by Lexy Timms
Austin shook his head, and I hated the pity I could see there in his eyes. “You know the truth would have come out eventually,” he reminded me. We’d had this conversation before, and that was exactly what he always reminded me. The press were always there following me; they would have outed Ivy’s secret eventually. Better that I found things out in private and was able to call things off before they could really get ugly. Better that I broke things off with her before I got used to calling her my wife.
“I know.” I sighed. “And I know I should probably be happy that Abby just doesn’t want anything to do with any of that. That she doesn’t want the press to know anything about her. It’ll make her great in her role as my advisor.”
“But you’d rather she fit into the role as your girlfriend,” Austin surmised.
I shrugged one shoulder and then shook my head. “Look, I don’t really want to talk about any of this anymore. She’s back to work for me, and I guess that’s something.”
“Are you going to try to convince her to change her mind?” Austin asked curiously.
“Of course not.” I sighed. “She made it clear that she doesn’t want anything to do with me. And it’s like you said before, when I told you about the good work she does for me. I don’t want to do anything that could make her want to quit working for me. Not least of which because I don’t want to deal with the hassle of having to hire someone else.” I paused and squared my shoulders. “So if she doesn’t want to date me, then I just have to respect that.”
Austin nodded at me. “That’s a pretty brave position to take,” he commented.
I gave him a bitter smile. “Well, what else could I do?” I wasn’t looking for an answer.
I knew what I’d like to do, and it was exactly what I had just maintained that I wouldn’t do. I’d like to keep things easy between me and Abby for now, a bookmark of sorts. I’d tame my wild ways, quit getting caught partying and running around town with various women.
Of course, there were some stories I would never be able to help, like when the press had snapped a photo of me outside McGregor Enterprises’ offices with two of my employees as I hailed a cab for them. Or those business-related outings with daughters of the men I worked with. But I could make Abby see, I was sure, that I didn’t always have to be in the media’s eye. And that she wouldn’t have to, either.
I knew that wasn’t going to help my situation, though. Abby was the kind of woman where once she got something in her head, that was just the way that things were. And she was cautious in matters of the heart, I could tell. I couldn’t blame her for that.
I had lost my chance with her. That was all there was to it.
Because the one thing I hadn’t addressed, something I hadn’t talked to Austin about, was the other part of what Abby had said. About how she didn’t want to be with someone violent. I would never do anything to hurt her, but I knew that I hadn’t exactly shown her my best side that night at the bar. And there was no coming back from that.
Suddenly, I raised my arm to signal the bartender that I’d like another round. When he came over with our drinks, I glanced around. There weren’t too many people in there, and I was pretty glad that they were so accepting of my presence there still.
“Oh, what the hell,” I said to the bartender. “Let me buy the next round for the whole place.”
Austin shook his head, but he refrained from saying anything.
He also let the topic of my relationship, or non-relationship, with Abby drop, for which I was grateful. But that didn’t mean I could quit thinking about her. And the more I thought about her, from her business decisions to her long legs and back again, the more I drank. I bought another couple of rounds for the bar, telling Austin that I didn’t want to be drinking alone.
He gave me a look. “You’re not drinking alone,” he reminded me. “I’m right here.”
I shook my head. “That’s not the same,” I insisted. “If you were the only person getting drunk with me, then I would spend the whole night talking to you. But I don’t want to talk right now. I’ve lost Abby, man, and all I want is to get fucking drunk and then go home and go to bed.”
Austin sighed and plucked my half-empty beer glass out of my hand, dumping it in the sink behind the bar before I could even form a protest on my lips. “I think it’s time to get you home to bed now,” he said.
I frowned at him and folded my arms across my chest. “There was a time when you would have encouraged me to get drunker and drunker,” I said, knowing by the petulance in my words that I was already pretty well sloshed and that Austin was probably right. Time to get me home.
Not that I was going to admit that to him.
Instead, I stuck out my arm, trying to flag down the bartender so I could get another beer, since someone had dumped mine out. The bartender was focused on his conversation with the brunette at the far end of the bar, though.
She was cute, I had to admit. But all I could do was compare her to Abby. God, that woman had ruined me for life. I hadn’t even felt this bad when I had broken things off with Ivy. But then again, when I had broken things off with Ivy, I had been angry. With Abby, I just felt empty. Powerless to change things.
I wasn’t used to feeling powerless, in my line of business.
Suddenly, I didn't want to be there anymore. The bar was noisy, even considering that it was a Monday night. Everyone around me was drunk, with the possible exception of Austin. I wondered how many of them would go home with strangers that night. Abruptly, I didn’t want to be part of any of it.
I wheeled around and headed toward the door with Austin at my heels, just as the bartender finally turned away from the cute brunette. I barely noticed that, though. I let Austin bundle me into a taxi and send me home.
Unfortunately, since we had come all the way across town from work, it took a while to get home. And in that time, I could practically feel myself sobering up. The empty house did nothing to soothe my melancholy of the night. I stood in the doorway of my office, staring at my desk. If only I could go back to that focus I’d had, earlier in my life. Before Ivy had come along and wrecked everything.
