“He told you that?”
“No.” Jay hesitated. “Someone else did. I don’t remember who.”
“I did.” At her stricken expression, he chuckled grimly. “Some rumors are true, Jay.”
“I can’t believe you did that!”
“Yeah. I had to spend a night in jail for it. Dad posted bail. I was supposed to apologize but I never did and my father didn’t make me.” He flashed her a tight smile. “Can’t have the heirwasting away behind bars.”
“He said that?”
“Something like it, before calling me an embarrassment.”
That bastard. “You shouldn’t have punched him, but I don’t think you’re an embarrassment. Far from it, in fact.” She locked her computer and grabbed her purse, and so she did not see the way his face softened. “But this is exactly what I was talking about. All of this happened so long ago and people still talk about it. It’s going to be even worse if I say yes.”
“You’re going to say yes?”
His eagerness was like a knife in her heart. “I don’t know,” she lied, lowering her eyes and keeping her hands at her sides so she wouldn’t touch the ring burning like a drop of cold fire beneath her clothes. “Why did you punch Jake?”
“Because of what he was saying about you. I won’t repeat what he said, but suffice it to say that after that incident, nobody else did, either. Not in my hearing, anyway.”
“You must have still been angry with me,” she said hesitantly.
“I didn’t hate you.” Nicholas’s eyes cut away. “I never hated you. Everyone just thought I did. People would tell me what they thought I wanted to hear about you, trying to fucking ingratiate themselves with me, usingyou, and it made me want to kill them.”
“Figuratively,” Jay prompted worriedly.
He glanced at her. His gaze was cold and terrible. “Not necessarily.”
They walked out of the building side by side, close enough that the wool of his suit rubbed against her arm with every swing of his broad shoulders. The violence that ran through him wasclose to the skin. Sometimes she imagined that she felt the teeth of it.A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“What are you thinking, Nicholas?” she asked, shaking that disturbing thought off. “You have the most terrifying look on your face.”
“I’m wondering if this is going to be a problem.”
“The Jake thing?”
“Yes, the ‘Jake thing.’ I ran into him myself not too long ago. I wonder if he’s following us.”
“He’s a creep,” Jay said. “But there are a lot of creeps, and we come from a wealthy family. That’s always going to attract the gossips and the bottom-feeders.”
“Bottom-feeder. Yeah, that’s exactly what he is.” Nicholas unlocked his car with a dark laugh, holding the door open for her. “But you’re more vulnerable than I am. Nobody would ever say anything to you with my name attached to yours.”
“It’s not the name I’m worried about. I don’t want to see the love slowly drain out of another person’s eyes when they look at me. That’s worse than being alone. It’s like being broken, slowly. I couldn’t stand it—”Not from you.
He closed the door and stormed around to the other side before buckling himself into the driver’s seat furiously. “I’m not my father. I don’t care about keeping up appearances. I thought I made it very clear when I punched that fucker who I was choosing when it came to you.”
“You did.” She spoke quietly.
He turned his key in the ignition. “I meant what I said earlier. I want you to come to me. For anything. Any time.”
Come to me. How many times had he summoned her exactly that way, expecting her to obey him? Somehow, hearing it as arequest made it even harder to bear.
Chapter Thirteen
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Nicholas watched Jay stare meditatively into the darkness, her face reflected in the dark glass window. Every time some specter from their past popped up like a fucking jack-in-the-box, he was afraid it was going to be the reason that she left him again.
