35. Trinity
Trinity
“What are you talking about? Not the only thing you’ve lied about? What’s that supposed to mean?” I scrambled to my feet and reached for my shirt.
He stood and tried to grab my hand. “Let me explain. Can we talk for a minute?”
“Talk fast.” I clamped my arms around my stomach while he struggled to pull his pants on.
“Will you sit? Please?” He gestured to the couch.
I slumped onto the cushion as a niggling feeling began to pulse in my stomach. Oliver was too good to be true. I’d known it from the start. What other secrets could he be keeping?
The cushion sank as he took a seat next to me. Nervous about what deep, dark lies he might be about to reveal, I shifted away.
“Just tell me.” I risked a glance at his face.
His eyes had lost that hint of humor he always seemed to carry with him. The slump of his shoulders, the hard set of his jaw—it was going to be bad. I could tell.
“I want you to know that when I agreed to help Wyatt, I didn’t know you. Not the way I do now.” He glanced down at his hands, his cheeks taking on a slight shade of pink.
“What do you mean? You’ve been helping Wyatt since before we met. You work at his bar.” I shook my head. It didn’t make sense.
“Yeah. But he asked me to help him with something else.” He gulped in a breath of air. “God, this is hard.”
I waited, my stomach twisting and turning while every awful possibility of what he might say drifted through my head. “What did he ask you to help with?”
He lifted his head, his gaze connecting with mine. Pain mingled with regret in the depths of his eyes. “When you first took over the building, Wyatt was pissed. He’d planned on buying it so he could expand.”
“I already knew that.” The pressure around my heart eased a bit. “He low-balled Mr. Hopkins, and he said he wouldn’t have sold to him even if his retirement depended on it.”
“Right.” Oliver took my hand, his fingers closing around mine in a firm grip like he was afraid I’d yank my hand away. “So Wyatt figured if Hopkins wouldn’t sell to him, then maybe he could buy from you.”
He was talking in circles. “But I never offered to sell. I have no intention of leaving.”
He captured his bottom lip with his teeth and waited like he expected me to have a moment of enlightenment.
“Just tell me what you need to say. I’ve got a million things to do today like figure out where my yarn shipment is, get the samples I need finished up, and so much more.”
His gaze dropped to the cushion while his thumb brushed over the back of my hand. “Your yarn isn’t coming.”
“Of course it is. The shipment just hasn’t been delivered yet.” The knot in my gut tightened.
“The shipment was refused.”
“That’s crazy. I wasn’t even here. Who would have refused delivery?” I waited for him to say something. He looked at me, his mouth turned down, a sadness in his eyes I’d never seen before. “Wait a minute… you were here.”
He didn’t respond, just glanced at his hands.
I slid my fingers out of his grip.
“You were here that day.” Even as the knot grew tighter and tighter, I waited for him to deny it. “Oliver, what did you do?”
His teeth worried over his lip as he flexed and unflexed his hand into a fist. “I didn’t know you like I do now. Wyatt said he’d make me a partner… he offered me a work visa.”
“In exchange for what? Sending all of my inventory away?” I couldn’t share space on the couch with him for a moment more. “I’ve got to go. I need to fix this.”
“That’s not all.”
“What do you mean that’s not all?” I whirled around to face him, tears threatening to spill over. How could I have been so wrong about him? I’d shut out my family, turned my back on my parents, and for what? For a man who’d been lying to me from the start? “I’ve got to go. I can’t be here anymore.”
“Trinity, wait.” He caught up to me at the door. “I’m so sorry. I want to fix this. When Wyatt made me the offer to be a partner, it was before I really knew you. I figured you were in it for fun.”
“Why? Because you figured I might want something more from my life than sunbathing on the beach or picking up the scraps my family leaves behind for me? Is that what you thought of me? That I was just messing around?” It all made sense now.
He was just like my family. They all thought I was crazy for wanting to build something that meant something to me, to my grandmother.
Something that might stand the test of time.
“No, that’s not it at all. I just figured Wyatt and I needed this building more than you did. But now I know you.”
I jerked my hand out of his grasp and pulled the door open. “That’s rich, don’t you think?”
“Let me fix it. I can help, I?—”
“You’ve done enough.” I shoved my bra into my purse. “And the irony isn’t lost on me for a second. You say you did all of this before you got to know me.”
He nodded.
“You really don’t know me at all.”
Then I stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut behind me.
I didn’t wait to see if he’d come after me—I needed to get out of there, and fast. My lungs burned from lack of air.
As I stumbled down the stairs that would lead me into the bar, I tried to catch my breath before the tears started to fall.
I didn’t want to waste any more energy on Oliver Martin.
He didn’t deserve my tears, and he sure as hell didn’t deserve my forgiveness.
His actions might have set me back, but I was a survivor. I’d been taking care of myself for years, and I wasn’t going to stop now. There had to be a way to get my inventory back. Macy would help. In all of this, she’d been the only one who hadn’t turned her back.