by Nikki Sloane
Payton’s resolution for me was stupid, but true. I could call Julius and ask for a wingman, but I was pretty sure he was holding out hope for Courtney. I’d had dinner with him right after Christmas, a casual thing to watch a college bowl game. How long would my new friend wait after the divorce was finalized, and would he make a move at all? Or would Julius wait forever to see if Courtney was interested in him as more than a friend?
I could call Joseph as well. After Payton had pitched her “project” to him, he’d set his gaze on me and seemed pleased. But I didn’t need help or a wingman. There was no reason to go trolling bars, or list myself on dating websites. I was done kidding myself. I already knew what I wanted, and I hated it.
There wasn’t a ring on Ruby’s finger.
Sure, we were both still angry, but there’d been feelings between us before. Strong, deep ones. What would have happened if I’d stayed in Chicago? Would there be a ring on her finger now?
I stared down at my drink. Maybe it was stronger than I thought.
Whatever. I’d convinced her to give me a shot once. Could I do it again? And . . . did I really want to? There were days when simply hearing her name scraped at the hole left where she’d ripped my heart out.
At that exact moment, the universe tilted on its axis.
A woman in a pale pink dress stood at the bar, her intense gaze locked onto me. My knees softened and I tightened my grip on my glass, fighting against the weak response. Her dark hair was pinned up, and her lips were stained a vibrant red, the same shade as her name.
Ruby.
Chapter
SIX
RUBY
Breath halted in my lungs. Kyle’s tuxedo was simple. Maybe it wasn’t even a tux, but a jet black suit he owned and a matching silk tie. He looked out of place, standing alone with his fingers curled on a glass tumbler, while everyone else mingled around him.
The moment he saw me, hairs lifted on my arms. Every nerve ending in me fired up to the ready. As anticipated, he looked amazing, and it pissed me off. What was I doing here? Was I really this stupid? I must have suffered PTSD last time I’d seen him, because I’d forgotten his magnetic effect.
The flood of emotions overtook me. Desire. Longing. And on top of it all, heart aching pain.
He stood still as a statue, watching me. His expression was confusion, and then it shifted into a blank one. To someone else it might look empty, but I’d seen him preparing for mock closing statements. There was definitely a lot going on behind his eyes right now. Was he deciding on the best way to bail?
No, I convinced myself. He’d wanted to talk to me last time. It was doubtful my “fuck you” comment had made much of an impact to change his mind. I shifted my weight on my nervous legs. Should I stay here by the bar? Could I walk up to him without giving away I was falling apart inside?
Shit. Shit! I had a plan, but it ran screaming with terror from my brain as soon as Kyle took a step toward me. This was when I was most dangerous. When my thoughts turned off, my temper made itself home.
I spun on my heel and faced the bar. “Get it together!” I whisper yelled to myself.
The female bartender, who was mixing a drink, paused and looked at me.
I plastered on an apologetic smile. “Sorry, not you. You’re fine.” I pointed to the bottle of chardonnay on the counter. “Can I get a glass of that?”
I couldn’t hear his approach over the music, but I sensed it. A shiver ran down my spine when he spoke. “Ruby.”
“Kyle,” I responded, my voice flat and even, which was a small miracle. I refused to turn and look at him. Instead I watched as the bartender poured my drink, and I fumbled in my purse for a tip.
“What are you doing here?”
“Getting a drink.”
He had no response, and it left me without options. I took the glass from the woman, dropped my tip in the jar, and forced myself to look at the man who’d callously squashed my heart.
“You look beautiful.” He spoke almost like he was mad about it.
His compliment was the last thing I expected him to say, so it was suspect. When my plan abandoned me, I switched into emergency backup mode, which was all defense. “Fuck you.”
He wasn’t fazed and let the barb roll off him. “I believe you mentioned that already.”
“Yes, but I feel strongly, so it bears repeating.”
“All right. Noted.”
