by Locklyn Marx
But that was ridiculous. Of course he wasn’t jealous. He hardly knew Alexis.
Then why are you going through all this trouble to help her? a voice in his head whispered. Because he was a nice guy. He couldn’t just leave her to fend for herself. It wouldn’t be right.
“Look, it’s complicated,” Alexis said now.
“Alexis, the guy put his hands on you and threatened to kill you. If there was any reason to file a restraining order against someone, I’d think that would be it.”
“It’s not that easy,” she said. “It’s not… I can’t…” She took a deep breath and twisted her hands in her lap.
“You’re not thinking of getting back with him, are you?” He couldn’t believe he’d said it.
“Are you kidding?” She laughed, shaking her head. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“You keep saying that!” He was frustrated now, and he was speaking louder than he’d intended. He lowered his voice. “You keep saying that I don’t get it. So then why don’t you explain it to me?”
“You think you can just waltz in here and save me, right? That I’m just some damsel in distress that you can help? Is that what you think?”
He shook his head, confused. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “Waltz in here? In case you’ve forgotten, you’re the one who showed up at my house, you’re the one who waltzed into my life. I was just trying to help you.”
“I don’t need your help. I don’t need anyone’s help.”
He looked at her. She’d gotten up and crossed the room to the bathroom, and now she stepped inside and shut the door.
He didn’t understand what had just happened. One moment she’d been trying to kiss him, the next moment she’d been yelling at him. Well, he didn’t need this. He had the biggest meeting of his life coming up in a few hours. A meeting that could change his career forever.
He didn’t need to be worrying about a woman he’d just a met, a woman who’d made it perfectly clear that she didn’t want him around. He got up and left the room, shutting the door softly behind him.
***
Alexis huddled in the bathroom, listening as Reid left the room.
She looked at herself in the mirror, watching as the tears streamed down her cheeks. She hadn’t meant to yell at him. She’d just been so confused and hurt. He’d rejected her when she’d tried to kiss him. And why had he gone and booked those tickets to Pennsylvania?
The thought that she wanted Leo back was laughable – she couldn’t even say his name without feeling like she wanted to throw up – but it wasn’t that easy to just go back and get her things. And it was even harder for her to accept help. What were Reid’s motives? Why did he want to help her?
She had a pretty good idea why. He was the kind of guy who was always looking for something he could fix. He saw a problem, and he went in and solved it. Look at the way he was at work – hyper-focused and totally anal. He wanted to save her. She didn’t need to be saved, and definitely not by a guy she’d just met.
She took a few deep breaths, then washed her face and brushed out her hair. Reid was right about one thing – she needed to stop running away from her problems. And that meant she needed to go back to Pennsylvania and confront her past.
She’d get a restraining order.
She’d pick up her stuff.
And then she’d leave again.
She didn’t need Reid to do that. She didn’t need anyone.
***
An hour later, Alexis had booked a ticket to Philadelphia leaving for that afternoon. She used her credit card, figuring it didn’t matter anymore. If Leo found her, he found her. She was sick of hiding, sick of being afraid. She packed up what little things she had hanging around the hotel room, and then headed for the lobby.
She’d take a taxi to the airport, and then go from there. Everything will be fine, she told herself as the elevator made its descent. She repeated this over and over to herself, and by the time the elevator doors dinged open, she was almost starting to believe it.
Chapter Nine
The offices of Vista Collection were done in shades of blue and tan, with a huge marble reception desk in the lobby.
“Beautiful, just beautiful,” Richard Mueller remarked. “Don’t you just love this travertine tile?”
Reid resisted the urge to throttle him. Leave it to Richard to try and remark on something like the look of the lobby. Who gave a fuck what the lobby looked like? Reid didn’t know anything about design, but he was willing to bet whatever Richard was talking about wasn’t even travertine tile. He probably just made it up to sound smart.
Even though all he sounded like was an idiot.
“That’s great, Richard,” Reid snapped. “But do you think it would be possible to focus on, oh, I don’t know, the meeting?”
“Whoa whoa whoa!” Richard held his hands up, like he didn’t know why Reid was getting so testy. “Someone has a case of the Mondays.”
“It’s Friday.”
“Which makes it even worse.” Richard nodded knowingly.
“Whatever.” Reid felt agitated. Energy was building up inside of him and making him feel testy and on edge. They’d been sitting in the lobby of Vista Collection for at least thirty minutes now. The executives were making them wait. Which was never a good sign – if a company was interested in seeing you, they did whatever they could to get you in as soon as possible. They didn’t just leave you waiting in their travertine or whatever-the-fuck-it-was lobby.
He wanted to ask the receptionist what the fuck was taking so long, but he didn’t want it to get back to Harold Warmer, his contact at Vista. If they were having any doubts, Reid didn’t want a bad attitude to be the thing that pushed them over the edge.
“Sure is taking a long time,” Richard remarked happily.
