Hayes
eighteen
“Oh, good, you haven’t left yet.”
I freeze at the voice, but keep my focus on steadying Paige, who giggles as she hops on one foot while struggling to put her shoe back on as we leave the service staircase into the lobby.
Once she is back in both stiletto heels, I look over at the face of the speaker, already knowing full well who it is, despite thinking I would never run into him again.
“What are you doing here, Rex?” I tuck Paige against my side, not wanting her to capture his interest.
“Just seeing what kind of property would make you renounce being single after all these years,” Octavius Rex says, straightening his suit lapels. “You have a little…” he says, wiping the corner of his own mouth with his thumb, indicating I must have some of Paige’s lipstick on my mouth.
“I didn’t get married to buy a property and that can’t actually be why you’re here on Christmas Eve. What do you want?” I wipe at my mouth absently as I take him in.
He’s polished marble, perfect in every way despite the lateness of the evening, even now with the crescent-shaped scar he sports on his left temple—a souvenir of a brawl we once tackled together after a late night studying for finals at Wharton.
Rex aced his finals despite the concussion he sustained.
He’s too smart for this, and I’m on guard knowing it.
“You’re right. I heard about your recent marriage and decided I had to meet your bride for myself.
There’s not nearly enough about her online to learn secondhand.
” Rex puts his hands in his pockets, pulling a practiced, slouching stance only a fuckboy brick house at six-three can pull off and still be crack for women. He is doing it to try to disarm Paige.
I clench my jaw and feel my shoulders rise, boxing out my frame and sending back my own practiced stance that should be loud and clear.
Rex gives us his signature roguish, dimpled grin, brown eyes flashing with mirth, and I want to deck the smug look right off his fucking face.
He knows exactly how to get under my skin, and I need to get my shit together.
I feel all of twenty-five again, instead of thirty-five, and I don’t want to be the hotheaded dick I was back then.
I take a deep breath and reach for the boardroom fortitude that usually sustains me.
“Don’t even try, Rex. I know every last one of your fuckboy tricks,” I growl, still working on the control I seem to have misplaced since running into my rival. Not just my rival, the fucking mastermind I know is behind the lawsuits surrounding the South African mine collapse.
“Oh, come on, Hayes. How about giving me a break from this macho bullshit. It is Christmas Eve, after all—“ The grandfather clock in the lobby cuts him off as it bongs out the time and Rex tilts his head in acknowledgment. “I guess it’s Christmas, now. So, how about we put aside our differences and get into the holiday spirit? If I’m able to put aside my feelings about what you did, then you should, too.”
Paige grips my arm, and I look down at her face, growing alarmed when I notice she is more distressed than she should be running into someone only I would know.
“That’s the guy I saw at Rare,” she whispers. “He was also at Underworld Spirits on my first day, and here in Savannah before that.”
I’m instantly on guard. “Are you following my wife?” I snap, my attention fully on Rex now.
My instinct to protect Paige is riding an adrenaline rush I can feel thrumming through my veins, hot and bitter.
Red creeps into the edges of my vision and I don’t care where we are or who is around, I will end him if he’s done anything to make her feel unsafe.
“I told you, there wasn’t enough about her online, so I had to see for myself. She really is beautiful. And so… innocent,” he says, his eyes growing dark as his attention slides to Paige.
I feel her stiffen beside me and there is a part of me that wants to roar and smash Rex’s head against the marble column beside him. I force myself to stay rooted in place to not act on the instinct for violence.
“Eyes off, Rex.” The threat is thinly veiled, and I don’t have to tell him what will happen if he looks at Paige too long.
“You and I have something in common, Paige,” he says, heedless of my warning. “Hayes took a family legacy from me, as well. You see, he has quite the habit of coveting other people’s businesses and doesn’t care if he fucks over his best friend, or his wife, to acquire them.”
I feel, more than hear, Paige’s intake of breath from where I have her pressed to my side, and I want to scream that’s not what happened.
To shut down every word he says that puts Paige on her heels about me—about us.
But that wouldn’t be entirely true, because no matter what my intentions were, I did what Rex said.
It doesn’t matter how much I fucking hate him for weaponizing it now.
“We’re done here.” I turn away from Rex, my arm around Paige to bring her with me and get her away from this situation. It feels like it could go one of two ways—Rex will say something that makes Paige look at me differently, or I will.
“Not exactly, Olsen. We have a lot to talk about, you and I. Paige, too, if she wants to know the kind of man she married.”
This mother fucker doesn’t know when to stop.
Paige pauses and places a hand on my arm to get me to stop. She looks up at my face and gives me a smile that just about breaks my heart before turning slightly to include Rex.
“I know exactly who my husband is. The good and the bad. I’m sorry for what happened to you, and the part Hayes played in it. I know how devastating that can be, but I don’t think this is the proper time or place to be having this conversation. Good night, and Merry Christmas to you.”
She takes my hand in hers and leads us out of The Mansion to the Maybach without another incident.
“I suppose you want an explanation,” I grumble, starting the car once I have settled her into the passenger seat and taken my own.
