against my hand. “That’s what alpha’s do. They get angry. They don’t like to compromise. But they also protect their…friends.” He’d meant to say lovers but he’d changed it at the last minute. “That’s why you’ve stayed, isn’t it? To protect me?”

  I looked down at his hand touching me. “I could have been nicer to you,” I admitted.

  “Make it up to me.”

  I raised my eyes and saw he was giving me an inviting and very sexy smile. My heart lurched up somewhere near my throat. He took both my hands and pulled me away from the shelves and guided me back to the work table where my laptop was pinging again. He closed it and shoved it to the back wall, then sat down atop the table and pulled me closer, until my knees bumped his. Christ, he was beautiful. And he smelled so good. Vanilla shampoo with that undercurrent of coffee from before. He made very good gourmet coffee.

  “You smell like French vanilla coffee,” I admitted, realizing I would probably never be able to walk past a Starbucks again without thinking of him.

  Without saying a word, he leaned up, palmed my cheek, and kissed me on the lips. It was brief, wet, and made me tremble with a surge of need I didn’t know I had. I slid my hands around his ribs and held him in place as I kissed him back, hungrily, wetly, demandingly. His mouth gave a little and his lips parted for me as if to welcome my tongue. It was incredibly hot to have someone give himself to me that way.

  We broke the kiss, desperate and panting. He fumbled with the buttons of my dress shirt, got them open, and looked down at me. I felt worried; I was much too big for him, I thought, large and kind of muscular and hairy, or so I’d always felt. I would hurt him. He only gave me a brief look before he crossed his arms and slid his silk shirt up ov
er his head. I finally got a good look at him, his slim, muscular hairlessness. The blush at his cheeks and throat. He touched the matting of dark hair on my chest, then reached for my glasses and slid them off. A slightly blurry version of Kit said, “You’re really beautiful, Henry.”

  I’d heard that from a few of the guys I’d been with. But Kit said it with such sincerity that I believed him. We kissed again. And again. Each was better than the last. He opened his legs, clutched my ass, and pulled me against the front of his body, against his incredibly hard erection. He ground it against me. “I have protection,” he said against my mouth.

  “We’re going too fast.”

  “We’ve already been together, Henry. I’ve blown you.”

  “And Uncle Al walked in on us.” I laughed at the memory, even though it had been painful and embarrassing at the time. It had led to a huge part of my family hating me. But I didn’t care about that right now. I liked having Kit in my arms. I liked it too much, probably.

  “Do you remember that time?” he asked as he touched me, fondling me gently through my trousers.

  “No,” I told him, though I did. I was just lucid enough to recall most of the details.

  “Henry, what do you want?”

  “Right now? I want to take you upstairs to bed and fuck you.”

  “Take me, then.”

  I lifted him up into my arms and carried him upstairs to the cramped little apartment, to the too cold room I slept in. It suddenly felt much warmer to me. I kissed him again as I set him down on the mattress beneath me. I couldn’t seem to stop kissing him, petting him. He squirmed in my arms like a playful little cat, almost purring against me. That was what he’d been doing the night we wound up in bed together. A part of me had instinctively wanted to hold and protect him, but somehow we’d gone too far.

  We were going too far again. I slid my hands over his flat male nipples, bowed my head, and licked and sucked at one and then the other, blowing them dry so he trembled violently for me on the sheets. He was dripping wet already, the front of his fancy imported jeans almost soaked through when I unbelted them. His cock leapt up, leaving a glistening trail of precum along his sculpted abs as it slapped against his lower belly.