Steele

  “Then let her withdraw her collection.” Dizzy Izz didn’t bat an eye as she threw Essie under the bus. “You shouldn’t have copied Dizzy Izz in the first place if you can’t handle the heat of real competition.”

  That bitch.

  A flash fire of savage heat swept over her as the words struck her like a contemptuous slap in the face. Blood roared in her ears and her vision narrowed in a black tunnel, and at the end of that tunnel was Dizzy Izz.

  That…fucking…bitch.

  Essie wasn’t aware of moving toward the other woman until Steele’s arm came around her waist to haul her back hard against his chest. “You bitch! You’re the one who stole my designs. I’ve had that hooded cobra hoodie design, a favorite tattoo that my brother came up with, since before the final round of this stupid fucking contest even began.”

  Dizzy Izz made a production of stepping back. “Prove it.”

  “She doesn’t have to,” Steele snarled, tightening his arm on Essie. “After the background-check meeting with the finalists, Essie showed me that hoodie design, along with the snowflake design, in her sketchbook.”

  Essie stilled along with the rest of the world, and her shocked gasp echoed in her ears.

  Her.

  Sketchbook.

  Goddamn it.

  A tidal wave of rage punched through so hard, so fast, it took over completely.

  She didn’t direct her hand to dig her fingers into Steele’s wrist to throw it clear. Nor did she consciously think of elbowing him in the ribs when he tried to grab her again, and she sure as hell didn’t plan on rocketing for Dizzy Izz with all the vicious poison of fury pouring through her veins, fueled by the intention of shaking the other woman until her frigging head popped off.

  She definitely didn’t plan to do any of that.

  But she did it all.

  And she did not care.

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She had deep regrets that Steele caught her again, this time hauling her up so hard her feet left the floor to kick uselessly in the air.

  “Where is it?” Essie screeched, in that moment hating everyone in that room, but hating Steele most of all for not letting her murder Dizzy Izz. “Where the fuck is it, you fucking thief?”

  “Oh. Oh, of course.” From far, far away Scout’s voice seeped in through the blanket of fury smothering Essie’s brain. “Essie’s sketchbook. It went missing early on. Almost from the beginning, now that I think about it.”

  Steele stiffened. “What? When?”

  Scout’s voice turned pensive. “Um… the day those paparazzi came crashing in, looking for a Royal and instead sending Essie to the hospital. She said she left it in her brother’s tattoo booth, but the next day no one could find it.”

  “I did leave it in Twist’s booth,” Essie raged, growling as she struggled against Steele’s impossibly strong arms. “But this bitch obviously snuck in somehow and stole it.”

  “Dizzy Izz will sue you for that,” Dizzy Izz announced.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Payne snapped before frowning over at Scout. “Why the hell didn’t I know about this?”

  “It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.”

  “Give it back to me,” Essie all but screamed at the older woman. “My sketchbook was my voice, don’t you understand? When I couldn’t speak, when I’d wished I had died, that book was all I had when I had nothing—when I was nothing. You don’t just take something that special from someone who was nothing.”

  “Sweetness, no.” Steele hunched his body over hers, pressing her down as if he was trying to shield her from the ravages that had torn her apart so many years ago. “You were never nothing, you hear me? Don’t you ever say such a damn dirty lie again. This world is a better place with you in it, a more beautiful place. You find a way to see beauty in everything around you. Even me.”

  “You’re not beautiful when you won’t let…me…go.” Rage drove her to beat and kick every part of Steele that she could reach, desperate to get to Dizzy Izz. “Let me go, now.”

  “Not going to happen, baby, not when you’re in fight-mode.”

  “I’m not in fight-mode, now let me go or I’ll fucking kill you.”

  Steele’s chuckle against her ear was worse than tossing a matchstick into a lake of oil. “Sorry, not sorry.”

