Chapter 8
Kai
WE FALL INTO a routine. Wake up, have breakfast together then sex. Or have sex then breakfast, and then I drive to the office. I stay inside her office the whole day while she works. While she talks to everyone.
Diana is a machine when it comes to work.
She rarely takes a break. Three, four hours can pass without her lifting her head from her computer, so I start bringing her coffee from the beverage station tucked into the far corner of her office.
Once in the morning, once in the afternoon.
The first time I set the cup on her desk, she looked up at me with an expression, and then she took a sip without saying a word.
The second time, she smiled. By the third day, she’s started glancing toward the beverage station around two o’clock, and I’m already on my feet.
She never asks me to do it. I never ask if she wants it.
This has been our routine for four days now.
Today, I’m sitting on the same sofa inside her office, watching her type. Every few minutes she pauses and reads back what she’s written, her lips moving over the words without making any sound.
I drop my eyes to the coffee table in front of me. The magazines are fanned out in a neat arc. Better Homes and Gardens. Six issues, different months. They weren’t there yesterday.
I pick one up. The cover has a white farmhouse with green shutters and a wraparound porch. I flip it open and land on a spread about raised vegetable beds. A woman in a linen shirt is watering tomato plants.
“You like gardening?”
I look up. Diana is watching me. She’s wearing a cream blouse with a low neckline inside the blazer that’s hanging on the back of her chair. I find cream is her color. Though really, everything is her color. Her hair is pulled back into a high ponytail, and the diamond earrings catch the sun.
“Not anymore.”
My heart’s been doing this thing lately.
Expanding. Filling up past what it was built to hold.
A smile from her and it balloons. A glance and it swells until my ribs ache from the pressure.
I’m the fish in the tank, darting to the surface every time the lid opens, mouth first, no dignity.
Stupid and grateful and alive only because she keeps me alive.
“Anymore?” she asks.
“I used to garden when I was younger. We kept moving though. Most of the time we didn’t have a place to plant anything, so I lost interest.”
“I can’t keep a cactus alive,” she says. “But I like reading that. It quiets my brain.”
She says it the way she says everything. Matter-of-fact. No sentimentality.
I don’t get to respond. The door opens after a single knock, and a man walks in.
Tall, well-built, salt-and-pepper hair swept back from a tanned forehead. The smile on his face freezes the second he sees me. He recovers quickly, though. Schools his face into pleasant neutrality.
“Michael.” Diana stands up. She doesn’t stand up normally.
“Diana.” He smiles at her, and the smile is sultry. “I was in the building. Thought I’d stop by.”
“This is Kai Romero. My bodyguard.”
Michael turns to me. His gaze lands on the Rolex and stays there for half a second too long.
“Michael Gordon. Corporate restructuring.”
I nod. Don’t offer more.
He turns back to Diana, and the look on his face tells me everything I need to know. He’s not here to discuss work. He’s not here to borrow a stapler.
I look at Diana.
Diana is looking at Michael. The recognition moves across her face, and she smiles. She knows what he’s here for.
My heart squeezes.
The sensation is physical and specific. A fist closing around the organ in my chest and tightening. I know what this is. It’s jealousy, and it’s eating me alive.
But what right do I have?
I’m a bodyguard. I earn in a year what she spends on a weekend. The watch on my wrist is worth more than every possession I’ve ever owned combined. She bought it the way she buys coffee.
We are not on the same level. She is the penthouse and I am the parking garage, and the elevator between us doesn’t have a button I can press.
“Kai.”
I look up. Diana is watching me. Michael is watching me. Both of them.
“Can you go downstairs for me? The convenience store on the ground floor. Cigarettes. My usual brand.”
She doesn’t smoke. She fucking doesn’t smoke, and she’s not even trying to sell the lie.
My feet don’t move.
They’re cemented to the floor of her office, and I know exactly why they won’t cooperate with the rest of my body.
Because I know what’s going to happen in this room the moment I leave.
The second that door closes behind me, Michael Gordon is going to restructure his way right into her, and she’ll be moaning and screaming.
Those moans belong to me. And he’s going to hear them instead.
She’s sending the fish out of the room. The fish she keeps in a tank by the window because it’s nice to look at and nice to feed when she’s not busy. But when the tank is out of her sight, does she remember she even has one? What happens to the fish then?
“Kai?”
Her voice again. Patient, but with a period at the end.
We help each other. Stress relief. As long as you remember who I am, and who you are. The conversation comes back, and it drills itself into the front of my skull all over again, in case I’d been foolish enough to let it slip.
Remember who you are.
A bodyguard. A man who could not afford a Rolex.
I stand. My legs feel disconnected from my body, moving on instructions my brain has issued over the screaming objection of everything else inside me.
I button my jacket. I don’t look at Michael.
I look at Diana, and she holds my gaze for one second, and there is nothing in her eyes that apologizes.
I walk out. The door clicks shut behind me. Then the lock. The sound of the bolt sliding into place is a blade between my ribs.
I don’t go to the convenience store. I walk down the corridor, past the glass-walled offices and the burgundy carpet with its thin gold pattern, past the reception desk, and I push open the door to the men’s.
I stand in front of the middle sink, and I look at myself.
The suit is expensive. The watch is expensive. The haircut is regulation-short, and the jaw is set.
But the man in the mirror, his eyes are wet. His hands are shaking.
I grip the edge of the sink. I stare at the man in the mirror, and his face is crumbling. This man, who has lived all his life breathing and feeling only one thing, is so far out of his depth right now that he can’t see the surface anymore.
My eyes burn. My throat is closing. There is a hand inside my chest and it’s ripping. Not squeezing. Ripping. Gutting me. Tearing out every fiber of the organ that keeps me standing, keeps me breathing.
And the pain is so real that I double over and grip the sink harder.
I don’t care about revenge.
I don’t care about Jack fucking Rutherford.
I don’t care that Diana is cheating on Jack Rutherford.
The only thing I know, the only thought my brain can hold, is that I am in love with Diana Jensen.
I am in love with her, and it is the most useless, devastating, one-directional thing I have ever felt.
Because she is not in love with me. She is not going to be in love with me.
I am a body she uses for stress relief. A service she employs the way she employs the barrister or whoever the hell else walks through that door with the right look.
But I can’t leave. I can’t walk away. I can’t quit the assignment and leave her. Because I will die in her absence. I know this the way I know my own name.
I am dying in a tank, and the only hand that can help me belongs to a woman I desperately love. And that woman doesn’t care whether I live or die.
I pull my fist back and drive it into the mirror.
The glass cracks, radiating from the point of impact. My reflection splits into different versions of the same broken face. Pain shoots through my knuckles and up my wrist, and I look down and see blood. Bright red, running in thin lines between my fingers, dripping onto the white sink.
My hand is bleeding and I feel nothing in it. The pain in my chest has consumed every nerve ending I have. There is no room for a cut hand. There is no room for anything.
She is so far above me.
So far outside the perimeter of what I am allowed to want.
She is a woman who moves through the world with power and beauty and money and intelligence, and every single one of those things is a wall I can’t climb.
I am a twenty-five-year-old disaster held together by rage toward a father who didn’t want me.
I slide down the wall. The tile is cold against my back. I sit on the bathroom floor with my knees up and my bloody hand resting on my knee, and I stare at the opposite wall.
The tears don’t stop.
I don’t wipe them. I don’t have the energy to pretend anymore.
What a life. What a fucked, rigged, loaded-dice life.
I came to this city to destroy a man, and instead, a woman destroyed me. And she didn’t even have to try.