I heard a door shut—his office door? Then he sighed. “There is nothing for you to follow up with, Cade. I gave the info to my guy as soon as I got back from lunch yesterday. Then I stayed up last night looking into a few things myself. Discovered a couple of other things for my guy to research—some out of the norm purchases, a pattern of runaways, etc., etc.—and as soon as he finds a single bit of useful information, he will get back to me, and I will get back to you. You get how that works? I call you. There wasn’t a part of that scenario where you call me.”
When Donovan got patronizing, it was time to hang up. Or punch him, but there was the whole we weren’t near each other thing, and violence wasn’t a real motivator where D was concerned.
But he’d said something I couldn’t let slide. “A pattern of runaways? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Right now, it means exactly what Jolie said yesterday—teens run away. Ninety-nine percent of teens who do return home, even when abuse is involved, which is often. So even if Stark had pulled his shit with other kids, they would fit into the statistical data. Problem is, of all the runaways that have been reported at Stark Academy, I can only find one that’s shown up again, and that’s you.”
Shit.
But data could be skewed. “Technically, I disappeared for a long fucking time too.”
“I’m sure none of the other runaways shared your unique circumstances.” He cleared his throat, and now he sounded like he was in motion, walking to his desk maybe. “Point is, it’s unusual, and it’s being looked into, and I will get you something eventually. Now’s the part where you leave me alone and let that happen.”
“Fine, fine. Fine.” What other reaction could I have?
But that left me with nothing to do and a woman I needed to avoid in the next room. “I’ll come by the office then to work. Put me on something to help with Weston being gone.”
“Don’t come in. Anything I have for you to do, I’d have to explain first, and that will take more time than just doing it. If you’re here, you’ll be in the way.”
I resented that comment, but I’d have said the same thing if he tried to show up at the Tokyo office and help out, and he’d only been gone from there for six months.
Through the door, I heard the sofa bed creak. Then creak again. Jolie was awake, and panic returned. “What the hell am I supposed to do with her in the meantime?”
I could practically hear his smirk. “Holed up in a hotel room together? I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
I hung up with more cursing. Fucking prick. Was that why he didn’t want me in the office? Was he withholding shit just to try to make his odds better on that stupid bet?
The only reason I didn’t truly believe that was the case was because Donovan was too cocky to think his wagers needed interference. And to back up his point, he’d almost won last night.
Or, wait—had he won? Did BJs count as fucking?
Since we hadn’t defined terms, I decided only fucking counted as fucking, which meant I hadn’t lost, and I was resolved not to lose.
But I was also realistic—the two of us holed up in a hotel room together really wasn’t working in my favor.
I leaned my head against the headboard, half listening as Jolie moved around the suite. The water turned on at the minibar. Making coffee, probably. The volume on the TV was turned up. The Friends theme song played.
The other half of my brain tried to remember back to when I was ten, and we’d moved to Poughkeepsie with Stan, my mother’s boyfriend of the moment. Stan had been one of the more decent father figures in my life, which meant he didn’t just ignore me or keep me locked in a bedroom all the time. It also meant he sometimes took me to the movies or let me go on day trips with the neighbor kids.
One such winter trip stuck in my head.
I picked up my phone and scrolled through a few things. Checked out my options.
Then I pulled on yesterday’s jeans and a Henley from one of the dresser drawers and forced myself out of the bedroom.
As soon as I saw her, curled up in her panties and my T-shirt with a mug of black coffee in front of the television, I realized I should have taken a moment to prepare myself for being in her presence. Were we going to act like last night didn’t happen? How was I planning to deal with the fact that every time I looked at her mouth, my dick got hard?
Fortunately, she decided the first answer for us. “Hey,” she said, barely glancing at me before returning her gaze to her show. “There’s still a pod of coffee if you want me to make some for you. Housekeeping only left two that aren’t decaf, and I’m already drinking this one.”
Normal then. We’d act normal.
“I got it. Thanks.” Except this wasn’t normal because there was no way I’d be making hotel coffee, and here I was, adding water to the machine. I peered warily at her like she was an unpredictable dog, one that I had to keep tabs on in case she suddenly decided to bite.
That wasn’t fair.
So far, I’d been the one who’d done all the biting. She’d been perfectly nice. Nicer than necessary.
And now I was thinking about her on her knees again.
I forced my head in another direction. “So, uh, talked to Donovan. He’s working on a few leads, but it’s going to be a few days.”
She didn’t blink. “I figured.”
“You planning on doing anything today?”
“Considering that I have two hundred fifty left in my account—that will probably pay for my meals this week with just enough left for the car ride to the airport—no. No plans.” Abruptly, she turned her attention to me, as though she just realized I might be trying to get rid of her. “Do you need me to get out of your hair? I can find something to keep me occupied outside the room.”
She started to stand up, but I waved her to stay put. “No, no. I wasn’t getting at that.” I concentrated on the task of coffee making, wondering why it was so hard to extend a simple invitation.