  “Look at her, she’s crazy.” Dizzy Izz’s voice cut through the veil of red around her. “So what if her stupid book went poof? That has nothing to do with Dizzy Izz. Anyone who attempts to say that Dizzy Izz stole anything will find themselves in court. Dizzy Izz will sue everyone here.”

  “Until I have proof of what happened, I’m suspending any judgment on who should be disqualified. And if I can’t find proof,” Payne added with a grimace, as though the words left a bad taste in his mouth, “then I have no choice but to drop all duplicated fashion items. That would make Olivier the winner of the contest by default.”

  It was nearly midnight by the time Steele shut the door to Essie’s apartment behind him. When his conscience nagged at him for the questionable B and E, he shut it up with the facts. And the facts were that Essie hadn’t answered any of his calls and texts for a week. Nor had she spoken to him after he kept her from murdering that fucking talentless bitch, Dizzy Izz, other than to tell him that if he grabbed her like that again, she’d bite chunks out of him.

  This was the only way he could talk to his fierce little fighter.

  Since Essie hadn’t responded to his knock—no surprise—he wouldn’t have been surprised if the studio had been dark. But the light was on next to that sad, broken-down couch she slept on, the bedclothes rumpled and showing all the earmarks of a sleepless tussle.

  But the would-be sleeper was nowhere to be found.

  One glance at the empty bathroom had him half-turning to head over to Carla’s, but the open window leading to the fire escape made him pause. There was a naked foot resting on the metal stairs leading up to what he knew was a vacant apartment above, so he altered course, making plenty of sound as he went.

  “Essie?” He watched that foot twitch in a response to an unexpected presence in her space, a nervous reflexive action she would probably have for the rest of her life. When it flattened, relaxing, on the stair and didn’t disappear on him, he eased his weight down onto the sill, ducked his head out and leaned back against the window frame, facing Essie. She sat on the stairs leading up from her fire escape landing with the orange cat on her lap, wearing a pair of thin, yellow cotton short-shorts and a loose-fitting, almost see-through white tank. “Hey.”

  “I don’t remember giving you a key.”

  Her voice was dead, unwelcoming. But at least she didn’t threaten to bite chunks out of him. It wasn’t much, but he’d take what he could get. “I don’t need one. How are you?”

  “Ready to go home.”

  He tensed, muscle by muscle. Considering where they were, that didn’t sound good. “Where’s home?”

  “Texas. I never should have left. I see that now.” She darted a glance in his direction, then away again. “You should go. I don’t want you here.”

  “Let’s clear something up first.” His chest tightened so hard it took his breath, and he had to wait for it to settle before he could speak again. “Are you saying you never should have left Texas because you genuinely believe it, or are you saying that because you’re feeling defeated?”

  “I am defeated. Every single day that I’ve been in Chicago, I’ve lost something that used to be mine. My savings, my heart, my dignity, my designs, my future. Now I have none of the above, so it’s time to get out before I lose my sanity. I can’t stand this stupid town.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said after a moment, absorbing that. “Because your future is here in this town, whether you like it or not. You need to give it another chance.”

  In the semi-darkness, he watched her brows pull together. “What the hell are you talking about? There’s nothing here for me now. I’m done, get it? I’m done with Chicago.”
<
br />   “It’s not done with you. Payne wanted proof that your designs got jacked, so I worked all damn day to get him that proof.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” he growled, the remembered fury still honing his tone to a lethal edge. “That bitch doesn’t get to cheat you, or give you even a moment of stress. She doesn’t get to steal your greatness and call it her own, and she sure as hell doesn’t get to turn right around and accuse you of pulling that shit on her. She’s lucky the only thing that’s happened to her is disqualification from the competition, not to mention Payne is currently hell-bent on doing all he can to let the world know she’s a fucking thief and a fraud. It’ll be all over the news tomorrow, but I wanted you to hear it first from me.”

  “Did she give up my sketchbook?”

