by Evans, A. K.
He must have seen the anxiety written all over my face because he urged, “Breathe and relax, Elise.”
I did as he said.
A few seconds later, I decided it was time.
I looked down at my phone, tapped on the screen a few times, and hovered my finger over Porter’s name. Glancing up at Kieran, I said, “Wish me luck.”
“You don’t need it, but good luck.”
My finger hit the screen. Then I held the phone to my ear and waited. It felt like everything was moving in slow motion from that point forward. It wasn’t until after the second ring, when Porter answered, that I flew into action and started moving at a rabbit’s pace.
“Hey, Elise,” he greeted me. “Everything go okay today? I’ve wanted to reach out.”
“Not exactly, Porter,” I replied. “Are you feeling better?”
“Yeah, actually, I’m planning to come tomorrow. I thought I’d need another day, but I don’t. What’s going on? You said everything didn’t go okay.”
This was it. Now or never.
“It’s not,” I started, doing my best to sound panicked. “We have a huge problem.”
“Don’t tell me that. What happened now?”
God, my heart was breaking with every word he spoke. But damn was he good. Honestly, now it was all becoming clear to me. Things he said. The stuff he did. My brother wouldn’t be the Flynn Beauty brand manager and marketer any longer. Still, if he managed to get out of prison after this whole snafu was dealt with, he honestly had a promising and lucrative career as a professional bullshitter. I didn’t know if that was a paid gig anywhere, but there was no doubt he could succeed at it.
“I can’t… Porter, I’m totally freaking out over here,” I told him, allowing panic to fill my voice. “I think we’re going to have to cancel the launch.”
“What?” he gasped.
“Yes, I know, it’s crazy. I think I’m going to be here all night trying to deal with this,” I continued with my pretend panicking.
“Okay, just hang tight,” he said. “I’ll get dressed and come over. Whatever it is, I’m sure we can figure it out.”
Yeah, I already did, I thought.
“Are you sure?” I asked, trying to sound like I cared. “If you’re still not a hundred percent sure—”
“I’m sure,” he insisted, cutting me off. “Give me a few minutes, and I’ll be there.”
“Okay. Just meet me in the warehouse.”
“The warehouse?” he repeated.
“Yes. I have to go now. I’ll see you soon.”
I quickly disconnected the call because I was sure I was going to lose it. I didn’t want to risk having that happen, so pretending to be distracted and in a hurry seemed like the best option.
The next thing I knew, I felt Kieran’s arms around me as he bent and brought his lips to my ear. “You did excellent, lady,” he praised me. “He’s coming?”
I nodded.
“Did Colton and Memphis move the car?” I asked.
“Yes, they did that while we were unloading everything,” he assured me.
When I realized we would be setting this all up to have Porter show up tonight, I didn’t think it was a wise idea to have the police car sitting out in the open. So, I urged them to move it where he wouldn’t see it.
Now it was a waiting game.
And I was shaking uncontrollably. The anxiety I felt was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. My insides were trembling, and my teeth were chattering, but I wasn’t cold. This was all nerves.
Kieran did his best to comfort me, but there wasn’t much that would help at that moment. I had to confront my brother and ask him why he stole from me. And the sad reality dawned on me that I might not like the answer he gave me if I even got one at all.
Though it had only been about fifteen minutes, it felt like hours had passed. And when Porter walked into the warehouse, he saw me there with Kieran.
We’d worked this out, and the two of us were standing over by the empty Flynn Beauty products.
“Elise, what’s going on?” Porter asked, his eyes scanning the very many opened boxes scattered on the floor. “Why is everything strewn across the floor?”
“They’re empty, Porter,” I told him.
He had the audacity to look shocked. Then I realized he was probably able to pull that off so well because it was likely he never expected I would have found out before he was able to pull off his master plan.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Bending down, I picked one up and held it out to him. “It’s empty,” I shouted. There was no way Porter was going to be thrown by this. He knew how animated I could get when I had something over which to throw a fit. Continuing, I repeated, “Empty—all of them. There’s thousands of dollars’ worth of packaging that has no actual beauty product inside. No blush. No lotions. No eyeshadows. No cleansers. No nail polishes. No lip balms. Nothing, Porter. Nothing.”
My brother’s eyes darted back and forth. “I… I don’t understand.”
Letting out a sarcastic laugh. “Which part?” I shot back.
He shot me a look of confusion. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m absolutely not okay,” I clipped. My emotions were bubbling up inside me, and I was starting to lose control. “Why, Porter? Why did you do this?”
“Me? What did I do?”
“Stop with the games,” Kieran interrupted. “Just tell her why.”
“Dude, I don’t know you, but I’m guessing you’re the guy from the news article,” Porter replied. “I don’t need to answer you.”
“No, but your sister deserves an explanation,” Kieran retorted.
Porter narrowed his eyes at Kieran before he pinned them on me. “Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on?”
Fine. If this was the way he was going to play it, I could do this.
“Follow me,” I demanded as I started walking across the warehouse. When I stopped and held my hand out to the side, Porter’s eyes followed. Then they got wide. Huge. Scared.
