“Dammit all to hell, wouldn’t you rather I told you the truth about what I’m thinking than keep it festering inside? Are you seriously taking offense because I want you to stay, warts and all?”
“What would I be staying for, Brody? Hot nights with the billionaire, who’ll be sleeping with one eye open because he doesn’t trust me not to stab him in the back.”
“How do you want me to answer that? Tell you I can overturn the habits of a lifetime, forget every lesson I’ve learned from my parents, the women I’ve known—”
“And me, Brody. Don’t forget me. I’ve done nothing but lie to you from the moment we met. Enhanced my résumé, omitted telling you about my second job, kept my true reason for needing money from you, probably faked all my orgasms, too. Of course you’re not going to trust me. What have I done to earn your trust except worked my ass off and loved every single moment that we’ve been together? Yes, I’ve told lies but sometimes the lies are necessary to break water, Brody. Sometimes a little white lie is the difference between drowning and breathing.”
Where the eff was her damn cat? Heart slamming wildly, she looked around for that curmudgeonly piece of shit.
“So you admit you’ve lied?”
“Yes, but not about what happened at the club and not about us. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. More like plastic. But I’ve fought like hell. For me, for my sister.” She walked back toward the living room, eyes blurring with tears, which was really inconvenient. She needed to find Kevin. Now.
“And you know what else,” she said, spinning to face Brody. “I don’t need your fucking forgiveness. I don’t need your approval. You want to know how I was going to fix this mess with Ray? I’d planned to run. Leave Ray and you and this skin that doesn’t fit behind.”
He blanched. “You would have left?”
She would have loved him forever if he’d let her. But enough sentimentality.
“Yes, I would have left. I didn’t want you to pay that debt because it would always be between us. And not only is the money between us, but you don’t trust me. All I’ve ever wanted is you. I may be poor and trying to pick up the rubble of my world, but I’m not afraid to live. There’ll always be something holding you back. Live in your penthouse, surrounded by your white walls and furniture. Live in your asylum, if it keeps you safe to retreat here. Where you don’t have to get your hands dirty or let anything impinge on your well-ordered life.”
A barely audible mewl alerted her to Kevin. She hunched down, which she noted was much easier in these low-heeled shoes, and found her cat under the Barcalounger.
“Come on, Kevin, we’re out of here.”
Kevin decided now would be a good time to play at statue. Please, kitty, I’m barely holding on by my fingertips here.
The least empathetic animal in the universe heard her silent plea and crept out into her arms. Fighting her tears, Emma picked him up, barely managed to unfold her aching body from the ground, and marched out the door of the penthouse.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Where the hell is the oolong?”
Serena’s eyes widened at Brody’s abrasive tone, and she looked around for someone to defend her from the cranky, tea-deprived brute looming over her desk.
Not her desk. Emma’s desk. Serena was merely filling in until they could hire someone Brody could shout at on a more permanent basis.
“Well?”
“I don’t even know what that is,” Serena whispered, her mouth in a wobble.
“It’s fucking tea and my fucking client happens to like it!”
Brody looked up to find the entire staff, including Hunter and Flynn, staring at him with not a small amount of pity.
“I can go get some.” Tears sprang into Serena’s eyes and she sniffed in Flynn’s direction. “Do they have it at Starbucks?”
“Basketball court,” Hunter said to Brody. “Now.”
“Smythe-Osborne will be here in thirty.”
“So how about we get into fightin’ mode on the hardwood? Beat Cross’s lame ass. Feel a shit-ton better.”
That sounded like the best idea he’d heard in days.
Ten minutes later, Brody was taking his frustration out on the boards instead of the poor, innocuous assistant whose only crime was that she wasn’t Emma. He bounced the ball several times. Then several more.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Flynn took a slug of water. “Got it.”
“I could waterboard S-O with that tea and he’d still dick me around.”
Hunter rolled his shoulders and wisely kept his mouth shut.
