"Help me? Why would you tell him? After everything that we … I just don't understand!" Her words came out on a humiliating sob.
Dominic stared at her. His lips settled into a line for a moment, then he frowned. "He's my father."
Ten
B ella felt Dominic's words like a slap across the face.
Everything had changed.
When Dominic first showed up, uninvited, in her lab, he was suspicious and wary of the man who'd finally claimed paternity of him. She and Dominic had formed a bond based on their mutual distaste for Tarrant's imperious ways and shady practices.
But Tarrant had won him over.
"I understand." She forced the words between tight lips. "Family is important." She realized too late she'd repeated the words that he'd said to her on that first night, when she'd claimed she had to take a train to see her mother.
Her excuse had been a lie, of course, since it was long past visiting hours and her mother was not at home.
Now his pledge to keep her secret-their "deal"-had turned into a lie, because in the end, newfound loyalty to his famous father had trumped his pledge to her.
He'd let go of her hands, and they trembled. The pulsing strobe lights dazzled her eyes, and the unrelenting thud of the bass beat rattled her body until she felt she might break.
She took a step back, suddenly afraid of the tall man in front of her. What was his next move in this gruesome game? "You told me you'd keep my secret."
"I never promised you anything." His dark eyes showed no emotion, even as the glittering disco lights flashed over the hard planes of his face.
Bella frowned. The music hurt her brain. Did he really offer no promises? Had she been so foolish as to take his kisses as words of assurance?
Shame scorched her skin. As if she could truly mean anything to a man like Dominic. Like her kisses were precious diamonds he'd treasure.
She really was delusional.
She was halfway across the room before she realized she was running, pushing and shoving through the crowd. At each moment she kept expecting to feel a large, firm hand grab her arm, to hear a deep voice in her ear.
But it didn't happen.
As she plunged toward the exit, her ears rang with the eerie wail of the Bee Gee's "Stayin' Alive."
She couldn't yet comprehend the impact of everything that happened tonight. Protons and neutrons and nanoparticles whirred in the air and blurred her vision and her capacity to think as they shifted reality and swirled into the patterns of an unknown future.
The music thundered around her as she pushed through the packed crush of sweating bodies, into the foyer and out onto the street.
Cool night air stung her exposed skin.
Her job was gone. Her relationship with Dominic-if you could call it that-was over, and thus all the other balls she was juggling, her mother's health, her father's work, her cherished projects, were about to come crashing down to smash on the dirty sidewalk.
"Are you okay?"
She whipped around to see the doorman. She realized she must be quite a sight, with her skimpy gold dress and tear-streaked face. "I'm fine." Her words came out a choked sob that belied her protest.
"I can get you a cab." The big man, clad in black leather from head to toe, looked helpless in the face of her embarrassing distress.
"Really, it's okay." What was one more lie?
She swiped at her tears with a shaking hand and set out along the street. By the end of the first block her high heels hurt so much that she slipped them off, picked them up and began jogging, barefoot, up Sixth Avenue.
Her clingy metallic clothing drew every eye and more than one whistle, but after a while she didn't even notice. She kept running and running and running.
Car exhaust and stray cigarette smoke hurt her lungs, but she ran on. Maybe if she just kept moving she'd outrun particulate matter and enter a realm of clean air and peaceful, ordered calm.
Like her beloved lab that she'd never see again.
Dominic leaned forward, keeping his mouth near the cab driver's ear. He knew she lived uptown, but he didn't know where. East Side or West? He'd tried information but she was unlisted.
"Take Sixth Avenue north." If she was on foot he might spot her before she got too far. He cursed himself for taking the time to yell at Samantha. If he'd followed Bella out of the club, he wouldn't be hunting her on the streets of midtown.
But Samantha's pale, stricken face and ice-cold hands had stopped him. What the heck was that woman thinking, trying to help and making a mess of everything?
His words to Bella rattled in his brain, mocking him.
I never promised you anything.
Of course he'd promised her. Maybe not in so many words, but he'd promised her with his body, with his actions, when he held her and when he kissed her. When he teased her and taunted her and laughed with her.
He didn't trust her. How could he when she'd admitted to being there under false pretenses?
But she'd trusted him-and he'd betrayed her trust.
Regret pricked in his chest, along with a painful longing to hold her in his arms. When she'd disappeared out of sight in the loud, crowded club he'd felt like someone stuck a knife in his back. He couldn't breathe, couldn't think straight.
Samantha had accosted him, Fiona hot on her heels.
She won't dare come back. Fiona's harsh words had rung with grim truth.
Dominic had warned Bella that if Tarrant found out, her career and likely her life as she knew it would be over. She had no grounds to sue, but Tarrant had plenty. Once she started running, she wouldn't stop.
All because of his betrayal. A gesture of filial devotion to the father he'd always wanted and never known.
He shoved a hand through his hair as he scanned the thinly populated sidewalks. Bella was probably in a cab and long gone and he was chasing gasoline rainbows.
The thought of losing her for good punched him in the gut. He'd been so busy playing his little games, trying to get everyone lined up the way he wanted them, that he'd taken her for granted. He'd just figured she'd be there-for him to gather in his arms-after the dust settled.
Now he'd created a whirlwind that blew her right out of his life.
His nerves and muscles stung with the urge to move, to chase her. Ambling pedestrians blocked traffic at the crosswalk. He tapped his fingers impatiently on the window, drummed his feet on the floor, scanning the dark streets for any sign of …
A flash of gold metallic fabric caught his eye in the headlights of a moving car half a block farther north. "To the right!"
Yes. It was her. Running-literally-along the sidewalk. "Pull over." He tossed a rumpled bill at the driver and jumped out of the still-moving cab.
"Bella!"
She turned her head in a panicked glance. Her haunted gaze struck him like a blow, before she turned and ran faster.
His gut clenched as he noticed that her feet were bare on the dirty sidewalk. Her gold sandals dangled from one hand as she sprinted along the block, dark hair flying behind her.
He wanted to call out again but he focused his energy on running. He dodged a homeless man and a couple walking arm-in-arm. Bella was fast.
But he was faster. He caught up with her at the end of the block, where a speeding cab forced her to hover for a minute on the curb. He lunged at her and caught her around the waist as she leaped off the sidewalk.
She let out a cry as his strong arm knocked the wind from her lungs. "Let go of me!"
"No." He spun her around. "I won't let you go."
The words emerged husky and loaded with every possible meaning those words might imply. He tightened his grip around her waist, and relief soaked through him as he felt her warm skin through the metallic fabric of her dress.
"You didn't promise me anything," she struggled to catch her breath. "I have been holding my job under false pretenses. I did take the position to sue your father. And now I know I was wrong, because my father deliberately sold his work to Tarrant to pay off my school loans. You're right to despise me. Trust me, you won't ever see me again." Her eyes flashed and she struggled against him. "Let me go!"
Her full breasts brushed against his sweaty chest, sparking a totally inappropriate surge of raw primal lust. Words caught in his throat and he wanted to kiss her. Showing her how he felt was so much easier and more natural than spilling a bunch of words out into the air.
"I can't." His pain and confusion rang in the air. "I don't want to."
"Why? It's not enough that you've taken your father's side against me, now you want to punish me too?"
"No. I don't want to punish you. I shouldn't have told my father about you. I should have kept my promise to you-wordless or otherwise. I'm sorry."