“You don’t get a break? At all?” I ask, trying to get him to admit he left the office.
Just not with me—not when I asked.
“No. I was working the entire day. I still have a few hours of work to finish up.”
I feel the pain of the lie rip through me even as I think bitterly, Was that because you took a few hours to go off on a lunch date? “I’ll leave you to it, then.” Pushing to my feet, I hear files slapping against the desk when he calls out my name. I pause but don’t turn around, lest he glimpses the tears welling in my eyes. “Yes?”
“Are you feeling okay? It’s a million degrees out, and you’re dressed like it’s winter.”
He notices the fucking sweatshirt, I think with wild amusement. “Don’t worry about it. You’re busy. Remember? Good night, Ry.” I start to make my way out of the doors of the study, wondering if it’s worth it to have a conversation with him at all when he calls my name again. Frustrated, I swivel around. “What?” I ask exasperatedly. “You said you have work to do.”
His face is wounded as I lash out at him. “I…I’m worried. If you’re not feeling well, that is.”
I bark out a sharp laugh. “Don’t worry. It’s nothing you can catch.” After all, broken hearts are entirely one-sided, aren’t they?
As if in slow motion, he drops the folder he’s holding to the desk. “You were waiting to talk to me.”
“And you don’t have time right now. It will keep for now.” We’re ten feet from each other but it feels greater than that. “Good night, Ry.”
“Good night, sweetheart,” he whispers.
And with that, I charge out of the study like the fires of hell are licking at my heels. Quickly I dash into Ry’s room, even as I’m wiping tears from my eyes. I grab my purse, intent on leaving. I need to write. I have to pour out this pain somehow.
And I refuse to do it punishing myself because a man is beginning to make me feel like less than my worth.
I’m dashing through the house when I come up short in the kitchen. Ry’s standing there with his head bent forward, arms braced on the kitchen counter. “You were just waiting up to tell me that you planned on leaving?” He doesn’t bother to look at me.
Starting to move around him, I say, “I was planning on staying, but if you’re going to be up all night working, then I’ll go home and do the same.”
“Why don’t you go get your computer and come back here?” His jaw is ticking. As if it’s taking everything in the world to make the offer.
Because you don’t seem to want me here. I almost say the words out loud. But suddenly, my desire for a confrontation leaves me. I still have to drive, and I don’t want to crash my car into a tree as I’m sobbing out my heartbreak. I need to leave while I still have a chance. “If you want to see me tomorrow, you will,” I offer softly.
“Want?” he asks, as if confused. Lifting his head, there’s exhaustion written all over his face. “Kels, I always want you here. I…” His head drops down again.
“Yes?” My voice is hopeful.
He shakes his head, and my spirit plummets. Pulling out my keys, they jangle a little in my hands. “Good night, Ry.”
My hand’s on the doorknob when I feel the warmth of his body heat me better than the sweatshirt ever possibly could. My head crashes against the jamb. “You have to work,” I protest gently because although I hate myself for my weakness, for not knowing if he’s betrayed me, I can’t help but love the gentle way he turns my body around in his arms.
“No, what I have to do is take care of the woman I love,” he declares. Yanking my bag off one shoulder, he drops it to the floor. He pulls the keys out of the other and drops them as well. “Come with me.”
“Ry.” I dig in my heels, but he tugs a little harder, so I stumble against his warmth. I’ve been so cold all night that it’s like setting my skin on fire.
“Come on, sweetheart. Let’s go to bed for a little while. Once I know you’re resting, I’ll work.” And true to his word, Ry walks both of us to the master suite.
“Just let me go,” I whisper.
Ry stops dead in his tracks. Then slowly, he brushes his lips against mine, letting them linger for just a moment, and then he straightens to his full height and gives me the barest of smiles. “Never willingly.” Turning away, he pulls down the covers before motioning for me to climb in.
Later as I’m staring out the window at the moon with Ry’s soft breath echoing in my ear, I’ve found one of the worst feelings is loving a man who can break the promises he made while clasping you to his heart.
