Page 27 of Taming the Beast (Fairy Tales of New York)

“Don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“So what do you do, Seb, in that big old office of yours?” When not screwing women on his desk, although hopefully he didn’t make a habit of that.

“I run the Madison Foundation,” he said.

“Which involves what?”

“Deciding on how to spend huge sums of money, largely. The Foundation designs and funds national and international initiatives. We offer grants and we help charities. The Madison Trust manages the investment side of things, and I develop the strategy to use the money it makes.”

“It’s a big job.”

“It’s a big business.”

That was an understatement. According to the last report she’d read, the Madison Foundation, which was over one hundred years old, had ten billion dollars under management. Its main areas of interest were improving world health and education, eliminating poverty and protecting human rights. The Madison name adorned institutions across the globe. “Did you walk straight into it?” Mercy asked.

Seb shook his head. “No, although naively I’d planned to. But I was only twenty-three and knew nothing so the board and trustees had other ideas. I did stints in various departments to get to know how it operated before taking up the reins.”

“It sounds challenging.”

“It is.”

“But does it match up to the excitement of a career in the French Foreign Legion, I wonder?” she asked, thinking about the tattoo between his shoulder blades, which consisted of a circle, about three inches in diameter and contained a vertical dagger with some kind of flame thing around it to the right, all of which she found unbelievably sexy, more so because it seemed so at odds with his cool, aloof exterior.

“Actually, that wasn’t as exciting as it sounds,” said Seb idly.

“Will you tell me about it?”

“What do you want to know?”

Did it work? Did you find absolution? No. Way too personal. And she didn’t want to know any of that anyway. Really, she didn’t. “What was it like?”

“It was fine. It was a job.”

Just a job? Or an escape, his own personal Lethe, a refuge… Agh. Stop it. “Were you good at it?”

“They offered me a medal.”

Mercy scrambled up at that, clutching the sheet to her chest, her eyes widening. “A medal? What for?”

Seb frowned, his expression suddenly shuttered. “Bravery,” he said, making it sound like a four letter word.

And, oh dear, there went her soppy, melting heart. “How come? What did you do? Can you even say?”

“It’s in the public domain.”

So she could look it up, but – “Save me some time?”

Seb looked as if he was going to tell her to forget it, but then he seemed to decide otherwise. “We were operating in a square in a remote town in Mali,” he said. “My platoon was under attack and we were outnumbered. There were women and children around. I saved a mother and child from a hail of bullets.”

She stared at him. “Wow.”

He shrugged. “Anyone would have done the same. I just happened to be there.”

Yeah, right.

“The timing of it was fortuitous though,” he said, “because it made my superiors more lenient when it came to having to take time out to deal with my wayward, troublesome sister.”

---