“Elise,” he croaked before he cleared his throat. “Elise, what is this? Where did this come from?”
I looked at all the Flynn Beauty boxes—boxes that had been stacked by good people who cared about me—and stared at them for a long time. After my gaze ran over them, I looked back at Porter and asked, “You mean, these don’t look familiar to you?”
He swallowed hard, and his lips parted.
Guilty.
Guilty as charged.
He did it.
It was a wonder I didn’t collapse getting that confirmation. Somehow, I remembered who I was and what I’d worked so hard to build. Nobody, not even my brother, was going to take that away from me.
“You did this to me,” I accused him. “How dare you do this to me?”
“Elise—” he started to speak, but I cut him off.
“I trusted you!” I shrieked. “I trusted you with everything! My whole company! How dare you do this? Why would you do this?”
“Yeah, your company, you greedy bitch,” he clipped.
I jerked back in shock and confusion.
“It’s always been all about you, hasn’t it?” Porter challenged. “When you set this whole thing up, it was all about you. What about me? I was there from the beginning!”
Blinking in surprise, I gasped, “Are you kidding me?”
He shook his head. “This was supposed to be ours,” he declared.
“It was,” I agreed. “But then you decided you didn’t want to get your hands dirty. You weren’t interested in doing any of the grunt work. I spent every waking hour focused on building this. You didn’t. You fucked around and were there to provide little more than advice along the way.”
“I helped you build your following,” he argued.
I was sure my head was going to explode.
“My following?” I repeated sarcastically. “You cannot be serious, Porter. I know how much time was put into my social media accounts. You’re lucky
if you spent an hour a day in the beginning. When it got bigger, and there was more interaction, you might have spent a little bit more time. But beyond that, you didn’t do anything to help. It was all me. It was all my investment.”
“I tried to put some money into it,” he argued. “You said you had it covered.”
“Because I did,” I shot back. “I’d been doing it on my own. Do you honestly believe that you should have been able to sit back while I worked and then just sunk your greedy paws in after all the hard work had been done? I thought we were in a good place. But I guess this is who you’ve always been. Always the guy trying to ride on someone else’s coattails. You’ll work just hard enough to make yourself feel important when the truth is that it could all get done without you.”
“You’ve always been such a bitch, Elise,” Porter cursed. “It’s always been your way or the highway.”
Before I could respond, Kieran warned, “You will not call Elise a bitch again. That’s twice now you’ve called her that. I won’t tolerate hearing it a third time.”
“Oh yeah? And what are you going to do?” Porter taunted him.
Kieran had the patience of a saint, so it was no surprise he didn’t allow Porter’s goading to affect him in a way that it might have affected most other people. Instead, Kieran calmly promised, “I’ll see to it that you learn how to speak to a lady.”
I wasn’t sure if Porter took Kieran’s warning seriously, but I knew he’d be stupid not to. Kieran had the size and a bit of bulk on my brother. And though I wasn’t sure that Kieran was a fighter, I knew for sure that my brother wasn’t.
Not wanting to prolong this whole ordeal any longer and knowing that I’d gotten the answers I needed, I decided to step in.
“You’re right, Porter,” I cut in. His gaze cut to mine while I felt Kieran’s eyes settle on me as his body went rigid. “It is my way or the highway, little brother. And that’s because it’s my damn company, my brand, and my name on the line. I’m just glad we figured this out before you had the chance to try to ruin me again. I do have one more question, though.”
Porter didn’t respond.
“Why now? Why, after all these years, did you decide to do this now?” I asked. “Why did you jeopardize the health of so many innocent people now? Why not do this years ago?”
A smirk spread across his face. “You were at the top,” he started. “You get up there, it’s a long way down.”
God, how was this person my brother? How was this family?
Kieran must have realized that hit me hard because he wrapped an arm around my back and asked, “Did you get what you needed?”
“Yeah,” I rasped.
“It’s time, boys,” he called out.
Porter’s body went solid as he looked around the warehouse. A moment later, he saw Kendall’s brothers walking toward him.
Then I watched as my brother was handcuffed and taken away.
Sadly, I didn’t feel an ounce of remorse.
Nope.
The only thing on my mind was that if I couldn’t trust my own flesh and blood, how could I trust anyone else?
“Are you okay?”
I looked at the woman I’d fallen in love with and saw nothing but heartbreak and pain written all over her face. It killed me to see it. This whole thing had devastated her.
Elise and I had gotten back to her place a few minutes ago. After Colton and Memphis hauled off her brother, I stayed with her at Flynn Beauty while she shut everything down and locked up the building. Then I followed her home.
Although my heart broke for her from the moment I learned the truth about what she was going through, I felt even worse now. We’d been here for a bit, and Elise had barely spoken. I was growing more and more concerned.
She had every reason to feel the way she did right now. Whatever the emotion was, it was justified. In those moments when she had been confronting her brother, she was so strong. It was hard for me to see her having to go through it, but I was so proud of her for standing up for herself.