Chapter 37
Rierson
I’m trying to finish reviewing a new contract that landed on my desk this morning so I can head home early. All I want to do is spend time with Kelsey. Something’s been off, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. She’s been there but has been so distant I feel like we’ve been two strangers sleeping in the same bed.
I know I started it by pulling away after my nightmare, but ever since that day I wasn’t able to have lunch with her, she’s been growing more and more detached. Pounding my fist on the desk, I’m startled out of my frustration by the phone ringing. Hoping that’s her, I snatch it up quickly. “Perrault.” I can’t keep the hope out of my voice.
“Son? Are you working on something important?” My father’s voice comes through the line warmly, but there’s an undercurrent of something that has me hitting Save.
“There’s nothing you can’t interrupt, Dad. What’s up? Don’t tell me you threw out your back again,” I joke despite the mixed feelings of disappointment and foreboding that wash over me. My father never calls me at the office to chat; that’s more my mother’s style. But even then, she usually waits until after typical business hours. Not—I glance at my watch—at a quarter of eleven in the morning.
“I was at the golf club…”
“I thought your doctor said no golf until your back healed from trying to change the tire,” I interrupt.
“I wasn’t trying to play, Ry.” A note of exasperation enters his voice before it’s quickly subdued. “I was just having breakfast when the police came in.”
Jumping to my feet, I yell, “What the fuck, Dad? What happened? Do you need me to come home to represent you? Tell me I’m not your only phone call.” I’m infuriated at the thought of my father being accused of something there’s no chance he did. I think frantically. Maybe he was just caught up in a raid.
My wild thoughts are wondering who I know who can get my dad out on bail until he says, “Ry, tell me you’re sitting.”
Heart pounding, I reach for my chair that I shoved away. Pulling it up behind me, I fall back into it. “Lay it on me, Dad. What. Happened?” I ask the question again, succinctly.
“The police came in to arrest Tom Balboni on charges of reckless conduct, hazing, and—” There’s a pause while he takes a deep breath. “—sexual assault.”
Immediately, the room begins to spin faster than an out-of-control carousel. “What did you say?” I manage. Tom Balboni graduated a few years before me. Now, he’s the assistant coach of one of the local high schools in the area, but back then, he participated in my hazing when I was a sophomore on the boys’ varsity swim team. He, two other seniors, and a flock of juniors decided physical abuse was the way to prove fidelity and loyalty. And once their girlfriends saw the way their power afforded them the status of kings, they used the same cruelty to rule as queens.
Forsyth wasn’t as much a prep school as it was a sentence in purgatory, no matter who attended.
Feeling nauseous, I reach for my trash can. My father would never bring this up unless there were a reason. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because.” He swallows so hard I can hear it across the lines. Beads of sweat break out across my forehead. “It was John’s grandson.” John has been my father’s lifelong best friend. They met when they attended Forsyth over fifty years earlier.
“How old is he, Dad?” I wipe them with the
back of my sleeve.
“Fifteen.”
“Goddamnit!” I roar.
My office door inches open. Vince pokes his head in. “Is everything…”
“Get the fuck out!” I lash out. His eyes widen enormously before he quickly snaps the door shut behind him. I grip the phone in my hand so tightly I’m afraid it’s going to crack. Hell, it might shatter when I throw it against the wall when I’m done anyway. “What do you need me to do?”
“No one knows who violated you, son,” my father says softly. My body lurches hearing those words said aloud. He’s never said that to me. It’s never the way I’ve ever associated myself. Hurt, yes. God, was I in so much pain, but it was Kelsey who was violated day after day. Lisa was the one who was threatened. And then the world comes crashing down on me while I’m thirty-three years old, sitting in an office that overlooks the city it dominates.
I’m a victim. Just like the kids in the stories Kelsey tells, just like the kids my sister wants to help.