I struggled with what to say next as he took the final sip of his drink and plunked it down beside me on the bar. His hand lingered on the glass. He was close.
Too close.
“You wanted a word last time we saw each other.” My voice was tight. “So let’s hear it.”
“Did you come here for that?” He glanced around the room as if taking in the expensive decorations and setting for the first time. “You could have called me, or my office—”
I shook my head. “Don’t go thinking I spent any money. I crashed this.” Sneaking into the event had been easy. I’d shown up after dinner was over and pretended I was with a group of women returning from the restroom. Security was incredibly lax as we closed in on midnight. “And I borrowed this dress from a friend.”
“Okay, then.” Kyle’s gaze wandered appreciatively down my figure. “Please tell her thank you for me.”
I rolled my eyes so hard I was sure to sprain them, but inside, his compliment created a flutter of warmth. Damn him. The truth was I felt like a million bucks in this dress. The skirt was layers of chiffon with a peekaboo slit halfway up my thigh, and the bodice had a plunging neckline. The dress gave excellent cleave, and Kyle sure hadn’t missed it.
Good. I wanted to show off what he’d walked away from. “You come by yourself?” I asked it as a jab, but really, for some insane reason I wanted to know.
“As did you, it seems. Did you leave the boyfriend home alone on New Year’s Eve?”
I clenched a hand into a fist. “No, there’s no boy— No.” Crap, I was better than this. “And you? Why come alone?”
His expression was devoid of emotion. “There wasn’t anyone I was interested in taking.”
When the conversation lapsed, his gaze dropped down to my breasts. I let him ogle me for another moment and then set my fist on my hip. “You wanted to talk. Well?”
He needed to get on with it. For years, I’d thought I didn’t need closure, but it was likely because I never thought I’d get it. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he would have said if I’d let him take me aside and talk to him. It plagued me every moment since, only quieting when I’d made the idiotic decision to seek him out at the fundraiser. At least here I had the element of surprise, and neutral ground.
Would an apology, if he offered one, do anything to lessen the damage he’d caused?
Kyle’s focus left me and he seemed to survey the ballroom critically. “Not here. It’s going to get loud in twenty minutes.”
I didn’t want to spend twenty minutes with him. I didn’t trust myself when his face looked good enough to wrap my thighs around. “Twenty minutes? Come on, counselor, we both know you can finish in five.”
His shoulders snapped back, but otherwise he didn’t seem fazed. “How can you be sure? Usually you’ve forgotten your name after the first two.”
My mouth hung open. He pulled out his wallet, dug out a few bigger bills, and made a production of dropping them into the tip jar so the bartender would see.
“Can I grab a bottle of champagne and two glasses?” he asked her.
It sounded like he was only asking as a courtesy, and confirmed it when he didn’t wait for an answer. He stepped to the side of the bar, where two servers were pouring champagne into rows of flutes, took two glasses from the end, and plucked an unopened bottle from the large ice bin.
Kyle didn’t wait for me to follow, and I hurried to keep up as he headed for the exit.
“Where are we going?” I tried to walk steady and not spill my nearly full wine.
We cleared the doorway
and he continued at a fast clip toward the elevator bank. He slapped the button for ‘up,’ and turned to look at me. “Upstairs.”
“Seriously? No. I’m not going up to your room.”
“Okay, not a problem. I don’t have a room.”
The elevator doors peeled back, revealing an empty car. I took too long to decide what to do, and Kyle made the decision for me. He crossed the champagne flute stems in his hand and gripped the neck of the bottle all in one, so his free hand could touch me in the small of my back and urge me forward into the elevator.
I sucked in a sharp breath at the contact.
It was silly. He wasn’t a stranger; he knew me intimately. This delicate touch wasn’t sexual, and yet the muscles tightened in my belly. My heart skipped faster. It felt like he hadn’t touched me in a lifetime, and yet my body remembered like it had happened only five minutes ago.
I spun around to face the doors and watched my last chance to escape fade away as they slid shut.