And while I knew it was difficult for Elise, there was no way I could even begin to comprehend what she was feeling. My family would never have done to me what Elise’s brother did to her. There was no doubt this was weighing heavily on her mind. He was the last living relative she had.
Beyond concerned for her, I wanted to do whatever I could to ease the burden in her mind and the heaviness in her heart. But she wasn’t speaking.
She remained silent for so long after I asked my question, I called, “Elise?”
Looking up from her lap where she was sitting on the couch, I watched as she shook away the thoughts in her mind. Then she replied, “Yeah?”
“Talk to me,” I urged, giving her hand an encouraging squeeze.
“I’m not okay, Kieran,” she confessed, answering my original question.
Nodding my head in understanding, I returned, “I figured that much, and I’m so sorry, lady. What he did to you is unimaginable and unforgivable.”
“Yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about,” she noted.
She just said she wasn’t okay. If she wasn’t referring to what her brother did, I had no idea what she was talking about. “Can you explain then?” I asked.
“I turned my back on two employees,” Elise explained. “I believed they were conspiring against me, and I fired both of them.”
Elise had such a good heart that she wasn’t sitting here feeling sorry for herself over what happened to her at the hand of her brother. She was concerned about other people. Knowing this only made me fall that much deeper in love with her.
“There isn’t a single person alive who’d blame you for letting them go,” I assured her. “All the evidence you had indicated Skye was responsible for what happened months ago. And the fact that you saw them out together yesterday for lunch only served to make you question Kat’s loyalty. And the truth is, they were working together, so you weren’t entirely wrong.”
“But they were working to save my company from another scandal,” she argued.
“Yeah, and they did,” I reminded her.
She swallowed hard and looked away. “How will I ever make it right?” she rasped.
“Elise?”
It took her a moment, but she returned her attention to me. “Yeah?”
“I was standing there with you when Kat said what she did before she walked out of your office earlier today,” I began. “She does not hold a grudge against you. You already know how to rebuild your relationships with them because Kat laid it out. You just need to make the call.”
“It’s like my sense of judgment is all wrong,” she declared.
“You made a decision based on the information you had, Elise,” I reminded her. “It wasn’t the wrong one given what you knew. And now that you know the truth, there’s no doubt in my mind that you’ll do what you’ve got to do to make it right.”
She nodded slowly in agreement, but I could feel the sadness she had in her heart and see the defeat in her eyes. It was crushing.
The silence stretched between us again before she murmured, “I don’t trust myself anymore.”
“Lady,” I whispered.
Her horrified eyes came to mine. “What am I doing?” she asked. “Kieran, I can’t… I can’t do this.”
Whoa.
Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.
Panic. She was panicking.
“Elise, don’t do this to yourself,” I advised gently. “You’re understandably upset, but it’s not going to help you to make rash decisions.”
Shaking her head back and forth, she insisted, “No, Kieran. I’m serious. I don’t know what I’m doing. But there is one thing I know. This won’t be fair to you. I’ll put you through the wringer because I won’t believe that I can trust you.”
“You already do,” I noted.
“What?”
She looked genuinely surprised, so I filled her in.
“If you didn’t trust me, we wouldn’t have had what we had o
n Valentine’s Day,” I started. “What you did that night required trust.”
Elise shot me an incredulous look. “That was different,” she argued. “Trusting you with my body is different than trusting you with my heart.”
I shifted closer to her on the couch so that my thigh was pressed up against hers. After capturing her face in my hands, my voice dipped low, and I promised, “Your heart is safe with me, Elise.”
“You can’t say that,” she replied. “You don’t know what the future will bring.”
“No, I don’t know what the future will bring,” I agreed. “You’re absolutely right about that. But I know that I want you in it because I love you too much to let you go.”
Her eyes grew huge as her lips parted.
Unable to stop myself, I dragged my thumb along her bottom lip. My eyes watched it, and then I brought my mouth to hers. I kissed her lips, my tongue sweeping into her mouth to taste her, and the moan that came from the back of her throat shot straight to my dick.
I was convinced I’d erased any concerns she had about the two of us, but the next thing I knew, Elise curled her fingers around my wrists as she tore her mouth from mine.
“Kieran,” she breathed. “We can’t. I can’t.”
“Elise, please,” I begged.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she rasped. “I appreciate you being there for me today and everything you’ve done for me, but I need to end this. It’s too risky.”
“Taking risks means getting rewards,” I declared. “And you know that sometimes you need to be patient to get those rewards.”
“This isn’t about sex, Kier,” she scolded me.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s about so much more. It’s about you calling me ‘Kier’ or ‘baby’ when you stop yourself from overthinking. It’s about you trusting me with your beautiful body. It’s about you making me laugh. It’s about me feeling more for you than I have for any other woman before in my life. It’s about me wanting to take you home to New York to meet my family at Christmas. But most of all, it’s about me loving you.” I let her sit with those words for a few moments before I reasoned, “You’ve got to know how much I care about you and how much you mean to me, lady.”
She licked her lips.
