Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Matthew

I’m a ticking time bomb.

I’m unwell.

A man on the edge of madness, waiting to see if the girl I’m obsessed with will betray me. By the end of today, I will know. I’ll know the direction my life is going to take. I’m either going to be the happiest man alive or I’ll want to jump from the very top of this building.

She is on the other side of my office, smelling of cedar and roses and my seed, diligently answering the phone and taking messages, making notations in my schedule. She senses me looking at her and we trade a long stare. That single glance from her is like a breath of mountain air, a shot of adrenaline, a soft, warm blanket. It makes my heart beat truer. My soul mate. Both of us know it’s true. Somehow we’ve found each other among the wilds of the city, despite the tragic way our pasts interconnect. She’s not faking it. There’s no way.

We’re in love.

I would walk across an ocean of broken glass for her.

I’d give my life.

She would crawl inside of me if she could and never leave. That’s the message she sends to me with her eyes right now. We love each other, goddammit.

And yet, the needs of her father might come first.

She might still fuck me over, despite loving me.

Don’t I know so well the lengths a person will go to to appease a parent? To honor them? It’s a deeply ingrained hunger we’re born with, this need for affection and approval from our makers. This whole company was built by a need to avenge my mother and father, wasn’t it? Even though, in the end, they couldn’t muster enough emotion for me to answer my phone calls. There is every chance Kaylee will forsake love to earn affection from her father.

I have no choice but to await my fate. See what she will do.

If I inform her right now that I know she’s Kaylee Hale and force her to side with me, I’ll always wonder what she might have done today. If she would have betrayed me.

Kaylee hangs up the phone and crosses her legs, that skirt tugging up nearly to her hip.

We agreed there would be no sex in the office, but my body is vehemently opposed. Everything she does makes my ball sac tighten up like a fucking drum. The way we made love in the park this morning has left me reeling. Made me almost sick for more. More. More. I could kidnap her right now, take her to some remote destination where our names and families don’t matter. I could take her in that brutal, desperate pace that leaves us both lathered in sweat and nail marks. Take her until neither one of us remembers our own names.

But this damn conflict would linger. It would hang over my head forever.

Please, baby. Choose me.

I open my desk drawer and turn on the recording device. It came installed with the desk—a tool meant to be used to record meetings. I’m using it for much darker purposes. I’m leaving it running while I go to my fake meeting, praying I don’t hear the love of my life betraying me on the other end. My computer will record every action that is taken while I’m gone and her voice will be captured thusly. I’ll know everything that takes place here in my absence. After one final hesitation, I straighten my tie and stand.

But I find I can’t talk. Not with this vise around my throat.

“Time for your meeting,” she murmurs from her desk.

When I don’t answer, she glances over and raises an eyebrow, her smile soft. Beautiful.

I nod firmly, reaching for the briefcase under my desk. “Yes,” I manage. “I should be back in an hour.” Coming around the desk, there is nothing I can do to stop myself from leaning down and kissing her. And Lord, she blooms open for me, her mouth gasping beneath mine, her legs uncrossing, hands lifting to clasp the sides of my face.

I drop my briefcase, sinking into her, my fingers spearing through her hair, the pace of my breath racing out of control, along with my heart.

“Matthew,” she exhales, shaken.

“I’ll give you everything.” I look her in the eye. “Everything.”

She doesn’t seem to take a single breath while she stares up at me, moisture clouding the gold of her eyes. I don’t give her a chance to respond, however. I only pick up my briefcase and go. Her actions over the next hour are what matter now.

* * *

Kaylee

When the officedoor closes behind Matthew, it takes me a few minutes to fill my lungs again. They’re totally depleted. That’s what he does, that’s what we seem to do together. Suck the oxygen straight out of the room. We’re using every ounce of it to exist around each other under the weight of feeling. Of love.

“What am I going to do?” I whisper, swiping at my damp eyes.

Turning in my chair, I look at his computer where it sits silently on his desk. No password engaged. Everything is right there. All I need to do is find some evidence that Matthew has been bleeding corporations dry financially so they will have no choice but to sell him their property in exchange for being bailed out of debt. Once I have that evidence, I’ll finally be brought into the family fold. No longer on the outside.