The air was thick being alone with him, but I refused to look at him. Instead I watched the numbers climb as we rose toward the top floor. Where was he taking me? If there was a bar at the top, that didn’t make much sense. It’d be just as loud as the ballroom at midnight, and they wouldn’t let us in with Kyle carrying the champagne.
My throat tightened as I spoke. “When did you come back?”
“About a year ago.”
Even though I already knew the answer, it wounded me all the same. He’d been in the city, working for his parents’ firm for more than a year. We had mutual Facebook friends. If he’d wanted to find me, he easily could have. But why would he want to find me, after he’d so cleanly severed my heart?
I washed the hard lump in my throat down with a healthy dose of my wine. Coming to the fundraiser had been a stupid idea. Maybe the dumbest thing I’d ever done, and I’d once gone to a Baha Men concert.
The elevator halted, and Kyle gestured to the opening doors. I hurried out of the confined space, but then pulled to a stop. “Again,” I said. “Where are we going?”
Kyle moved swiftly to the hallway and swung left. The sign announced rooms were to the right, and the pool was to the left. The . . . pool? On the top floor?
“Shit,” he groaned as we approached the door. “It closed at eleven.”
Sure enough, the pool hours listed on the glass door declared the pool area closed. He cupped a hand to the glass and peered inside. It was too dark for me to make anything out, but he straightened abruptly and rapped his knuckles loudly on the door.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“There’s a guy in there cleaning up.”
I stood back as a man in a hotel uniform pushed open the door and flicked an irritated gaze at Kyle.
Only the irritation evaporated when Kyle pulled out his wallet and shoved a handful of cash toward the man. “Mind if we have a private party in there?”
The janitor didn’t mind at all. He snatched up the bills and jammed them in a pocket. “Clean up after you’re done. The door will lock behind you when you leave.”
My mouth gaped wide as Kyle held the door open for the man, who pushed a cleaning cart out and toward the elevators. It rolled with a squeaky wheel.
“Happy New Year’s, folks,” he added, disappearing around the corner.
“You, too,” Kyle said, his voice soft, and his deep gaze set on me. The way he looked at me was unsettling. I felt hot and twitchy. He used to look at me that way, and I had loved it.
Once upon a time, I’d loved everything about him.
You hate him now. He crushed you. Don’t let him continue to do it.
I marched into the pool area where it was steamy, and instantly began to sweat. I surveyed the room and felt my eyes go large. “Oh my God.”
Because the place was stunning. The ceilings were tall and reflective, making the room feel much larger than it really was. The infinity pool wasn’t very big, but it didn’t matter. No one came here to swim laps. Surely people came to soak and enjoy the view. The far side of the room was mostly glass, separated with columns that were illuminated by uplighting. The pool’s edge was almost to the windows, giving the impression it was right against the glass.
The Opulent Hotel was a modest height, barely considered a skyscraper, but it boasted a fabulous view of the other buildings nearby, the skyline beyond, and the edge of Lake Michigan.
“My sister Payton got married here,” Kyle said. “I remembered the pool was something else.”
It was lit with two underwater lights, and the water cast shadowy ripples all around. “It’s amazing.”
I flinched when the cork popped on the bottle of champagne in Kyle’s hand. I’d been too distracted with the view to notice he’d set about opening it.
His tone was sheepish. “Sorry.”
I turned to glare at him while he poured the glasses of sparkling wine and set them on a table positioned between two lounge chairs. “So,” I snapped, “you do know how to apologize.”
Kyle shrugged out of his suit coat, probably sweating worse than I was in the hot room, and laid it gently over the chair back. “Do I have something to apologize for?”
“Are you shitting me?”
His gaze narrowed, and I wanted to scream. Did he honestly think what he’d done was no big deal? I couldn’t handle it if that was the case. Being this close to the pool was a bad idea. A vision of holding his head under the water until he stopped moving flitted through my evil mind.
