“When they get shot as part of an assassination plot? I guess.”
He gave me a wry look. “You know what I mean.”
“Don’t you ever play cards with anybody?”
“Well, yeah, but usually it’s poker at $10,000 a hand.”
That took a second to process.
“No. Normal people don’t do that.”
“Hey… speaking of poker… remember that first night we met?” he grinned.
My face flushed red, and I glanced over at Johnny. He was reading a magazine and pretending not to listen to us. Once bitten, twice shy.
I looked back at Connor and scowled. “Hush, or you can just play with yourself.”
I didn’t realize what I’d said until he started laughing – and then going ‘Ow, ow’ between guffaws.
“Play by yourself, play by yourself!” I shouted.
Even Johnny could barely stifle his chuckling. I kept hearing him snort behind us.
“I meant play by yourself, not WITH yourself – ”
“Stop, stop, please, it hurts,” Connor howled – both in hilarity and pain – as he held his ribs.
“Good, you deserve it,” I muttered. “Now draw.”
25
I spent Saturday night in the room, but Connor was adamant that I go home Sunday night.
“You need your sleep,” he lectured me.
“But I have to go into work on Monday – ”
“Even better reason for you to get a good night’s sleep.”
“But – ”
“I’m not going anywhere, Lily. Just come by the hospital in the morning before you go to work, and then come by afterwards.”
I grudgingly agreed, kissed him goodbye, and left around 11 PM to go home.
Monday morning, I told Anh I was going to drive to work separately so I could visit Connor beforehand. She told me to say ‘hi.’
I got to the front desk of the hospital about 9AM.
“May I get a visitor pass? I’m here to see Connor Templeton.”
“Who?” the woman asked. She must have been a weekday person; I didn’t recognize her from over the weekend.
“Connor Templeton, Room 817. I’ve been visiting with him since he was admitted on Friday night.”
The woman checked the monitor and shook her head. “He checked out this morning at 7AM.”
I stared at her. “What?”
“That’s all it says – he discharged himself against his doctor’s orders.”
I stood there at the counter in stunned silence.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” she asked.
“Um… no. Thank you,” I said, and moved away.
Son of a bitch.
He knew he was leaving early – he had to have known.
So why didn’t he tell me?
And why did he try so hard to keep me from spending the night?
I pulled out my phone.
No messages.
I dialed his number.
It went to voicemail.
“If you have this number, then you know who this is. Leave a message,” his familiar, sexy voice rumbled over the line.
“Connor,” I said, trying to choke back my fear and disappointment and anger. “Hi. I just asked at the front desk and they said you checked out two hours ago? Um… why? Call me.”
I hung up and thought for a second… then called Sebastian.
“This is Sebastian Berg of Extremis Incorporated. Please leave a message, or if this is an emergency, contact the 24-hour company hotline at – ”
I ignored the number and started talking as soon as the phone beeped. “Sebastian, it’s Monday morning at 9 AM, and I just found out you guys checked out two hours ago. Now I can’t reach Connor. Call me and let me know where you are, okay? I just want to make sure everything’s okay.”
I hung up… considered the pros and cons against it… decided I didn’t care how desperate it made me look, and dialed Johnny.
“This is Johnny Inaba of Extremis Incorporated. Leave a message.”
“Johnny – the hospital says Connor checked out two hours ago, and I can’t get any of you on the phone – where are you guys?! Call me, okay? Please.”
I hung up and stared out the hospital lobby window for a long time, hoping one of them would call me back.
None of them did.
26
As I fought my way through Monday morning traffic, I was basically on autopilot. My brain was otherwise engaged in figuring out why the hell nobody was calling me back.
I wanted to believe that it was an honest mistake, but that was bullshit. We’d all just spent two and a half days together. Never mind Connor, who I felt more in love with than ever; I’d bonded with Johnny and Sebastian during our shared fear and stress. I was closer to the two of them than anybody else in my life except for Connor and Anh.
And none of them had bothered to tell me they were leaving.
There were only a couple of options, as far as I saw it:
They were on an airplane or somewhere they couldn’t physically contact me – which meant they had skipped town without telling me. If that was the case, it was a betrayal that cut to the bone.
Or they had been kidnapped – or worse – by Miranda’s thugs, and that’s why they weren’t answering.
That was horrific, but unlikely.
The most likely scenario of all: Connor had had a change of heart.
He’d booted me out of the hospital room last night so there wouldn’t have to be any awkward goodbyes this morning. No tears, no fuss, no muss, no ‘thanks for staying with me and all, babe, but don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.’
And he’d forbidden the other two to answer my calls.
Asshole.
Asshole, asshole, ASSHOLE.
It was like I was falling down a deep, black hole of self-pity and anger, and there was nothing to grab on to and slow myself down. It was just an unending spiral into a bottomless pit.
At one point, honking startled me out of a teary daydream. I was sitting at a traffic light, unaware that it had turned. It probably hadn’t been green long; Los Angeles drivers are not known for their patience.
