“Yeah.” I moved to look for my purse and remembered I didn’t have it. “It’s in the office.”
He entered something into his phone and then pocketed it again. “Okay. I just sent it to you via text. You can watch it later. When I’m not around.”
As angry as I was, I was also curious. Was he married or not? And what the hell was he sending me? But I was more shocked by something else. “You have my number?”
“Ye-ah.” He dragged out the word, as if ashamed to admit it.
I sat up straighter, realizing that if the trial had gotten over an hour ago, he hadn’t had time to go to the Eighty-Eighth. “And you knew where I worked.”
Before he could respond, there was a knock on the bubble room door. Liesl entered before I invited her in. “Hey. Sorry to bug. But you’re needed.”
No. I was needed here. Where I was. Needed to be here so I could get to the bottom of the secrets between us. “I’ll be out in a few. Whatever it is, handle it.”
“Alrighty then.”
She hadn’t even completely shut the door when I pressed JC. “How did you know where I worked?” There was urgency in my tone. Norma had worked hard to make sure I had disappeared. It shouldn’t have been that easy to find me.
JC leaned forward, lacing his hands together in front of him on the table. “I hired a detective. A very good detective. He found the basics. Gave me updates now and then. It wasn’t easy for him to get anything, but he managed. I’m sorry if you hadn’t meant for me to find you.”
Thank God it had been difficult. That was the point.
But then I realized what else he’d said. “For you to find me?” He’d thought I was hiding from him? “No. Oh, no. It’s my father I didn’t want coming after me, not you.”
“Your father?”
“Yeah. He jumped his parole and after he’d threatened me…” I didn’t really want to get into the topic of my asshole father. I was already mad enough. “Let’s just say my sister thought it best for me to disappear.”
“Ah. Right. That makes sense.” Was it my imagination, or did he seem to be relieved? “God, I thought…” He shook his head. “Anyway. Don’t worry. You did a good job hiding. Like I said, it wasn’t easy.”
My head was muddled. He’d shown up with no hint of wanting to reconcile and made no effort to make amends and yet he’d gone through hoops to find me. “I can’t believe you went to the trouble of hiring a detective. Why would you do that?”
He looked at me as if I’d asked him the most obvious question in the world. “I didn’t want to lose you.”
He hadn’t said find me. “What do you mean by lose me? When exactly did you hire this guy?”
JC’s face took on a guilty expression. “When you left Vegas. When you said no.”
I blinked at him. I didn’t want to have another reason to be pissed off, but it seemed like I didn’t have a choice in the matter. This was an invasion of privacy, one that wouldn’t have bothered me so much except that I would have told him anything he’d wanted to know about me, and he’d refused it. Instead of talking to me like people did in a normal relationship, he’d gone behind my back to discover what he wanted to know. It was maddening.
And if he had known all along where I was—what my number was, where I worked—then why hadn’t he reached out to me sooner? Why hadn’t he tried to let me know he was okay and give me a goddamn sign that he still cared?
My fury must have been easily readable because he immediately tried to soften me. “It’s not how it seems.” He reached his hands out on the table, toward me even though mine were folded in my lap, out of reach. “I didn’t want to put you in danger, Gwen. Otherwise, I would have gotten something to you.”
I bristled. “Getting a message to me now and then couldn’t have been any more risky than communicating with a detective.”
He held my gaze for several silent seconds. Seconds that heightened both my irritation and my awareness of him, an awareness that hummed in every erogenous zone.
“You’re right,” he said finally. “It was risky to talk to him. I didn’t care. I paid him well enough not to care either. Because I did care about you. I do care about you.” He paused long enough to let that settle in. To let it lay heavily on my skin like the warm steam from a sauna. “I wouldn’t put your safety at risk.”
He cares about me. Still. It made me feel better but not a lot. Was he hinting that he still loved me? Or had I been demoted to a friendly obligation?
Both possibilities scared me.
“Besides,” he said, after a minute. “I didn’t want you to wait around for me, and I thought that reaching out might keep you from going on with your life.”
“Fucking incredible.” I’d told him back then that I wouldn’t wait for him, but that didn’t give him the right to make sure I didn’t. It was my prerogative to waste my life. It was my right to pine.
“You have to believe that none of this was what I wanted.” He was sincere. Soft.
But I was too angry to be affected. “Obviously you didn’t care about what I wanted either.”
“I’m not going to apologize for wanting to set you free from my baggage.”
There was another knock at the door. “In a minute,” I shouted, before the intruder had a chance to walk in.
Then I turned back to him, no longer able to keep my cool. “What the hell, Justin? If you wanted to set me free then you shouldn’t have told me you’d come back. You shouldn’t have told me that you’d find me. You shouldn’t have proclaimed your love and made me think we—”
The door flung open suddenly, interrupting my rant.
I threw my rage in that direction. “Jesus, what is it?”
Liesl stood with a hand covering her eyes as if she were afraid of what she was interrupting. “I’m really sorry, I really, really am, but we need you out there because the club is supposed to open in two minutes and there is a line already at the door and there are no cash drawers out because Laynie locked her keys in the safe, which might actually have been my fault and that’s why she sent me here to get yours instead, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”
She delivered her speech in one long run-on sentence, with no breaths, spoken so fast it took me a second to register what she was saying.
Then when I did, it took me another second to think about where the heck my own keys were.
In my purse. In the office. In my cubby. Which was secured with a combination lock. “In my locker,” I snapped. “The combo is twelve to the right, then go left, pass seventeen once, the next time land on it. Then right—”
“You really expect me to remember this?”
No. I didn’t. This was Liesl, after all.
Goddammit. Just when we were getting somewhere.
