Resisting Redemption

by Amabel Daniels

  He faced her briefly and heat shone in his eyes.

  She palmed her face. Walked right into that one. “No! As more than a boss… As a…friend.”

  His free hand sought hers and he held them joined together. As she’d never had the time to properly make and keep friends, she couldn’t conclude friends didn’t hold hands. But since it was either his fingers rubbing circles in vulnerability, or his fingers threading through hers, perhaps as a comfort, she relaxed and welcomed his touch.

  Time to turn the tables. She’d shared more with him than anyone else she knew.

  “Why did you shut down after our interview with Kylie? That wasn’t a pensive, thinking moodiness. Something struck a chord.”

  Please? She wanted, needed to hear him explain. Theirs was a risky relationship, and she suspected he knew her reluctance to go after him would wane with each passing day that they spent together. But it wasn’t only his status of boss that distanced her from sleeping with him.

  He was more adroit of closing himself in than she was herself. Even to allow for a supremely idiotic fling between assistant and boss, she needed more than drop-dead sexiness to lure her in to dropping her panties. She needed to know him. For him to let her inside even the smallest inch.

  When his finger started drawing slight circles on her knuckle, she squeezed tighter.

  “My reaction was because Kylie reminded me of Tara.”

  She wanted to laugh. “Don’t get me wrong. I respect she was your ex and all that. But Tara? She might be Pantsuit Barbie, but I wouldn’t go so far to compare her to a model.”

  “Not her appearance. The depth of her manipulation.”

  “Tara had you under her thumb?” Roxie snorted. “As if anyone could control you.”

  He sighed. “I told you I was one of five.” He cleared his throat. “We were like a little team, the six of us with Dad. Never a quiet moment. I’d always wanted that. A huge, busy, loud house with a bunch of wild kids running around.”

  So how had Lia gotten her information wrong? He wasn’t anti-family, but pro-kids?

  “We all had our roles, especially after Mom died. Finn, he was the oldest, he started working to help Dad pay the bills. Wade, the youngest, he was the ass-kicker. Sean, he was the comedian. Kelly, well, she mothered us all.”

  “And you?”

  “I was the tutor. Helped with the homework. Kelly did too, but I was the studious one.”

  “I’m shocked.”

  He smirked. “I had a scholarship to play football for Purdue. Couldn’t wait. Play ball, go to law-school. It was my future. I couldn’t wait to start.”

  “But…?”

  “But, Tara. She was my high school sweetheart. More like she was around enough that it made sense to say yes to dating her. I was captain of the football team. I kept a summer job and a tutor position in the library. I didn’t have time to date. So when she asked, I figured why not. She was planning to attend Emory, her family’s alma mater. Law, as well. As the day came closer for me to accept the offer to play and study at Purdue, she grew antsier about me leaving. Didn’t think we could survive a long-distance relationship. And then she got pregnant.”

  Oh boy. She had an inkling how the deceit began. Tara used their baby to get what she wanted from Grant? Just like how Jimmy had accused Roxie of trying to do that to him?

  “So I stayed. How could I not? I couldn’t leave my child. Sure, it was premature, the pregnancy. I was eighteen for fuck’s sake. I wasn’t ready to be a father, but I’d dreamed of having my own family. Tara and I got along all right. So I gave up Purdue and went to Emory with her instead. Took out loan after loan. Still had to work. Played football as long as I could until it cut into my studies.”

  “And the baby?”

  “Lost it. The week after my offer at Purdue expired, she had a miscarriage.”

  “Grant, I’m so sorry.”

  His laugh was harsh. “Roxie, baby, that’s only the start of it.”

  Baby. Roxie could have batted her lashes and blushed at his endearment if they weren’t having such a heavy conversation.

  “I was devastated. It was such a short time, but I honestly thought I was going to be a dad. I threw myself into my classes and work. I was a TA. I coached junior leagues. Even though I’d stayed with Tara, as she’d wanted, it was a cycle. After the first couple years of school, she was harder to please, agitated, clingy. Said I never had time for her.” He shrugged. “And I didn’t. I didn’t have a free ride at Emory like she did. I had to work my ass off. And I did.