I poured myself another drink, this time a scotch neat. Then, I settled into my favorite leather armchair, staring out at the lonely night, wondering if behind every light in this city of Chicago, there was someone as lonely as me.
In that moment, though, it didn’t feel like anyone else in the world could possibly feel the way I did.
Chapter 8
Abby
I TOLD MYSELF ON TUESDAY morning that I wasn’t going to check the papers. I wasn’t going to actively try to find out if Daniel had been out with someone the night before. If he had been, it was his own business. It didn’t change things between us, either way. I couldn’t let it change things between us.
But of course, when I woke up on Tuesday morning, I was so jittery just trying to predict how the day would go that I figured one little look wouldn’t hurt.
I felt disgusted with myself, but I was happy to see that there was no new news about Daniel McGregor that morning. I smiled smugly to myself and headed into the office ready to face a new day. I shouldn’t be looking forward to seeing Daniel, but I couldn’t help it; I was.
When I got to the office, Daniel wasn’t in yet. That wasn’t entirely unusual. I checked his schedule to see what our morning looked like and was surprised to see that there weren’t any meetings scheduled. Odd. I didn’t think that had ever happened since I’d started working for the company.
Maybe Daniel meant to give me time to catch up on all the changes that had taken place in the two weeks I’d been gone? But I was sure that I’d been mostly caught up on all of that the previous day. Sure, I could take my time leisurely going over everything I had missed or catching up on some of the other business accounts that I hadn’t touched yet. I could research into the companies that we’d be meeting with over the coming week.
But what the hell was Daniel planning on doing during that
time?
He still wasn't there by 9:00 a.m. I frowned toward his empty office, drumming my fingers against the edge of my desk. Finally, I went over to Erin’s desk. “Hey, any idea where Daniel is?” I asked.
Erin glanced over her shoulder at the darkened office and then shrugged. “He called a little while ago,” she said. “He said he’d be in a little later today.”
I stared at her as though she had grown two heads. Daniel never came in late. “Does he have an appointment or something?” I asked. But it was odd for that not to be on his calendar. He didn’t keep a separate work and personal calendar, figuring that if someone needed to get in contact with him, they could determine whether it was a good time to bother him. Besides, Erin was the one scheduling most of his business meetings, so she needed to know if he wasn’t going to be there.
Erin shook her head, though. “Nah, no appointment. He just said that he was going to be late.”
I felt as though someone had dropped a bucketful of ice right into my belly. Maybe I had been wrong after all. Maybe Daniel had been out with someone the previous night and someone managed to evade the press. Or maybe he’d invited someone he knew directly over to his place. Why else would he be late this morning?
I could practically picture them curled up together in his bed. I remembered how Daniel had made breakfast for me that one night I had stayed over there. Did he do that for all of his women? At the time, that had seemed like such a sweet gesture, something so incongruous with the playboy personality that the press insisted on portraying him as having. But now, I wasn’t so sure. Maybe he just had a routine with the women he slept with. Maybe I had walked right into his act without even knowing it.
I spent the morning feeling worse and worse about the relationship between us. I couldn’t keep my eyes from straying to the door every so often, waiting for him to arrive. So that I could what? It wasn’t as though I could confront him about my suspicions. It wasn’t any of my business. The sooner I could get that through my head, the better things were going to be for me.
If I had this much trouble with the idea of Daniel sleeping around, I probably shouldn’t be working for him anymore, I realized around 11:00 a.m. I swallowed hard, glancing over toward Erin’s desk, and then opened a private tab in my browser. With the way that my desk was situated, no one would be able to see over my shoulder as I searched for new business positions rather than continuing to leaf through the files of information on our latest business proposals.
I closed the tabs guiltily when Daniel finally walked in just before lunch, however.
I watched him go into his office, noting how slowly he was moving. I glanced over at Erin, who gave me a meaningful look. I rolled my eyes at her and then headed into my boss’s office.
“Are you all right?” I asked Daniel when I had closed the office door behind myself.
Daniel groaned piteously. He looked even worse up close, deep shadows beneath his eyes and his skin sallow and sickly looking. I didn’t think I had ever seen him look this bad before, not in any of the photos the media had ever posted even.
He gave me a sheepish smile, though. “I’m sorry I left you to your own devices this morning,” he told me, his voice gravelly like he’d spent half the night shouting. “Hope you had enough to do?”
“Yeah, it was fine,” I said, opting not to tell him what I had spent the morning doing: staring at the same information over and over again while I thought about all the things he might have been up to the previous night with someone else, before finally deciding it was time for me to search for new positions elsewhere. “Seriously, are you okay? You look rough.”
The words were out before I had given them conscious form in my thoughts, and I winced, expecting Daniel to say something snide in response. I had basically just told Chicago’s hottest young billionaire that he looked like shit.
But he grinned at me. “To be honest, I had a few too many drinks last night with Austin.”
