He tried not to hear the pain she was finally allowing to show in her voice. He still had to know, so he asked again. “Did you tell him?”
“He guessed,” she said on a tired sigh. “He saw your shirt. The one you gave me the other night.”
“Great. That’s great.” Shaking his head, he felt the last of his plan shatter out from under him. He’d thought he had it all figured out. The perfect revenge. Now it was all gone, and he was left standing alone with the woman he’d dragged into the rubble.
He pushed one hand through his hair and tried to figure out how this could have gone any worse, but he didn’t come up with anything.
“Now I need to know something from you,” Rose said.
His gaze snapped to hers. “What?”
“Was Dave right? He said you were only with me to get back at him. Was this all for revenge?”
He hadn’t planned to tell Rose about the revenge plot. He wasn’t interested in hurting her, after all. It was Dave he wanted to make pay. But looking into her eyes, he couldn’t lie to her, either. There’d already been enough lies between them. “Yeah. That was the plan.”
“The plan.” She huffed out a breath and shook her head again. “Wow. There was an actual plan.”
Her cool blue eyes locked on him, and Lucas shifted uncomfortably under that steady regard. It had been a long time, years maybe, since he’d felt the stirrings of guilt and regret that were starting to burn through him right now. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d felt like this.
And he didn’t like it. Damn it, he had done what needed doing. Dave had had to pay for his betrayal, and now he would. Collateral damage wasn’t pretty, but sometimes it was unavoidable.
Going for a bravado he wasn’t really feeling, Lucas said, “Rose, I didn’t set out to hurt you.”
She nodded jerkily as if she were a puppet having her strings yanked. “So, just a bonus for you, then.”
Another sharp stab of something hot and painful poked at his insides. He looked at her and felt completely torn. She was the sister of the man he considered his enemy. But she was also the woman he had spent the last couple of weeks with, laughing. Talking. Loving.
No. He pushed that last word out of his mind so fast, it was really nothing more than a blur on his consciousness. He didn’t love Rose. He didn’t love anyone. What he felt for her was…hell, he couldn’t even name it, but he knew it wasn’t love. How could it be?
That wasn’t part of the plan.
He took a breath. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to turn out.”
“Really? Then what? You were just supposed to get me into bed and then you would disappear? Never to be heard from again? Was that it?”
“Pretty much,” he admitted, though the words tasted bitter and had to be forced from his throat. When he’d first come up with this scenario, it had seemed pretty straightforward. Now, it was all tangled up in things he didn’t want to identify. Now, he was looking into a pair of blue eyes glittering with pain and humiliation and he felt like kicking his own ass.
She was still staring at him as if he were a stranger that had somehow wandered into her home, so he tried to make her see this from his side. “Rose, I didn’t know you when this started.”
“You still don’t, if you think I’m going to stand here and listen to you try to explain away what you did.”
Frustration boiled through the regret. “Dave stole from me. Betrayed my friendship.”
“And what have you done, Lucas? Is it really so different?” She glared at him for a long minute before looking away and adding, “At least Dave had a reason for what he did, all you had was your own petty need for payback.”
“Petty?” He grabbed her shoulders and turned her to face him.
Fine, he deserved to feel like a jerk for using her. He could accept that. But damned if he’d stand there and have her tell him that his need for revenge was nothing more than petty. “I trusted him. My brothers trusted him. He turned on all of us. I don’t think it’s petty to want some satisfaction for that.”
She pulled away from his touch, and instantly, his hands felt cold and empty.
“And I was a tool to be used.”
“Not just a tool, Rose,” he said, hating the words as they came out of his mouth, but somehow, he was unable to stop them. “You were—”
“Pitifully easy to trick?” she finished for him.
“Rose, try to understand,” he said, even knowing that she wasn’t listening to him anymore.
He reached out to her again, but she jerked back as if protecting herself from something foul.
