by Lindsey Hart
She was beyond tired, but she felt wired, like she was still buzzed from those few shots of whisky the night before. She knew sleep would pretty much be an impossibility after the night she’d just had.
She also knew that she had to call her dad. Soon. Cason opening up and sharing was like a kick in her motivational butt. She’d run from home and she knew her dad must be worried. God, she could have just done the adult, rational thing and sat down and talked with him. Instead, she’d done the twelve year old thing and ran.
Noemi sipped at her coffee. It still wasn’t very good, even though it was a different barista working. He’d been just as casually rude as the other one. She thought the night her dad told her about Byron so and so and his shoe empire and how it would help their own shoe empire, blah, blah, blah. She’d tune out and checked out for most of it, as she usually did when her dad talked shop. He could go on for hours. She did care, but shoes got a little boring after a while. He’d dropped the big M out of nowhere and that caught her attention, but she’d gone into immediate panic mode and checked out on that too.
Maybe it wasn’t even the whole marriage thing. Maybe she just needed to get out of the house and experience life on her own for the first time ever.
She downed the rest of her nearly cold coffee and set the paper cup on the nightstand. Her dad’s face flooded her memory when she closed her eyes. He had a nice face. A kind face. No matter how busy he was, she was always right up there for him, a major priority, even if he had a hundred other things going on. No matter how stressed he got, no matter how shitty things were after her mom died, it had always been them.
And she’d left without even telling him.
Her chest squeezed and clenched, as jumbled up and messy as her brain was at the moment. It felt a little like someone dipped a spatula in there too and turned her heart, stomach, and other internal organs into a full body stew.
She realized she was being ridiculous and swiped her finger over the trackpad on the laptop to turn the screen back on. Step one in independence, if she really didn’t want her dad to drag her home when she told him where she was- find a place to live.
The sooner she got out of the hotel, the better. It was expensive and renting out an apartment or even a condo would be a heck of a lot cheaper. She browsed dizzily through a few pages of apartments, but there really wasn’t much on the market and the prices were terrible for what they were. One of the places even had a report about bed bugs. Bed. Bugs. It made a shiver rip up her spine and her skin feel crawly at the thought of bugs taking over her house.
She flipped through three different condo rental websites with only a few prospects, which she wrote down on the hotel notepad. Money wasn’t tight. She had her savings and she had a Business Degree, even though she’d literally just graduated. It was always the plan that she work at her dad’s company. So, what if she didn’t have any experience. She could get a job somewhere. She could make a better cup of coffee than anyone at that shop could, she’d say that for herself.
Still. She didn’t want to just rent something and put her name down on a year lease when she felt so unsettled. Was this really where she wanted to be? Was leaving New York and staying away the right thing?
Noemi was about to close her laptop when she thought about houses for rent. Maybe someone out there needed a shorter term roommate. It would give her time to decide what she was going to do with herself without needing to make a long-term commitment to a lease and it would save her some money getting out of the hotel and not being in an expensive condo.
The idea gave her an energy boost, like an espresso shot, only that little glass was filled with straight up inspiration. She did a quick search and came up with a classifieds site that had all sorts of rentals on it.
She searched through a few roommates wanted ads and wrote the numbers down on her notepad before she clicked on the second page.
Her hand froze on the trackpad.
What the hell? There. At the top of the second page was Cason’s house. The exact one. She even double checked the address on the off chance that there were two houses in town that looked exactly the same from the outside. She clicked through the pictures and at the bottom, where it was listed as rented, she checked the date the ad was updated and her whole body began to vibrate with confusion.
Yesterday.
The website listed the house as rented the day before.
It had to be a mistake. Cason said he’d been in town for a while. Isn’t that what he’d said? He’d made it seem like he’d been there for a year. Two years? Maybe she couldn’t remember what he’d said, but he sure as shit hadn’t made it seem like he’d just moved into the place.
Her brain felt less like scrambled eggs and more like eggs over hard, burning, scalding, smoking away. Burnt. That’s what she felt. She felt burned out. No, that wasn’t right either. Burning. She was burning up on the inside. Rage rose in her chest, cutting off the confusion and drowning out logical reason.
I never told him my name.
The thought hit her so hard it nearly toppled her right off the bed like a sucker punch from some douche bag invisible force. She actually righted herself on the bed and straightened her laptop, to keep it from ending up on its side.
She did a quick mental check, searching through her inventory from the day before. She’d seen him in the coffee shop. Cason. He’d rear ended her at the stop sign. She’d offered to exchange information, but he said it wasn’t necessary. At the diner, he’d told her his name. Cason. She hadn’t told him hers, but he knew it. He’d freaking called her Noemi and she’d never told him.
No. No, fucking way.
She rarely swore, even inside her own head. The thought just proved how dialed up her rage truly was. Her hands both shook so badly when she reached for her laptop that she could barely type. She forced herself to enter two names she’d heard only once. From her father. That night he’d told her about the marriage he’d arranged.