I stand up and approach his desk, sitting down carefully in the leather executive chair, still warm from his body. After several deep breaths, I begin going through his files. Long minutes pass while I open and close documents that have no relevance to my mission. Old pitches. Proposals. Employee contracts. Nothing here is pertinent.

Until I find a file marked Vacation Photos and I know it’s a decoy.

I open it—and there on the screen are his detailed financial records.

Years of them.

A lot of the numbers and words make no sense to me, but they will to my father—

My phone buzzes across the room on my desk. I almost let it ring, because I don’t want to sit here in Matthew’s chair longer than necessary, but also because I still haven’t decided what to do. I need a clear head. I need to think. But the emotion and adrenaline welling in my chest make me feel like I’m running a marathon.

With a frustrated sound, I push away from the desk and cross to the other side of the office, picking up my phone. My father is calling me. Did he sense my conflict from downtown?

“Hello?”

“Kaylee!” His chair creaks in the background. “Or should I say Sarah? Are you able to talk?”

Acid gurgles in my belly. “Yes.”

“Good. Your first day on the other side of enemy lines.” He chuckles, but there is a note of eagerness to his laugh. “How are things progressing?”

My father has never sounded so interested in speaking to me.

I expect to feel pride or pleasure, but there’s only nausea. It rolls through me like wet garbage and I wander back over to Matthew’s desk, desperately needing to feel the warmth of his body again. “I haven’t found anything yet,” I lie, looking at the endless rows and columns of numbers.

There’s a wealth of strain in his sigh. “I realize it’s only day one, but remember you’re only there as a temp. You don’t have a lot of time. And Borden is a shrewd bastard. There’s every chance he’ll realize who you are before time is up. You’ll need to work fast.”

“I understand.”

“No, I don’t think you do. He is rendering my company obsolete, Kaylee. Choking the life out of what I’ve spent decades building. This is your chance to make a difference. After all, you’ve certainly enjoyed the advantages money has to offer. Money I made in real estate.”

“I know. I…I understand. I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me. I just…” I take a long, bracing breath. “I wish you valued me for who I am. Not what dirt I can find. I just—”

“Your generation wants something for nothing,” he hisses. “I had to earn my keep at your age. No one patted me on the back unless I was busting my ass.”

“I don’t want a pat on the back. I just want to be…relevant to you. I—”

“And you will, Kaylee. Just do this important thing for me. For your family. Help us get over this Borden Enterprises obstacle and then we can—”

“We can what? Be a big happy family?” I shake my head. “I shouldn’t have to ruin someone for that to happen.”

“He’s a terrible person. He is a fucking villain, Kaylee. You’re doing a good deed.”

“You never told me what happened to his parents,” I whisper, my eyes straying to a picture on Matthew’s desk. A little boy sitting at a metal table with a man in an orange jumpsuit. A man who is practically lifeless, the boy dejected. “They were taken from him in more ways than one. By you. That would make anyone ruthless and angry.”

He scoffs. A drawer slams on the other end of the line. “Exactly whose side are you on?”

“I’m on…my side,” I murmur.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

There is no way I can betray Matthew. Is there?

I’ve never experienced the sense of belonging he gives me. I can’t trade it. I won’t.

Furthermore, I’m done letting expectations other than my own color my life. Determine my mood and choices and who I am. I’m done being pinned down by the past and the needs of a child. I’m a grown up now and I’ll stand up for myself. On my own two feet.

“It means I’m going to do what I think is right. For me. And I don’t want to be used. I want to be worthy all on my own.” I wet my dry lips. “I’m not going to help you. I’m sorry things couldn’t be different. But I’m going to get over it, because I’m stronger than you know.”

I hang up the phone to the sound of my father sputtering.

Exhilaration winds through me, turning my limbs loose. The anger I’ve been carrying around for so long, the self-disgust, it evaporates like a puddle in the sunshine and I can breathe deeply, deeply. I start to push back from Matthew’s desk, already practicing my speech when I come clean to him. Maybe he’ll be angry. Maybe he’ll never want to see me again. But at least I won’t have betrayed him. At least I did the right thing.

Please let that count for something.

Please let his heart listen to mine and know the love is real.