That was it. Reid couldn’t take it anymore. He got out of his chair and walked up to the receptionist, a pretty blonde who’d introduced herself as Emily.
“Hey,” he said, leaning against the desk.
“Hi.” She gave him a smile. She was wearing a sexy little outfit – plunging red shirt, a tight black skirt, and high heels. He wondered how she got away with dressing like that. But then he remembered that most of Vista Collection’s employees were men, and it made sense.
“Any idea what’s taking so long?” He gave her his most charming smile.
“Nope.” She shrugged. “You know how long these things can go.”
“What things?”
“Meetings.”
He nodded. So obviously they were in a meeting. But with who? It was time to pretend to know more than he did. “What time did they start?”
“About an hour ago,” she said. “Which should have been enough time. But sometimes when people bring in tons of pitches, it takes forever.” She rolled her eyes at him, like she couldn’t believe how ridiculous it was to be in a meeting forever.
Shit. What the hell was she talking about, pitches? Could she have possibly gotten it wrong? She seemed like she might be a bit of an airhead. But surely she wouldn’t have messed up something so simple.
Reid leaned over the desk and zeroed in on a picture of a black and white cat that was sitting next to the computer. “Is that your cat?” he asked. “He’s adorable.”
“Oh, yeah!” Emily brightened and picked it the picture. “That’s Mr. Whiskers.”
He resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Mr. Whiskers? Who the hell named their cat Mr. Whiskers. “How old is he?” Who gave a fuck?
“He’s three. I got him from a shelter.”
“I’d love to meet him sometime.” It was something he would have said before in an effort to get into Emily’s pants. Before. The word shocked him. Before what?
Before Alexis. But there was no Alexis. She’d made it perfectly clear she wanted nothing to do with him.
It was ridiculous for him to have even tried to help her. What did he think he was going to do? Ride in like some knight in shining armor and save her f
rom her ex-boyfriend? He’d only known her for a couple of days. To think he had some kind of connection with her or knew anything about her life was insane.
Then how come every time you’re around her all you want to do is take care of her? Why can’t you stop thinking about her? He pushed the thoughts away. Focus, he told himself.
“So who’s in that meeting again?” he asked Emily. He pulled out a legal pad and started flipping through it, like he’d written the information down but just couldn’t remember where.
“Let’s see.” She tapped at her keyboard. “It was with The Phillips Agency.”
“That’s it.” Reid snapped his fingers and tried not to betray what horrible news this was. Vista Collection had decided on their campaign. So then why were they seeing other agencies?
His phone rang, and he pulled it out his pocket and looked down at the screen, irritated. It was the hotel.
Alexis.
He stepped away from the reception desk.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Mr. Lawson?”
It wasn’t Alexis. “Yes?” he snapped.
“This is Laurie, from the front desk.”
“This isn’t a good time.” He looked over his shoulder to where Emily had begun to paint her nails.
“Oh, I understand,” Laurie said, sounding nervous. “I just had a quick question about your rooms. We have you checked out of 306, but we’re wondering if you’ll be checking out of both rooms today, or will you be keeping the remaining room for tonight?”
“What are you talking about?” Jesus. First a new agency coming in to steal his account, and now some kind of fuck up at the hotel.
“Well, it says here you’ve checked out of room 306. Will you be checking out of room 304 as well?”
“I didn’t check out of 306,” he said. “There must be a mistake.” But even as he was finishing saying the words, he realized what had happened. Alexis. She’d left.
Checked out. But to go where?
“It says here you did,” Laurie said, sounding even more anxious than she had before. Probably because she thought he was going to go ape shit on her.
“Thanks,” Reid said. He hung up before she could say anything else.
He had to find Alexis and stop her. He couldn’t let her just leave. Who knew where she was going or what might happen to her? So before he could talk himself out of it, Reid walked out of Vista Collection without looking back.
***
The airport was actually somewhat soothing, Alexis thought as she looked around. There were so many people, and so much security. You didn’t have to worry about things like stalker ex-boyfriends. If one popped up, a security guard would almost certainly stop him before he could cause too much damage.
Although she wondered if Leo could actually be considered an ex-boyfriend if she hadn’t technically broken up with him. The thought was slightly alarming. If she didn’t have the break-up conversation, would they just be together forever? She knew it was silly – of course they were broken up, regardless of whether or not they’d discussed it--but it was creepy nonetheless.
Alexis had a few hours before her flight was scheduled to depart, so she sat in front of Starbucks and sipped a mocha while she watched the people walking by. A little boy started having a temper tantrum, screaming that he wanted to go back to Disney World.
“Mickey and Minnie need to sleep,” his mother tried to explain to him. She offered him a cup of cut up apple slices, which the boy grabbed and then dumped on the floor.
Alexis wished she could do something like that. It would be liberating to just scream and cry and have a tantrum in the middle of the airport.
After a few minutes, the boy’s cries had gone from being mildly amusing to completely annoying, and so Alexis got up and headed for the gift shop.
She browsed through the racks of magazines, finally selecting a Cosmopolitan.
