His for the Taking by Julie Cohen

bill.
    ‘It would be a pleasure to have my ass kicked by you,’ said José, but he took Zoe’s money, ignoring Nick’s.
    ‘I was paying for the cab,’ he said to her when he got out, frowning.
    ‘Hey, as you say, I’m a multimillionaire,’ she said breezily, and climbed the steps with him to the church’s grand entrance.
    She certainly did know how to walk in high heels. With every step her hips had an extra sway that was one of the most seductive things he’d ever seen, all the more so for being unconscious. He wanted to put his hands on her hips and feel her movement, as well as see it.
    Instead he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his trousers. It was a church. A funeral. No time for lustful thoughts.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    T HE CHURCH WAS huge. Inside its vast echoing space, Nick felt as small as a child.
    ‘I can see why Xenia wanted to have her funeral here,’ Zoe said, gazing at the enormous stained-glass windows, the elaborately carved stone, the soaring ceiling and the immense gleaming organ. Scaffolding spider-webbed up the inside walls, too. ‘It’s straight out of The Addams Family. ’
    ‘And that would make me Lurch,’ said a voice from their left. Nick felt rather than saw Zoe start beside him as a man came out of the shadows.
    He wasn’t really kidding about the Lurch reference, Nick thought; he was very tall, very thin, and sunken-cheeked, dressed in the black of a clergyman. But his eyes were glittering with humour.
    ‘Well, if you’re Lurch, I’m Pugsley and this is Uncle Fester,’ said Zoe cheerfully, going up to him with her hand outstretched.
    Uncle Fester? Nick ran his hand over his head to make sure he wasn’t suddenly bald as Zoe and the man of God got acquainted. From their conversation he could tell they had met before at one of Xenia’s birthday parties, which were apparently famous all over Manhattan for their eclectic mix of people and the quality of the champagne. His name wasn’t Lurch, it was John, and as he guided them through the church into a gilded side chapel set up for the funeral, Nick began to search his surroundings for a maybe-familiar figure.
    He and Zoe had agreed: if Nick’s father was in New York, he could be at this funeral. Xenia had expected well over a hundred guests.
    Nick had been bang-awake since four this morning, an urgent feeling he couldn’t quite name making his heart beat fast and his stomach feel queasy, his mind spinning on the idea that he might be seeing his father again. Zoe had distracted him before, but now the feeling intensified.
    He peered around him. There were plenty of people in the church, strolling around, kneeling in prayer, sitting in the pews, and about a third of them were male. He stared at every man who was close to his father’s age, questioning and weighing probabilities.
    What colour would his hair be—grey or still dark? Would he even have any hair? Would he have gained weight, lost it, be healthy or sickly?
    Nick remembered his father as tall and broad, a very big man—but then again Nick had been ten years old, and now he was over six feet himself. His mother and Kitty told him he resembled his father. Would it be like looking in a mirror, or stepping into a time machine?
    He couldn’t remember Eric Giroux’s voice at all, although Nick remembered hearing it, could even remember some of the words his father had said. But the pitch of it, the timbre and the accent, was gone from his mind. He didn’t think it had lasted much beyond his twelfth birthday.
    Mostly, he remembered his father’s hands. They were always rough and reddened from working outside. They were good at tying knots, chopping wood, creating flies for fishing, fixing things.
    He looked down at his own hands, rough from working outside, good at catching animals, treating them, building shelters and paths, planting trees. Would this be how he knew his father, not from his face or his voice but from his hands?
    Or maybe there would be an instant