I wiped my eyes, moved on through the intersection, and vowed to put all thoughts of him out of my mind until I was safely at work. I wasn’t going to get killed because of that ASSHOLE.
It worked for about two intersections, whereupon I started obsessing and crying again.
But I did make it to work in one piece.
27
I swept open the glass door of our office and cried, “Anh, you are not going to believe what that asshole did to…”
I stopped in my tracks.
Nobody was in.
Even though the door was unlocked, nobody was inside.
“Hello? Anybody here?” I called out as I checked all the smaller rooms.
Nobody. Not Anh, not Susan, not Phuong – nobody.
I was beginning to get scared.
I whipped out my cell phone and dialed.
Anh’s chirpy little voice said, “Hi, this is Anh Nguyen of Ross and Associates. Leave me a message and I’ll return it as soon as possible. Have a great day!”
“Anh, this is Lily,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper as I paced up and down the main room. “Where are you? Nobody’s here, but the door to the office was open – call me as soon as you get this, okay?”
I hung up and collapsed in an office chair, then swiveled around to stare out the floor-to-ceiling window at the trees.
What the hell was going on?
Was it Miranda?
Was she targeting not only Connor, Johnny, and Sebastian, but my best friend, too – and anybody her thugs happened to find here when they walked in?
Should I call the police?
I had the detectives’ numbers – I should call them –
Just as I was searching my purse for their business card, a voice spoke behind me.
“Hello.”
I shrieked and swung around in the chair, expecting some guy in a ski mask and a shotgun –
But it was Connor, dressed in a suit.
“What the FUCK, Connor?!” I screamed at him. “Where have you BEEN?!”
Connor took a step back and stared at me like I was clearly insane. “Um… are you okay?”
I buried my head in my hands and leaned over. When I straightened back up, I took a couple of deep breaths and opened my eyes.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “Sorry.”
Connor tilted his head to the side. “What’s wrong?”
“What, besides the fact that you weren’t at the hospital when you said you’d be, and you didn’t call me back, and Johnny didn’t call me back, and Sebastian didn’t call me back, and then I get in here and my roommate and business partner’s gone, and so are her friends and our employees, so I started to wonder if maybe Miranda had kidnapped and murdered all of you? You mean besides that?”
Connor’s eyes widened even more. “Wow… I am going to return all of your calls from now on, as soon as you make them.”
I burst out laughing – then stopped, shut my eyes, and complained, “It’s not funny.”
“Actually, I’m not even going to let them go to voicemail – I’m going to get you your own Bat Phone. Maybe I’ll even have a direct line surgically implanted in my ear.”
“Okay, ha ha, it was a little crazy, yes, I got it, okay,” I conceded. “I was just worried, that’s all.”
“About us all getting kidnapped and murdered.”
I closed my eyes and put my hand to my forehead. “Yeah, okay, I admit, I overreacted. Sorry, it’s just been a tough couple of – ”
“Are you sure you weren’t worried about something else?”
I opened my eyes and stared at him.
His face was kind as he looked at me, the tiniest hint of a smile on his face. You never would have known he’d been in the hospital for two days; he looked absolutely dazzling in his suit, with a gorgeous blue tie matching his eyes.
“I thought… maybe you didn’t… want to say goodbye,” I whispered. “So you just left.”
“No.” He gave me a wry little sideways look. “You should know me better than that.”
I wanted to say, Well, you kind of avoided me for days because you said ‘I love you,’ and then I thought I was never going to see you again, so how was I supposed to know?
But I held my tongue. I didn’t want to get into all that. Not now.
“Why’d you check out of the hospital so early?” I demanded.
“I had some things I needed to take care of.”
“Well, why didn’t you call back?”
“Because I didn’t think you would immediately jump to the conclusion that we were the victims of a mass murder plot.”
He was making fun of me.
Asshole!
“It’s not entirely crazy, you know, considering you got shot Friday night,” I said belligerently.
“It’s a little crazy,” he said, holding his finger and thumb about an inch away from each other as he tried to stifle a smile.
I was getting seriously pissed off.
“Well where’s Anh, then?” I demanded as I swung my arm around the empty office. “Where’s Susan and – ”
“I asked them if they wouldn’t mind going out for a bit. So you and I could talk.”
My stomach dropped about three inches – and not in a good way. “Talk?”
“Yeah. There are some things I need to say that are a bit overdue.”
“Oh.”
I sat there in the office chair, silent and afraid.
29
He looked down at the floor. He wouldn’t – or couldn’t – look at me as he started.
“Everything that happened two months ago… I handled that really badly.”
I swallowed, hard. “Well… I could have handled it better, too… I guess…”
He straightened up and looked me in the eye. “No, you handled it fine. You drew a line in the sand and you refused to take less than you deserved. I admired you for that.”
I wondered if he knew where my advice had come from, but I decided now wasn’t the time to ask.
