Boy, did she get that one wrong.
“That does not mean you own me or my employees,” she insisted.
“I disagree. I’ve assigned William elsewhere.”
“You did what?” She left a space between each word, spoke nice and slow, to make sure he understood her position on this matter.
“He’s working on damage control after the Dex situation. The last thing I need is for clients to get word that our trainers and employees are not trustworthy. It’s a potential disaster.”
Since when did William listen to anyone but her? “William does what I tell him to do.”
“We can argue about that later, but today he’s not here. You are. You have intimate knowledge of the family business, not to mention a financial interest as a shareholder.”
“This—me and Noah—is never going to happen, Gray. We’re over. Not that it’s your business, but there’s no way to make the relationship work. Not when our priorities are so different.”
“This is business, and you have four minutes to get to your meeting.”
Her fingers ached from the death grip she had on the leather portfolio. “I can’t believe Noah agreed to this.”
“Noah is expecting William.”
The news slapped at her. “Then he should get William.”
Some small part of her figured that Noah stood behind this maneuver. Finding out he was as clueless to all this planning as she was should have been a relief. Instead, the realization hollowed her out even further.
Gray crossed one ankle over the other. “I want the best for this company, and that’s you.”
“Why should I?”
“Other than because your big brother asked?”
“Yeah. Other than that.”
“Because if you really intend to move on, you should move on with dignity. Don’t slink away from the family business this time. Stand up, stake your claim to what’s yours, and do your job.”
All good advice. When she was solidly back on her feet, she would work on that plan. Maybe in two or three years.
“Noah won’t like it.”
“Noah won’t say anything.”
The idea of a silent noncomplaining Noah struck her as odd. “Why?”
“Go see for yourself.”
Chapter Thirty
F ive minutes and a trip to the bathroom later, Lexy stood at the door to Noah’s office. His assistant already told her to go in. No chitchat or girl talk like they used to do while she waited for Noah to finish a meeting or get off an important call.
This time, the older woman had taken one look at Lexy and nodded to her boss’s door with a simple “he’s in.” Looked as if she was the bad guy in the situation. Again. Noah broke her heart and everyone sided with him. She had no idea how that kept happening.
With a deep inhale, she squared her shoulders and knocked on the door.
“Come in,” came the muffled reply.
When she stepped into the large airy office, the one with the navy walls and furniture she picked out and arranged, memories assailed her from every direction, both fiery and comfortable. How they sat and talked as they ate lunch at his desk. How they made love on that same surface. Even the sweetest moments pricked her with pain as she remembered them.
Then she realized she was alone.
The door to the adjoining bathroom stood open. A sliver of gray suit pants was visible in the light from the opening. “I just need a second, William.”
Gray had not lied. Well, not about this. Noah really did expect a meeting with William.
“No rush,” she said.
At the sound of her voice, Noah’s head popped around the door frame. “Lexy?”
“I’m here for the meeting.”
He stepped into the doorway wringing a crumpled towel in his hands. She figured she caught him in the middle of washing up.
“I see.” That was all he said.
The towel remained wrapped over his fists, but she could see everything else about him. The mischievous spark that lit his eyes and so attracted her the first time she saw him years ago was gone. A deep frown marred his otherwise strong face and solid jaw. He looked tired. Sad.
Every emotion crushing her could be seen on his face. In his dull skin.
“What happened to William?” Noah asked in a tone as flat as his demeanor.
“Gray.”
“What?”
Whatever scene Gray planned, he planned it alone. From Noah’s frown, she could tell he was as in the dark about this situation as she was. “Gray insisted I take this meeting.”
If possible, Noah’s face fell even further. “Your brother’s a stubborn ass.”
“Do you expect me to disagree?”
“No.”
“He insists he’s not matchmaking.”
Noah smacked his lips together. “And Gray never lies.”
She had to smile at that. “Yeah, I know. I didn’t get to pick my sibling. Blame my parents. Gray is one more strike against them, I guess.”
Noah motioned for her to take a seat in one of the mission-style chairs in front of his desk. “You may as well sit.”
Was it possible he was even less enthusiastic about this situation than she was?
“Since I didn’t know I was coming in today for this meeting, I don’t have the specifics about the PR campaign.” She didn’t have anything. Only William got things done in the office right now. She was too busy mourning the loss of the man sitting at the desk in front of her.
“Did William pass my report to you?” Noah asked.
“Uh, no?”
Noah reached into the credenza behind him. “I wasn’t sure what information you needed to set up the marketing and PR.”
She had trouble getting up in the morning and he spent the same time making impressive files. Life sucked. She flipped through the folder he put in front of her, but did not see anything but a smear of black where the words should be.
