Chapter Twenty-Eight
Elliot
F ury, hot and wild, storms through me as I stalk out of the damn bar and toward Prince Street.
I shove past people, vision blurred as something bitter rises in my throat, threatening to choke me.
He’s a coward, pure and simple. I don’t know what game the man’s playing, but I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve him. I deserve better than a man who sees me and then deliberately flirts with someone else.
“Elliot.”
His voice wraps around me, the urgent note going for my heart, but I harden that stupid, stupid part and keep going.
“Elliot. Wait, damn it.”
I don’t stop. I’m at my building, and inside so fast I almost sob with relief.
But I don’t because my skin starts to prickle as the door slams shut a moment or two too late.
“I said wait.”
I whirl around, hating his beautiful face in that moment. Hating all the things he made me feel, all the things he enticed me to believe, all the hope he stirred, only to smash it all to pieces with one cowardly act with a side serve of careless words.
A few people are still in the building and I turn away from him and head to the stairs, Ryder hot on my heels.
If I can’t shake him, I still have a job to do, so I’d rather we fight away from everyone else.
I’d rather not see the bastard at all.
He’s there, behind me, swearing, and I just race up the steps. It’s not until I’m on the second floor landing in the stairwell he grabs me. I snatch my arm back. “Go away, Ryder. I’m sure there are some women in the world left for you to fuck.”
“I deserved that.”
The bitterness bubbles over like acid. “Oh, you do, do you? Would you like a medal?”
“No. Damn it, please, I’m sorry.”
But I back away from him as he reaches for me again and I shake my head. “All these women? All these beautiful, gorgeous women who keep throwing themselves at you, and you sleep with me.”
“I didn’t want her, Elliot. I was…” He doesn’t finish it, but heat flares high in his lean cheeks. On his throat is a mark from my mouth last night.
It punches me hard in the stomach. And the memories roll through me, hard and fast and unwanted.
I’ll never be able to get rid of them, I realize. No matter how much I want to. They’re all lasered deep in my brain. In my heart. And I…
I don’t just have a crush on him.
This involves my blood, my bones, my heart.
I hate him.
I want to cry.
Instead, I nod. “Was what? You can’t finish that, can you? Because it dawned on you, all these women and you’ve been sleeping with me. And it hit you, didn’t it? What it would mean if we kept doing that.”
He closes his eyes and my heart somehow hurts even more. “Because you’re the only one.”
Ryder doesn’t explain what that means. And all kinds of thoughts jumble through my head. From hopeful to desperate to full of despair.
“Yeah, and it hit you.”
“Yep.” He takes a breath and pushes his hair from his face, looking all levels of disgusted. “It did.”
Like that, I know it’s over. Just like that.
“You got all caught up in it all, Ryder,” I say, a terrible weariness weighing down my words as I grip the painted iron handrail because if I don’t my knees might buckle. “You slept with me because I was the only one you could access during this. Just like I said before.”
I turn and push open the exit door to the floor and go to my office, unlocking the door.
“That’s not true.”
Of course he’s still there. Ryder’s tenacious and stubborn and even if I hate him, he’s still the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. Funny, I thought once the gloss of him came off I’d see him differently. But he’s still him.
He just doesn’t really want me and he went all ham fisted about ending it.
At least we’ll have Paris. I almost laugh at the clichéd line. But I can’t because this isn’t funny at all.
“It is and we both know it.”
“I don’t know why I flirted with her, I wasn’t into her at all, Elliot.”
I suck in a breath. “You said. And yet, you did. And I got the message, loud and clear.”
He closes the door to the office and in the semidarkness of my closed offices, he leans back against the wall, hands behind his back, eyes shut.
Tired.
Tired and beautiful, a fallen angel, like something from his tattoos on his back. Except that’s me putting it on him. Because this isn’t real conflict. It’s him being his version of decent. He thinks he’s conflicted because he isn’t someone who doesn’t care. He isn’t someone who’s indifferent or worse, likes to cause pain.
Ryder doesn’t want me, but he wants me to feel better. And that, I think might make it all worse.
“I get it,” I say. “Like I’ve said, I get it.”
His eyes snap open and he looks at me steadily, but doesn’t say a word. There’s something there in his eyes I don’t quite get, but if it was a thing for me to hold on to, a thing to give me hope, he’d tell me. He’d fight.
And in that tiny moment I want that. I want a man to fight for me. To prove he wants me.
“You don’t.”
“Ryder…” I go to the desk where Lena sits and open a drawer. “I was easy access for a man like you.”
“No, you were difficult, are difficult. I fucked up. I know that. I thought—it doesn’t matter what I thought. I just figured you should have better.”
