Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
I’d waited for this day for years. Dreaded it and longed for it at the same time.
I hadn’t seen him since my trial. Two years.
“Okay, what are we doing here?” Cecil asked.
“A quick goring? I can stab him in both kidneys at the same time if I strain myself. That will do the trick if you don’t want to get your hands dirty.
I’d prefer not, though. I did my back at yoga last week, so it would be helpful if you had a gun on you somewhere… ”
It felt like I was looking at a photo of another time.
Vincent looked as gorgeous as he’d always been.
Some men got better looking with age, and Vincent was one of them.
His hair, dark-blond and tousled in a way you couldn’t replicate, hung thick and tangled around his face.
His body was still lithe, lightly muscled, with barely any fat because he often got lost in his work and forgot to eat.
Only faint laugh-lines in the corner of his eyes indicated his age.
“I could back up this Lambo and ram him into the wall. Although, it would make more of a mess,” Cecil went on. “Violet’s bones are in the earth now, though, so she might be able to swallow him. If not, we could dissolve his body in lye in the bathtub. He’d be gone in a week.”
I barely heard him. I was too busy trying to see Vincent, trying to recognize him with my new eyes.
He looked the same… but he was different.
He wore the same clothes as usual, ripped light-blue jeans stained with paint and a plain white t-shirt—also so perfectly paint-stained it looked deliberate, like a thousand-dollar shirt you might find in a boutique.
He leaned against the entryway of my building, gazing up at the sky with his piercing blue eyes.
A beautiful man, lost in the beauty of the stars.
You couldn’t see the stars, though. The city had far too much light pollution.
Was it all an act? Was everything about him an act?
I knew what he’d done to me now. I’d acknowledged the truth. I should have wanted to kill him, but I didn’t.
I didn’t feel anything at all.
“Okay, girlfriend. Give me a second. I’m coming with you.” Cecil whinnied and bristled in the bucket seat. A sprinkle of glitter sparked in the air, surrounding him, raining like sparks of fireworks, slowly disappearing into nothingness.
A large goldendoodle sat on the seat next to me. Cecil, now a giant dog, grinned widely. His teeth were very sharp. “How’s that?”
I hit the button to open my door, and it lifted slowly. “Fine.” I didn’t care what he looked like. I didn’t care what Vincent thought about anything.
Well, maybe I did a little. I had automatically put my high heels back on, after all.
I got out of the car and walked towards him slowly.
He didn’t look at me as I approached; he’d even completely ignored the gold Lamborghini screeching to a halt at the curb in front of the building, because that’s the kind of guy Vincent was.
He just leaned against the wall, head tilted up, looking at the stars, lost in thought.
It looked like a performance. Good grief, it was like I had new eyeballs, and they were showing me things that had always been there.
Vincent looked like an actor in a stage performance, playing a handsome, enigmatic artist. Just waiting.
Too cool to be looking at his phone because real life was much more interesting.
What an ass.
The performance wobbled a little when he finally turned towards the clicking of my high heels coming towards him. His eyes widened when he saw me; blood-red silk dress split to thigh-high, swishing dramatically out behind me, the gold Lamborghini in the background.
“Susan.” He stood up straighter, then, with almost visible effort, forced himself to relax back against the wall again.
I stopped in front of him. Old feelings smacked into me like moths against a lampshade, trying to get through to burn themselves on the burning bulb. I loved this man so much. And he’d destroyed me.
It took me a moment to get a hold of myself. “What are you doing here, Vincent?”
“I came to see you.” His lips curved up—a slow, sexy smile. “I wanted to see you.”
I swallowed. “Why?”
He stared at me for a long time. I’d forgotten how much his eyes glittered. Vincent had a way of looking at someone so soulfully, so intensely, you almost stopped breathing.
A quiet little growl came from behind me. “Grr. Grr. Grrrrepugnantlittlewanker.”
Vincent frowned and leaned sideways a little. “You got a new dog.”
Cecil’s interruption broke the spell. It reminded me that Vincent hadn’t answered my question.
Realization smacked into me. Vincent never answered questions he didn’t like.
He would just stare soulfully or with unbearable hurt in his eyes, until you got uncomfortable and changed the subject.
I clenched my jaw. “What are you doing here, Vincent?”
He turned back to me. Yep, there it was. The carefully constructed look of hurt. Brows furrowed, eyes hooded, mouth open very slightly.
