And now things had gotten awkward.
“Hi! I’m Audrey. Sabrina’s sister.”
I wanted to shoot her a thank you glance for breaking the weird mood, but her attention was completely on Dylan. The way she flipped her hair and threw her shoulders back told me she wanted his attention on her too.
“I see the resemblance.” Fortunately for Dylan, he kept his gaze on her eyes, the place any decent man in his forties should keep them when he meets a girl half his age.
If he’d looked anywhere else, we may have had to have some words, owner of my company or not.
“Do you work here as well?” he asked.
“Nope. Just getting the tour. It’s my first time in the city. It’s exciting.”
Dylan seemed to be taken by surprise by her enthusiasm, though not exactly put off. “Yes. I’m sure it is exciting the first time.”
“Been too long since your first time, Locke? Have you forgotten what it’s like to get your cherry popped?” Weston teased.
“Apparently I’ve forgotten what it’s like to spend an evening with you and your innuendos.” The look he gave his partner made me think he’d appreciate those innuendos more if he weren’t in mixed company. Spending time with Weston would be a lot more fun for the older man if he wasn’t worrying about offending his young female employee and her even younger sister.
Which was why I didn’t expect it when he next said, “We were just going to dinner. We’d love it if the two of you would join us.”
Two
“Art conversation?” Weston asked, an hour later, his fork paused mid-air.
Of course we’d accepted the invitation to dinner. Audrey seemed so smitten with Dylan’s British dialect that she likely would have killed me if I’d suggested we do anything else. And I wouldn’t have anyway. When your employers invite you somewhere, you try to go.
Though if I’d known the destination planned was Gaston’s, I might have considered my options, for no other reason than I didn’t want to be at a restaurant that Donovan owned.
Perhaps that was the reason I’d gotten so tipsy. I didn’t know why the others had.
“Art conservation,” Audrey repeated, over-enunciating in that way that told me she was also not quite sober. She was only a little more than a semester away from completing her master’s at the University of Delaware in their art conservation program, and Dylan had just asked about her degree.
Weston swallowed his bite of foie de veau and nodded. “That makes a lot more sense. Is that like the people who work in museums to preserve the paintings?”
“That’s some of it. It’s a little chemistry, a little archeology, a lot of art, a whole lot of art history. Not nearly as exciting as your jobs.” She was way too modest, in my opinion.
“I’m not sure what Weston does day-to-day, but it sounds a hell of a lot more exciting than my job,” Dylan said.
While Weston had gotten louder as the wine had poured, Dylan’s lips had gotten looser. It was a great way to learn about the new man, actually. Though I’d only gleaned surface details—born in Southampton, lived in the US for a number of years, back to London, secretly loved Metallica, played electric bass in a local pub band—he was turning out to be quite fascinating.
“That’s because you handle finance. There is nothing creative about finance,” said Weston, obviously quite smug about the fact that he handled marketing.
“I think your father finds finance to be quite creative,” Dylan retorted.
“Rumors. No one can prove anything.” Weston took a swallow of wine. “But also why I don’t work for him.”
Donovan and Weston’s fathers dominated the financial industry. I’d never gotten a straight story on why the guys had decided to go into advertising instead of following them in the family business.
This breadcrumb was one I ate up eagerly.
“Corruption at King-Kincaid?” I scooted my chair a little closer to him. “Am I allowed to ask?”
Laughing, he shooed me away with a soft pat of the back of his hand. “No. You are not allowed to ask.”
I continued to stare at him. Apparently drinking made me shameless.
He let out a sigh. “It’s nothing that hasn’t already been suspected by someone at one point or another. Your guess is as good as mine. It was definitely one of the reasons that D and I wanted to do our own thing, though. So we can genuinely say we don’t know.”
While I doubted that Donovan ever preferred being in the dark, Weston probably truly did. “Well, that was smart, I suppose. And boring. Who’s going to give me gossip now?”
I turned to my other employer. “What about you, Dylan? How did you end up part of Reach with these bozos?”
He smiled and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I’d had previous experience managing operations at another advertising firm. Donovan wisely saw the need for another rational man to balance out the unruly ones.”
“Another rational man? Who are you counting as the first?” I regretted the question immediately because I knew the answer was Donovan. He was the man who formed Reach. The one who brought everyone together. The impetus behind all of it.
So I didn’t bother waiting for an answer. He was the one I really wanted to know about anyway whether I wanted to admit it or not. Might as well just go there. “How did you know Donovan? I don’t really picture you running around in the same circles.”
“Ha. No. We don’t exactly,” Dylan admitted. “We met years ago. I used to be married to the mother of his fiancé.”
My skin went cold despite the alcohol warm in my blood. I hadn’t been expecting that. “Amanda?”
“You know about her.”
“Yeah. Donovan’s told me.” The bare bones anyway—that he had loved her, that he’d been obsessed with her, that he blamed himself for her death. He’d told me that she’d been trying to outrun the private investigator that he’d hired when she got in the accident that killed her. I’d been searching for more information on her when I’d found his file on me.