She typed them in. Her eyes fixated on the first letter of the first name. B. B for Byron. Not C for Cason. She closed her eyes before she hit ENTER, hoping like heck that she was wrong, and things just weren’t making sense. That she didn’t remember correctly, and she had told Cason her name. That maybe whoever actually owned the house he was renting, though she’d thought it was his, had forgotten to update the site or maybe Cason was moving, and he had a month to get out. There could be a thousand explanations that were all logical.
Except that when she opened eyes that felt grainy and acidic and strained to look at her search, there was a page full of results. And a couple pictures that weren’t the grainy, low resolution print out her dad shoved in her face before she checked the heck out on him mentally and went AWOL physically.
Cason.
Cason started back at her.
The same blue eyes. Eyes she’d recognize anywhere, when they were in color and in focus.
His hair was longer now, but the rest of him was still the same.
Holy fucking fudge nuts. She’d just spent an entire night doing all manner of illicit, wild, amazing things with the man she refused to marry. With a man she’d flown halfway across the country to avoid.
Turned out the bastard had a talent for giving multiple orgasms.
Turned out he was also a lying, cheating, scum sucking, horrible dirt bag who had tricked her, lied to her, tongued her va-jay, and fucked her thoroughly into next week all while she thought he was someone else.
Byron the Bastard. Her mind conjured up the name and it fit. It fit so effing well.
Byron the Bastard had made a fatal mistake doing what he’d done to her.
Byron the Bastard was going down.
Epic flames style.
CHAPTER 14
Byron
Bang bang. Bang bang. Bang baaaannnnngggg.
Byron shot straight upright in bed, the sheets falling away from his chest, pooling at his waist. He blinked into the room, bright now that daylight spilled through the blinds
. His heart thrummed wildly until he realized that he hadn’t been dreaming. The banging really was out there, not some skeletal figure of his imagination. After the nightmare from the night before, in which the last night with his father replayed in vivid technicolor, all the details painfully accurate, he was primed.
The banging continued. Bang, bang, bang. Thwump. Thump. Something followed up what was obviously fists. A foot? Was someone actually out there trying to kick his door down?
Annoyance crawled up his throat and constricted his chest. He fumbled around the room, half asleep, his head a mess from the night before- a night that didn’t even feel real given that Noemi was no longer in bed with him. She was obviously not in the house either, given that the banging went on unabated. If she was there, she probably would have either got the door or got him by now.
He fumbled in the tall dresser in the room for one of the few extra pairs of jeans he’d jammed in there the day before. He tugged the faded denim on and nearly zipped his cock into the zipper in his hurry. He winced, even though his member was currently okay, snugged away and zipper free. He didn’t need to give himself a trip to the ER for the most embarrassing thing on earth. What he needed to do was slow the hell down.
And answer the front fucking door since whoever was out there was still pounding away.
He stumbled to the door, feeling hungover from the few shots he’d had and the tremendous lack of sleep. He was emotionally drained, something he wasn’t used to feeling because usually he shut down and shut that shit out. He wasn’t used to feeling anything and then Hurricane Noemi swept into his life, or more like he went storm chasing and got what he was asking for in a big way. Turned out karma really was a bitch.
Of course, the one person on earth he could actually see himself with, the one person he wanted to get to know, was the one person who wanted nothing to do with him.
The real him.
Not the fake him.
He reached the door without stumbling and falling on his face or tearing a toe off on anything. His eyes still felt grainy and the banging went straight to his already overtired, overworked brain. What the hell time was it anyway? He felt like he’d slept a total of five minutes the night before and it actually physically hurt after the jetlag of the previous days.
Thwamp, thump, bump, bang, bang, baaaannnnggggg…
The pounding went on and on and he turned the handle, realizing that the lock was on. Noemi must have flipped it before she left. Which was nice. She obviously liked him enough to lock the door so no one could come in and steal his shit or murder him in his sleep. He was touched, really.
He tugged the door open ready to give whatever mailman or maybe even the little prick of a landlord out there a piece of his nearly braindead mind.
Noemi.
It took him a surprisingly short amount of time to realize that it wasn’t a mailman, a solicitor, someone peddling religion, or his landlord.
It was a very pissed off, red faced, thin lipped, nostrils flared, brow scrunched, eyes spitting hate, raging version of his sort of fiancé.
Fuck me sideways and backwards. She knows.
Even his foggy-ass brain could process that much. She looked at him, looked down at her tote bag, looked back at him, then pulled out a white piece of paper with a picture on it. Of him.
“You’re a sick piece of shit,” she growled.
Yeah. It was going to be one of those conversations. Nothing good started out that way. He immediately abandoned his plans to talk her down and went right into defense mode.
“Noemi- please. This isn’t- I- I did come looking for you. I just wanted to talk. I wanted to see if we could come to some kind of agreement. I didn’t expect- I- I’m sorry. I- I met you and it just… I wanted to see if you’d actually enjoy hanging out with me. If you could stand me and I could stand you before I told you who I really was.”