  Steele couldn’t stop the wince. That was another item she could add to her long list of losses. “What I got was the approximate time of the theft. That bitch didn’t know it, but when PSI took over the security for House Of Payne, we installed CCTV cameras on all the common areas. Normally the video gets dumped on a weekly cycle, and since the disappearance of your sketchbook happened almost two months ago I thought there probably wouldn’t be a chance of getting the proof we needed. But then I remembered my boss had culled all the video from that particular day—the day you got crashed into—because he wanted to see where our security failed in stopping those paparazzi from getting in. Come to find out, PSI had high-res video of Dizzy sneaking into Twist’s booth after your brother left it to take you to get your hand glued back together. When she comes back out, she’s got your sketchbook, plain as day.”

  “Wow.” She was quiet for a moment as she mulled that revelation over. “That explains why she never had an activewear line, since I had the inspiration for that line when I was separated from my book. But… my God, that’s so stupid. Why would she make the same designs I’d sketched out when she knew I was going to make them? Didn’t she think anyone would notice?”

  “She didn’t care if anyone noticed. Remember what she said? Show both designs and let the people choose which collection was better? She genuinely believed that what she’d made was better than your original concept, to the point where she thought no one would care. Worse yet, she’s done this before,” he added, and watched her eyes widen in surprise. “Three times, in fact. She’s had labels under the names of Isadora D, J’adore Isadora and Designs by Izz. Each time she’s pulled something like this—plagiarizing the work of more talented designers. We found this out during our background check on her, which explains why she was always so jumpy whenever she had to deal with PSI. Apparently she believed we were unaware of her background, so she feared us discovering it.”

  “But you did discover it. Why didn’t her background disqualify her?”

  “Because Payne’s a decent guy. He didn’t want to hang her for past mistakes, so he gave her a fair chance. He’s regretting that decision now.”

  Essie shook her head, as if she couldn’t quite make all the information fit into her brain. “If she keeps getting caught, why does she keep stealing other people’s ideas? That’s just stupid.”

  “No, it’s hubris. Remember my buddy Luke? He’s our resident shrink—military-trained and worked at the Pentagon as a criminal behavioral analyst and forensic profiler before joining the private sector. He pinned her right away as a classic narcissist. She’s got this overblown, entitled sense of importance, to the point that in her view, everyone on the planet is here to serve her, and whatever she does is going to be blindly adored. In her mind, she wasn’t even stealing from you. You were just a stepping stone that was there to inspire her greatness—her words, not mine—as she put her own spin on your designs. She’ll probably never be able to understand why she’s getting tossed from the competition while you get to stay in the hunt.”

  “I don’t care about the hunt anymore.” She loosed a gusty sigh that made the cat on her lap stir grumpily. She petted it with gentle hands and it settled back down with a purr so loud he could hear it. Lucky cat. “Did she at least give my sketchbook back?”

  Damn it. “No.” He took a deep breath. “She burned it.”

  She closed her eyes and sharply turned her head. She looked like she’d been slapped. Probably it felt that way, too.

  That tightening in his gut got worse, creeping all the way up into his chest. “Sweetness, I tried—”

  “I know, and thank you for that.” She opened her eyes but kept her face averted from him, instead looking out into the night-washed alleyway. “It’s no biggie. I just wondered.”

  “You don’t have to cover with me. Anyone else, I can understand you not wanting to show what’s going on inside. But you don’t have to do that with me.”

  “No, really, it’s okay. I’ve been without it for a while now. I miss it, but being without it has taught me that I don’t need anything but myself to, you know… keep on keeping on. So that’s what I’m going to do. Keep on keeping on.”

  “Nothing in this world is stronger than you.” He heard the words come out of him, and though he was startled to hear his thoughts out loud, he didn’t regret them. They were the truth, after all. “I brought you something.”

  She gave a little sniff, and when she at last turned back to him he saw a glimmer of tears in her eyes—tears she wasn’t going to let fall. “You didn’t have to.”

  “I know better than you what a man has to do when his lady’s had a shitty day.” He unhooked the plastic bag that dangled from his wrist and held it out. “Take it.”