She seemed to sense I had more to say. “Do you need to go into the office? I’ll be fine here alone if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Come on, you pussy. Just fucking say it.
I turned to her. “Actually, I was thinking… Donovan doesn’t need anything more from us, and sitting around here all day’s just gonna make me stir-crazy. I don’t know about you, but, um. We should just forget all the shit going on. For the day. Get out of here. Do something fun.”
She looked at me in that way of hers, the way I’d never forgotten, where she made me feel like I was the only person that mattered on the planet. “Did you have something in mind?”
She wasn’t flirting, really. Wasn’t trying to be suggestive at all, and probably most definitely wasn’t thinking about being spread out on that sofa bed so I could eat her like a breakfast buffet, so I made myself ignore the fantasy that had just popped in my head and focused on the idea I’d had when I brought the whole thing up. “Yeah. I think I do.”
“Awesome. I’m game.” Without even knowing what I had in mind, she was on board. Like she trusted me.
I had to not let myself think about that too long. “Cool. Dress warm.”
I abandoned the tasteless coffee—we could pick up to-go in the hotel lobby on our way out—and went back in the bedroom so I could shoot Donovan a text. I’m going to need to borrow your car.
Nineteen
An hour later, we were in Donovan’s Jag, headed out of the city, and surprisingly, considering the fact that I hadn’t been behind a wheel in years, I was managing the New York City traffic without any problems.
Donovan’s threat to cut off my dick if I returned his car harmed in any way might have had something to do with my attentiveness.
Fortunately, concentrating on the task at hand made a good excuse for silence, but thirty minutes into the trip, we turned on I-87, and from there it was smooth sailing.
After that, the quiet between us might not have been awkward, but it did give me time to think, and t
he things my mind kept wanting to think about were complicated and heavy. Our past. Stark’s future. Jolie’s eyes. Jolie’s lips.
Several times I found myself thinking about the night before, and not just the dirty parts, but the haunting parts. You probably don’t still think love can save the day, she’d said. You can’t separate now from the past, she’d said. Because we’re not strangers? After all these years, we kind of are.
The last one was the one that tormented me most. Probably because it was the accusation that I felt I had the most control over. We were strangers, but we didn’t have to be. We were strangers, but I could do something to change that.
Getting to know her might have seemed a counterintuitive way to go about getting closure, but in reality, not knowing her anymore was one of the things that stung the most about the status of our relationship. I used to know all of her. I’d wanted to know all of her for a lifetime. I’d planned on loving all of her forever.
Trying to hold her over the years had been like holding sand. Every day, some part of her slipped away, which had made me even more desperate to hold on to the parts of her that I still had.
So maybe if I didn’t feel like I was clutching onto scraps, I could finally relax, open my fingers, and let her go.
Or maybe I’d just have more to clutch onto. Fuck if I knew. But it was as good of a plan as any.
I tapped the button on the steering wheel that adjusted the radio volume, and the You + Me Spotify list she’d turned on faded to background noise. She looked at me expectantly, assuming I must have something I wanted to say.
I really should have figured out what that was exactly before I’d turned down the sound. “You, um. You said we’re strangers. It’s weird. Thinking of you as a stranger.”
Fantastic preface, asswipe. I was a bumbling teenager again, with absolutely no chill.
The corners of her mouth lowered, and she turned her head to look out the window. “That’s my fault. I know that wasn’t fair to you.”
“That wasn’t what.” I glanced at the back of her head and resisted the urge to touch her to try to get her to look back. “I wasn’t trying to place blame. I was saying that, um.” Why was it so hard to have an honest conversation with her? “I’m saying I don’t like it.”
“Oh.” She turned her face back to study me, again in that way that made me feel like I was everything. “I don’t like it either,” she said, and it felt like she was making a confession. As though she wasn’t sure she had the right to feel that way.
I wasn’t sure she had the right either.
But I was glad she didn’t like it.
With both of us on the same page, conversation should have flowed easily from there. Yet a whole song had started and finished before either of us spoke again.
“I’m a teacher,” she said.
“You are?” I’d been handed gold. That little bit of information, tiny and miniscule in the wording, filled an entire quadrant of the Jolie puzzle. From this, I could envision the structure of her days. Could see the makeup of her years. I could begin to imagine the pattern of her life that had for so long seemed like a deep black, shapeless sea.
“Yeah.” She gave me her best smile, and I knew now that she also liked the job. “Middle school literary arts. But I’ve taught high school too. And filled in for the assistant principal for a semester while he was having back surgery. My bachelor’s is in secondary education English, but my master’s is in educational leadership and policy.”
“So you could one day take over the academy?”
She nodded without really committing. “I mean, it was always in the back of my mind. Also, it just seemed like the most natural thing for me to do. Kind of in my blood.”
“Yeah.” When we’d been kids, we’d been so hell-bent on leaving everything behind that I’d never considered she’d follow the career path of her ancestors.
It made sense. From a practical, adult perspective, of course it did, and I was happy for her for finding her place like that.
