Chapter 15 – Cain #2
“Don’t sweat it. I’ll tell them I broke it. I doubt they’ll charge me for it given I didn’t even know it was in there and I’ve been living there for two years.”
She shoots me a lopsided smile. “Two years in that place and you haven’t even looked at the furniture is kind of sad.”
I nod but stare straight out the front window when I do because she’s not wrong.
“I hope that the stitches won’t impact your work too much.”
“Shouldn’t be an issue.”
Another long stretch of silence and I realize we’re getting closer to my penthouse now. I should be eager to get out of this hazardous piece of junk. But instead, I’m scrambling for any way to extend our talk.
This conversation wasn’t enough to get her out of my system, and I can’t keep living every day in this city of millions wondering if I’m going to run into her around every corner.
“So, you work as a maid, sorry, cleaning personnel, two days a week, a sex therapist for virtual clients who need relationship help, manage a very successful snark account where you take on the influencer community and sometimes act as a model for music videos?”
She laughs. “And I help with my family’s thrift store.”
“Thrift store?”
She smiles proudly. “It’s been in our family for generations.”
“Damn, and I thought I was busy.”
“It sounds like a lot, but if you sit down and think about how much free time you have in a day, anyone could do it.”
Now I understand why she doesn’t have time for sex or dating. This woman doesn’t have time to breathe.
“No, I don’t think anyone could work five jobs.”
“It’s not five fulltime jobs. The social media thing is more of a hobby for me and the thrift store only requires my time when my brother refurbishes new pieces, or something sells in the store, and we need to take it off the website.”
I rub at my jaw. “So, you repurpose furniture?”
She nods. “Yeah. Restoration and refurbishing.”
Interesting.
“What do you do to relax?”
She laughs. “What do you do to relax? You’re more uptight than I am.”
Touche.
“But why so many jobs?”
She winces slightly but quickly recovers and I immediately regret prying.
She’d said she didn’t want to divulge any personal details, but I thought we were past that now.
Guess I was wrong to think that something had shifted between us since she cut my hand open.
Of course, she has a reason for working so much.
Maybe she has a lot of debt or is taking care of aging parents.
Maybe she’s paying off a divorce, or student loans.
“It’s a long story,” she says softly.
I want to tell her that we have time but she’s pulling in front of my hotel’s curb now and I know that my doorman will yell at her in ten seconds if she doesn’t move out of the fire lane.
“Well, thanks again for driving me to the hospital.”
“Yep.”
She doesn’t even look at me.
“And uh…” Fuck this is difficult. Can’t say I’ve ever apologized for suing someone before.
Not sure if Rhiannon deserves the apology either, but something tells me that she was downplaying the way the whole Madison and Matt thing impacted her and her family.
“I’m sorry if the whole suit stressed you out. ”
Her brows raise. “So, you’re not sorry for suing me, just sorry if it stressed me out?”
I shrug. “I was doing my job. I didn’t know it was you.”
“If you had, would you still have done it?”
Her hazel eyes almost look green in this lighting. The late evening sun is catching them through her cracked window just right making them and the stain on her uniform glow.
I don’t want to lie to her, so I don’t. Even if it makes me sound cold and calculated.
“Yes. Only because my sister asked me to. Not because I thought there was an actual case.”
I assume saying that will be the thing that pushes her over the edge. The moment where she tells me to fuck off and realizes my moral compass isn’t always straight, but instead her hazel eyes study mine and then she gives a small nod with a tiny smile.
“I get that. I’d do the same thing for my siblings. Loyalty to family is important.”
Fuck me this doesn’t help.
We stay like that, locked in each other’s gaze, suspended in a silence that feels like it might tip into me asking her up to my penthouse for a drink if I breathe too hard.
I open my mouth, ready to finally say what’s been sitting heavy on my tongue for weeks.
Something like, hey, what do you think about going on an actual date that doesn’t involve a trip to the hospital so that we can confirm that we’ll drive each other insane if we ever tried to have a relationship?
Or tell me the worst thing about yourself. The thing that’ll make me see you differently.
Can I pencil you in for next month when I still won’t have time and you’ll still be working yourself into the ground?