“This is your fault.” Brody pointed a finger at Flynn. “You and your strip club recommendation and your flavored condoms and the land of sensual taboo.”
“Yup.”
Unappreciative of Flynn’s mature acceptance of the blame, Brody turned his ire on Hunter. Standing before him was the definition of self-made man. Born and raised in a Texas trailer park, Hunter’s childhood was filled with pain, misery, and death. But he was a survivor, through and through, just like Emma. Character always outs.
So does assholery, Kane.
Brody glowered at his friends. “Why aren’t you telling me what a dick I was to Emma?” A week of telling himself wasn’t enough; he needed the condemnation only true friends could dispense.
What in the fuckity fuck of fucks had he been thinking? On his way back from paying off Grigson, that video—and Emma’s prior knowledge of it—had fueled his fury. Deep down, he knew she would never have used it against him. She’d had chances. Not once had she come out and asked for the money.
Then he told her he forgave her, as if it was in his power to give.
He’d treated her like she owed him, and that his trust was this special reward she had to earn. All along, she’d resisted his help because owing Brody instead of Ray would be no different in her eyes—and he’d proved her point a million times over. She’d confided her brokenness to him and like the class act he was, he threw it back in her face. Assured her that the nature and circumstances she’d worked so hard to overcome were insurmountable.
Brody had thought he was over Kerry. He wasn’t over shit.
God, he was so damn spineless a new genus of invertebrates needed to be invented. Fuckheads like him were never more righteous than when in the wrong.
“Well?” he snapped when neither of his buddies had the common decency to be pricks about his behavior.
“You seem to be doing a fine job on the self-flagellation,” Flynn said. “But it’s time you stopped taking it out on the staff at the office. We can’t afford to lose any more employees, especially as we just lost the best one.”
Brody slapped the water bottle out of Flynn’s hands.
Discomfort tightened Flynn’s expression, and Brody immediately regretted his temper tantrum. Losing the woman you loved sucked ass, a fact Flynn knew better than anyone.
“I think the Crown Point development is a bust,” he muttered. “Nigel just likes being wined and dined on the company dime.”
The boys didn’t disagree.
S-O would be seated in Brody’s office in fifteen minutes, playing his usual mind games. Well, Brody was done with games. If that limey asshole was still around when Brody showed up thirty—no, sixty—minutes late for their meeting, then they could talk.
“Let’s play ball.”
The slump in the ass-dented sofa happened to be right at the small of Emma’s back and to compound the discomfort, there was a broken spring. She turned over, but slid farther into the seat cushions. Rather than take this as an opportunity to search for loose change to buoy her life plans, she leaned over to the coffee table and checked the time on her phone.
Two thirty-seven a.m. On cue, the front door opened with an uncharacteristically cheery, “Honey, I am home.”
Emma smiled despite herself. That one never got old.
Katerina closed the door of her apartment—and Emma’s crash pad for the last two weeks—and went straight to the cozy kitchenette. She fished a couple of shot glasses out of a cupboard and brought them into the living room with a bottle of raspberry vodka as shotgun.
“It’s two thirty in the morning,” Emma murmured, feigning just-woke-up energy levels.
“What do you care? You have no job, no home, no prospects.”
That never got old, either. Sighing, Emma swung her legs off the sofa and sat up straight to get drunk off her ass. “Pour away.”
They knocked them back together and flipped them over on the coffee table, already riddled with dried rings commemorating their late-night girl talks over the last two weeks.
“Good night?”
Kat patted her purse. “The clients were extra drunk.”
Emma did not miss that in the slightest.
“No handsome billionaires to whisk me to paradise,” Kat added wistfully.
That was Kat’s way of saying Brody hadn’t stopped by the club to find Emma. Which was just fine. She didn’t need a handsome billionaire to rescue her. She’d been rescuing herself since the age of eight.
Daisy had completed her ninety days and was staying with a friend in Philly. Getting organized was Emma’s number one priority before she could bring her sister back to Chicago—find a place for them both to live, a job to support them, the girl she used to be.