Page 16 of Manhattan Heart

My face pensive when I slide into the back of the Mercedes I prefer to use when I have business to conduct.

Joe turns around from his driver’s seat. I’ve told him countless times he doesn’t need to dress like my driver, but he insists on a shirt and jacket, sometimes a tie. Thank fuck he never required a drivers hat.

“Well, how did it go?”

“Fine.”

“When?”

“Friday,” I tell him with my head over my business phone, scrolling through which emails need my immediate attention and which can wait until I get back to the office, which by looking at the traffic as Joe pulls out, it might take us more than thirty minutes at least.

I look up and see his jaw twitching in the rear-view mirror.

My driver and friend has opinions and I know they’ll come.

For someone in my employ, and has been for years now, he’s not quiet when he thinks I need to hear something. Mouthy shit is younger than me too, by at least six years, but we’ve become friends. He eats dinner with India and I at least once a month, more if she can talk him into it. He tries to keep employee-employer distance but my girl doesn’t go in for that kind of crap when she likes a person.

Sure enough, not a few seconds later when I’m midway through an email reply to a supplier in the Middle East.

“Are you going to tell her yet?”

It’s a good question and one I’ve wrestled with for more than two weeks when he’s driven me back and forth from the expensive building we’ve just left behind.

Whichever way I look at it, and I’ve covered every eventuality, my India is going to be upset. And I can’t in all good conscience justify doing anything to dampen her good mental state she has right now.

“Boss…” Joe states. His blond head facing forward on the hellish traffic, trying to get us back to the office before the day is over. I still have too many conference calls I’ve put off for the afternoon while I saw to my appointment. My PA, thank god that Harrison is good at his job, happily rearranged my calendar last minute. But it means I now have twice as much to do before I can go home.

I need to have a meeting with my GM in the next day or two, too. He’ll be taking on more of the work force.

“She’s going to be spitting mad,” Joe goes on. “No disrespect to the Mrs, but she can get kinda mean.”

I laugh at this because he’s so fucking right. My wife has always been my beloved mean girl, she fires emotional bullets when she’s pissed or upset. Not so much in the last years, not since she’s gotten a grip of her anxiety and dealt with a lot of her emotional baggage.

I love her when she’s being mean.

Not even lying when I say it makes me hard as stone.

I love fucking her when she’s mad.

But this is different.

She won’t want me on top of her when she knows the secret I’ve been keeping.

A secret that has bile churning around in my gut. I hate keeping anything from her. Before me, she lived a life of holding herself together by thread, afraid to break and I promised I’d never add to that kind of traumatic upheaval.

I don’t know how this could have happened.

“That she can,” I smile, finishing the email. I start a fresh one. “I intend to talk to her tonight.”

“Fuck,” I hear him curse quietly, again I grin, he’s seen my wife in moods. He drives us everywhere 90% of the time, he’s heard us arguing. Probably heard us fucking too.

“I’ll be on call, boss, if you need driving to a hotel when she kicks you out.”

I burst out laughing, feeling lighter than I have in days.

With my India, it’s a possibility she’ll go tsunami on my ass with her initial emotions and fight or flee tendencies being her default actions.

But she won’t kick me out.

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