The Note (Manhattan Nights #5) - Natalie Wrye Page 0,2
around slows to a reality-defying pace, and through it all, I can hear my heart beating, feel my pulse.
My throat closes up. My muscles lock up.
Every tooth in my mouth clenches, and before I can think twice, the car is sliding, skidding, drifting through the rain and slush, narrowly missing devastation as the two cars in front of us collide instead in a tangle of twisted metal and gray water.
My heart knocks on the center of my chest.
The town car comes to a halt, just a few short feet from the accident. It teeters on the edge of disaster, somehow missing, and past the symphony of secondary horns that kick up, we continue down the freeway no less than a minute later, the silence even louder than the crash.
Until my driver speaks up.
He spins in his seat. “Mr. Quinn?”
I glance up at him. “Yeah?”
“We’ve been here for two minutes already. Did you plan on leaving any time soon? Looks like the funeral’s begun.”
The tint of the back window is dark. But I can still see out of it.
The grass is unrealistically green, the cemetery lawn too perfect. But it’s the people who catch my eye most, the “shufflers” on it.
In black, my father’s mourners pitter-patter their way through his ceremony, and it takes everything in me, all of my strength—every muscle in my too-sloshed body—to make myself reach for the door handle.
By the time the driver opens the damned thing, I’m already lost in my thoughts, already numb to the world.
I don’t even realize we’re blocking other cars entering our segment of the cemetery until my driver clears his throat, pulling me back from the dead. Slipping him a hundred, I head out, flowers in tow—the ones I requested when I ordered the car—just as the funeral procession begins.
I shake an avalanche’s worth of rain off my suit, approaching the small gathering. With wet hands, I slick my dark hair back, doing my best to blend in.
I join the rest of the mourners without another word. Mouth dry, my shoulders slumped, I stare everywhere but inside of the coffin.
Everywhere but where my dad lays.
It’s too much. And he’s too dead. But so is the future of my real estate company, unbeknownst to my brothers.
And I stare back at the damn green grass, hating it.
I wish I’d brought my Stephen King novel from the car instead of the flowers. Because fictional horror was better than this factual one any day.
I made it to my “meeting” on time. But in the back of my mind, I know I’m still too late.
The past I’ve tried to escape is like a stain; it settles on my skin like a tattoo. Staring at my father’s coffin makes sure of that.
Coming back home bloody drunk wasn’t as hard as I thought; coming back home when it’s too late to say goodbye?
That’s the worst part of all.
Chapter 1
NOAH
PRESENT DAY
Manhattan, New York City
Friday evening
I found out there are worse things than being a dead man walking. And that’s being a dead man walking with no money.
I never thought I gave a shit; I really didn’t.
But when the company you inherited was on the brink of collapse, and the life you’d known was slipping out of your hands, as a man? You only had two options to cope.
And I was already knee-deep into choice number one.
You could drink as much as you could take. Consider that choice checked.
Or you could fuck the most beautiful woman you could find.
And I thought I was close to doing that. But then the woman I’d found spoke.
Becky Callahan clearly never learned the beauty of silence, and as she sprawls in my hotel bed’s thousand-count sheets, half-naked, it is all I can do not to carry her off.
It’s still early evening, the sun barely set.
As a chilled sleet settles over the city of New York, I sit in the seat opposite the bed, my hands wrapped around a scotch, tuning out the pixie’s pleas to the sounds of Frank Sinatra on the stereo. I sigh.
“The size of this hotel room tells me that you’re doing much more than alright. Just look at the size of that bathtub!” she exclaims, pointing a finger towards the tub. “You can fit three of me in there.”
Not with the size of that mouth.
I let Frank drown her out.
Truth is? I didn’t need Becky for the night. Just for the next few hours while I