“He did?” Dylan was openly surprised. “That’s good he’s talking about her. He tends to not mention her at all. He took her death very hard. As we all did. Sweet girl. So young.”
I glanced at Weston, ready to let him jump in. But he seemed to be happy to let me be Donovan’s spokesperson.
“I think he still takes it pretty hard,” I said. Besides blaming himself, Donovan had told me he couldn’t love anyone after her. Because of whatever it was he’d done to her. Which, if I had to guess without any real proof, looked a lot like what he’d done to me.
“Not surprising,” Dylan said, disappointment in his tone. “Tortured son of a bitch. That relationship was doomed from the start.”
“Why do you say that?” I tried not to sound too curious, not the easiest of tasks considering how desperate I was to know everything. Anything.
“He was too in love with her.” He set his fork down and began pouring the last of the bottle of wine around the table.
Audrey frowned. “Too in love?” She said each word deliberately. “How can someone be too in love?”
“He obsessed over her.” Dylan filled my glass, and I took a swallow. Okay, a gulp. “Knew everything about her. Cared everything about her. He hung the moon for her.”
It was ten years ago and the woman was dead and still I ached with jealousy.
I shouldn’t ask any more.
I couldn’t stop myself. “Like, what did he do?”
God, I was so pathetic.
“Dylan,” Weston leaned over to his partner. “She’s. You know. With him.” As if I wasn’t sitting right there. As if I couldn’t hear him talking.
“I’m not with him,” I snapped a little too defensively. “He’s in France. And I’m here. By no definition am I with Donovan.” I pressed Dylan. “What did his too much love look like? Was it obvious?” Did it look like what he does to me?
Or, what he did to me. I had no reason to believe he was still having me followed and w
Dylan seemed to consider Weston, but answered me anyway. “Not flagrantly, no. I’m sure most people didn’t notice. It was subtle. The way he was always in control. Always a step ahead where she was concerned. I remember once she’d wanted this specific Tiffany bracelet. It was a piece the company didn’t make anymore but she’d seen one up for a charity auction and had convinced her mother to try to bid for it. She failed. Her mother didn’t try very hard, to be honest, and someone else bought it. Donovan found out and tracked down the person who’d bought it or something. A week later, Amanda had the bracelet.”
Audrey sighed next to me. “That’s actually quite romantic.”
I concentrated on Dylan’s eyes so that I didn’t shoot daggers with mine at my sister for her obvious betrayal.
“Another time,” he continued, almost as eager to share as I was to learn, “she’d gotten in an argument with her advisor at Harvard. A class she’d taken didn’t count like she’d thought it would. It wasn’t too long before her advisor was dismissed from the school on allegations of credit fraud.”
Weston scoffed. “Are you saying that was Donovan too? Because I heard about that and there was nothing tying him to it.”
Dylan shrugged. “King-Kincaid Financial couldn’t alter credit reports? All I know is that Donovan didn’t seem a bit surprised when it happened and Amanda’s next advisor had no problem accepting her course credits. He also drove a brand new Jaguar. What do you want to bet his loan had been approved through a King-Kincaid bank?”
Weston shook his head, unconvinced.
But he hadn’t seen the file on me. I had, and there were many things Donovan had done for me that had been just as extreme. And I wasn’t his fiancée.
“And you think those were signs that he loved her?” I asked Dylan, desperate for those acts to mean something.
“Those are definitely signs that he loved her,” Audrey said dreamily. She looked pointedly at me. “Anyone who did those things for someone else is obviously in love.”
I ignored her. I already knew her opinion on the matter. Already knew what she hoped would happen between Donovan and I.
“Loved her too much,” Dylan repeated. “If she’d lived, it wouldn’t have worked out.”
“You don’t think so?” Weston asked. He’d always said that Amanda and Donovan had been the real deal.
“Because he’d eventually smother her?” I asked, making my own guesses.
“Because it’s not real,” Dylan said matter-of-factly.
“What isn’t?” I asked, confused.
“The whole thing. Love. Marriage. It’s an outdated arrangement. Amanda seemed to know what was what and had reasonable expectations. But Donovan bought into the pitch. He bought into the feelings.”
“You don’t believe love is real.” Audrey’s statement was a mix of shock and disbelief.
Weston waved his hand in the air. “Don’t listen to him, Audrey. He’s a bitter divorced old man.”
“Bitter, yes. Divorced, thank God. Old…” Dylan scanned the faces of his companions. “Well, maybe that’s true in the present company. It doesn’t mean I’m wrong. In fact, by default, I’m the wisest one here, experience points and all, and I’m telling you: love’s not real. It’s a card trick. It’s a marketing ploy. It’s a term we use to pretty up a rather dull and worn out social system built entirely on the tradition of coupling off. Weston’s fake relationship is probably the smartest arrangement I’ve seen in a long time. That’s about as true as it gets, kid. Enjoy it for what it is and stop trying to figure out the mess. There’s nothing to figure out. It’s messy because it’s fiction. And for some insane reason, modern western civilization has decided that the messier the story, the better the tale.”