Or hell, maybe even the truth. Can you please stop crashing into my life like a wrecking ball and rearranging everything I thought I had under control? I can’t focus. I can’t sleep. I can’t even win a goddamn case because all I can think about is you, and it makes no fucking sense.
But before any of that can escape my mouth, a sharp banging rattles the window beside her head causing us both to jump.
“Gotta move, lady!” my doorman yells, and then he spots me and looks confused as hell. “Oh, hey, Mr. Prescott.”
The spell snaps clean in half. Rhiannon’s eyes flick toward the windshield, suddenly far away, her expression completely unreadable.
I open the door and step out, words still crowding the back of my throat. I turn to say something, I don’t know what, but by the time I face the street, she’s already gone. Her unsafe car swallowed up by the noise, the lights, and the endless stream of traffic like she couldn’t wait to escape.
Well, damn.
With any other woman, I’d be relieved to see her gone. But Rhiannon isn’t any other woman. She’s never been. From the moment I stumbled across her in Bryant Park, when I was simply trying to grab a bite to eat for dinner between reviewing briefs, she’s changed my world.
The chances of running into her are slim—after all, the cleaning crew comes in during lunch, and I’m never home for it. But something tells me that I’m going to be seeing her again soon.
And when I ride the elevator up to the penthouse and open my foyer, I’m unexpectedly thrilled to find confirmation for that feeling.
She’s left her wallet behind. Again. And I can’t blame her for being scattered.
She’s clearly got a lot on her plate. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling both frustrated with her lack of safety and secretly pleased I get to see her again.
I try not to read too much into that second part.
The truth is that I’m fucking lonely. I already texted my clients to cancel our meeting this evening and I hate to admit it but sitting alone in my penthouse for the rest of the night sounds like torture.
This never would have bothered me in the past. I’d go to my office in the back, fill the silent space with work, the news humming in the background, or the Manhattan Mayhem game, New York Cities professional hockey team.
But now, everything’s different.
In a completely unnatural, and thoroughly confusing way, I don’t want to stay in and catch up on the mountains of work that I know I’ll never be able to finish. I miss bantering with Rhiannon. I even miss her fucking up my hair, my hand, and my head.
I barely know her, yet something about her keeps pulling me back, drawing me closer, like a magnet I can’t resist. Maybe it’s because, before she crashed into my orbit, my life was stuck on autopilot.
I went to work, sat through court cases, hit the gym, and occasionally caught dinner with my sister Rosie. On rare occasions, I’d go on a date just so I could fuck. The rest of my time was spent alone at home in predictable, clinical, regimented solitude.
And it’s not that I’m a grumpy recluse. I haven’t always been some introvert who prefers being alone. I have a wide friend group, who I rarely see anymore. Somewhere along the way, I’ve just lost the spark for going out, exploring the city and letting loose.
I make my way to the kitchen and grab a bottle of water, acting like I’m not dying to flip through her wallet and get her address so that I can head straight to the small town she described with bright eyes right this instant.
How does she get around the city without her wallet? She needs to be more careful about where she loses this. More alert. What if she lost this in someone else’s room? She could easily get robbed.
I tell myself not to do it. Not to drive out to Brookhaven tonight to return it in person, to just leave the wallet with the hotel’s security desk downstairs for her to come pick it up later this week.
But I’m too far gone.
I snatch it off the table, keep my head down like I’m hiding from my own conscious, and jog to the parking garage. A quick turn of the key and the engine purrs with life. My car is hardly ever driven. It’s certainly not a rust bucket with squeaking breaks and a taillight that’s missing.
I don’t know how to fix a car, never learned that stuff growing up considering I was too busy shadowing my dad on the cases he was taking and learning how to be emotionless, but I’ve got enough money to get hers repaired and I have a guy who I know will do it.
Hell, I could buy her a new one if I wanted to. Knowing the lemon she’s been driving around the city, I won’t be able to sleep until it’s fixed because I won’t stop worrying about her crashing or hitting someone.
That’s what I’ll do. Once I get her car fixed and hand over her wallet, she’ll be out of my system, and I’ll need nothing more from her.
Yeah, sure.