  “I thought about leaving her, thinking she wasn’t a good influence in my life. I needed a partner who would be proud of me making top of my class, not scorning the hours I spent studying for it. Someone who would encourage me to take on extra courses to get ahead in my academics, not bitch about being lonely.”

  It was déjà vu, Grant’s experience in law school to her experience in vet school. Precisely the reason she’d never dated, never sought out someone she would only leave in her dust. It wasn’t coldness, it was the promise of her coveted dream career.

  “She started to say I hated her, and sometimes it wasn’t far from the truth. Said that I held it against her that she lost the baby. That I didn’t want her or didn’t try to make time for her anymore because she lost the baby. No matter how many times I told her otherwise, she insisted. So she put me on the spot. If I wanted to be the father of her child, we should get married.”

  He maneuvered the car into the parking lot of Geraldo’s Cut. Light rain still showered outside the windows as he turned off the engine. “It was the one chance I had to get the fuck out of there, and I didn’t. She kept ragging on me about the baby. That I detested her because she lost it. When I hesitated too long to answer her about marriage, she said it was true. If I loved her, we would just try again to have another. Never mind we were in college. Never mind I said we were too young. She wanted to have a baby, she said. So I said yes. We got married. I still wanted a family, my little brats running around and causing hell, I wanted it all.”

  Grant let go of her hand.

  “Make a run for it?” He jerked his head toward the gray-clouded sky out the window.

  Huh? Oh. We’re here.

  They opened their doors and dashed for the entrance. Once they were seated at a table upstairs, they ordered drinks and Grant resumed his story. He seemed agitated, revealing himself, his forefinger making this circles around the pad of his thumb, but he spoke with an urgency, like he wanted to shake the weight of his secret off his shoulders.

  “So we married while we were in school. Went through law school together. Got our first place together. Hired in at her uncle’s firm together. And her promises to start a family fell flatter and flatter. For a while, she turned my words back on me. Too young. Let’s finish school first. Let’s wait ’til we start our careers.

  “And sure, it made sense. It was initially my warning to get settled before starting a family. But at each milestone we achieved professionally, she stalled. After pre-law, she wasn’t ready. Before graduation from law school, she wasn’t ready. After passing the bar, she was too scared. After we’d started at Kaniz, she wasn’t ready.”

  He took a solid gulp of his brandy and eyed the ceiling for a moment.

  “Never had the time to try. Too tired after work. Needed to stay up late prepping for a case. Early court date next morning.”

  “But you were doing that too,” Roxie interrupted. “You work your ass off in the office. You stay up late prepping for cases. If you do it now, I bet you did it then.”

  “I did. We both did. Only she used it as an excuse. Then she said maybe we can’t have a baby.”

  “Infertile? Then how did she get knocked up in high school?”

  He snorted. “Right? But anyway, I went along with it, her excuses, with useless fertility testing, and shifted my marriage to my job. She was rising in the firm in her own right. I kept trying for the team of kids I wanted, hoping she’d be ready on
e day, hoping maybe whatever she said was scarred from her miscarriage would still let her get pregnant.

  “But in reality, we were only drifting further apart. Once I hit thirty, I had a bit of a crisis. Thirty. Nowhere closer to kids with the same woman I’d been with since high school. I said it wasn’t working.”

  “You threatened to leave?”

  He nodded. “Having kids isn’t something you can go halfway on. You either want them or not.”

  Roxie resisted an internal cringe. He couldn’t be remarking about her, could he? She hadn’t planned for Lucy, but she loved her, and surrendered to blackmail to keep Lucy. But in his and Tara’s situation, her heart broke for Grant.

  “She’d told me she wanted a family, and I believed her at first. She got baby name books. She already knew which room would be the nursery. But then she proved it was a lie. She’d tossed me too many times. We weren’t getting younger. I even suggested a surrogate if she didn’t want to go through the gestation period. She refused that. Hated another woman having my baby in her.”

  Roxie shook her head.

