Or hell, maybe even the truth.Can you please stop crashing into my life like a wrecking ball and rearranging everything I thought I had under control? I can’t focus. I can’t sleep. I can’t even win a goddamn case because all I can think about is you, and it makes no fucking sense.
But before any of that can escape my mouth, a sharp banging rattles the window beside her head causing us both to jump.
“Gotta move, lady!” my doorman yells, and then he spots me and looks confused as hell. “Oh, hey, Mr. Prescott.”
The spell snaps clean in half. Rhiannon’s eyes flick toward the windshield, suddenly far away, her expression completely unreadable.
I open the door and step out, words still crowding the back of my throat. I turn to saysomething,I don’t know what, but by the time I face the street, she’s already gone. Her unsafe car swallowed up by the noise, the lights, and the endless stream of traffic like she couldn’t wait to escape.
Well, damn.
With any other woman, I’d be relieved to see her gone. But Rhiannon isn’t any other woman. She’s never been. From the moment I stumbled across her in Bryant Park, when I wassimply trying to grab a bite to eat for dinner between reviewing briefs, she’s changed my world.
The chances of running into her are slim—after all, the cleaning crew comes in during lunch, and I’m never home for it. But something tells me that I’m going to be seeing her again soon.
And when I ride the elevator up to the penthouse and open my foyer, I’m unexpectedly thrilled to find confirmation for that feeling. She’s left her wallet behind. Again. And I can’t blame her for being scattered. She’s clearly got a lot on her plate. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling both frustrated with her lack of safety and secretly pleased I get to see her again.
I try not to read too much into that second part.
The truth is that I’m fucking lonely. I already texted my clients to cancel our meeting this evening and I hate to admit it but sitting alone in my penthouse for the rest of the night sounds like torture.
This never would have bothered me in the past. I’d go to my office in the back, fill the silent space with work, the news humming in the background, or the Manhattan Mayhem game, New York Cities professional hockey team.
But now, everything’s different.
In a completely unnatural, and thoroughly confusing way, I don’t want to stay in and catch up on the mountains of work that I know I’ll never be able to finish. I miss bantering with Rhiannon. I even miss her fucking up my hair, my hand, and my head.
I barely know her, yet something about her keeps pulling me back, drawing me closer, like a magnet I can’t resist. Maybe it’s because, before she crashed into my orbit, my life was stuck on autopilot.
I went to work, sat through court cases, hit the gym, and occasionally caught dinner with my sister Rosie. On rare occasions, I’d go on a date just so I could fuck. The rest of my time was spent alone at home in predictable, clinical, regimented solitude.
And it’s not that I’m a grumpy recluse. I haven’t always been some introvert who prefers being alone. I have a wide friend group, who I rarely see anymore. Somewhere along the way, I’ve just lost the spark for going out, exploring the city and letting loose.
I make my way to the kitchen and grab a bottle of water, acting like I’m not dying to flip through her wallet and get her address so that I can head straight to the small town she described with bright eyes right this instant.
How does she get around the city without her wallet? She needs to be more careful about where she loses this. More alert. What if she lost this in someone else’s room? She could easily get robbed.
I tell myself not to do it. Not to drive out to Brookhaven tonight to return it in person, to just leave the wallet with the hotel’s security desk downstairs for her to come pick it up later this week.
But I’m too far gone.
I snatch it off the table, keep my head down like I’m hiding from my own conscious, and jog to the parking garage. A quick turn of the key and the engine purrs with life. My car is hardly ever driven. It’s certainly not a rust bucket with squeaking breaks and a taillight that’s missing.
I don’t know how to fix a car, never learned that stuff growing up considering I was too busy shadowing my dad on the cases he was taking and learning how to be emotionless, but I’ve gotenough money to get hers repaired and I have a guy who I know will do it.
Hell, I could buy her a new one if I wanted to. Knowing the lemon she’s been driving around the city, I won’t be able to sleep until it’s fixed because I won’t stop worrying about her crashing or hitting someone.
That’s what I’ll do. Once I get her car fixed and hand over her wallet, she’ll be out of my system, and I’ll need nothing more from her.
Yeah, sure.
Chapter 16 – Cain
A one hour and forty-five-minute drive later I’m parked outside of a single-family home in a modest neighborhood with houses that match in different colors surrounding a lake.
It’s not the super-wealthy part of Hartford that I’ve been to with some of my entertainment clients who don’t live in the city, but it’s nice, and it’s close to the train stop that takes residents directly into NYC.
The town is idyllic, exactly how Rhiannon had described it. There are autumn themed decorations everywhere, people wave to you from the sidewalks, and I passed what looks like a small, local dive bar on the way in, advertising their annual Halloween party they’re throwing soon.