Before I can stand up, an icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen catches my eye. A cloud. I’m not sure why I reach for the mouse and click. I’ll never know why my curiosity prods me. But I lean down and I double tap the cloud, watching more icons flood the screen, along with pictures of various buildings. Construction sites.

There’s a video at the very bottom.

Recognition hits me in the throat.

That’s my apartment. My dollhouse studio.

When did he record a video inside of it?

I hit play.

It starts with Matthew setting up the phone in the corner of my bookshelf, guilt and conflict written in every line of his face—and my stomach drops to the ground. Oh God.

In the here and now, the office door opens.

Matthew walks in. He’s breathing hard. There is a look of utter relief and elation on his face that would be beautiful at any other time. But not now. Not while I’m watching us make love on the screen of his computer. No sound is coming out, but I can hear every second of it in my head. I’m never letting you go. I’m never, ever, letting you go. Don’t go anywhere. I’ve been lost, baby.

Lies.

There’s only one reason a man secretly records a woman in a vulnerable moment like that. He was gathering blackmail. Which means…he knows my true identity?

He’s known all along?

Matthew has stopped short on the other side of the desk, his handsome face pulling into a frown. “What’s wrong?” A few shades of color leave his complexion as he rounds the desk, swallowing audibly at the vision on the screen. The rear view of him taking my virginity on the easy chair, our bodies straining. Bucking. “No. I can explain,” he wheezes, reaching for me.

I don’t just move out of his reach, I run, tears coursing down my cheeks.

My heart is in my mouth. I’m choking.

“God, I’m nothing more than a pawn to everyone in my life. Aren’t I?” A sob nearly rends me in two. “What…what were you going to do with that video?”

He grips the desk, seemingly for balance, his face white as a ghost. “I thought you were here to steal the evidence that would end me, Kaylee. I thought you were here to dismantle my company on behalf of your father.” He comes toward me slowly, hand outstretched. “But you didn’t. I heard the whole conversation. You chose us. You chose what we have, because it’s real.”

“You heard…” I’m dizzy. He was recording me again? How? It doesn’t matter. It’s obviously true. “If you knew I was Kaylee Hale, why hire me in the first place?”

“The plan was to make an example out of you,” he says, raking a hand through his dark hair. “But I made that plan before I knew you. Before I fucking loved you.”

“What if I’d followed through?”

“Christ. You would have broken me, Kaylee.” His throat muscles strain, his eyes wild. “I couldn’t see beyond that.”

“Make an example out of me?” I ask, his words finally registering. “What were you going t-to do with that video? Send it to my father for some sick, twisted revenge?”

Matthew is in the process of reaching for me again when I ask that question, but it stops him cold. He sways subtly and lowers himself into his chair, looking seasick. “Yes.”

“Oh my God.” I start to cry openly. Shoulders shaking with the force of my sobs, the earth crumbling underneath my feet. “I hate you.”

“Even if you’d sent your father every financial record under the sun, I would have still loved you. You’ve changed me. You’ve turned me into the man I should have been all along. My plans changed along the way, too. I never would have sent him that video of me loving you,” he rasps. “You have to believe me.”

“I don’t. I don’t believe a word you say.” My legs are made of rubber, but I jog toward my desk nonetheless, trying to see through the blur of tears long enough to throw my possessions into my purse. “I hope I never see you again.”

He propels himself out of his desk chair and across the room, face a mask of crazed denial. “Don’t say that. Don’t.” He wraps his arms around me, ignoring my struggles and gathering me close. “I’m going to die without you. I’m already forgetting to breathe with you angry at me. Kaylee, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Let me go.” I twist and kick until I finally put some separation between us. My entire body is punched full of holes. I’m decimated—and I’m taking him with me. “The truth is, Matthew, you haven’t been a good man. If my father is right and you’ve been bleeding people dry and forcing them to sell, maybe you deserve to have your business dismantled.”

For long moments, he says nothing. And then, “You’re right, Kaylee Hale. And you deserve far better than me.”

I want to run to him in the wake of that confession, because love for him still blares inside of me like a siren. We’re connected, despite everything. Our bond is never going to fade, together or not. But somehow I manage to back away, instead of running forward. I back all the way out the door and leave him broken, sinking to the floor without our link to hold him upright. And downstairs, I run into the sunlight knowing I’m never going to be the same.