Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
CADEN
Past
“Who are we waiting for?” My brother looped an arm around my neck, joining me at the bar on my mega yacht.
I brushed off his arm. “No one.” I nursed the Macallan in my glass, eyes fixed on the main entrance.
The student-faculty party—a two-hour river cruise on my boat—was in full swing.
Every nook and cranny of the main deck was crammed with infuriating students and unbearable professors.
The only person I wanted here was the only one missing.
Frustration consumed me as I stared at the ramp.
Rose excelled at time management and had never been late.
Where the hell was she?
Some of the students had discussed meeting up before the party to pregame.
There was little comfort in the fact that Doyle was here, which meant he had made no such plans with Rose.
It was a good thing because I would have ripped his skinny little arms off if he had tried meeting up with her.
Though there was no evidence such a thing had occurred, my jaw clenched at the idea of her pregaming with a different man.
A stabbing sensation in my stomach said the irrational jealousy could only be put to rest once I saw her.
I thrummed the bar counter with my fingers. The little patience I exercised around these clowns was entirely missing tonight, and I had postponed the sail time indefinitely. If I got stuck with this lot without Rose, I would throw them into the Hudson River one by one.
My impatient gaze returned to the main deck.
My twin watched me. “Eighteen times.”
“What?”
“You have glanced at the door eighteen times since I’ve arrived. You’re waiting for someone, and since you hate everyone, I am guessing a woman has caught your attention. I didn’t think that was possible. Who is she?”
“No one.”
“So you’ve said. Is she from around here?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Nineteen times.”
I gnashed my teeth together.
“Can we give the all clear to the captain if you aren’t waiting for anyone? The poor man’s scared shitless of you and sent me to find out when we could leave.” He nodded at a man in a blue hat with a gold band around the base.
The captain of the boat was antsy to set sail and stole glances at me whenever he thought I wasn’t looking. It was comical to see a grown man shake in his boots. It was funnier that he had sent Damon to do his dirty work.
Damon RSVP’d as soon as he found out I was hosting a school-sponsored event. He assumed the dean twisted my arm into it and wanted to make sure I didn’t throw everyone out within the first ten minutes.
Understandable.
The dean also thought I was playing a practical joke when I offered to host, and he asked for the cameras to come out with a boisterous laugh. Little did they know that for the first time, I was looking forward to a party. I needed an excuse to spend time with Rose in a social setting.
I had forced her to eat most of her meals with me for weeks.
Our connection had been steadily intensifying as a result.
Rose was reserved, with an aversion to touch, but she was beginning to thaw under my attention.
There was a heaviness in the way she watched me, like she wanted to uncover everything about me.
She blatantly put herself out there with daily home-baked goods, often accompanied by handwritten notes.
“Thank you for helping me, Professor Maxwell.”
“Great lecture today, Professor Maxwell.”
The things she couldn’t say in person, she put them on paper.
She wouldn’t go to such lengths unless she had feelings for me.
One day, after lunch, she suggested an activity outside the lab—a team-building exercise at an amusement park.
As my soon-to-be lab manager, she said such outings needed to be normalized to boost morale.
If anyone else had suggested such an absurd waste of time, I would have laughed in their faces.
But there I was, agreeing to an after-work bonding experience with the entire research team.
Once we arrived at the park, Rose had dragged me to a ride.
I accidentally brushed my fingers against her chest when strapping her belt.
After that, I was solely focused on her body for the rest of the evening and the following two days.
It was pathetic how much power that girl wielded over me.
If one accidental brush of a finger could ignite this reaction, it was disturbing what the real thing would unleash in me.
Nowadays, just her scent got me hard. Her company, while stimulating, was unfulfilling when I couldn’t touch her.
My work was suffering as a result, and I had reached the point where refraining from touching her was proving nearly impossible.
This intense need had to be mutual, I was sure of it. It was impossible for something this magnetic to be one-sided.
The problem?
She was too self-conscious to give in to her primal instincts, especially with her professor and someone in a position of power. If I made a move before she felt completely secure, she would retreat and never give me an inch.
I had to enlist our head of security’s services to figure out her insecurities. I called Alex a week after he started investigating her past.
“Tell me you have something useful,” I had demanded.
“I have something useful.”
“I’m listening.”
“They never found the culprit who attacked Ms. Ambani. There was no description of the person. I can keep digging into it, but the gist of it is that someone stabbed her and then vanished into thin air.”
I scratched my stubble. “I don’t need you to find the culprit. I already know who did it.”
I initially had Alex explore Rose’s case to find out who had attacked her.
But one night, a thought came to me, and I started digging into the Ambani family’s finances.
It wasn’t difficult as we kept extensive logs on them—know thy enemy and all that—including the beneficiaries for each family member.
Following the money was an age-old trick that never failed.
I considered who had the most to gain if Rose died and stumbled on the answer. It was painfully simple.
“The person who attacked Rose is dead,” I told him.
There was a surprised pause on the other end of the line. “You didn’t do it, right?” he had asked, unsurely.
“No.” But only because someone had beaten me to it. Otherwise, I would have taken great pleasure in burying them six feet under. “I thought you said you found something useful ? —”
“Right. It’s not about the culprit but about Ms. Ambani herself.
The police report said she saw the perp but couldn’t remember anything about him.
Ms. Ambani was diagnosed with PTSD-related amnesia.
She’s known to dissociate from traumatic memories and has trouble recounting events around the time.
There are reports of many distorted memories between the ages of eleven and twelve. ”
Everything about Rose finally clicked into place.
PTSD-related amnesia was quite common in patients with trauma.
The brain blocked out painful memories to protect itself.
The person may seem emotionally numb, often experiencing incomplete and altered memories.
Triggers could bring back intrusive memories, but they could also cause avoidance behavior.
Perhaps it was for the best if she detached from recalling the past.
Given her history, it made sense that she was easily spooked by men.
We had spent numerous hours together at the lab.
I knew everything about her, yet she kept me at arm’s length.
It was fucking infuriating. She had sealed off a part of herself that I couldn’t break through.
If I wanted her to come out of her shell, I needed to change her perception of me as her professor, and that could only happen in a social setting with a lot of alcohol.
Except Rose was nowhere to be found.
My fingers gripped the crystal glass tighter than necessary.
I wanted to burn everything to the ground.
The past several weeks had been hell, being near her, always wanting to touch her while acutely aware of her invisible walls.
The only thing that kept me sane was this upcoming student-faculty affair.
I needed to create a carefree setting on a yacht that reminded her of the good times from her childhood.
I even had the boat painted in beige and soft colors to put her mind at ease.
I would have never volunteered to host this insufferable party if I knew Rose would bail.
I set the glass on the bar counter louder than intended. “We’ll leave when I’m ready.”
My twin had an infuriatingly accurate understanding of me.
His head reeled back. “Holy shit! There is a girl. I was just fucking with you before.” He tilted his head, reading me like an open book.
“And you’re nervous about seeing her. People lose their shit at the thought of talking to you, but a girl’s got your panties in a bunch.
Where did you even meet her? You haven’t been anywhere except for your lab in weeks. Is she a professor at the university?”
I couldn’t tell Damon about Rose. Her family was having him investigated for her cousin Rayyan’s murder. The claims were bogus and wouldn’t amount to much. Still, there was a point for contention.
My fixation with Rose would complicate things for him as he already had an unhealthy obsession with another Ambani—Poppy.
It was unlikely for their family to approve one Ambani-Maxwell match, let alone two.
Damon would discourage me from pursuing Rose, using the trump card that she was my student, which could jeopardize everything I had achieved in my career.