Undercover in the CEO's Bed(30)
“I’m not yet a corpse,” she snipped as she hauled herself upright. “I need to go after them. I need to talk to her.”
“Holly?”
“No, Nancy, of course.”
“Her? You want to talk with Nancy?”
She drew away from him, her face drawn, all her previous joy snuffed out. “Somebody has to.”
He could only watch as his grandmother limped from the room without another word. Only Jacinta remained in the library. In the stillness he heard the blood pounding inside his skull.
“Well?” He swept his palm across his brow and realized he was covered in sweat. “Aren’t you going to say I told you so?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry it turned out this way for you.” She pleated her fingers together, then unpleated them. “It must have been a shock for you, learning about—about Nancy and your dad.”
His insides spasmed again. He bent to pick up the copies of the meeting agenda strewn across the carpet. “I guess I shouldn’t be that shocked. My dad had countless affairs, after all.” He riffled the sheets that Nancy had conscientiously produced. She’d always been so industrious and self-effacing. Everyone, including him, had taken her for granted.
“If my dad hadn’t used her and then neglected her, she wouldn’t have felt the urge to revenge herself.” But Philip wasn’t the only one responsible for this mess. With a muttered expletive, he ripped up the sheets of paper and hurled them into a wastepaper basket. “Who the hell am I kidding? I’m as much to blame as my lying, womanizing bastard of a father.”
His lack of trust, that was what had brought him undone.
“Will you be all right?”
The concern in Jacinta’s voice intensified his headache. He stared at her and realized he wanted to bury his face into her hair. He wanted to feel her arms around him holding him tight. But he couldn’t afford to succumb to his weakness.
He stretched his lips into a bleak smile. “I’ll survive. I always do.”
“Will you?” Her brow puckered. “But you still haven’t told them about the business problems. How will you get any consensus from your family now?”
Now that they knew how much he had mistrusted them. But right now he didn’t want to think about it.
He affected a nonchalant shrug. “I’ll think of something. It’s not the first time I’ve had run-ins with my relatives.”
The line remained between her eyes. It irked him to see her so worried. Did she think he was about to crumble under the pressure? If so, she had no idea what he was made of. He didn’t need anyone’s pity.
“There’s nothing more to do here,” he said brusquely. “We may as well head back to San Francisco right now.”
“What about your grandmother?”
The thought of his nana made him scowl harder.
“You saw her a minute ago. She doesn’t want me around.” Impatience surged over him. He wheeled around and headed for the door. “Come on. Let’s finish packing and get the hell out of here.”
Chapter Twelve
When they returned to their room, Lex said to Jacinta, “Can you hurry with your packing? I want to leave as soon as possible.”
His face was a rigid mask, shutting her out just as he had downstairs in the library. She’d tried to show her concern, but he didn’t need her.
“I suppose this is it,” she said slowly, a leaden weight sinking into her guts. “We don’t need to pretend we’re a couple anymore.” God, was that a mournful note in her voice?
Lex grabbed a couple of things off his nightstand and threw them into his suitcase. “No, we don’t.” He said it with such forcefulness, like he was drawing a line in the sand. For him, this was the end. Full stop. No gray areas.
He stalked into the bathroom. She waited until he returned with his toiletry bag before saying, “We have to sort out this engagement thing before we leave.”
Lex pulled a face as he added the bag to his luggage. “Can’t that wait?”
Her eyes widened, and try as she might, she couldn’t suppress a tiny throb of hope. “What do you mean? Your grandmother still thinks we’re engaged. She still thinks we’re a couple. Don’t you want to tell her the truth?”
“She’s had a stressful morning. I’m not going to add to her troubles. I’ll tell her later.”
It felt as though her heart was deflating. For a second there she’d thought that maybe, just maybe, Lex might want to prolong their fake relationship for his own enjoyment. But of course he didn’t.
“Fine.” Jacinta sighed.
“But you can give me the ring now, and I’ll keep it safe.”
