Chapter 34
CHAPTER 34
BECKETT
R uby was silent the entire drive back to her apartment, and if he didn’t know any better he would say she was pouting. Which, when he thought about it, she probably was since she hadn’t gotten her way about taking the week off work.
Not only had Braden given her strict orders “not to show her face in the club until her Daddy gave her the all-clear”, her manager at the coffee shop had also told her very firmly to take as much time as she needed.
It was good to know some people actually cared about their employees.
“How’s your throat feeling, baby?”
“Fine.” Arms crossed, she slouched down in the passenger seat of his car.
“Oh, that’s a shame.” He deliberately kept his tone light and breezy. “I was thinking if it was still bothering you, I could see about having some ice cream delivered to the house.”
“Ice cream?” That seemed to perk her up a bit and she sat up straighter. “I could go for ice cream…”
“Why don’t you grab my phone from the holder there and figure out what you want. The code is one-one-zero-two-two-one.”
She tapped in the numbers, then paused. “Is that the last time the Braves won the World Series?”
“It is, yeah.” And it made him unreasonably happy that she not only knew but could recognize the date so easily.
“God, that was an amazing game. One of the few times I’ve called off work without being super sick, just so I could watch the game at a local bar. I was supposed to have tickets, but…”
“But, what?” he prodded when she fell silent.
“Nothing. It didn’t work out. What kind of ice cream do you want?”
He was getting really fucking tired of her so blatantly keeping her past from him. But it seemed like an asshole move to push her now, when she was so sick.
And when he had his own secrets he kept firmly tucked away.
Setting that aside for later, he glanced over at her, and he couldn’t help but grin at the adorable picture she made, staring so intently at his phone as she scrolled her options on the app.
“I’m a fan of anything chocolate.”
“A man after my own heart.”
Back at her apartment, he pointed her to the couch with explicit instructions to ask him if she needed anything. For once, she didn’t argue, which he took as a sign she was feeling even worse than she let on.
With her wrapped up and occupied with a movie, he ducked into her kitchen to check out her food situation. It wasn’t quite as dire as he’d been expecting, but enough for him to add several cans of soup, a few bottles of juice, and other essential items to her grocery order along with the ice cream.
“What were you doing in there?” she asked when he returned to the living room to join her on the couch.
He was damn well tempted to order her a new one of those, too, if he hadn’t been absolutely certain she’d lose her shit. The food was enough of a risk. “Just finishing up the grocery order.”
“I thought we were just getting ice cream.”
“And a few other things.”
Beside him, she tensed, and he mentally braced for the argument to come. “Let me know how much it was so I can pay you back.”
“We’ll talk about it when you’re feeling better.”
“No, we’re going to talk about it now, Beckett.”
Shifting to face her, he cupped her chin in his hand. “You may be too sick for me to spank you, but you aren’t too sick for me to put your butt in a chair facing the corner until you’re ready to be reasonable.”
“You can’t put me in timeout. I’m not a child.”
“No, but you are acting a bit like one at the moment.” Deliberately softening his tone, he leaned in to press a kiss to her forehead. “Can you accept that I need to do this for you right now? I can’t just sit by and watch you suffer when I know I can help.”
He saw the moment his words landed. Most of the defiance faded from her expression, though she did roll her eyes. “You’re being dramatic. I’m not suffering .”
“You’re sick. I have the means to make being sick a little less miserable. And as your sometimes Daddy, it would help me if you could accept my help, just this once. Please?”
“Well… since you said please.”
“Good girl.” Releasing her chin, he wrapped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what movie are we watching?”
Ruby
She woke the next morning feeling marginally better. But she had a feeling Beckett would take one look at her and declare she was still unfit for work.
Which, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she was forced to concede he’d probably be right.
But she really couldn’t afford an entire week off, no matter what Beckett and Dr. Winters had to say about it. It was easy to say that when you weren’t one medical disaster or car breakdown away from not being able to afford to eat.
So she forced herself into the shower, no matter how her head protested every single movement. The steam helped, a lot, and she gave herself an extra five minutes to simply stand there and breathe it in.
“Ruby?”
Shit. Caught.
“In the shower,” she called back through the closed bathroom door, praying he’d at least let her finish and get dressed before interrogating her.
No such luck.
The door creaked open, and she watched his shadow moving on the other side of her shower curtain. “Why, exactly, are you in the shower instead of in bed?”
“Because I need to go to work.”
“Ruby, we talked about this yesterday. You need?—”
“No.” Yanking the curtain aside, she glared at him through the steam. “We didn’t talk about anything. You just declared I wasn’t going to work, and I was too tired to fight with you about it.”
One dark eyebrow rose as he leaned back against her sink, folding his arms across his chest. “Am I to assume you aren’t too tired now?”
She was. She was fucking exhausted. But if she told him that, he’d just use it as a reason to force her to stay home. “I need to work, Beckett. Are you really telling me you’d take a whole week off from conquering the finance world for some measly little cold?”
“First of all, it isn’t a measly little cold. You have the flu, Ruby. And yes, if I had the flu and my doctor told me to take time to heal, I would.”
“Bullshit. Men like you don’t know what sick days are.”
“Men like me?”
There was a dangerous edge to his voice that told her she was walking on thin ice. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“One of these days, you’re going to realize I’m not him.”
