Chapter 5 - The Suite on the Sixteenth Floor
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"You're... Julian Vane," Clara breathed, her fingers tightening around the strap of her purse as she looked at the tall, lethal man standing three feet away in the small basement office. "The Vane syndicate."
"And two hours ago I was just Julian from booth six," he replied calmly, keeping his distance so he wouldn't crowd her in the small room. He reached down, picked up her cracked smartphone from where Dante had retrieved it upstairs, and handed it back to her along with a thick cream envelope containing seven months of her skimmed tip money—nearly nine thousand dollars in crisp hundred-dollar bills from Richie’s safe. "Count it when you get home. That’s what Grasso stole from your shifts since March, plus severance for tonight."
Clara looked down at the thick envelope of cash in her hand, then back up into his startling blue eyes. "Are you closing the restaurant?"
"For two weeks to gut the kitchen, replace the rotten booths, and put Chef Mateo in charge as general manager with a ten-percent profit share," Julian said. "When it reopens next month, your job is waiting for you if you want it—Wait. Actually, no, it isn't."
Clara’s stomach dropped. "You’re firing me?"
"A woman who keeps her head while a man has a gun in his drawer and risks her neck to stop a poisoning doesn't belong carrying water pitchers to tourists on Tenth Avenue," Julian said, studying her face intently. "What did you do before your father got sick and you had to pick up night shifts for the cash tips?"
Clara blinked in surprise. "I... I have a degree in Hospitality Management and Event Operations from Cornell. I was an assistant director of private dining at the St. Regis until two years ago, when my dad needed daytime care during his first round of chemo and I needed flexible night hours."
A faint, approving glint lit Julian’s arctic-blue eyes. "Cornell Hospitality and the St. Regis. And you let Richie Grasso yell at you about bread baskets for seven months without saying a word so you could pay for your father’s infusions and your sister’s nursing boards."
"You do what you have to do for family, Mr. Vane," Clara said quietly, lifting her chin. "I’m sure a man in your position understands that."
"Better than most," Julian murmured. He pulled out his own sleek black phone and tapped the screen twice, turning it so she could see a confirmed hospital transfer order stamped with the seal of the Executive Oncology Pavilion at Memorial Sloan Kettering. "Before I came down here at eleven-thirty, I made that phone call I promised you. Starting at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, your father, Thomas Harper, is being moved out of the outpatient clinic into a private sixteen-floor residential suite in the Rockefeller Pavilion under the direct care of Dr. Evelyn Vance, the head of thoracic oncology. Every experimental immunotherapy trial, every nursing bill, and every medication is covered in full by my family’s medical foundation."
The air rushed out of Clara’s lungs in a single, ragged gasp.
For eighteen months, she had lain awake until four in the morning staring at the water stains on her bedroom ceiling, doing impossible math on the backs of utility envelopes, terrified that her father was going to die simply because a waitress’s tips couldn't buy the $28,000-a-month targeted immunotherapy drug that his standard insurance had denied twice!
Suddenly, hot, unstoppable tears spilled over her lashes, running down her pale cheeks as her knees trembled.
Instinctively, Julian took a single step forward and caught her gently by the elbows before she could stumble, his large hands warm, solid, and impossibly gentle over her bruised wrists.
"I can't pay you back for a quarter-million-dollar cancer treatment, Mr. Vane," Clara whispered, her voice shaking with emotion as she looked up at him through her tears. "Why are you doing all this for a three-dollar napkin?"
"Do you know how many people sit across from me every week in Manhattan, Clara?" Julian asked softly, his thumb brushing a tear from her cheekbone before he could stop himself. "Bankers, senators, captains who swear blood oaths on saints' cards—and ninety percent of them would put arsenic in my espresso tomorrow morning if they thought it would net them ten percent on a port contract. Tonight I walked into a room wearing mud and rags, with nothing to offer you and everything to cost you... and you looked me in the eye and tried to save my life anyway."
His intense blue gaze held hers from less than a foot away, the heat radiating off his chest cutting straight through the chill of her exhaustion.
"In my world, loyalty like that is rarer than diamonds," Julian murmured. "Consider your father’s hospital suite paid in full. And starting Monday morning at nine, if you want to earn the rest, you can report to the sixtieth floor of the Vane Tower on Park Avenue as my private hospitality and estate director—ninety-five thousand a year, nine to five, with full executive flexibility whenever your father has an appointment."
Clara stared at him, her heart beating so fast against her ribs she thought he must feel it through his palms.
"And if I take the job on the sixtieth floor," she whispered breathlessly, "do I have to worry about people shooting the locks off the front door?"
May you like
For the first time all night, a slow, devastatingly handsome smile curved Julian Vane’s mouth—taking ten years of ruthless hardness off his face.
"Only if someone skips the line for the steak," Julian said softly. "Come on. My driver is taking you home to Queens so you can get some sleep before you take your dad to the hospital in the morning."