Which, he thought, was just about right.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, shaking her head and swallowing hard. “God, you’re just like all the rest of them. You used me. Like my father. And Dave. And Henry. My God, I didn’t see it.”
She laughed, and it was a harsh, brittle sound that tore at something inside Lucas that he refused to recognize.
“You weren’t supposed to see it,” he said.
“Well then, big congrats to you! Mission accomplished! Saint Rose taken down a peg, and big bad thief taught a very important lesson, I’m sure.”
“Look, Rose—”
“No. You look,” she interrupted, anger churning in her voice now and fury coloring her porcelain cheeks. “Whatever was between us? You’re right. That’s over. You got what you wanted, so we don’t ever have to see each other again.”
He didn’t like the sound of that even though he’d gone to her house to pretty much say the same damn thing. And that didn’t make a bit of sense. Lucas didn’t like confusion. He liked order. He liked knowing where he was going, how he was going to get there and what he’d find when he arrived.
But ever since getting involved with Rose, he’d been wandering around in a daze. Why was he only noticing that now?
“Get out, Lucas. Get out of my house.”
She was looking up at him as if he were the enemy. He guessed he’d earned that. He’d never been tossed out of a house before, but he supposed that he’d earned that, as well.
But he wasn’t leaving until she understood one more thing.
“I’ll go,” he told her. “But we’re not completely done until we know if you’re pregnant or not. And if you are, Rose, I’ll be back.”
Ten
“He sent me a check.”
Three days of silence, Rose told herself. No contact at all from Lucas and this is what she gets in the mail?
In the mail?
“How big a check?” Dee asked from her usual perch on the couch. Like the true best friend she was, Delilah had shown up a few hours ago with more lattes and, even more importantly, a fresh supply of doughnuts.
They’d spent the afternoon on the couch with Rose alternately feeling sorry for herself and wanting to go kick Lucas. Now, evening was crouched outside the windows and the rain was beginning again. It was as if the weather matched her mood lately. Southern California was getting the rainiest winter in twenty years, and Rose felt right at home in the gloom.
“How much is the check?” Delilah asked again.
“Does it matter?” Rose turned to look at her friend. “For three days, I’ve been moping around here, missing that big ape, torturing myself and what does he do? He mails me a check for…” She glanced down and her eyes bugged out. “Ten thousand dollars!”
“Seriously?” Delilah bolted off the couch and snatched the check from Rose’s numb fingers.
Even though she and Delilah had both been born into wealthy families, they had each been on their own for the last few years. Rose by choice; Delilah because her father had lost everything to the IRS. So ten thousand dollars seemed like a vast amount of money to both of them.
Which to Rose’s mind only made this more insulting.
While her friend cooed over all the zeroes on the check, Rose’s brain went into overdrive. Since the night she had practically thrown Lucas out of her house, she’d been miserable. Every
minute, she’d ached for him—despite knowing that he’d been using her all along to get back at her brother.
What kind of sense did that make? Shouldn’t love be more like a faucet? Turn it on when it was right and shut it off when it wasn’t? She hadn’t slept, had cried so much her eyes were no doubt permanently red and puffy and this is the thanks she got?
The universe had to kick her while she was down?
Was he really that cold? Had she romanticized every feeling she had about him? Rose swallowed hard and tried to look away from the offending piece of paper, but her gaze refused to shift. It was all there, her mind whispered. All the proof she needed that he had never cared. That every word, every touch between them had been a lie.
And what had the last few days been like for him? Was he out partying? Moving on to some bimbo who wouldn’t care what he thought or said or did? Had he even given her a moment’s thought aside from the time it had taken for him to write that stupid, insulting check?
“Ten thousand dollars,” Delilah said. “‘For services rendered.’ Uh-oh.”
“What? Services?” Rose grabbed the check so she could scowl down at Lucas’s scrawled signature. That’s when she saw the memo line. Delilah was right. For services rendered.