Not that she would need any of the articles -- learning a hundred ways to please your man wasn’t something she would find particularly helpful right now. She grabbed a bottle of strawberry lemonade and a bag of pretzels, then added a paperback mystery to her haul and headed for the checkout.
After the cashier had rung up her purchases, Alexis pulled out her credit card and handed it over.
“It’s denied,” the cashier said, a bored look on her face.
“What?” Alexis was startled. How could her card have been denied? She hadn’t bought anything with it, and she’d just checked her balance this morning.
The cashier shrugged. “I dunno. It’s coming up with an error code.” The girl pointed vaguely at the register, which, as promised, was blinking an error code.
“What does that mean?”
“It means your card was denied.” The girl rolled her eyes, like she couldn’t take the stupid people she had to deal with.
“Yeah, I get that,” Alexis said, rolling her eyes right back. “But does it say why?”
“Um, no. You should, like, call your bank?”
Alexis wanted to, like, punch the girl in the face, but instead she reached into her bag to pull out her wallet. She’d have to pay cash. But she took a moment to think about it. She wasn’t sure exactly what was going on with her card. It had just worked a little while ago, when she’d book her flight online. So why wasn’t it working? Was it something simple? Or was it something else, something Leo had done? Should she be saving her cash? How much money would she need to get back to Philadelphia? All morning she’d been telling herself to just take things one step at a time, to just work on getting home and take it from there.
But now she was starting to think that might not have been the best plan.
Shouldn’t she be thinking ahead, figuring out what she was going to do?
“Do you want to pay cash?” the cashier asked, tapping her hand against the counter impatiently.
“Um…” Alexis thumbed through the bills in her wallet. But before she could decide how much money she was willing to part with, someone slapped a twenty- dollar bill down on the counter.
Alexis turned around.
Reid.
He was wearing a black suit and a crisp white shirt, and his hair was pushed back from his face. His eyes were blazing.
Relief flowed through her body.
“What are you doing here?” Alexis blurted. She was so happy to see him, it was all she could do not to fling her arms around him.
“Just stopping by the airport,” he said conversationally. “I got a call that you’d checked out of the hotel, so I thought maybe I’d make sure everything was okay.” His friendly tone didn’t fool Alexis – she could tell he was annoyed.
The cashier took Reid’s money wordlessly and started counting out change.
“I can pay for that myself,” Alexis said, pulling out her own twenty-dollar bill.
She was happy to see Reid, it was true. But she couldn’t let herself start depending on him, no matter how much she wanted to. She needed to stand on her own two feet. If she started to let him in, and she was wrong about the kind of person he was, well…Alexis didn’t want to think about how much it would hurt.
The clerk stopped, looking uncertain as she held out the handful of change. “I already rang it up.”
“Well, ring it up again,” Alexis said.
“But I already shut the drawer.”
“I’m sure there’s a way to – ”
“She already shut the drawer,” Reid said, reaching over and taking the change from the girl’s hand. “We wouldn’t want her to have to go through any more trouble.”
“Thanks,” the girl said gratefully, like Reid had just saved her from a major trauma.
“No problem.”
Whatever. If these two wanted to stand here flirting, that was their business.
Alexis had a plane to catch. She grabbed her bag and started heading out of the gift shop.
“Where are you going?” Reid asked, following her.
“Back out to the airport.”
“Yes.” She kept walking, ignoring the spark of guilt that was beginning to flare inside of her. She reminded herself that she didn’t owe him anything. She hardly knew him.
“The flight that’s leaving in a couple hours?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Alexis quickened her pace. Reid kept up with her, though, and by the time she got back over to the waiting area, he was walking right next to her. She sat down. He sat down.
She pulled her lemonade out of her bag and took a sip. He didn’t say anything.
Why wasn’t he saying anything? Shouldn’t he be yelling at her or something? She tried to glance at him out of the corner of her eye. He seemed to be sitting there calmly, his hands folded in front of him. It was very unnerving. She was just about to get up and move seats when he finally spoke.
“So were you going to tell me you were leaving?”
She thought about lying. Then, finally, she just said, “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t need your help.”
He took in a deep breath, and then opened his mouth to say something. He must have thought better of it, though, because he stopped talking and waited a moment before starting again. “That’s fine,” he said. “But don’t you think it was common courtesy to tell me you were leaving?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Yes. I mean, I can see why you would think that.” Her heart was hammering in her chest. She wanted to tell him she was sorry, that she never should have left like that, that she was thankful that he wanted to help her, that she did need him, that she wanted him to go with her. But how could she? The only people she’d ever cared about in her life were her mom and Leo. Her mom had died. And Leo had threatened to kill her. She didn’t trust herself to know who she could trust – if anyone.
“So you’re sorry?”
“I’m sorry I left without telling you. I shouldn’t have done that.”
Reid didn’t say anything. Instead, he reached into her bag and pulled out the pretzels. He opened them and popped one into his mouth.