  “I suggested adoption. I won’t even bother to tell you her reasons to refuse that alternative. She had done a one-eighty, and I was done. I told her I was leaving the practice to start my own. I was fed up with it. Tired of defending pieces of shit rich scumbags who deserved to go to jail. Tired of hearing Tara’s excuses. I was going to start over, without her, in my career and my future.

  “She said I was being rash and begged me to wait. She had an appointment with the fertility clinic the next week.” He ceased speaking and rubbed his temples. “The day of her appointment, I thought I’d surprise her when she came home from the clinic. Nothing big. Flowers and dinner to show my appreciation of her commitment to still try to get pregnant. To show how I respected her through this struggle.”

  Roxie grimaced. A foreboding tensed her stomach.

  He slightly jerked his head forward. “Here comes Wayne.”

  She reached for his hand on the table and clutched it. “But what happened? When you got home to surprise her?”

  Grant turned his gaze to hers and said in a hasty, menacing whisper, “I caught her fucking Stuart, the private investigator Kaniz hires.”

  He let go of her hand and shoved up from his chair to stand. As she remained seated, speechless and torn in her chair, he offered his hand to their approaching dinner mate. “Wayne, what a pleasure. Nasty storm out there, huh?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  While Grant stood, shook hands with Wayne, and then sat back down again, Roxie stumbled to compute the punchline to Grant’s revelation.

  Manipulated. Teased. Led on. Forced on guilt trips and tugged along with false promises. That was what Tara had done to him for years.

  Years.

  Still frowning, she centered her stare on the stark-white empty plate in front of her, tuning out the common bullshit chit-chat Grant carried on with their dinner companion.

  How evil, how low, could a woman—any human—be to deceive and ruin another person’s life, his deepest dreams and wishes? And Tara hadn’t just done a number on Grant. She’d done a multiple digit integer taken to the nth exponent on Grant.

  I was wrong. I had him all figured out and I couldn’t be further from the truth.

  Lia’s introductory, sketchy explanation of Grant being a ‘rough, hard-to-please, and anti-family’ kind of man didn’t characterize him at all. He didn’t hate kids. He had been longing for his own for too long. How could every reminder of everyone else reaching his goal for a family not feel like swallowing a shard of glass? It wasn’t annoyance, rudeness, or hatred that formed the firm’s opinion of Grant loathing the working parent, he likely despised the constant reminder of what he was missing out on in life.

  Rubbing the heel of her hand on her chest, she grimaced, unsure if it were heartburn or heartbreak. His confession had been too raw, too personal for her to not take his words for truth. Sure, there were two sides to every story, but she couldn’t help but believe Grant.

  It was coming together, congealing into simple sense. The sheepish way his smile had fallen when she corrected him on how to hold Lucy. The stiff admission he wasn’t familiar with how to be around babies. The constant stares—likely not of condemnation, but of curiosity and regret—when he’d always catch her smiling at pictures of her daughter on her phone.

  How cruel it had to be, her having Lucy near him.

  Tara…that bitch!

  Sorrow and sympathy for Grant quickly boiled into hot, searing anger at Tara. Lied to Grant. Cheated on him… Roxie clenched her fist under the table. Still cheating on him. It would take a significant amount of eons to erase the memory of Tara going down on the DA in his office.

  What was her game? She’d wanted to feed Ben to the lions and have him plead guilty to a murder he didn’t commit. Now thwarted with Grant in charge of the case, what was next? Hand over insider info on the case to the prosecution? Play Grant—and Ben—even more in the next episode of her twisted agenda? All those constant nagging texts, emails, and voicemails from Tara’s assistant, and the ice-queen herself. Were those signs of her floundering because Grant was no longer under her finger?

  No more. Roxie would be damned if she took a backseat. Grant deserved better, a chance to win the hottest case of the decade and re-confirm his legal legacy so he could start his own firm. Ben deserved a real defense, without anyone else’s shadiness.

  Roxie had surrendered to malice before, stupidly agreeing to Jimmy’s scheme of blackmail and the death of Bolt. Then, she’d been stuck, forced to comply with that asshole’s crap in order to keep Lucy. Now, working with Grant? She had nothing to lose in helping her boss, in truly aiding him to get out of the funk and hell Tara had foisted on him.