As an adult, I can admit the truth. I never wanted anyone—especially Kelsey—to know what happened to me because of the shame. I’m no hero standing up for what’s right; I’m the broken boy hiding from his fears. I never wanted to face the sympathy, the odd looks, or the worst thing—the woman I love walking away after she realizes I’m not the man she should fall in love with because there’s no one else I’ll ever love.
The collision of my thoughts leave me sick at heart, but one terrifying thing keeps surging to the forefront over and over even as my father continues talking.
I’m going to have to tell her who I really am.
I should have known better than to have believed a reunion between us would be so smooth, so easy. But I thought it was a gift, a recompense for both of our lives being so fouled by Forsyth. How did I know reunions were only meant to be temporary?
“Ry? Damnit, Ry, are you listening to me?” my father bellows.
“Not really,” I admit.
His ragged sigh is just a mirror of the pieces of my heart. “What do you need me to do?” I ask him again, trying desperately to focus on something other than the fact than my world is crumbling around me.
“If you think you’re capable…” And my father goes on to talk about how he’d like me to come home. Before I got there, he’d be breaking a vow he swore to me he’d take to the grave. It would mean talking to a young man who thinks his life is over because he was abused by someone he was supposed to be able to trust.
This time there’s no controlling my response. I grab the trash can and begin hurling the breakfast I ate before I left for work inside it. And in my ear, I vaguely hear my father’s tears as the sobs he’s likely been hiding from my mother cut loose.
That’s all right. They mingle with those sliding down my face.
* * *
A few hours later, I’ve drafted up my letter of resignation after preparing notes on all of my open tasks. I asked Eli’s secretary for the last appointment of the day. Resting my hand on the door, I wish there was some other way, but didn’t I learn that doing what’s right involves sacrifice? Even if it means hurting the people you care about?
Knocking on his door, I wait for him to call out, “Come in,” before I push the door inward. Eli leans back in his chair, crossing an ankle over the opposite knee, steepling his fingers. “What can I help you with, Ry?”
I cross the large office with my hand holding the sealed envelope behind my back, suddenly as anxious as I was when my father and I walked into President Adams’s office the day after graduation. It’s as if Eli already knows what I’m about to say.
Swallowing convulsively, I stand in front of my friend, despising how my past has collided with my present. I’d give anything to change this part of my life. But even as that wayward thought sneaks in, thunder claps outside, grabbing my attention. Now I hurt even more because the floor-to-ceiling windows in Eli’s office show me the stormy skies that are like drowning in Kelsey’s eyes. Desperately, I try to figure out a way to avoid doing this, but I have no idea how long I’ll be gone. “I need to hand you this.” I pull the letter out from around my back.
Eli doesn’t react. He doesn’t even look down away from my face. “You don’t appear to be pleased by it.”
Pleased? By giving up a job I love? Knowing I’m going to end up losing the only woman I’ll ever love in the process? Not hardly. Instead of answering his question, I walk forward and lay the letter on his perfectly organized desk. His face remains implacable. “Ahmed will make an excellent replacement,” I manage to get out. My assistant general counsel has a CV almost as impressive as my own.
Eli waves his hand as if he can’t be bothered with that. “Tell me why.” The first edge of bitterness slides into a voice that’s usually a slow, cultured drawl.
“As your general counsel, it’s my duty to protect Bayou Enterprises from all known threats.”
“Since when did you become one?”
Wearily, I run my hand over my head. “I guess I’ve always been one.”
Eli surges to his feet. “Excuse me?” A few inches taller than me, and broader, his anger is usually impressive. Today, it does nothing but bounce off me. It can’t touch me.
Nothing can.
“I’ll be going home for an indeterminate amount of time.”
Eli makes his way around the desk, eyes narrowing. “And there’s something there you think can hurt us? This company?” he questions.
“I’m certain of it. If anything about what happened ever were to come out, the media coverage would…” Fuck. I didn’t mean to go there. “Just forget I said anything.”
“Not hardly,” Eli scoffs. Coming around his desk, he gestures to a chair.