But was it really her place? Or was it just a trap?
She had to know what I was thinking. “It was half the reason I hesitated too, Cade. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the family legacy. I didn’t want…” She shook her head, changing her course. “I didn’t even go to college until I was twenty-five.”
“Not really typical of a Stark alum.” The academy promotional material bragged endlessly about the high percentage of graduates who pursued higher education.
“Not at all typical. I was proud of that. It felt rebellious, throwing away my potential and such.” She picked up her phone from her lap and paused the playlist altogether. “Then I realized that throwing away my potential hurt me more than it hurt Daddy, and I was already working at the school so what was the point of avoiding it?”
“You worked at the academy?”
“I did. For a handful of years. Administrative stuff, mostly. Substitute teacher. Daddy didn’t think a degree was necessary when the school was in the family. I didn’t need any credentials. I was already hired. Which is bullshit, by the way, because you most certainly need credentials to run a school. But. Well. You know Daddy.”
I did. But I didn’t know what method he’d used to bully her into doing his bidding. Was it emotional and psychological manipulation? That seemed to be his favorite tactic with Jolie. Or had he resorted to physical abuse? She would have been an adult, but I doubted that would have stopped him from striking her if he’d thought it would be effective.
It was tricky wanting to know the present while having to dance around the past. It wasn’t that her father or our time together was necessarily off limits, but I knew that if we went there, there was no coming back, and I wasn’t sure that was a trip I wanted to take.
So I didn’t ask the questions I wanted to ask and resigned myself to being content with what she chose to share on her own.
“When I finally decided to get a degree, I wasn’t planning to ever go back to Stark Academy. But I kept returning to the education courses in the catalog. Like I said—it’s in my blood. So I thought I’d try it until something else stole my interest, and no one else ever did.”
My heart missed a beat.
I glanced at her and saw her cheeks pinken. “Nothing else ever did, I mean.”
But now I wanted to know about her slip. Had she said that for a reason? Had there really been no one over the years? That couldn’t be possible.
It would have been easy enough to ask. Natural, too. That was exactly the kind of thing a person asked about when catching up.
But I couldn’t get myself to form the words, and then she was talking again. “I took a vacation week to come here. I don’t have to be back until Monday, but I booked my flight for Friday because I thought I might need a couple of days after being here to…” Recover. She didn’t have to fill in the blank. “There’s only one more week before winter break, and I have more vacation. I could call in if we need more time. My lesson plans are already done.”
No one else.
I could feel her eyes on me, waiting for an answer. “I think we need to wait until Donovan comes back to us before we think about that.”
“Right. Sure.” A beat passed, and I wondered if she knew what I was thinking. No one else. No one else. “What about you?”
There’d been no one else for me. Not anyone that I’d loved. Fucked, yes. Fucking wasn’t the same.
But she couldn’t be asking about that. What had she said before? “I’m one of the owners of my company. I get all the vacation I want.”
She chuckled. “I meant…” She paused, as though trying to decide what exactly it was she meant. Then twisted in her seat to better face me. “How did you get involved with Donovan Kincaid?”
“He recruited me from, uh…” This wasn’t necessarily safer ground. It would be if I stuck to my lie, the one I told most often when other people asked this question, but this was Jolie.
And I meant it about not wanting us
to be strangers.
I went with the truth. “From dealing art. Forged art.”
“Oh.” My answer had startled her, but when she processed it, she had no judgment in her expression. “How do you get into a business like that? I’m sure there’s not an application.”
“You meet someone who knows a guy who knows another guy. I started out legit. Got a degree in international finance management. I was good at math in…” I didn’t need to tell her my best subjects from school. “Well, you know. There’s a lot of boring ways to use math, but I thought international would be an opportunity to get out of the country. But you can’t really get anywhere without a master’s, and when I graduated with my bachelor’s, I had more student loan debt than I could afford, so when a guy I knew said he had a line on how to make some cash, I took the job.”
“What did you do exactly? You didn’t forge the art.”
I laughed. We both knew I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body.
But I also wasn’t really interested in going into the specifics of what I’d done in the early days. The people I’d beat up. The ways I’d threatened men who got in our way. “Mostly, I was just there to look scary.”
“I never thought of you as looking scary back in high school.”
“Well, that’s why I was intent on bulking up. I wanted to look scary.” I’d been a scrawny teen who’d gotten his height before his width. I might have had a chance with Headmaster Stark if I’d looked like I did now.
She nodded, and I knew she understood.
“And you don’t usually get to looking scary without actually being scary. I learned to fight. I can throw a pretty big guy around if necessary. I can also get someone to stay in line with just a look.”
“No, you can’t. Show me.”
I tried for a full thirty seconds before giving up. “I can’t do it.” Even if I could stop smiling, I couldn’t give “the look” on demand. Too bad because there were a shit ton of people I wished could have seen it from me. I’d imagined giving it plenty of times to the boys back at school. To her father. To her, sometimes. When I was feeling really bitter.
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