“You want to finish your wine first,” he asked, “before we get into it?” He leaned over and braced his hands on the back of the lounge chair, waiting.
I stared at him for a long moment and decided his suggestion was a solid idea. I slammed the wine, hoping the time it took to drink it would bring me to a calmer state, or slow my reaction time down and give him a better chance to escape. Because I was still considering the most efficient way to get him underwater.
Then I was thinking about how he’d look wet. Goddamn it.
“You remember the last conversation we had?”
His tone was casual, but something was off. There was tension buried inside his voice, and I moved slowly to set my empty wine glass down.
“You said you thought you’d be finished loading your car in another hour.” That was the last thing he’d said before a hurried goodbye on the phone. I’d had no idea it was all the goodbye I was going to get.
He paused. “That’s it?”
“If you want to get technical, you sent me a text message the next day demanding I delete your number. I didn’t respond.”
His expression was strange as he picked up both the champagne glasses and held one out to me. When I took it, I was careful not to brush my fingers over his, even though I had the weird desire to do so.
“Okay, it didn’t take me an hour to load up.” His tone was dry. “As you established earlier, I can finish faster.”
I ignored the humorless joke. “Yeah, I figured it out when I went to your place and you were already gone.”
The glass was chilled in my hand, but it did nothing to subdue the fire that flared wildly until it was all I could feel. Maybe I didn’t need closure from him in the form of an apology. Perhaps all I needed was to tell him about the colossal pain he’d inflicted.
“God, Kyle. Do you have any idea what that was like? How much it hurt? I sat outside on the front step of your place, bawling my stupid eyes out.” I didn’t want to relive the memory, but it was unavoidable with him standing there, staring at me. I’d been too upset that day to drive, and my car had been far down the street, anyway. The shock and grief was physically debilitating, making it impossible to get to.
“On top of everything, it was so embarrassing! All your neighbors saw me, and I couldn’t stop crying like a fool. Fuck, it hurt just to breathe.” It’d felt like part of me was dying. Maybe it was. Kyle had damaged a section of my heart that still hadn’t recovered.
His expression was bizarre, as if to
rn between confusion and concern. So much time had passed, yet I shook violently just as I’d done then.
“Why?” I demanded, my voice breaking with emotion. “Why’d you do that to me? Didn’t I mean anything to you?”
There was no sound in the room. Light bounced off the water’s surface, casting ripples of blue beams on him while he stood motionless, holding his glass of unsipped champagne.
Then, he blinked slowly. “You meant a lot to me, Ruby. A lot.”
Why didn’t he just stab me with a knife? It would have been less painful than his words. “Then, fucking why?”
He was calm, my total opposite, as I was coming unglued. Kyle took a tiny step forward, but it felt enormous, like he was right up against me. “The plan was to meet at your place,” he said quietly. “When I told you I’d be done loading my car in an hour, I think you misunderstood.”
Confusion coiled in my mind. “What are you talking about? We were going to meet at your apartment.”
His shoulders rose as he drew in a deep breath, and his expression turned sad. “Do you actually remember discussing it, though? Because, honestly, I don’t. I assumed you knew I was heading your way.”
I stared at him, trying to process. In a professional setting, we excelled at communication, but personally? It was never our strongest suit. Had we said specifically where we were meeting? I’d been so twisted up about saying goodbye . . .
Wait a minute.
Wait one fucking minute.
Had I spent the last five years hating him for a misunderstanding that might be my fault, at least partly? My tone verged on horror. “What are you telling me?”
“I drove over to your place,” he said. “I waited hours for you to show up so we could say goodbye.”
Shock cemented me into stone, and Kyle destroyed me all over again, but he didn’t seem to notice. He leaned over and clinked our glasses together.
“Cheers.”
Chapter
SEVEN
KYLE
It was a dick move, but I wanted to watch Ruby stomach some of her own medicine. I took a drink of my champagne while she simply stood there, dumbfounded.