What I did ask was what I’d been dying to know all that time:
“Why didn’t you call me?”
He looked away and began to pace slowly, methodically. I saw him wince, and realized his broken ribs must still be hurting him.
“I asked myself that a lot, too,” he said. “I guess I’m just not very good with relationships. My father, my mother… we weren’t the kind of family that…”
His words petered out, the idea left hanging in the air. He stopped walking and looked me straight in the eye.
“No, that’s bullshit.” He took a deep breath. “The reason I didn’t call was because I was afraid.”
After a few seconds, I nodded slowly, sympathetically. “Because you told one woman you loved her, and… she turned out to be a psychopathic bitch?”
He burst out laughing. “Yes. Well, no – I mean, you’re totally right about her, but that wasn’t the case. I mean…”
He struggled to find the words.
“Yes, I was afraid of being hurt again. And I was afraid of being wrong again. With her, I’d known, deep down in my core, that something wasn’t right. But you and me… it felt right, through and through. And I knew I wanted you. But I was afraid of that. Of being… powerless when it came to you. Not to mention there was a whole bunch of ego wrapped up in it – I mean, it hurt, bad, REALLY bad, when you walked out on me. Part of me was like, ‘Whoa – do you know who I am?! You don’t do that to me!’ But that was just me being an asshole, I know that. These competitive, egotistical parts of me? Pretty good for business, but not so good when it comes to being in love with you.”
I gasped at his words:
When it comes to being in love with you.
He realized what he’d said, but instead of being panicked, he smiled – warmly, sweetly. “Because I do. I love you, Lily. Totally and completely. It just took me awhile to admit it… when I was sober.”
I smiled and hiccupped and laughed and wiped away the tears that were coursing down my cheeks. I expected him to come over and lift me out of my seat and kiss me – but he wasn’t done.
“Do you know when I realized it? When I knew it for sure?”
I shook my head ‘no.’
“When we got out of the elevator and you screamed, and I knew he was going to shoot. At that second, I knew there was nothing more important than you. And I swore that if I made it out alive, I was never, ever going to forget that again.”
Now I was bawling.
He smiled and walked over to the chair and pulled me up by my hands, wincing every so slightly as he did it. I put my hands on his face and he kissed me, softly, sweetly, tenderly. But after a moment he broke off and backed away.
“There’s something else I have to tell you, though,” he said.
I stared at him, and my stomach lurched as I thought of all the worst-case scenarios I could imagine him saying:
I got married to Miranda in a secret ceremony and we’re still hitched.
I have 15 love children scattered across six continents.
I’m gay. (Although I didn't see how that one was possible.)
Then I figured I was just overreacting again, and I let him go on.
He looked down almost shyly at the carpet again. “I asked you if you remembered that day in Santa Monica in the hospital.”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“I never told you, but I made Johnny take pictures of us while you weren’t looking.” He took his cell phone out of his pocket, tapped the screen, and held it out. “Then he sent them to me afterwards.”
I took the phone in wonder and looked at the picture. It was of me and him in a store, laughing at some secret joke.
“There’s more,” he prodded.
I swiped the screen, and there
was another picture, me feeding him a piece of cotton candy off my fingers.
There must have been twenty photos, from us on the jungle gym rings on the beach, to us walking the pier at Santa Monica, to us kissing with the sun behind us.
None of the pictures were posed; all of them were just stolen moments of time.
I had never seen myself look so happy in my entire life.
Or in love.
And Connor… he was obviously happy. Beaming in every photo, except the ones where he was telling me some joke that made me crack up, or when we were kissing, lost in our own passionate world.
“I looked at those obsessively when… two months ago… up until Friday night,” he said. “It was all I had of you. I must have looked at them a dozen times a day.”
“I’m jealous,” I said with a smile. “There was one horrible regret I had… that I never took any pictures of us.”
“There was something else, too.”
I looked up at him. He reached in his suit pocket and brought something out, cradling it in his palm so I couldn’t see it.
“You remember the toy store?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“They had all these gumball machines up at the front… do you remember that?”
“Definitely.”
“Well, one of the machines had all these plastic bubbles in them with little rings, and I saw this one that was absolutely beautiful – I mean, for a ring that costs 25 cents – but I thought, ‘Damn, I want to give her that.’ So while you and I were in the back of the store, I made Johnny change out $20 in quarters and go through the entire machine before he finally got it out.”
I put my hands to my mouth and laughed.
Connor grinned. “You should have heard him afterwards. He was so mad: ‘I’m a freakin’ bodyguard, not a bubblegum machine attendant.’”
He held out his hand to me. In his palm was a tiny ring, meant for a child, and obviously cheap: a plastic diamond surrounded by two smaller blue stones that were supposed to be sapphires. The ring band was gold-colored metal. It wasn’t even one continuous circle; instead, there were overlapping prongs, so it could be bent to fit the finger of a three-year-old or a preteen girl.
All That He Loves (Volume 2 The Billionaires Seduction) Page 34