Audrey finished off her wine and set down her glass. “That was really sad.”
Sad but probably wise, I thought. I was already twenty-seven years old and had never come close to finding a relationship that I would have called the real deal. Donovan had been the closest I’d come, and that was only because he’d been the first man to force me to be honest sexually. We hadn’t had a chance to get any further than that. Maybe there wasn’t any further to go.
“Wow Dylan,” Weston said, setting down his napkin. “That was a major downer. You’re not getting enough pussy, man. Should we talk about your Tinder options across the pond?”
Dylan glared at Weston. “Perhaps this isn’t the most polite conversation for our dinner guests.”
Weston glared right on back. “And trampling all over America’s number one reason for living is?”
“You know what?” I turned to Weston. “You’re whipped.” He wouldn’t have defended romantic relationships a month before. Elizabeth Dyson had gotten under his skin.
He shook his head. “You’re on his side. Of course.”
I wanted to disagree, for Audrey’s sake. Say I still believed in the happily ever after. Our parents were dead. I was her example of what adulthood should be. I didn’t want her to grow up to be a cynic.
But after everything tonight and the last few weeks, I didn’t know if I believed in happily ever after anymore.
And she was already grown up.
“I’m not on anyone’s side,” I said. “I’m on my own side.”
Dylan raised his wine glass toward me in a toast. “Thatta girl.”
We’d finished our meal by then. Weston charged the bill to a company account, then stood and helped me with my chair.
“Go on ahead,” I said to the men. “I need to use the restroom before we leave. Audrey?”
“I’m good.” More like she didn’t want to miss a single second with Dylan. I wanted to attribute her fun and flirty nature to her age, but I had never been that easy with people. It made me jealous sometimes.
But also, good for her.
“We’ll meet you by the elevators?” Weston asked. “We’ll get your coat.”
“Be right there.”
On my way back from the restrooms, I took a different pathway through the restaurant than I had on the way there. I hadn’t planned it. I’d just gotten my directions mixed up and suddenly I was walking past the table that Donovan always used when he ate at the restaurant. It was a total accident.
At least, I told myself it was an accident.
It was definitely an accident that I happened to catch the eye of the woman dining there as I passed by.
“Sun?” I’d only met her once, but her face was unforgettable. She was a model who Donovan used to sleep with. “What a surprise.”
She smiled in greeting, her eyes darting from me to the companion across from her.
I turned to follow her gaze and found myself face-to-face with Donovan Kincaid.
Three
The ground beneath me suddenly felt unsteady, as though the floor had been yanked away. My mouth gaped, but nothing came out. No words. No sounds.
He was here.
With fucking Sun, the most gorgeous woman on the planet.
All I could do was stare.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” Donovan said quickly. The long blink of his eyes afterward and the quiet curse under his breath told me he understood how trite and canned he sounded.
At least he was ruffled too.
It made it possible for me to speak. “It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It doesn’t matter what it actually is. I don’t even care.” And then, just to prove how catty I was, I said, “Weston’s waiting for me. So if you’ll excuse me. Nice to see you again, Sun.”
I left before he could say anything else. Before he could touch me. Before he could look at me another second with those fucking green-brown eyes that saw everything inside me. Those eyes made me confess secrets I never wanted to share. Those eyes made me be and feel and try, and how the fuck could he see all that he’d seen and still be able to look away so goddamn easily?
“Sabrina!”
My legs almost gave out when he called after me. Even now, even after this, there was a part of me that wanted to go to him. Just to talk. To show him that running wasn’t the way to handle conflict.
But I didn’t look back.
Because I didn’t want to do this here.
And I’d turned around too many times for him before.
I realized a second later that walking away was going to be a short-lived victory. As soon as I got to the front of the restaurant, I’d have to wait for the elevator. He’d catch me there.
He’d also catch Weston and Dylan, though. Maybe they could distract him. Or keep me from causing a scene.
But somehow I got lucky.
The elevator opened as I approached. Weston caught my eye, and I nodded for him to go ahead and hold it. Then I slipped in and turned around in time to see Donovan’s face just as the doors were closing.
“Was that…?” Weston asked when the car started to move.
“Yep.” I was shaking so bad, even that one word sounded tremulous.
“That was Donovan?” Apparently Dylan had seen him too. “I thought I was seeing things.”
“Donovan was here? Your Donovan?”
I glared at Audrey. “He’s not my Donovan.” Especially not now. “He was with someone else.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, helping me on with my coat. “That must have been a shock.”
“I didn’t even know he was in the States.” I looked down at my trembling hands. I hugged myself to still them.
“Uh,” Weston said, already sounding guilty. “I probably should have told you…”
My head snapped up. “You knew he was here?”
“When he called earlier he said he’d just landed. I told him your sister was visiting. I didn’t know he was going to be at Gaston’s. Hell, at that point, I didn’t even know we were going to be at Gaston’s.”
I stared at him incredulously. “Why didn’t you say he was here?”
“He told me not to. Remember?” A simple reminder that he’d betrayed Donovan to tell me about the phone call at all.
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