Her jaw dropped and her eyes widened even further than they had before. “Services?”
“Rose,” Delilah said cautiously, “you know he meant the cooking lessons.”
“Do I?” she snapped in a voice so high it cracked as fury rushed through every inch of her body like an out-of-control wildfire. She was practically vibrating she was so angry. And insulted again. And hurt. And humiliated.
“That no-good, lying…” She ran out of invectives when Delilah interrupted her.
“You know he’s not paying you for sex.”
“We don’t know that,” Rose told her, still so angry she could hardly draw a breath. “This was probably part of his ‘plan.’ The big goodbye speech after using me to get back at Dave, followed by a nice check—not too big, not too small. Payoff has to be handled carefully, after all….”
“Oh, boy,” Delilah muttered warily.
Rose hardly heard her. Her blood was rushing in her ears and her heartbeat was pounding as if she’d just completed a marathon. “Who does he think he is, anyway?”
“Rose…”
Her fingers curled into the check, and it was only through a supreme act of control she didn’t tear it into bits. Lucas King had given her a metaphorical slap for the last time. It was her turn now and she had a few things she wanted to say to him. In person.
She glared down at his signature again. “Think you can pay me off without even facing me over it? Well, I don’t want your damn money.”
“Let’s not be hasty,” Delilah urged.
“No,” Rose said with a sharp nod. “You’re right. I do want his money. But only what he owed me for those cooking lessons.”
“He did say he was going to pay you three times your usual rate.”
“That still wouldn’t be ten thousand dollars, Dee,” she said, tapping the edge of the check against her fingertips. “No, he did this on purpose. He sent a check that isn’t so large I’d have to kill him, but still big enough for me to understand this was the big goodbye.”
“There are worse ways to break up,” Dee muttered.
“Hah! What? They were out of trinkets at the jewelry store?”
Delilah sighed. “You’re going to go see him, aren’t you?”
“You’re damn right I am,” Rose said, with a glint in her eye and a lift of her chin. Lucas King may have started all this with his ridiculous plan, but she was going to finish it. He wanted a big goodbye? Fine. She’d give him one. And when she was finished, he’d be sorry he had ever heard of Rose Clancy.
“Okay, as the best friend,” Dee said cautiously, “I feel it’s my duty to remind you that you actually love this guy, Rose. Remember the misery? The doughnuts? You’re angry right now, but you still love him in spite of everything.”
“I know,” Rose said, pulling in one deep breath after another. “And because I love that big creep, there is just no way I’m letting him get away with this.”
“Uh-huh,” Dee said, “and then what?”
“Then,” Rose told her firmly, “I will come home and do deep meditations or something until I’m out of love with him.”
“Yeah, that’ll work.”
“Supportive. That’s your job, remember?”
“Right, right.” Delilah held up both hands. “I’m supporto girl. Need a getaway driver? Here I am. But Rose, there’s still the question of whether or not you’re pregnant to consider, too.”
“I know.” She nodded again, glanced at her flat belly and wondered for the thousandth time in the last few days if there was a baby already growing inside her. And if there was, that baby deserved better than a mother who was crazy and a father who didn’t have the sense to know what was good for him.
Her shoulders slumped as her fingers moved over Lucas’s handwriting. Shaking her head, she said, “If I am pregnant, I’ll have to deal with Lucas. But if I let this go…him treating me like a bill to be paid…then how will we ever work together to take care of a baby? He may not love me, Dee. But he has to at least respect me.”
Delilah nodded and gave her a smile. “You’re absolutely right. I’m with you. Do you want me to go with you to see him?”
“No.” Rose threw a look at the window and the cold, rainy day outside. “I have to do this alone.”
“Okay, then.” Delilah picked up her purse off the coffee table and shrugged into her windbreaker, pulling the hood up over her perfectly styled red hair. “But call me when it’s over, okay?”