I frowned. It wasn’t like him to be late for work, no matter what the paparazzi had to say about his partying ways. For him to admit he was late because he was badly hungover had to mean that something else had been going on.
“Were you celebrating something?” I tried.
Daniel stared at me for a long moment, looking surprised that I had asked that. Slowly, he shook his head. “No. Definitely not celebrating.”
“Oh,” I said. Suddenly, I realized what he meant. Surely I was wrong, though? He wasn’t trying to tell me that he was this hungover, that he’d had so much to drink last night, because he’d been thinking about me? Surely he wasn’t telling me that he was as miserable without me as I was without him?
But from the way that he was watching me, I realized that it was. Oh.
I wished that there was something I could say to make things better. For both of us. But instead, all I could feel was awkward. I hated that I had taken this wonderful, kind man and turned him into the kind of guy who went on a Monday-night bender that affected his ability to make it to work on time the next morning.
Belatedly, I remembered that I still had some baby Tylenol in my purse from the last time I had watched Layla when she was sick. I slipped out of Daniel’s office, figuring that he probably wouldn’t go anywhere in the time it took me to find those and a glass of water. Sure enough, when I got back, he was still sitting there looking pathetic.
“So you’re probably going to have to take about eight of these to make any difference, but on the plus side, they’re all tiny,” I told him, handing him the whole bottle as well as the glass of water. “But next time, you might want to stick with the popcorn and marshmallows. I feel fine today.”
I couldn’t resist smirking at him as he stared uncomprehendingly up at me for a moment. Slowly, he reached out and accepted my peace offerings. He frowned at the bottle and then opened it, emptying about half the pills into his palm before tossing them all back at once.
“I didn’t realize you had children,” he said carefully as he put the lid back on the bottle. He wasn’t looking at me, but I could see a flicker of uncertainty in his gaze. It just drove home to me how ridiculous we had been, getting so far in over our heads so quickly. We still barely knew each other.
I shook my head gently. “I don’t have any children,” I told him. “But I do have a little niece and nephew. My brother’s kids.” I smiled at him before he could leap to any more incorrect conclusions. “Actually, that’s who I went to see the movie with last night: my sister-in-law and her two kids.”
“Oh,” Daniel said quietly, sounding properly chagrined. “You had a good time?”
“I did,” I told him, deciding it wouldn’t do any good to tell him that I’d been missing him the previous night as well. Better that he didn’t know that. Things already felt awkward enough right now. But there was nothing we could do to fix it.
Except that I was going to keep working, and working damned hard, so that maybe, eventually, he’d be able to think of just my work things when he thought of me. So that maybe, eventually, he would be able to write me a recommendation when I went to apply for other positions. I could only hope that he could do that one day.
I didn’t want to think about how badly I’d screwed up this position in the first weeks of being there. This position that I said I’d been waiting my whole damned life for. Looking through the job boards that morning, I hadn’t been able to find anything even remotely as interesting, that was the thing.
But if I wanted to keep this position, then I was going to have to work for it. I could do that, though. I was ready to do that.
“I’m going to take my lunch break now, but when I get back, we should have just enough time to go over how we want to attack this afternoon’s meeting with the board,” I said to Daniel, knowing that would also give him a little time to start feeling better, now that he had taken some Tylenol.
Sure enough, Daniel smiled at me. “Sounds like a plan,” he said as I headed for the door. “Thanks for everything, Abb
y.”
“You’re welcome,” I told him, trying not to think about all the reasons he shouldn’t be thanking me. He knew the score as well as I did. No point dwelling on it; we both needed to start moving forward.
Chapter 9
Daniel
I COULDN’T REMEMBER ever feeling this hungover before, and I couldn’t help looking back at the previous night and wishing that Austin had cut me off sooner, or that I hadn’t done any more drinking when I had gotten home, or that I had at least stuck to beer when I did get home and decided to continue drinking on my own. But that was hindsight for you.
Plenty of things I would have done differently with the whole Abby situation too, if I had the chance to go back and redo them. That didn’t mean things were ever going to be any different. It was all just wishful thinking.
Talking to Abby on Tuesday morning felt good, though. She relaxed me, and I already felt a lot less shitty than I had when I had woken up that morning. Not just because of the Tylenol she had given me, either.
I felt so stupid for assuming that because she had baby Tylenol in her purse, she must have children that she hadn’t told me about. But fortunately, she hadn’t seemed offended when I’d said that. Instead, she just seemed amused. She had been so good to me, even though I knew I must have left her in the lurch by not showing up this morning. I hadn’t really told her what her tasks were going to be for the coming week, because I was honestly still surprised she had really agreed to come back to work with me.
It made me wish that things could be different between us. But I could tell that she was keeping things strictly professional, not even letting our fingers brush as she handed me the pill bottle. I forced myself to respond with the same.
And I vowed that this wasn’t going to become the new norm for me. I couldn’t let my whole business tank just because I had lost Abby. If that was a fear of mine, then I was going to need to turn the business over to someone else while I took a sabbatical or something.
