Chapter 15
Kat
If I was goingto recover from the worst night of my life, there were worse places I could do it than a million-dollar penthouse in Dallas, on the twenty-fifth floor overlooking the skyline.
It was night, and the city was lit up below me where I stood looking out of Alex’s floor-to-ceiling windows. I watched the city below me, and it struck me again just how rich my ex-husband had become.
I still remembered the scrawny, ready-to-fight teenager I’d met and fallen in lust with. He’d had an irresistible bad boy appeal, at least to me—dark hair, tattoos, surprisingly soft mouth that often quirked up in a cynical smirk. Plenty of guys had tried to impress me, but Alex never bothered. He just looked at me like he wanted to devour me, everything he was thinking and feeling right there in his eyes. He’d learned in his rough existence that life was too short to bother playing games.
Anyone would have said, back then, that Alex Blake was destined for prison. He was trouble through and through, and he didn’t bother trying to be anything else. But even when he actually went to prison, I’d seen something different in him—the man who was smart and humorous and kind, who was powerful and loyal. He was rough around the edges and he had faults, especially when it came to Damon, but I was far from perfect myself. If I’d had a perfect husband to measure myself against, I probably would have gone insane.
And now that rough-around-the-edges bad boy owned the penthouse I was standing in, which he’d bought with millions of dollars he’d earned. He’d spent the time since our divorce becoming one of the most powerful venture capitalists in the south. His place was enormous compared to the tiny apartment I’d been living in, filled with rich, modern furniture and a fully stocked kitchen. There was a concierge and a security detail in the lobby and he had more than one car parked in the garage below. Alex Blake had everything he could ever want.
No matter how broke I was now, I’d been born rich, so I knew that money didn’t automatically mean happiness. But Alex’s wealth was different. He’d earned it himself, and along with all that money he’d earned the right to do whatever the hell he wanted. Whereas when I’d been rich, I’d been trapped in a cage.
I stepped back from the window. I shouldn’t be thinking about Alex so much. I was here for only a few days to recover in safety while the police looked for my attacker, nothing more. This wasn’t home. Whenever I was done here, I would pack my pathetic bag and go somewhere else.
Alex had gone into his bedroom—the penthouse had two—and now I could hear the gush of water in his en suite bathroom. He was taking a shower. I picked up my cell phone and dialed Knoxy’s.
The voice that answered was Chris, the other bartender. He shouted over the loud noise of a band playing in the background. “Knoxy’s, help you?”
“Chris, it’s me, Kat,” I said, talking loudly so he could hear.
“Kat! Jesus Christ. Hold on.” There was a series of clicks, then a beep, then more clicks. I knew this meant he was putting me on hold on the phone behind the bar so he could pick up the extension in the tiny office in the back hallway. The phone system at Knoxy’s had cost about ten dollars and sometimes it sounded like you were shouting at the other person through a tin can.
I frowned to myself. I’d meant to ask Chris to put me through to Eric, our boss, if Eric was there tonight. I wanted to talk about the paycheck they owed me and whether I would be welcome back after I recovered, or whether I would be out of a job. I hadn’t expected Chris to want to talk to me himself.
“Okay, hey,” he said when he came back on the line, the background quieter now. “Kat? You still there?”
“I’m still here.”
“How are you doing? The last we heard, you’d left the hospital.”
“I did,” I said. “I’m banged up a bit, but nothing that meant I had to stay. I’m staying with a friend for a while.”
“Well, that’s good. Jesus, we were all shocked when we heard what happened. You got insurance?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, looking around at the penthouse I was sitting in. “Look, I was going to ask to talk to Eric, but?—”
“He’s not here tonight. I’ll give you his cell. I have to warn you, Kat, if you’re not up for working a shift next weekend, I don’t think he’s going to keep you on.”
Ah, yes, the restaurant business. Where you get back to work after nearly being abducted, or you’re fired. I hadn’t expected anything different. “Then I have to talk to him about my final check, because I’m not coming back next weekend.” It didn’t matter. There were a million bars in this country. I’d find a job slinging drinks in one of them.
Except suddenly that didn’t seem like something I wanted to do anymore. The thought of dragging out my low-cut black top and fending off drunk passes made my stomach turn. But I needed to make a living. I tried not to think about it.
“Yeah, okay,” Chris was saying. “Too bad, but I understand. I’ll get you Eric’s number. But I wanted to talk to you about something else.”
“Yeah? What is it?”
“There was a guy who came in here looking for you.”
My blood went cold. “A guy? When?”
“Just an hour ago. Came in by himself, ordered a beer, asked if you were around. Said he wanted to talk to you.”
There had been very few times in my life when I’d felt panic. One of them was the night my half-brother, Tyler, got high and attacked me. Another was the moment I realized my attacker wanted to get me into that car. The third time threatened to be right now.