“Then there’s the added question about whether or not we should hold off and put some time and distance between the company and Dex’s situation.” Noah winced over his former friend’s name.
She thought she heard a brief fumble in his voice as well. For a guy with a practiced serious look and determination to plow through the business in front of them, something terrible bubbled inside him. They were connected enough for her to know it. Feel it. To ache for him.
“I’m sorry about Dex.” The comment came out as a whisper because resentment and pain backed up on her over Dex’s actions.
And she was one step removed. She did not consider Dex a best friend. Didn’t spend hours with him. Trust him, work with him, and believe in him. She wondered what that sort of harsh betrayal did to a man like Noah. He lived by a strict code of right and wrong. His upbringing scarred him. In a way, warped him.
“He finally confessed. He set up Henderson and me.” Noah broke eye contact and went back to his credenza. “I found some old marketing plans you put together for—”
The all-business attitude broke her will. She wanted to be strong and not care, but she was not that person. She loved him too much to play this odd role.
“Stop.” The word came out as a whisper.
He swiveled back around. “Huh?”
“That’s enough.”
He had the nerve to look confused. “You lost me.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Work.” No compromise there. The word practically snapped out of him.
“We can’t sit here and pretend nothing has gone on between us. The two of us trying to conduct business is ridiculous.”
“You walked into my office. I’m trying to be professional about this. Trying to maintain some semblance of a regular meeting.”
The coldness of his voice and actions killed her by inches. “We have too much history to act as if we don’t.”
He stared at her, not saying a word.
“What?” she asked.
“I’m just sitting here.”
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That was the worst part. He acted as if he did not care about her or anything she said. The only thing he let her see was a blank face and a stern expression. He treated perfect strangers with more warmth.
“What do you want from me, Lexy?”
Everything. That was the problem. She wanted him to put her first and not push her into an adult life filled with secrets and misplaced protectiveness. She had done that for too many years already.
“We have to figure out a way to work together,” she said.
He rubbed a hand over his face. For a second, his rigid composure broke and she saw a brief glimpse of the compassionate, loving man who got treated her to a lavish dinner with champagne before getting down on one knee to propose. Then his face closed up again, leaving her standing on the outside looking in.
“You know what?” He tapped to his desk. “We can’t. You were right to put William on this project.”
So it was up to her to walk away and make herself scarce at the office. “We should be able to keep business separate from our personal relationship.”
“That’s not going to happen.” His lips flattened. “There’s a limit to what’s possible.”
The realistic and intelligent part of her agreed with his assessment. Some deeper dying part needed him to acknowledge that the situation was killing him the same way it was killing her.
She hit her fists against her knees in an attempt to bring all of her crazy thoughts back under control. “We care about each other.”
His mouth dropped open. “Care? That’s the word you’re using to describe how you feel about me?”
She closed her eyes on a waved of pain. “I never denied loving you, Noah. That was never the issue.”
“No. The problem was that you didn’t love me enough.”
His words flew at her out of nowhere and landed like a punch right to her stomach. The breath actually rushed out of her.
How in the world had he come up with such a wrong answer to what happened to them? This amounted to something more than a communications issue. “That’s not true.”
“Of course it is.” He relaxed back in his chair even as his voice rose with anger. “Your love was conditional.”
“No. Absolutely not.” She wanted to scream the denial.
“You loved me only as long as I did what you wanted, when you wanted. When I broke with the plan you had in your head of how a fiancé should act, you left me.”
He had the facts tangled and rearranged.
“I didn’t—”
“You left me, Lexy. Not once, but twice.” His voice trembled from the force of his words.
Their fights unfolded in her head in a very different way. She was trying to protect herself. To prove a point to him so that they could have a meaningful future together.
He gave her a sad smile. “You walked out of my life when I did something that disappointed you.”
Once he started talking, emotion spewed out of him. From the tense way he held his body to the tight clench of his jaw, she could see how much the conversation cost him.
“You make me sound like a petulant child.”
“You made me feel disposable.”
The weight of his words crashed down on her head. “That’s not how it was.”
“It’s exactly what happened.” His eyes grew huge with a mix of fire and rage. “I blamed myself. I kept thinking if I changed, you would stop leaving me.”
A sob rushed up her throat, but she choked it back. As she heard the words, she could almost see him work it all out in his mind. As the thoughts entered his head, he threw them at her. It was as if he did not realize how hurt he was until he started talking.
“We saw things differently. Things that didn’t matter to me, for whatever reason, mattered to you. When I didn’t immediately see that, I got punished.”
He made her sound so horrible. So little and petty. The more he spoke, the less sure of her position she became, but she rushed to defend her actions anyway. “The issue was trust.”
“Did you ever really not trust me?” He shoved his chair back hard from the desk. “Really? Ask yourself.”
