27. Todd #2
“I don’t know Cici well,” he said. “But I saw the two of you together. On the plane. Even when you were pretending it was fake, it wasn’t fake. Anyone could see that.”
I looked at him.
He shrugged once. “For what it’s worth, people don’t look at each other the way you two do unless something real is there.”
Bunny reached across the island and put her hand over mine.
“You keep showing up,” she said. “Not to pressure her. Not to corner her. To prove you meant what you said.”
Frank’s words echoed in my head.
Sometimes the best thing a man can do after he screws up is keep showing up.
I pulled in a breath that didn’t feel quite as sharp as the last one.
“I don’t deserve her.”
“No,” Bunny said. “But you love her.”
I looked down at her hand on mine.
“Yes.”
“Then start there.”
For the first time since I had walked away from Cici’s porch, something inside me shifted. It was not hope. Not yet. I had done too much damage for hope to come easily.
But it was something.
A direction.
A place to stand.
I rounded the island and pulled Bunny into a hug. She wrapped both arms around me and held on tight.
“You smell like a distillery,” she muttered against my shoulder.
I almost laughed. “Thank you for coming over.”
“That’s what family is for.”
Justin stood, and I pulled him in too, mostly because he had shown up with coffee and had not once told me I looked like hell. Bunny made a muffled sound of protest from between us.
“Oh, good,” she said. “A sweaty group hug. Exactly what I wanted this morning.”
Justin patted my back once.
“You should shower.”
“I was about to say the same thing,” Bunny said.
I released them both. “Someone brought pastries, help yourself.”
“I wonder who?” Bunny laughed.
Ten minutes later, I stood under a shower hot enough to burn away some of the bourbon and none of the guilt. I braced one hand against the tile and let the water pound over my shoulders.
Cici’s voice played over and over in my head.
You didn’t trust me.
That was the wound.
Not the files or accusations.
Not even my silence when she told me she was pregnant.
It all came back to that.
She had needed me to believe in her, and I had failed.
When I finally shut off the water and stepped out, I felt more human, but not lighter. I dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, ran a towel over my hair, and went back into the kitchen.
Bunny and Justin were gone.
The pastry box was still there, but half the contents were missing. A note sat on top.
I picked it up.
Eat something. Then fight like hell.
Bunny had drawn a small heart under it.
I set the note down and stared at it for a moment. I couldn't help but smile.
I picked out a pastry then walked to my office.
Most people expected a man with my financial status to live a certain way. I never got caught up in that. The penthouse was nice because I liked it, not because I needed to impress anyone. My home office was comfortable and had everything I needed to work from home.
I didn’t have a full-time staff or a driver waiting downstairs. Although, I may have to rethink that one after the fiasco of last night.
I didn’t have a chef standing by in the kitchen or security guards posted at every entrance.
I never saw the point.
The cleaning service came once a week. A local chef stocked the refrigerator with enough meals to get me through the days I was home. Beyond that, I handled things myself.
The jet was the one luxury I refused to compromise on.
When you spent half your life traveling, convenience stopped being a luxury and became a necessity. I had no interest in wasting hours standing in airport security lines, waiting for delayed flights, or fighting for overhead bin space.
Everything else was just stuff.
The jet saved me time.
Time was the one thing money couldn't make more of.
The office was quiet, freshly cleaned, and too controlled for the way my life felt. I sat behind the desk, opened my laptop, and pulled up everything I had collected over the past few days.
Access logs.
File metadata.
Security reports.
Copies of the leaked photographs.
The USB contents.
Ethan Vale’s termination file.
I already knew Cici was innocent. The file activity had not lined up with her access, her devices, or her schedule. The setup had been careful, but it had not been perfect.
The part I still did not understand was why.
Why Cici?
Ethan had been fired two years ago. So why had he chosen her?
I opened Ethan’s personnel file and read through it again, even though I already knew most of it by memory. Director of Corporate Intelligence. Strong technical skills. Problems with authority. Inflated expenses. Unauthorized access attempts. Terminated after an internal review.
He had blamed me.
Men like Ethan never blamed themselves.
I moved from his termination file to the leaked images. The first photograph had been taken in Chicago. Cici and me boarding the jet. My hand at the small of her back. A moment that should have been private, captured from an angle no random reporter should have had.
I opened the next one.
The hotel lobby.
The airport.
Outside the restaurant.
The article that had made her look like a scandal instead of a woman caught in the orbit of my mistakes.
Then I pulled up the original clip from the Sunday morning broadcast.
I had avoided watching it again.
I did not want to see her walk through the background in my room. I did not want to see my own face when Monty asked about her. I did not want to relive the exact moment the world got a piece of her it never should have had.
But I watched it.
The clip loaded, and there I was, sitting in a hotel suite in Aspen at four in the morning, pretending I had control over my life. Monty asked a question about the markets. I answered.
Then Cici crossed behind me.
The internet had replayed those three seconds until they became something cheap and ugly.
I paused the video.
There she was.
Black panties.
Bare legs.
The side of her breast.
Wings tattoo on her shoulder.
A woman who had trusted me enough to fall asleep in my bed.
A woman Ethan had not known existed until the world saw her there.
My fingers stilled on the keyboard.
I opened the first leaked photograph again and checked the date.
Then the second.
Then the file transfer logs.
Then the metadata from the USB.
A cold thread moved through me.
The timing was too clean.
Before the broadcast, there was nothing connected to Cici. No planted evidence. No photographs. No media leak. No reason for Ethan to have even known her name.
After the broadcast, everything changed.
The first planted file trail.
The first attempt to tie confidential documents to her.
The first photograph taken from a place no casual observer should have been.
It didn't matter that he didn't know her.
He had found her because of me.
I sat back slowly.
The realization landed with the kind of quiet force that emptied the room of air.
Ethan had seen the broadcast. He had seen a woman in my hotel room. He had seen the way Monty reacted, the way the clip spread, the way people speculated. He had not needed to know who she was at first.
He only needed to know that she mattered.
Then he dug.
He had done what obsessed men did. He had watched. He had followed the noise. He had waited for the connection to reveal itself.
Cici was my pilot.
My stomach turned.
Ethan’s plan had never been complicated. It had been cruel.
He did not have to destroy me directly.
He just had to make me destroy her.
And I had.
I had looked at the woman I loved, seen fear in her eyes, and doubted her.
I pressed my fingers against my temples.
“Jesus.”
Every single thing Ethan had done required proximity.
He had not just been watching me.
He had been watching Cici.
I reached for my phone and called her.
It rang.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then voicemail.
My grip tightened.
I hung up and called again.
This time, it rang once before the automated voice picked up.
My pulse changed.
I stood so quickly my chair rolled back and hit the wall behind me.
I called a third time.
Straight to voicemail.
A cold knot formed low in my gut.
Cici always had her phone.
She might not want to talk to me. She might ignore my call. She had every right to ignore my call.
But straight to voicemail was different.
I grabbed my keys from the desk and was already moving toward the door when the message started playing in my ear.
The person you are trying to reach is unavailable.
I hung up before it finished.
Something was wrong.
Really wrong.