“Do you owe me one?” Her voice is deadly quiet, and I have to strain to hear.
Fuck. I don’t know how to answer that without admitting guilt or having to stumble over some shortened version of the events in question.
Paige tends to retreat into herself when she’s attacked, and she’s had two run-ins tonight that should be turning her inside out. She doesn’t deserve this.
I rub a palm across my face, leaving it over my mouth for a moment before starting the drive away from The Mansion.
“That was Octavius Rex—he was called Tavi back when I met him. We were friends once, probably the closest I’ve had to a best friend,” I say with a begrudging sigh, knowing I do in fact owe her an explanation.
“It seems like something went very wrong in your friendship, given the interaction we just had.”
That’s an understatement. She strokes my arm where it rests on the center console, and I’m so grateful she’s even touching me right now. She could have withdrawn completely after what she just heard.
“When my brothers and I took over my father’s company, it wasn’t much.
I mean, it was doing great with the mining side of things, but it wasn’t diversified.
One of the things we started doing pretty quickly was acquiring businesses to complement our mining operations and grow where we needed to.
It just so happened that acquiring the Rex family company would get us into transportation. He didn’t love that.”
“Why did you pick his company when you could have found another and kept your friendship intact?”
“I did him a favor by taking on that business because it wasn’t a healthy company.
Tavi was too close to the situation to be objective.
He couldn’t see that his father had wrung out every dollar he could from the company and was doing a shit job of running things effectively.
I thought I was doing him a solid by paying way more than the business was worth, which got his family out of debt. I helped him while helping myself.”
“And he couldn’t see it your way, right?”
I risk a glance at Paige and see her eyes focused on her lap, her hand motionless on my arm.
I’m fucking this up, no matter how truthful I am and I’m at risk of pushing her away if I keep this up.
Still, I’ll tell her what she wants to know because she deserves that much from me.
No matter how badly it will make me look.
“No… he called me an opportunistic asshole and told me he’d make me pay someday.
” I just hope my past mistakes aren’t about to take Paige down with me if that retribution is coming for me now.
“I haven’t seen him since. Now it looks like he’s after Olympus.
We think he’s behind the lawsuit over the mines, and now he’s fixated on you and I’m not letting that happen. ”
Paige blinks her bright eyes up at me and I quickly take in her solemn face as I wind through the dark and silent streets of Savannah to our house.
“I don’t think he’s actually fixated on me, it’s you he wants to get to and I’m just a soft spot. As for coming after Olympus, can you blame him, if you put yourself in his position for a moment?”
Fucking hell, I don’t like when she forces empathy on me.
It makes me… uncomfortable. I’ve been fine making business decisions without emotion.
If it makes sense for our bottom line, I don’t even consider the casualties.
That’s how business should be done, without all the feelings and mushy bullshit that complicate matters when you think of the people involved.
But… now I’m actually thinking of Rex and what he must have felt.
Betrayed, likely. He was my closest friend and I saw the opportunity to take something from him that would benefit me, so I put that over our friendship.
Just like I put acquiring the Xenios Group over my relationship with Paige.
Hoping she would see it my way. I really am an asshole. Fuck.
“What would you do, now, in my place?” I ask because I don’t have a fucking clue. It’s easier to ask for her to give me the right answer she wants to hear me say than it is to be the man she actually wants me to be. I can’t live up to that and I’ll just disappoint her.
She interlaces her fingers with mine on the console and bites her lip in concentration. “You do the right thing, even if it’s hard.”
My fingers flex in hers with impatience.
That’s easier said than done, obviously.
It’s not practical. I pull into the drive of the gorgeous Victorian I bought for Paige knowing she would love it.
Knowing it was the right thing to do to make sure she could be close to family and her roots here in Savannah.
I am capable of doing the right thing, when it suits me, but the right thing by Rex?
What does that even look like? Giving him back the parts of Rex Inc.
we absorbed? Making him a business partner?
Not fighting the lawsuit and letting it cripple the overseas mining division of Olympus?
Nothing is easy when the situation is so convoluted that I can’t even predict what the right thing is.
I stay silent as I park and exit the car, drawing in deep gulps of the cool night air, tinged with an underlying brine from the coastal inlets that feed Savannah.
Our house is lush with greenery even in the midst of December, and it beckons as a solitary retreat for me but I have Paige to answer to and can’t fall into the melancholy that comes on the heels of the holidays.
I round the car and help Paige out, pulling her to her feet and into my arms, crushing her to my chest, and hoping I can steal some of her fortitude and emotional intelligence.
What if she thinks differently of me now, seeing the results of the evil ways that are so ingrained in me?
Will she pull away, close the chapter on us because I can’t live up to the image she has of me as a man with integrity?
Her arms snake around my waist and she hugs me back without hesitance. I breathe a sigh of relief and know I’m a lucky bastard to have a wife who will love me despite my inherent darkness and desire to take what I want. If only I could be the man she sees me as instead.
“Let’s go to bed. It’s late and there’s no use beating this to death right now,” I say into her hair instead of letting my thoughts take us down a path that will end in a fight, or worse.