“Oh.” Her back stiffened. “What do you mean ‘keep it safe’? You don’t trust me with this ring? Think I’m going to run off with it?”
Temper flashed across his dark face. “For Pete’s sake, I just found out the woman I trusted for years was going behind my back. You think I’m in the mood for a lecture about trust?”
“And you made me sign a piece of paper promising I’d keep my mouth shut, so I know you have trust issues, but I’m not Nancy, or your father, or your college friend! I’m me. I thought we were in this together.”
“You didn’t want to help me until I’d jumped through your hoops,” he shot at her. “You’re only in this because of Kevin. We had a business arrangement, that’s all, and now that business is finished, so you can hand my grandmother’s ring back to me.”
Her spirits slumped even further. She glanced at the glittering ring weighing down her finger. When Lex had slid it onto her finger, and she’d felt his hands trembling as much as hers, for a surreal moment she’d imagined they truly were promised to each other. But it was all a mirage.
She tugged at the ring, but it wouldn’t move. “It’s stuck.” She wrestled with it again, still without luck. Lex was beginning to look exasperated. He probably thought she was faking having trouble with the ring just to annoy him. She thrust out her hand to him. “Here, you do it.”
He twisted the ring, his hands still gentle on hers, but the ring remained stubbornly in place. He swiped his forearm across his brow. “Shit, this thing is stuck like cement.” A hint of panic lurked in his voice. “Let’s try some soap.”
He grabbed her by the hand and marched her into the bathroom, where he briskly lathered up her hand with soap and resumed his efforts. “We gotta get this off. Dammit.”
His alarm stung her. “You don’t have to look so scared,” she said stiffly. “I’m not going to hold you to this engagement.”
“What? The hell I’m scared.”
“Then why are you so anxious to rip the ring off my finger?”
He dropped her soapy hand, rinsed himself off, and grabbed a towel. “You’re the one who wants to break off the engagement right away,” he flung at her, deep lines scoring his brow.
“It’s not a real engagement!” Her heart thudded.
“It is to my grandmother.”
“So you want to prolong it, just for her sake?”
Silence throbbed in the cool, marble-tiled bathroom. He tilted his head back and let out a groan. “God help me, I don’t want to be engaged.”
It felt as if he’d slipped a knife through her ribs. “Me neither, buddy,” she retorted through clenched teeth.
She resumed wriggling the ring, and as she fought with it, her own panic rose. She had to get this ring off before Lex saw how much it meant to her. How much he meant to her. Because when he’d stated so baldly that he didn’t want to be engaged, that was when the walls of denial she’d built up began to fall apart, and every second this ring remained on her finger brought the truth louder and clearer to her—she was in love with Lex.
And this time, it wasn’t just the electric physical love she felt for him each time he touched her, but a stronger, broader emotional connection that ran fathoms deep, because now she saw him in his entirety. He wasn’t just Lex, the super sex god and all-around alpha male. He was also Lex, the man who would do anything for his grandmother, who put up with his best friend’s teasing, who covered for an imperfect father, who wanted so desperately to trust his family.
He was stubborn and arrogant, and yet he was also vulnerable and unsure. She saw his faults and understood them and loved him for them, and she was so, so in love with him it made her achy and trembly and teary. And she was violently afraid he would see the emotion scrawled all over her face like a billboard, guess the truth, and be...dismayed. That was one humiliation she couldn’t bear. So she kept her head bent over the basin as she struggled with the ring.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” Lex said curtly, clamping his hand over hers to still her furious efforts.
Her emotions were stretched to breaking point, and the rough touch of his hand splintered her brittle self-control. She flung herself away, soap lather spraying in all directions. “Goddammit, Lex. This is all your fault!”
“My fault?”
“Of course it is.” Yes, anger was good. Anger kept the mushy feelings at bay. Anger masked her breaking heart. “None of this would’ve been necessary if you’d only been able to trust your family. No need for snooping around and pretend girlfriends and fake engagements.”