I shake my head.
Silence hangs between us. “We can do this standing, but you look like you’re about to collapse.” Eli motions again to the black chair behind me.
Exhaustion, the kind I’ve only felt two other times in my life—the first after telling my father what happened to me and the second after explaining why I hurt Kelsey to President Adams—settles over my shoulders like a yoke weighed down by anvils. “You’re not going to change my mind.” I drop down into the chair behind me.
Eli nods once. “We’ll see about that by the time we’re done talking. Now”—he folds his long body into the chair facing me “—will that letter tell me you’re going to work for another company?”
“Don’t be an ass,” I grumble. I rub my hand over my forehead back and forth. When I finish, I get a glimpse of Eli’s face. He’s trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Good luck, buddy, I think with a flicker of amusement that’s gone as quickly as it appears. “Listen, I don’t know how long I’m going to be gone. None of the reasons I’d be taking a leave of absence fall within company policy…” I begin, but Eli cuts me off.
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. We’re not a bunch of assholes here, Ry. Though I’m beginning to think I might be looking at one,” he says pointedly. “We’re hardworking, demanding employers, yes. I’d also like to think we care about our employees…”
“You do.” This time it’s me who cuts him off because the guilt is killing me. There’s no way for me to win. I’m going to walk out of here having lost it all. Why wasn’t I brave enough to do something about this when I was just a kid?
My hand clenches on the arm of the chair, nails digging into the leather, when Eli murmurs, “I see.” Pushing himself to his feet, he walks over to the cabinet in his office that holds the bar. Pouring a few fingers of rich amber liquid into two tumblers, he carries them back and hands me one. I’m nauseated after I swallow a sip when Eli says, “I’ve always kept your secrets, Ry. All of them. So, why would you think I’d ever believe the crap you’re trying to hand me right now about being a threat to the company?” The knowing look he flashes me is like the shock from a defibrillator.
He knows, my mind whispers. “How?” I manage to croak out.
Eli nods down to the
drink in my hand. “It was the same night you told me about Kelsey. I asked one question that night. Why? I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t fly out to apologize to the girl who held your heart back then. And in your inebriated state, you told me why you didn’t feel worthy enough of doing just that.” He lowers his lashes, not giving me any chance to read him until he pulls the rug out from beneath my feet. “I suppose now I can thank you though. Knowing what you’d been through, the kind of man you turned out to be, helped me in several ways.” He turns the tumbler over and over in his hands.
I open my mouth to again ask him what he means, but intuitively, his head snaps up. “That’s not just my story to tell. It involves Kate’s past.” His smile is a bit crooked.
I nod because he’s right. As he so often is, much to my annoyance. “So, you understand why I have to resign.” The words are ripped from my soul. I don’t want to leave, but I need to do what’s best for the company, and leaving it without its lead counsel for an indeterminate amount of time leaves them vulnerable.
Eli’s face gets hard. “Fuck no. If you need time off to do something, I’ll rely on your team, but I expect your ass back in the chair when you’re ready to return.” Turning, he stalks over to his desk. Slamming the tumbler down, he snatches up my letter of resignation. “Do you want to destroy this, or should I?”
“Jesus, Eli,” I mutter. “It’s not that easy.” But I feel myself caving.
A ghost of a smile crosses his face. “Nothing worth having ever is. But Ry, you’ve earned the life you have now: your family, your job, Kelsey. Don’t throw it away because you think you’re a victim of anything.”
Putting my glass aside, I push myself to my feet. I hold out my hand. Eli slaps the letter into it. Tearing it in half, and in half again, I ask him curiously, “What would you have done if I’d have insisted?”
The corners of his lips tip up. Picking up his drink, he knocks half of it back before turning to reach for a file on his desk. Lifting it, he faces me with a wicked smile on his face. A face, I think with some amusement, I’ve heard more than one legal assistant sigh over when they believe they are not being overheard. “What’s that?”
Easy Reunion Page 24
