“Bart.” I smiled at him fondly. “You’re the head of the Base Budget Insurancecompliancedepartment. Nobody would dare mess with compliance. You know I love you, but your job is so boring I feel like my eyes are glazing over the second the elevator dings on the fourth floor. You wouldn’t know office gossip if it walked up and punched you in the face.”
He chuckled and examined his wine again, swirling the merlot around the big round goblet. Too late, I realized he was only holding the glass to be polite. My dinner plate had shifted forwards an inch, and there was no room on the table for him to put it down.
Smoothly, I tugged my plate forward into my chest and pushed the vase half an inch to the side, so he had a place to put his glass, which he did with a flourish.
“Could he be bluffing?” Bart said. “Are you sure he knows? Gordon and Delilah did a very good job wiping all traces of you from San Francisco society. Nobody even whispers your name anymore.”
A stab of soul-crushing despair pierced my heart, penetrating through all my defenses. I inhaled sharply, still shocked at the pain it caused me. It took enormous effort to stop my hands from shaking, but I managed it, wordlessly repeating a mantra in my head, over and over.I am a strong, confident woman.The past is the past. I forgive myself. I deserve a fresh start.
“RichieCurran made it very clear.” I swallowed, bracing myself. “He even dropped Vincent’s name into the conversation.”
Saying my ex-husband’s name out loud hurt so much it felt like a dagger to the chest. I loved him so much. I mourned him like he was dead. The loss was so painful that I almost wished hewasdead.
Instead, he was in my beautiful old house up in Pacific Heights, getting ready to marry his intern, a gorgeous, willowy stick-thin Irish beauty named Seraphina.
Seraphina was only twenty-four. She was nearly half my age.
I blinked. A flash of light had exploded outside the window, a sudden bright flare somewhere out in the communal rooftop garden. Someone was taking photos with a very bright camera flash, or something like that. I welcomed the distraction; it dragged me out of the painful past. And at least the models out there hadn’t fallen off the edge of the building yet.
Bart peered outside the window for a second, but the light was gone. It was dark out there again. The twinkling lights of the cityscape shone merrily in the distance, leading down to oil-black water of the bay.
“Well. If he mentioned Vincent, then Richie definitely knows,” he said gloomily.
I exhaled slowly, trying to keep a lid on the black fog that threatened to rise up and devour me again. “It’s to be expected. Even with my surname changed, there’s a lot of old photos of me at events floating around the internet. San Francisco is a big city, but I’m not naive enough to think that I’d become anonymous just because I changed my name.” I swallowed.You’re a strong, mentally stable woman. “Even with Vincent’s parents trying to wipe all traces of me from the face of the earth.”
A crash came from right outside. Both of us turned to look, but I could only see our reflections in the glass. I leaned closer, put my head on the glass, and peered out. From here, I could only see the fern wall on the left wall of the rooftop. Loud voices shouted furiously for a second, the young woman snapping, and one of the men arguing back in a sexy, low tone.
I stifled my groan. Apart from having half the floor space as all the other single apartments in the building, this was the worst part of living on the rooftop. Other residents could hold parties right outside my window, and there was no escaping the noise. It was the only apartment I could afford, though, and the leasing agent had only given it to me because he was a friend of Bart’s.
Bart turned back to me, graciously ignoring the noise outside, and nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, so Richie knows. What are we going to do about it?”
Warmth bloomed in my chest. I smiled at him. “We?”
“Of course I’m going to help you.”
“Bart…” My grin grew wider. “You are the best. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Another smash came from outside—the tell-tale tinkle of broken glass on concrete. Those damned gorgeous models were going to get broken glass all over the rooftop.
My lips thinned. “Excuse me for a second.” I stood, carefully squeezing myself out from where I was jammed between the kitchen counter and the table, walked the four steps to my front door, opened it, and walked out into the hallway.
The door immediately to my left led out to the rooftop garden. I opened it with a bang and strode outside.
The cool night air breezed around me. It wasn’t too cold tonight; we were still in the dying days of late summer and it wasn’t as windy as usual, but goosebumps rose on my flesh anyway, just like they had before. The four stunning creatures were gathered around what appeared to be another special effects prop—a huge black circle ringed with blue fire, hovering in the air. For a second, I was fascinated, then, slightly concerned. I got my phone out of my pocket, brought up my camera app, then checked the scene in front of me through the screen.
Yes, they were really there. I wasn’t hallucinating. The ring of blue fire must be a hologram.
Oh no. Too late, I realized they were all staring at me, and I was holding my phone up. It looked like I was filming them.
Karen mode activated. Goddamnit.
I whipped my phone away. I could hardly yell at themfor the broken glass now. I sighed deeply. “Just… just make sure you clean up after yourselves, okay?”
Before they could respond, I turned around and marched back to my apartment.
Bart stood in the middle of the room. He’d obviously very politely used my absence to remove himself from where he’d been wedged in between the wall and the dining room table. Now, standing up, all six-foot-two inches of enormous teddy bear almost filled my whole apartment.
“I’m so sorry, Bart,” I said. “There’s a group of models doing a photoshoot on the roof.”