  She didn’t move. “You’re not my man. I’m not your lady. We’re not together anymore. To put a finer point on it, we were never together in the first place. I just didn’t know that at the time. My mistake.”

  “We’re going to get to that in a bit. Take it.”

  “No.”

  “Essie—”

  “I said no. If I take it, that means I’m saying deep down I think there’s a snowball’s chance we’re still together. I don’t, so I can’t.”

  He held the bag higher. “You’re wrong.”

  “Which part am I wrong about? That we’re not together anymore, or that we were never together in the first place?”

  “Both. Take it, or I drop it on the cat.”

  She snatched it out of his hands, then stared at it like it was a dirty bomb about to detonate. “Shit.”

  “Might as well see what it is.”

  She closed her eyes again and muttered something he was glad he couldn’t hear, before reluctantly reaching a hand into the bag. Confusion crossed her face when she brought out a leather-bound, mid-sized three-ring binder.

  “I couldn’t remember what kind of paper you had in your old sketchbook—plain, or graph or whatever, so I bought every kind they had available that would fit. If I still didn’t get the right thing, you can tell me what you need and I’ll get it for you. The hot new designer for House Of Payne can’t be without a sketchbook.”

  “I haven’t won that stupid contest yet, and I’m thinking of shoving the whole fashion show contest debacle straight up Payne’s ass even if I do win.” She stared at the leather surface of her binder in her hands. “You really bought me a new sketchbook.”

  “Yeah.” But he had bigger fish to fry than his most recent purchase. “You know why you want to turn around and kick Payne in the ass, don’t you?”

  “Gee, let’s think. I got lured away from a great-paying job with the promise of an even better-paying job, but by the time I got here that asshole turned it into a fucking three-ring circus, with me and the others as the tutu-wearing dancing bears. He made us publicly fight for a job like a bunch of morons, I lose my savings and my dignity while working my fingers to the bone for nothing, while he rolls in the dough, thanks to all the free publicity.”

  “I’ve talked to him about how you got the shit end of the stick on that, and I believe your brother has too. So has Scout. It sucked that it happened, but you’re not going to have a lot to pis
s and moan about on that score when all is said and done.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Why didn’t you say no?”

  She looked up. “What?”

  “All those months months ago, when this crazy contest began,” he expanded when it looked like she was once again thinking of biting chunks out of him. “You could have told Payne to go fuck himself after screwing you out of that job offer, gone back to Texas and probably gotten your old job back because you’re the best at what you do. But you didn’t. Why?”

  “Because I don’t have a crystal ball. I couldn’t see into the future to know how long this dumbass process was going to take, or how much it would cost at the end.”

  “Wrong. You didn’t tell him to go fuck himself because you’re a fighter who had a challenge waved like a red flag in front of her, and you couldn’t resist it. This same instinct to fight when the odds are against you is also the reason why you’ve got a thing for kicking Payne’s ass now.”

  She gave him a dirty look. “I’ve got a thing for kicking his ass because he jacked up the job I was supposed to get when I first got here, and because he yelled in my face and accused me of stealing my own damn designs. I mean, what the hell was that all about?”

  “That was a calculated move on Payne’s part. He knew exactly what he was doing when he did that.”

  “What do you mean, calculated?”

  “Remember, he knew Dizzy’s checkered past, along with Scout and the rest of the security detail. But he still wanted as much proof as he could get that she was the one who was trying to pull a fast one. You noticed Luke was in the office, right?”

  Her frown turned into a scowl. “Yes.”

  “Luke knows human behavior better than anyone. He’s the one who suggested that Payne get in your face, then Dizzy’s, so that he could get assess your natural reactions. I didn’t like it, but I knew what Luke would see when you were confronted—total bewildered innocence.” Then he grimaced. “If anything, I’m the one who should be pissed. Luke was laughing his ass off when I couldn’t stop myself from reacting when I saw how horrified you were at being accused of stealing.”