  She cared for Grant. There was no way to deny it. But he didn’t need a damn hug. He needed his sidekick, his co-pilot, his Girl Friday. The biggest help to Grant would be for her not to give in to his desire to get in her pants and screw up their familiarity with sex.

  Grant would most likely succeed with her head in the game, not her heart on his sleeve, or her libido in his hands.

  If she honestly wanted to get him back on track with his new take on life, she had to buckle down and get to it, concentrate on how someone other than Ben should be facing charges for murder. Starting with this has-been sitting across from them.

  Determined, she shot her gaze up and studied the once-famous movie and TV actor from a decade ago. Wayne’s smile was superficially carefree yet subtly tense as he and Grant conversed about Miami.

  Roxie hadn’t followed Wayne’s career. She’d either been too busy rebelling at the end of her teenage years, drinking and following the wrong crowd, or after she’d met Hazel and Rory, too preoccupied studying and preparing for a career in animal medicine.

  Since launching her efforts into researching the VIP guests, Grant’s prime suspects, she’d acquainted herself with the former actor’s credits. First a start on MTV’s Real World. Then a teeny bopper movie, followed by a few cameos in sitcoms. His big break was in a trilogy of sci-fi/action films, and thus a star was molded.

  Too quickly he lost it all, hitting troubles with alcohol, then heavy drugs and violence. After doing several months for assault, among other charges, he’d been forced to enter rehab. Again, and again. Fans had no hardship to cast him aside as simply another poor, star-twisted celebrity, tragically destroyed by his vices as he struggled to stay afloat in the high life.

  And what had he been doing at Velocity, as a VIP guest the night Josh was shot? Planting the seeds of his comeback. Wayne’s presence at the party was a given since he’d done a commercial for one of the Hawks’ sponsors. But Wayne’s connection to Josh was far more than a coincidence of attending the same party.

  “Kinda surprised my agent said you were down here, anyway. Thought you were up in Jackson,” Wayne said, sipping his water.

  “Atlanta,” Grant said. “We came here to speak with Kylie. Sinc
e you were also in the area, it didn’t hurt to try to catch you, too, while you were on the East Coast.”

  Yes. The geography hadn’t been too helpful in her attempts to arrange meetings with either of the big stars, well, ex-stars. Since Josh’s death, Kylie stuck to her home in LA. And Wayne was based in Dallas.

  “Ah.” Wayne set his glass down. His brows went up to show something like annoyance. “And how does her highness fare?”

  “Misses her Josh,” Roxie said.

  Wayne snorted. “Hers? Her Josh?” Another ugly laugh. “Yeah, she had him fucking eating out of her hand, all right.”

  “How so?” Grant asked. “Because Josh was hesitant to have you in his video? Because Kylie instructed him not to?”

  “Hesitant? No. Josh flat-out motherfucking refused to let me in his video. Not because of her, though. Hell, she was all for me working with Josh in the studio. Would have made it easier to see each other. That was why he wouldn’t work with me.”

  “Because you and Kylie had a thing in the past?” Roxie asked.

  “You call getting engaged and buying a villa in Tuscany a thing? I even put a rock on it. Dumbass Josh couldn’t even get that far with her.” Wayne smiled across the room, presumably at a gawking fan, but his tone at the table was anything but pleasant. “Ten years ago, Kylie and I were the real deal. If I had been able to keep it clean, we would have tied the knot.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Then again, any man marrying that diva would be looking at divorce in a matter of days, but yeah, Kylie and I were a thing.”

  “Were or are?” Grant asked.

  Wayne’s glare was steely. “Did you ask Kylie?”

  “She couldn’t stop talking about Josh. No time to ask if other men were also in her possession.”

  Roxie cut her gaze to Grant. Oooh… Taunting him with competition. Nice play.

  Wayne’s Cheshire Cat grin replaced the frigid glare.

  “In her possession.” He shook his head. “See, that’s where it was different. Why Josh didn’t want to sign me on. Kylie never owned me.” He tapped his finger to his sternum. “I had her. She was mine, not the other way around. I’ve got Kylie in a way Josh never could.”