I nod. “Because you’ll fuck up? You won’t change?”
“And if I don’t?”
“Ryder, what is that meant to mean? Are you offering yourself to me as some kind of experiment? To see if you can keep sleeping with one woman, maybe see if you can form a relationship?”
“I think I might be. Elliot—”
“Because that’s a really half-assed, one foot out the door, selfish jerk move. I deserve better than that. I was easy access, but that access is gone. You go do you, Ryder. Really. I’m sure there are other women out there you can run your little experiment or trial on.”
“So you’re done? That it?” He straightens, frowning.
And I dig in the drawer for the keys I keep in a small box in there. I wrap my fingers around it and look down. “I think so. With you and me.”
There’s a silence but then he moves. I feel more than hear him approach. “No one else…no one out there is you, Elliot. I might want to fuck someone else, but I don’t want to hang out with them like I do you.”
Fucking asshole. My fingers tighten on the box and I look furiously up at him.
He meets my gaze. “That may have come out wrong.”
“Or right. Here. You go do you.” I hand him the keys.
“I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean I want to fuck other people. I meant if I did, I—”
“Ryder, stop. You’re making things worse.”
He looks down at the keys I pulled from the box. “I don’t understand.”
“The board’s decision is going to be made soon, but you can’t just snap back to the old Ryder. Not right away. That’s just begging for you to lose it all. I think they call it snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”
I’m running on professional autopilot right here. Inside, I’m a mess, making running down inner me’s face, as I hide in a corner, doubled over in pain. But outside? I’m angry, but professional. I’ll do my job until the end.
“I didn’t…what are the keys?”
“As I said, go do you, Ryder. They’re to a place I have for clients in Murray Hill. It’s Tudor City Place between East Forty First and Second. Nothing much but rich people and the UN, but it’s private and not happening in the way you like.”
He glances at the keys and then at me. “Punishment?”
“No. It’s for clients to use on the downlow if they need to. Use it. Just…just don’t report in. I don’t need to hear about who you’re banging.”
Ryder nods tightly. “You want me to fuck other people?”
“Have orgies for all I care. Keep out of the papers for the next month and you’ll sail home free. That advice is for free. So use it. Fuck all the women you want.”
“Fine,” he says lowly. “I will.”
The words are a knife edge slicing through bone. “And we’re not friends. I can’t be friends with you, Ryder.”
“So if I do the noble thing and walk so I don’t screw things up—”
“Noble?” I hiss the word. “There’s nothing noble about this. About what you did, about what you said. It’s half assed, and it’s all for your precious cock. You want your cake and you want to eat it as well. But you can’t. And I’m not a cake.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t, Ryder. That’s the problem. You didn’t try. You give me a wonderful night and then decide you can’t change, so you go and deliberately flirt with someone you don’t want to send me a message—one I got, by the way—and then you come after me and offer me nothing but more half-assed words.”
Something wet is on my face and with rising horror, I swipe the tear away.
“Don’t—”
“It’s frustration, nothing more. Am I hurt? Yes. Of course I am. I’m not you. I don’t use my body as a trinket the way you do. I wanted you, I had…feelings…and you just trampled them down because you don’t know if you can keep your dick in your pants.”
Oh, God. I’m a fucking idiot.
I know what’s wrong with me.
I’ve gone and done the thing I didn’t think I would do with him. This isn’t a crush. This is unforgivable.
This is love.
And he’s not willing to be capable in the right way back.
“I think,” I say quietly, “you should go now. You’re never going to change, Ryder. We both know this.”
He’s pale. Very pale and he stares hard at me.
I want him to step up. I want him to say he’s willing to try.
“We’ll still see this through, the job?”
“Yes, Ryder. We will. I’m a professional.”
“Good.”
“Great.”
Silence stretches thin and cold.
“That it, Elliot?”
“Yes. You’re not about to change, Ryder. Are you?”
I want him to say yes. I want him to give me the keys back and offer me the world.
Actually, no. I don’t want the world. Just him.
I want him to say he’s not going, that this isn’t the end.
I want him to say he loves me.
But he doesn’t.
Ryder steps back. “No. I don’t change, Elliot. Not in the long term. And you don’t need to see it through to the end.” He tosses the keys and catches them. “I think I got this.”
“You’ll let me just go?”
“Yes.” He half takes another step, but stops. “And you? You’ll let me take the keys and walk out the door.”
“I gave them to you.”
“Fine. Goodbye, Elliot.”
Ryder turns and walks out the door, shattering my heart in to a million, bleeding pieces.