All those words, which he was quite proud of his brain for coming up with, obviously pissed her off a hell of a lot more, because her nostrils went wide and wild. Her eyes shot daggers and if fire could actually pour out of her mouth, he’d be roasted on the spot. In short, she looked like a rage machine and he knew he deserved every single second of her wrath.
“Oh really? Was tonging my vagina part of your plan?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Was telling me you were someone else part of your convoluted plan?”
“It wasn’t exactly- er- the plan… it wasn’t exactly a plan. I just had this idea about-”
“Save it. Fuck you, Byron.”
He leaned against the doorway, fully aware that Noemi’s dark eyes were drawn straight to his very naked chest. He flexed a pec and watched her eyes widen and then she ripped them away and focused on her shoes, a plain, sensible black set of flats.
“That would actually be implying that you’d agree to continue on with this charade, or that you were actually into me, which isn’t exactly the message you’re trying to get across, I’m sure.”
More nostril flaring. “You’re a real asshole. God. I can’t believe I fell for this shit. You should be proud. You proved to me how stupid I actually am. I opened up to you. I did things with you that I’ve never done with anyone before.”
“Me too,” he admitted, although he wasn’t sure why he was still offering the truth when he was sure that she didn’t want to hear anything from him, truth or lies.
“Yeah right,” she snorted. Her eyes ripped to his and she looked him straight in the face. “I bet all that shit you told me about your dad wasn’t even true. You just wanted me to feel sorry for you. You probably got that scar being a huge douchebag and someone finally stabbed you with your own pitchfork.”
He crossed his arms slowly, just so she could get an eyeful of his bulging biceps as he did so. Not putting a shirt on had never served him better and he wasn’t too proud to admit it. “Are you implying that I’m the devil?”
“No. You’re worse. Although, you do have a forked tongue. I doubt that one thing that came out of your mouth was genuine.”
“Actually, most of it was genuine. You’re the first person I’ve told about my family. Honestly. Other people knew. The people that worked for my dad, but I’ve never volunteered that information before. I’m a rather private person. My PR team works hard to keep my pictures off the internet, as well as my life story and what happened with my parents. It’s not the kind of shit I want known.”
“Why? Because people wouldn’t buy shoes from someone who basically killed his own father?”
He winced. Yeah. Ouch. That one had barbs. Even though she was pissed, Noemi obviously realized that was over the line and she winced too. Her lips wobbled and she stuck out a hand, bracing herself on the other side of the door frame.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. At least she had the courage to maintain eye contact. “That was a horrible thing to say. Being angry at you being the world’s biggest ass didn’t give me the right to say something like that. I didn’t mean it. Please don’t think that I think that or that it was true. If you actually were honest with me, and I seriously doubt it, so I feel even more like an idiot at the moment, I’m sorry for what happened to you. It obviously scarred you in horrible, irrevocable ways.”
“Turned me into a monster?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“So that was really an apology and an insult all wrapped into one?”
“I don’t honestly know. Take it how you will. Just like you can take this how you want. Oh wait, there really only is one way to take this. I don’t want to have anything else to do with you. I know what you look like now so you can’t trick me again. When my dad hears about what you did, he’ll drop the whole marriage thing. He would never want me to be married to someone who would treat me so callously, lie to me, use me, toy with my feelings. That’s not the kind of husband he’d want for me. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t come after you with everything he has. He’d probably love to ruin your business.”
B
yron leaned against the doorframe a little harder. His legs were doing funny things, threatening to give out and his stomach was doing worse shit, dropping down somewhere around his toes, but he was good at putting on a face by then and tried to appear as causal as possible.
“Yes, well, to do that, he’d have to ruin your reputation first. Are you going to tell him all the sordid details? Every single thing we did, just to really help him understand? Because if he heard where I was coming from, that I wanted to get to meet you and help you get to know me so you could make an informed decision, I think he’d be on board with that.”
Noemi’s face turned a deep shade of scarlet so abruptly he nearly stepped back to avoid being slapped. “You’re a real class act, Byron. God. Seriously. Do my father and I both a favor and stay out of our lives. If you want to sell your shitty shoes in Europe, do it on your own.”
His eyes flicked back down to the black flats she had on, right when she said the word shoes. She shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, as though she just realized that she’d made a fatal error.
Because she was wearing his shoes.
They were unmistakably his shoes.
“You’re wearing my shoes,” he pointed out, because he was a serious asshole and she was right, he was beyond redemption. “Are they comfy? Your go-to pair? So much so that you completely forgot and didn’t even realize when you slipped into them? They look nice and worn in. Like you actually enjoy them. Do you think they’d sell well in Europe? I could really use your endorsement if your father isn’t going to give me his. Hold on. One second. I’ll get my phone. Just wait. Wait right there…”
“You’re terrible!” Noemi’s hand flashed out, fast, but he was faster.
She tried to hit him. She was aiming for his face, but likely would have struck somewhere around neck level. He’d never been smacked there before and anticipated a good Adam’s apple punch wouldn’t feel great, so he captured her wrist in his hand. She tugged, trying to dislodge her hand from his grip, but he wouldn’t unwind his fingers no matter how much smoke was pouring out of her ears.