Now there was hurt riding along that’s knife edge of anger in his tone. Reaching for the faucet, she turned the shower off and grabbed her towel from its hook, wrapping it around her as she stepped out onto the teal bathmat. At least now she wasn’t completely naked. “I know you’re not him. I’m working on separating you two in my head. But I need you to understand that I really, really can’t afford to miss another day at this new job, Beckett. I don’t get paid sick leave until I’ve been there ninety days, and if I’m already going to be in a bind without the coffee shop and the club.”
Something flickered in his eyes. The same something she thought she’d seen yesterday, but again it was there and gone too fast for her to really pin it down. “I’ll cover whatever you need while you get better.”
“No. You can consider that a hard limit.”
Beckett’s eyes narrowed. “Taking care of you is a hard limit?”
The metaphorical ice beneath her feet cracked. “Making me rely on you is a hard limit.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I need you to get out of my way so I can go to work.”
“Absolutely not. The only place you’re going is back to bed, little girl.”
Dammit. This was exactly what she’d been trying to avoid. “I can’t do that.”
“You mean you won’t.”
“Oh my god!” Shouldering her way past him, she stomped back to her bedroom. Head pounding, throat burning, she yanked open her underwear drawer. “Fine. You’re right. I won’t go back to bed. Because I need to go to work. You do whatever you need to do to be okay with that.”
“I’m never going to be okay with you putting your health at risk, Ruby.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Beckett. It’s not like I’m dying. Get a fucking gri?—”
But the words turned to ash on her tongue when she spun around to face him, ready to fight. And found him standing there, watching her, his expression completely void of any emotion, his face all but drained of color.
Haunted. That was all she could think. He looked haunted.
And she’d done that to him.
“Shit. Beckett. I’m sorry, I… that was a shitty thing for me to say.” Whatever trauma he had that had led him to being the way he was, it was clear she’d triggered it. Hard.
“It’s fine. I’m fine.” But the tightness in his voice told her he was anything but fine. “My issue. My baggage to deal with. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Then why did she feel like dropping to her knees and begging his forgiveness?
Stepping forward, she reached for him, placing her hands on his too-pale cheeks. “I’m sorry for what I said. And I’m so fucking sorry for whatever happened to her. But I also can’t let you keep me locked up like some china doll because you’re scared I’m going to get broken.”
“I know.”
“Okay.” Maybe she hadn’t fucked everything up, after all. “Look, we obviously have some shit we need to figure out. But I really do need to get to work.”
“That’s going to be difficult, seeing as how you no longer have a job.”
Her head jerked back, as if he’d physically slapped her. Which, if he had, would honestly have been less shocking than what he’d actually said. “I’m sorry. What do you mean I no longer have a job?”
“Nancy called while you were sleeping yesterday morning. When I told her you were too ill to come into work, she said if you weren’t going to come in then you shouldn’t bother showing up again. I told her that was fine.”
Numb. She’d never known she could be this angry and completely numb at the same time. “You told her what?”
“I told her it was fine. And then I asked her name so I know who the fuck to fire when I buy the company.”
He looked so goddamned smug, standing there, bragging about how he could use his money to do whatever he wanted. To ruin lives.
Money. Power. Control. Was that all he cared about, after all?
“Get out.”
“What?”
“Get the fuck out of my apartment. Before I do or say something we both regret.”
The stone mask he’d been wearing finally slipped, revealing the fury beneath. “I’m not going anywhere, Ruby. Not while you’re this sick.”
“I don’t need you to take care of me. I need you to leave me the fuck alone. I’m serious, Beckett. I don’t want you here.”
“Jesus Christ.” Running his hands through his hair, he paced into her bedroom, then back out again, agitation pouring off him in waves. “What the hell was I supposed to do, Ruby? Wake you up and make you go to work when you were clearly in no shape to do so?”
“You were supposed to let me make my own goddamn decisions about my life!” She was screaming now, or at least as close as she could get with her throat still on fire. “It wasn’t your decision to make!”
“I don’t care!” The words exploded out of him as he whirled on her, grabbing her by the arms and pushing her up against the wall behind them. “I don’t care about some shitty job and some bitch on a power trip, Ruby. I care about you. I care about keeping you out of the goddamn hospital. I care about never watching another woman I love?—”
Now it was his turn to jerk back, his face once more going white. Silence fell between them, so thick and heavy it felt like an actual physical barrier between them.
And inside Ruby’s chest, her heart was breaking. Shattering, really, with every single breath she took.
Because she’d been right, all along. No matter how different Beckett seemed, no matter how often he said just the right thing, at the end of the day he didn’t give a fuck what she wanted. What she needed . All he cared about was keeping her locked away in some ivory fucking tower.
Never again. Never . Again .
“You told me that someday I’d realize you weren’t him.” The words came out slowly, each one slicing her open from the inside. “But you still haven’t realized that I’m not her. I’m really, really fucking sorry for whatever happened. But I can’t, and won’t let you strip me of my choices, of my life just because you’ve got some misplaced hero complex.”
“Ruby, that’s not?—”
“Get out.” There was no anger behind the words now, because she was too empty to feel much of anything. “Please just… go, Beckett.”
“No. No, I’m not leaving you here alone. Not in this state.”
“Red,” she whispered, soft but firm as she met his shocked gaze headlong. “I’m saying red, Beckett, because I am done. With this conversation, with you, with all of it. Red .”
Dropping his hands, he gave a single wooden nod. “All right. But I’m not done with you, Ruby Red. I’ll go and I’ll give you however much time you need to be pissed at me. But this isn’t over.”
With that, he turned on his heel and strode from her bedroom. And as the door slammed behind him, hard enough to rattle the walls, she slid to the floor.
And wept.