A Little Harmless Addiction(43)
She sighed. “Yeah. I was at the top of my game when I tumbled down.”
“You didn’t tumble. You were pushed.”
Her eyes widened. “I guess you could say that. I guess you want to know more.”
“Only what you want to tell me.”
She laughed, but this time there was little humor in it and he hated it. He took her hands into his.
“I’m serious. I don’t have to know anything you don’t want me to. But I think you need to say it.”
She nodded. “You might be right. I didn’t really talk to anyone about it. I mean, I had to give a statement to the police and all, but I didn’t tell family about it. I couldn’t.” She sighed. “I met Greg when I was working on my Masters. He was brilliant and he usually picked one student each year to mentor. I thought I had made it when he chose me. He didn’t usually pay attention to the bakery students. Greg was usually all about the grill.”
Of course, the bastard had chosen Jocelyn. He remembered the picture he’d seen a few weeks ago, her smiling face. She would be tempting. She was beautiful, and the attention of someone like him would definitely be more than a young woman would be able to ignore.
“Did you have a relationship with him?”
She shook her head. “God, no. He was…like one of my brothers. Or I thought so at the time. We worked a lot together and he was the one who suggested Atlanta at first. I wasn’t too keen on it. I like big cities, but I tend to like them a little slower, like Honolulu. Atlanta is, well, it’s crazy. I didn’t know he’d planned on moving there himself. It just had seemed so natural when he contacted me six months later and asked if I would be interested in his new restaurant.”
“Of course,” he said, barely keeping his sarcasm at bay. She tossed him a look that told him to settle down.
“It wasn’t like that. Or I didn’t know it was. He hadn’t tried anything while I was at school, so I thought he might not be interested in me.”
“Really? I would say he would have to be dead.”
She snorted. “No. Greg was white and he never messed with any of the black students, so I thought maybe he didn’t like black women that way. I assumed that he saw me as a colleague. Stupid.”
He shook his head and took her hands in his. “No. If he had been a decent guy, you would have been right. It has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the bastard.”
She nodded. “Yeah, Doctor Sawyer said as much.”
“Your therapist?”
“Yeah.”
“When did it go bad?”
“Not for another six months. He was pretty cool with his advances, I didn’t even recognize them. I was living with Mike at the time so I wasn’t even paying attention to men in that way.”
“Mike?”
“Yeah, Mike Sanders.”
“Mike Sanders, the big celebrity chef?”
She nodded. “That would be him.”
Irritation and a good deal of jealousy burned in him. It was stupid, he knew that, but still part of him hated that she had been involved with anyone. Especially someone so successful.
“Ow, Kai.”
He realized he had been squeezing her hand. He relaxed his fingers and then rubbed hers. “Sorry.”
“About six months into the working relationship, Greg’s wife moved out.”
“He was married?”
She smiled at his outrage. “Yeah. And with her went a lot of his money. She had financed a lot of his restaurant, and when she left she cut off his money flow. She apparently found out he’d been sleeping with their twenty-one-year-old nanny.”
“The guy is a predator.”
“Agreed. I didn’t know this at the time. Some of it came out later when he was arrested. The prosecutor dug it up on him. She said we had to establish a pattern.”
She paused and he realized she was scared to tell him. Reliving the horror of what she had been through might be too much for her.
“You only have to tell me what you want.”
She smiled. “I know you probably hate to hear it, but you are the sweetest man.”
She leaned forward and brushed her mouth over his.
“If it gets me kisses like that, I can deal with being called sweet.”
“Yeah. I bet.” She sighed and then straightened her spine. It intrigued him even more. He had been known as a man who helped women through their heartaches. But this woman went beyond that. He didn’t want to save her. She could stand on her own and dammit, that made her irresistible.
He took her hand in his and threaded his fingers through hers. “Go on.”
“When I began to work for him, the problems started. He became a little too…touchy. I mean, he had always been a guy who did that, to everyone, men and women. He was part Italian and that is what he blamed it on. And at first, it didn’t bother me. You’ve seen how Chris and I are. We are a demonstrative family so I didn’t have a problem. Until Greg. It became kind of creepy.