She did not know if he wanted space or was just staving off the violence running through him. “My trust was not in question.”
“Neither was mine. You had it from the beginning. I didn’t question your parents or their odd behaviors. I supported you in your career and in therapy.”
“Noah, come on. You wouldn’t share any information with me. Then when you did, you still held back this huge secret about being blackmailed. After our deep discussion at the resort, you went back to acting the same way.”
“So you walked out.”
“I had to.”
He stood up and turned his back to her. She could see his face in the window. Gone was the strong man who never broke down. Anguish, heartbreak. In that moment, she saw each emotion play across his face.
“No, Lexy. You chose to leave. You decided my love for you was not enough. That I couldn’t change, or maybe that I wasn’t worth the wait to see if I could.”
She did not think her heart could splinter any more.
She was wrong.
“It sounds as if I’m not the only one who felt betrayed,” she whispered the realization more to the room than to him.
“You’re just now getting that?”
“You never said it before.”
“Because I hoped I was wrong.” He turned back to her with his mask of indifference firmly back in place. “You made it pretty clear how easy it is for you to leave me behind.”
Her heart broke. This time, it broke for him. “It was never like that.”
“It was only like that.”
“You see everything in such black-and-white terms. Life is about gray.”
“Not this. There’s never been anything about my feelings for you that had to be hid in the shadows or explained or muted. Black-and-white. Love and trust or not.” He visibly forced his fingers to unclench from the back of his chair. “You made your decision. I made mine. Unfortunately, we made different choices.”
“You’ve thought about this a great deal.”
“It’s been a long two weeks.” He looked down at his hands.
The longest and worst of her life. “What should I have done?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
“You say I ran.”
“That’s not up for debate. I wasn’t at that damn resort in Utah for a vacation.”
He was right.
Her knees buckled, but she managed to stay on her feet. She failed to fight for him and refused to stick it out. The entire thing—the trip to Utah, the fights—all revolved around her needs. Her security depended on him acting a certain way. The demands she placed on him did not really have anything to do with him. They related to her and her anger at her parents. Yet she put it all on him.
It all made sense now. His history with Karen taught him to provide only happy news. His time in the military and government showed him how to separate out the parts of his life so he could handle them. His parents taught him that love came with a price.
And she broke his heart. That she had the power to do so stunned her, but watching him now, she knew. The man standing there, so firm and unbending, looking at her with hate in his eyes. She did this to him. Everything and everyone that came before her took him down one trail and she failed to help him see another.
The joking Noah turned back into that cold man everyone else saw when he started at Stuart Enterprises. He changed for her, maybe even for them, and earned the respect of every doubter. Now he had changed back to the cool operator who focused only on work and kept the softer side of himself locked away.
“I handled everything wrong.” She knew that now. Felt it with bruising clarity down to her toes.
“You gave up.”
“I didn’t know what else to do.” That was the truth. She kept running into walls. How many times could she bang into concrete be
fore she got smart and walked around the wall?
“You could have changed me.”
Whatever answer she expected, it was not that one. “What?”
“You taught me everything else, including how to love again without worrying about failure or…”
Then she taught him that love inevitably died. Her path to the wrong way stood out, so easy for her to trace. “And?”
“You could have cared enough to teach me to be the man you needed me to be.”
Chapter Thirty-one
A s soon as the words left his mouth, Noah wanted to catch them and drag them back. He could not go down this road with her. They did not understand each other. Watching her walk away from him a second time taught him what he always suspected was true. That he could not hold on to a woman like Lexy.
He eased his grip on the back of his chair. Much harder and he would puncture the leather. Not that he cared. Not that the office would be his much longer anyway. He could not stay here. Could not be this close to everything he ever wanted and not attain it.
As soon as he launched this new division, he would start to back out and rebuild his life elsewhere. He owed Gray and the Stuarts the guarantee to finish what he had started. They took a chance on him and accepted him without limits. Something more than his former fiancée ever did. He would repay that debt to the rest of the Stuart clan before he moved on.
“I’ll call William and make an appointment to go over the plans.” Hell, he would meet with anyone if that meant Lexy would get out of his office.
“No.”
“What?” He looked at her then. Truly looked at her.
For a woman who finally made the break from him, she sure as hell did not appear happy about the fact. Her usually rosy cheeks now seemed hollowed out. She had lost weight. Fatigue pulled at her.
“Are you sick?” he asked, even though he did not want to care.
“Forget about William and the campaign and work.” She dropped the portfolio she had been holding and stepped forward until she stood just on the other side of his desk.
If she came any closer, he would lose it. His temper wanted to rage until he inflicted as much hurt on her as she had on him. The only thing preventing him from unleashing was a thin barrier of decency.
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