A surge of heat boiled in my belly. This man had destroyed me.
No. He didn’t destroy me. He tried to. He wanted me out of the way. He was a kid who had gotten tired of his personal candy store, so he’d burnt it down, and gone and gotten himself another one.
And I’d risen like a phoenix from the flames.
I eyeballed him, keeping my face blank. “Well? Are you going to stand there and stare at me all night, or are you going to answer my question? What are you doing here?”
A flash of anger flared in Vincent’s eyes.
He carefully disguised it and threw me a slow, sexy smile.
“Like I said, I wanted to see you.” His gaze drifted down from my face, taking in the shimmering skin on my collarbones, the tops of my breasts peeking out of the top of the corset of the blood-red dress, the silk draping over my curves perfectly, down to my bare leg, exposed by the split.
“You’re looking good, Susie. Real good.”
“You’ve seen me. You can go now.”
He leaned back against the wall, sexy and defiant. “It’s been too long, Sue. I’ve missed you.”
As the words left his mouth, something strange pricked inside of me. It was subtle, like static electricity running under my skin. I frowned. “What did you say?”
He stared at me again, the slow smile back. He was trying to reel me in harder than a sports angler with a blue marlin on a line. “I said I missed you.”
My skin zinged again. It felt… wrong. Like something inside of me was physically reacting to his words.
A realization hit me. A lie. Vincent was lying. He didn’t miss me at all.
My mouth dropped open. I’d never thought to check if the scribe stone gifted me any magic, but here it was. I could actually feel the lie in Vincent’s words.
“Vincent… why are you really here?”
He tossed his hair back lightly. “I wanted to check on you.”
No buzz. Apparently, that was true.
“Why?”
He frowned. “What?”
I’d thrown him off guard. “Why did you want to check on me?”
“I still care about you, Susan,” he said soulfully. No buzz. That was true, too. “I want to make sure you are okay.”
Buzz. Mother fucker. He cared about me, but he didn’t want to make sure I was okay? What the hell did that mean? “What is it that you care about, Vincent?”
He shifted on his feet uncomfortably. “I… uh… Susie, I’ve always cared about your life. I care about what is going on with you right now.”
“Oh.” I nodded slowly. “I just figured it out. Your lawyer told you I’d bought this building, right? And you care about where I suddenly got the money from to get it?”
His mask was slipping. The soulful gaze turned suspicious. “So, it’s true. You did buy this building.”
“Yep.”
He nodded. A light of triumph flared in his eyes. He really thought he was going to get his hands on it.
“Feel free to let your lawyers know,” I said breezily.
He held out his hands in a pleading gesture.
“Susie… I don’t want to take anything more from you,” he said mournfully.
Buzz. “I don’t want anything else from you.
” Buzz. “But my lawyer is furious. You cannot hide assets. It is illegal.” He stared at me urgently.
“I’m thinking only of you.” Buzz. “You are still on parole. You could go back to jail.”
I threw my head back and laughed. This was crazy. “I never hid anything from you, Vincent.”
“But… but how…?”
I shrugged. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I’ve… ah… upskilled recently, and I am currently employed by a… a wealthy company. They have offered me a very generous remuneration package.”
Fury simmered in his eyes.
I smiled. “You gave up your golden goose, Vincent.”
His features arranged into a careful expression of hurt and outrage—mouth slightly open, brow furrowed, shoulders drooping. “I never thought of you as a golden goose, Suzie.”
Buzz.
“Liar.” I laughed out loud, almost giddy. “You’re a liar, Vincent. You used me. You’ve been using me for our whole marriage, and you’re still trying to use me.”
I took a step closer to him, fury burning just under my skin.
“I gave you everything. My heart and my soul. I loved you more than anything in this world,” I bit out through clenched teeth.
“And it was all a lie. For our entire relationship, you were just with me to get what you wanted. And the second I couldn’t give you one thing that you wanted, you fucked me over and left me for a sappy, skinny ginger bitch.
She’s a terrible artist, too,” I added, rubbing it in.
“A shitty cook. An awful hostess. Bart tells me you don’t hold dinner parties at Bayview anymore.
You might want to work on that; your patrons all liked to be entertained. Your sales will dry up.”
“Well.” His jaw clenched once. “At least she could give me the one thing that you couldn’t.”
“Ouch. Well, funnily enough, we could have had kids. You didn’t want to try IVF.”