How to Tame a Silver Fox novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Page Three
Willa overhears her father and his partner approve tearing down her mother's studio, goes to the guesthouse in her mother's robe to seduce Arlen, and learns he read her plan first.
I was standing on the stairs in my socks when my father sold my mother's studio.
He did it over bourbon, in the study, with the door open an inch.
"The carriage house comes down the first of the month," Albert Chadwick said. "Sabrina wants a pavilion for the wedding."
"It's a pavilion on a lawn," a calm voice answered. "You could put it anywhere."
"Arlen. Just sign."
I knew that voice.
Arlen Rhodes had owned thirty percent of my father's company for eight months and my guesthouse for six.
He ate my breakfast.
He knew my class schedule, my curfew, and the name of the boy I had stopped seeing in March.
I was twenty-two, a senior with a gallery show in May, and my father still gave me a curfew.
He had told my father about that boy.
"Her mother's paintings are in there," Arlen said.
"Her mother's paintings are junk in a barn," my father said. "Corinne has been dead twelve years. Willa needs to paint something else."
I heard a pen cap click.
I heard nothing after that, and nothing was the sound of him signing.
I went back up the stairs without making a board creak, because I had learned how at ten.
My best friend Junie was cross-legged on my bed with a bag of cinnamon sugar pretzels and a laptop.
"Well?" she said.
"They signed it."
"Both of them?"
"Arlen signed it."
Junie put the pretzels down, which is how I knew it was serious.
"Okay," she said. "Then we do the thing."
"The thing is insane."
"The thing is perfect. Your dad treats him like a son who pays rent. If your dad walks in on you two, he'll throw Arlen out by morning."
I had a spiral notebook open on my knees.
I had written the plan in blue ink at two in the morning, and I had underlined the first line twice.
Make Arlen Rhodes want me so badly he can't stay in this house.
Page three was the part I was proudest of.
It had a diagram.
"He's forty-one," Junie said. "You're twenty-two. He'll think it's a prank."
"He'll think I'm a spoiled girl who needs a daddy substitute. Fine. Let him."
"You're really going to kiss him."
"I'm going to take his breath and his job in the same minute."
Junie looked at my mother's old robe, folded on the chair.
It was green silk, too big, and it still smelled faintly like turpentine.
"Wear that," she said. "Nobody says no to a dead mother's robe."
That was the dumbest sentence either of us had ever said, and I put the robe on.
At eleven forty the guesthouse light was still on.
I crossed the wet lawn barefoot with my notebook tucked in the pocket.
I knocked once and let myself in, because he never locked it.
He was at the kitchen table in shirtsleeves, reading a set of blueprints with a pencil behind his ear.
His hair was dark except at the temples, where it had gone the color of a nickel.
He looked up with an expression of mild surprise.
"Willa," he said. "It's late."
"I know."
"Your father's asleep."
"I know that too."
I walked around the table until I was close enough to smell soap and cedar.
My heart was hammering so hard I could hear it in my ears.
I had practiced this in the mirror.
In the mirror it had been easier.
"You signed my mother's studio away," I said.
"I did."
"I wanted you to know I noticed."
"I noticed you noticing. You've been on the stairs since ten."
I put both hands on his shirt, and then I kissed him.
I meant it as a tactic.
It was supposed to be a brief performance, and I was supposed to feel nothing.
His mouth was warm, and he did not move away.
His hand came up slowly and settled at my waist over the green silk.
He kissed me back, patient and careful.
My knees went strange.
I pulled my head back first, which was the plan.
I was breathing hard, which was not.
Arlen looked at me for a long moment with grey eyes that gave away nothing.
Then he reached into his shirt pocket and unfolded a sheet of paper.
It was torn from a spiral notebook.
It was covered in blue ink, and it had a diagram.
"This fell out of your bag on Tuesday," he said. "You were borrowing salt."
The blood drained out of my face.
He had labeled nothing.
He didn't need to, because my own handwriting called him The Target.
"Page three is my favorite," said Arlen Rhodes, and slid the pencil back behind his ear. "Please. Keep going."
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