it’s after seven.” He flinched when his boss rapped loudly on his door before pushing it open. He squinted at Lex, square hipster glasses magnifying his gray eyes. “Go home!” They were finally in the homestretch of the project. He could afford to be generous with free time. “Work on it there.” Or not. Then he was gone, leaving Lex alone with the pencil still clutched in his hand and his mind still full of her.
This celibacy thing was going just great.
After giving his body enough time to calm down, he packed up his work laptop and left the office for the short drive to his house. For the first time in weeks, he was getting home before ten with the project almost finished and his boss well on the way to acting human again. Which made Lex happy. If anyone had asked him ten years ago if he would have felt fulfilled working for a small tech firm in midtown Miami, living in a modest house his parents and most of his siblings could afford with pocket change, he would’ve said they were crazy. But his contentment came in small packages these days.
When he opened the door, the music he’d programmed to turn on as soon as he walked into the house started playing from the speakers installed in every room. Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland.” At the kitchen counter, he sorted through his mail. Bills. An invitation to a wedding. An envelope with no return address. He frowned and turned it over. The envelope was small and square, just large enough to fit a thank-you note. He slit it open and turned it upside down. A Monopoly card fell to the countertop.
The only thing that surprised him was his lack of surprise.
So she had noticed him at the gallery. The card sat on the speckled-gray granite, innocuous-looking but very far from that. It was an old-fashioned “Get Out of Jail Free” card, orange and rectangular. It looked brand-new. Without examining it too closely, he saw that an address was scribbled on the bottom of the card, along with a date and time. Lex closed his eyes and released a slow breath. When he opened them again, he wasn’t seeing his own kitchen; instead, he saw the red velvet couches and wide stage of the Kingston strip club where he had hidden from himself for nearly two years, dancing and showing his body off to women who had the money and the time to look.
That time was ten years behind him, but the card brought it back as if it was yesterday.
The date on the card was two days away. A Saturday. He didn’t waste his time wondering what she wanted. He left the card on the counter and finished sorting his mail. Saturday would come soon enough.
* * *
And it did. When the time came, he dressed like it was any other weekend, in jeans and a T-shirt, pushed his feet in leather sandals and left for the address on the card. It was a small Jamaican restaurant he’d never heard of hidden among the boring beige buildings in Coral Gables. Its outside seating was only two tables on the narrow sidewalk, but that was where he found her.
She sat in a bistro chair facing the road, a too-slender figure in a bloodred suit. The hem of her skirt sliding up above her knees, legs crossed, a black high heel slowly tapping to the music coming from inside the restaurant. She was still as beautiful as he remembered, a brown Morticia Addams, although her hair was short now, styled in a chin-length precision cut. When she saw him, she stood up.
“Alexander.”
“Madame M.” He felt a little foolish calling her that, but he’d never learned her real name. Not in the two years she had regularly dropped by the club to check on its progress.
A corner of her mouth curled up. “It’s good to see you.” She put down the glass of sparkling water she was drinking and reached out to him. Lex clasped her hands in his, a gentle version of a handshake.
“I wish I could say the same,” he said.
Her smile faded away. “I understand.” She released his hands and sat down. “Please, have a seat. Can I get you something to drink? My treat.” She waved the waitress over.
Lex reluctantly smiled. She treated him like the wannabe rent boy he had been ten years ago, offering to spend money on him like he didn’t have a perfectly functioning wallet of his own. But what the hell. When the waitress came, he ordered a Red Stripe.
“That’s all you want?” she asked.
“For now.” Lex thanked the waitress before she left to put in his order.
Then he settled back in his chair, ankles crossed, to wait for the reason Madame M had brought him here. The calm felt good, a direct contrast to the panic that had burned down his spine at the gallery. Back in Jamaica when they first met, he’d been a spoiled and ridiculous kid, high on his own self-importance and spoiling for a fight. He wasn’t that dumb kid anymore, but with Madame M in Miami and so close to his parents, who still didn’t know about the bad choices he’d made while in Jamaica, he felt antsy.
He drummed his fingers once across the table. “What can I do for you, Madame M?”
She leaned in with a warmish smile on her red lips. “For starters, please, call me Margot.”
Margot? The unexpected sweetness of her name almost made him smile. “Okay, Margot. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I wish this visit was purely for pleasure,” she said.
“I figured it wasn’t when you sent the Monopoly card.”
She had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “Sorry about that. Sometimes my sense of the dramatic gets the better of me.” Her red-tipped fingers curled around the glass of mineral water, but she didn’t drink. “By the way, your sister’s show was great. I picked up one of her pieces for my living room.”
The fact that she had a living room in Miami, or so he assumed, made Lex’s hand tingle for the feel of the bottle that hadn’t arrived yet. He didn’t necessarily want to drink it, but it would give him something to hold on to in his suddenly shifting world.
“I’ll let her know you enjoyed it,” he said.
Margot chuckled. “Will you really?”
Lex’s beer came and he took a long pull from the brown glass bottle. “So, do you plan on telling me anytime soon why you’re here?”
“It’s actually a little embarrassing—” Her eyebrow jerked up and her mouth quirked, self-deprecating in a way Lex had never seen before. “It’s about my sister. And...” She sighed, finally lifting her eyes to meet his. “Just hear me out before you flat out say no.”
“If that’s not an inviting buildup, I don’t know what is,” he said.
“I know, right? I think I used to be much better at this.”
“Okay.” Lex put his beer on the table. Maybe he wanted to be absolutely sober for this. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands in his lap. “I’m listening.”
“It’s my sister,” she said again. “She’s going through a rough time right now, and I want to help her.”
Lex nodded for her to continue, although she obviously didn’t need the prompt.
“Her fiancé left her at the altar a year ago.” Something moved across her face, an emotion—which was unusual in itself—that Lex couldn’t clearly interpret. “She hasn’t been the same since. Maybe not depressed,