“I will.” She stood there in the center of the living room and watched her friend leave. Then she told herself to get a firm grip on her sweeping emotions. There was no point in facing down Lucas if she couldn’t calmly and clearly tell him exactly what she thought of him and his stupid check.
Minutes passed and she realized she wasn’t going to calm down. The best she could hope for was that she wouldn’t shriek at him or maybe kick him in the shins.
“Did he really think I could be bought off?” she asked herself, and then in the next instant, answered her own question. “Well, why wouldn’t he? He knew Dave stole jobs out from under him, so in the world according to Lucas King, that makes all of the Clancys thieves.”
Turning on her heel, she headed for her bedroom. She needed to change. And fix her hair. And makeup. This Clancy was going to teach Lucas King a lesson he wouldn’t forget.
If it was the last thing she ever did for him.
“Lucas…”
He didn’t even look up from his desk. “Evelyn, if you don’t want Katie’s cookies in the break room, tell Rafe.”
“This isn’t about the cookies,” his secretary said and waited for him to look up at her. “Someone’s here to see you.”
Someone? Evelyn usually wasn’t so vague. He frowned, then understood as a man walked up behind Evelyn, then slipped into Lucas’s office. “Dave.”
Almost the last person he’d expected to see here at King Construction. The only way he could have been more surprised was if Rose had shown up unannounced. Something inside him jolted to life at the thought, and he ruthlessly squashed it down.
He and Rose were over.
Even if he hadn’t called an end to it himself, after the way things had gone between them at her house, he knew she was done with him.
He didn’t like it and maybe he regretted the whole useless revenge plan in the first place—regretted it more than he would ever have thought possible—but hindsight was pretty much useless in most situations.
“It’s okay, Evelyn,” he said, standing up from behind his desk. He looked at the man opposite him and realized that he didn’t even feel the old anger anymore.
Lucas couldn’t help thinking about what Rafe and Sean had said, about letting it go. And somewhere over the last couple of
days, he now realized, he had. Wasn’t sure why. Wasn’t even sure how. But that hard, cold ball he’d been carrying around in his gut for the past two years was finally gone.
When his secretary left and closed the door, Dave said simply, “You shouldn’t have gone for Rose, Lucas.”
There was that sting of shame again. But he didn’t owe Dave anything, so he squashed that emotion flat. “And you shouldn’t have betrayed our friendship, Dave.”
“Damn it,” Dave countered, “this was between you and me. You didn’t have to drag my sister into it.”
“Wrong.” Lucas met his stare evenly. “This was between our families. You didn’t just cheat me, Dave. You cheated my brothers. You cost us seven jobs that winter.”
“Yeah,” he said on a snort of self-derision. Scrubbing one hand across his face, Dave said, “I know. Still can’t believe it myself, really. And you should know, I didn’t want to do it.”
“Small consolation. Whether you wanted to or not, you did.”
“I needed the money,” his old friend snapped, shooting Lucas a look that mixed both pride and embarrassment.
It was an admission he hadn’t expected to hear. Hell, the Clancy family wasn’t as wealthy as the Kings, but they came damn close. “For what? What was so damn important?”
Was he finally going to get the answers to the questions that had plagued him? And when he had them, would it make any difference?
Lucas had spent far too much time over the past two years thinking about the betrayal that had cut him so deeply. He’d even questioned his own ability as a judge of character and that bothered him more than anything. If he could be so wrong about Dave, what was to say he wasn’t wrong about a lot of other people in his life?
“My father was dying, and the business was going down,” Dave said, his words spilling from him as though a dam inside him had finally broken. He looked at Lucas. “Dad had made some bad investments in the years before I took over. He lost most of our capital. There were suppliers to be paid, contracts to honor and hospital bills piling up. I had to make good on it all or we would have lost everything we had left. I needed the jobs, Lucas.” He scowled at the memories, but added, “I had to protect my family. I’m not sorry I was able to do that, but I am sorry I used you to do it.”
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