I hadn’t thought that what happened to me could scare me anymore. It was over—I was going to put it behind me. It turned out I was wrong about that.
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Nothing weird, really,” Chris said. “Six feet tall, maybe a little more. White. Brown hair, cut kinda long. Brown jacket, jeans. Kinda skinny but he looked strong, you know. Built.”
That didn’t sound like the guy Alex and I had seen in the hospital parking lot, but I couldn’t be sure. That man had had lighter hair, but it was easy to change hair color. “Did he say who he was? What he wanted?”
“No. I said you weren’t in. He asked when you’d be back. I said you were off sick and I didn’t know. He asked if you were okay. I told him it was none of his business, and if he was a friend of yours he could ask you himself. Then I told him to pay for his drink and get lost.”
I racked my brain, trying to make my thoughts get in line. It could have been the man I’d seen putting a duffel bag into his trunk. It could have been one of my attackers. It could have been the man at the hospital. It could have been the man Alex met ransacking my apartment.
It could have been any of them, or it could have been someone else. Someone worse.
After all, the first attack on me had failed. What if the men who wanted me silenced had sent someone even more dangerous?
I glanced back over my shoulder. The water was still running in the shower in Alex’s bathroom. Should I tell Alex about this? What would he think?
“Kat?” Chris asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”
“I didn’t want to alarm you. But I thought you should know, right? Like, you get attacked outside the bar, and then some creep comes looking for you. I don’t know much about this stuff, but maybe you should leave town.”
“You’re probably right.” I didn’t correct him and tell him I’d left town already. If people were looking for me at Knoxy’s, the less the staff there knew about me, the better. “I’ll look into it.”
“Your car is still here, parked in the lot across the street. Are you going to come get it?”
“Maybe soon. I think I’m just going to lie low for a while.”
Chris paused. “Kat, I know there’s some weird stuff that goes on here sometimes. Drugs and stuff. I stay out of it. I thought you did, too.”
“I did. I do. I think someone has the wrong impression. And I don’t know how to fix it.”
“You didn’t seem like the type.” He sounded relieved. “Like, you’re a tough chick and all, but you don’t mess with the hard stuff. I think I’ve only seen you take a drink once or twice. We’ve had to fire a few people for showing up high, stuff like that. This whole thing has been a surprise.”
“I don’t do drugs.” The words came out forceful, defensive, the way I always sounded when someone assumed I wanted drugs because I sling drinks in a bar. It was a sore spot with me because of Tyler, but that had nothing to do with Chris. I tried to even out my tone. “You aren’t wrong about me. I don’t mess with the wrong people and I don’t owe anyone money. This has all been a mistake.”
After I hung up, I stood for a minute, looking at the window unseeing. The water in Alex’s bathroom had stopped running.
Take care of this yourself,a familiar voice in my head said. It was the voice that had directed my life for the past thirteen years. You can’t rely on anyone. You’re alone in this world. Whatever trouble this is, find a way to deal with it on your own.
That voice had been my defense, my protection. And it told the truth. Or did it? Had I really been alone all this time? Was I on my own right now?
I made a decision. Alex may have shown up at the hospital uninvited and barged back into my life, but what was done was done. He was here now. And—I could grudgingly admit it—he had actually been kind of helpful. And not awful. It had almost—almost—been good to have his help with this problem.
Now who’s lying?I asked myself.
“Shut up,” I said aloud. I made a decision. I put my phone down and walked into Alex’s bedroom, trying not to look around at it, trying not to remember that Alex slept here, possibly naked—cold feet and all—and possibly with other women. Women I didn’t know and would never know. Women who hadn’t hated him for thirteen years. Women who adored him and were nice and sweet and not tough, like me.
I kept my gaze forward and headed for the bathroom door. “Alex?”
Too late, I realized the door wasn’t closed all the way. It was ajar, a sliver of light coming from inside. I’d thought I’d stand outside and yell through the locked door, and instead I could see some of the tiles, a slice of counter, his jeans lying crumpled on the floor.
Oh, shit. I should have waited. Alex was in the bathroom, and he was doing something embarrassing like sitting on the toilet or beating off, or?—
“Come in,” he said.
He didn’t sound embarrassed. Maybe he was dressed in there, and he’d put on a different pair of pants than the jeans I could see on the floor. Maybe he was wearing a towel. He sounded casual, like there was nothing wrong at all.
So I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I put my hand on the bathroom door and slowly pushed it open.
He wasn’t dressed. And the water I’d heard running wasn’t the shower. It had been the water running in the bathtub.
The bathroom was enormous, the bathtub a huge expanse of expensive porcelain, and it was filled with water. And in the tub, leaning back like a rich lord, was my ex-husband. Naked.