“I have to go.” I stood, wondering if he caught that my combination had been his tattoo, the date he had inked on his forearm. For him, it was the date Corinne had died. For me, it was him.
JC waved his hand. “It’s okay. I understand. I didn’t come at a good time. I should have waited, but I—” His voice lowered. “I had to see you. I couldn’t wait anymore.”
An unwanted thrill ran through my body, heating me in places that I wished would stay as cold as the rest of me. Why did he still have to have such an effect on me? Why did I still have to care?
I opened my mouth to form some sort of polite response when Liesl tugged on my arm. “She’s yelling in my headset, Gwen,” she pleaded.
Laynie was indeed yelling loud enough that her shouts were audible even to me. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I muttered.
“It’s fine. Go.” JC stood as he spoke, sounding disappointed, the most emotion he’d shown since he’d walked into the club. It made my blood boil, and not all out of anger. Especially when his eyes raked down my body, touching me with his gaze in ways that felt more intimate than when Chandler had his hands all over me. I didn’t want to blush and squirm but I couldn’t help myself.
Just like how I couldn’t he
lp myself from giving him a onceover as well. When I found the crotch of his pants were tight, my desire went from sizzle to full blaze. And, damn, did that make me even madder.
I wished with everything I was that I didn’t have to leave. I wanted to stay and scream and throw things and maybe have an angry fuck to get rid of some of the tension, which, I knew, would be a terrible idea, and so it was probably a very good thing that, instead of staying, I had to go and open the fucking club.
“Gwen! Come the fuck on already!”
JC opened his mouth to speak, but I wanted the last word. “Nice to meet you, Justin,” I said snidely. “Maybe next time you’ll actually let me get to know you.”
I left before he could respond, letting the door slam on my way out.
Chapter Seven
JC stayed in my mind the whole night—as I set out the cash drawers, as I cleaned up the bottle of wine spilled all over the main dance floor, as I gave away a free beer to satisfy the customer complaining about his mug having a hair in it. Even though I was engaged in each present moment, my senses were alight and alive, as if JC was still nearby, still drawing my body and soul toward him.
But I was still mad and a lot confused.
It was a good two hours before the club calmed down enough to be able to take a break to think. I headed up to the office with a cash drop and was met there by Laynie, who, of course, wanted to be part of that thinking.
“He said he still cared about you,” she said after I gave her a brief synopsis of the conversation we’d had in the bubble room. “That’s a good thing.”
I shook my head both at her comment and at the drop sheet that I’d filled out wrong for the third time. “If Hudson said that to you, would you think it was a good thing?” I crumpled up the form and tossed it toward the trashcan, missing. Again. “And honestly, he might have said that just to be polite.”
Laynie pushed up from her chair and crossed in front of my desk, demanding my attention. “He came here right after the verdict was given. Right after, Gwen. He’s been waiting for this for—what? Five years now? And he came straight to you. That’s not for catching up. That’s not to be polite.”
I chewed on the end of my pen. “I didn’t think of that.”
“Maybe you didn’t want to think of it.”
“What does that mean?”
She reached across the desk and pulled the pen from my hand. “It means that sometimes it’s easier to be hurt and closed off than it is to let yourself be loved. I speak from experience. And if you asked Hudson, he could tell you something about it as well.”
She could be on to something. Shutting down was one of my go-to defenses.
But that wasn’t the only reason I felt trepidation over anything happening with JC. He’d been aloof. He’d been distant. He’d—
“He texted me!” I said, suddenly remembering the video he’d sent. I jumped from my seat and headed to my locker to get my phone. I’d meant to grab it when I’d opened it for the keys earlier, but had forgotten it in the bustle to open the club.
“He what?”
“He sent me a video.” I rifled through my purse looking for my cell.
“He sent you a video?” Laynie sounded more suspicious than I was. “Of what?”
Having found my phone, I went back to my desk. “I’m not sure. Haven’t watched it yet.”
She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. “Videos are never good. They make me nervous.”
I had a feeling there was a story behind her statement, but I was too singularly focused to press. “I don’t think this is the kind of thing that you should be nervous about.” I sunk into my chair, hitting the icon for my text messages, and before clicking on the video link, saved the unknown number at the top of the list. I debated for only half a second between naming the contact Justin or JC, then settled on the latter.
“Uh, is this the kind of thing you need to watch alone?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, maybe?” The idea that he might have sexted me was distracting, to say the least. It made my skin feel too warm and my throat suddenly moist. I paused, my finger poised above the play button.
No, I was being ridiculous. First chance to send me something, it wasn’t going to be naughty.
“He said this was supposed to explain something about something that he did that was horrible and embarrassing.” I peered up to find Laynie as confused as I’d expected. “Long story. Never mind. Anyway, I’m sure we’re safe.”
The video started, a stationary camera pointed at the front of a room staged as a chapel, classical music playing quietly in the background. The woman I’d met in JC’s hotel room—his “wife”—stood alone, angled toward a bored-looking man holding a binder. She was dressed in a skanky-looking cocktail dress that was too tight for her abundant bosom. Her mascara was smeared and the dazed look in her eyes suggested she was drunk or high or both.
I frowned, confused.
Laynie circled around the desk to watch over my shoulder. “What is this?”
“Not sure yet.” But my neck was stiff and my muscles tight, bracing myself for what I thought it might be.
“It looks like one of those insta-wedding chapels. Did I ever tell you that Hudson wanted me to run to Vegas to marry him in one of those places? I said no, obviously. Men have the strangest ideas of what’s romantic.”
She hadn’t told me. Maybe I should take comfort in the fact that it was possible to still have a successful relationship after turning down a Vegas proposal.
I didn’t though.
The woman on the video drew my attention back with her whining. “Jace.” She kicked at something on the floor. “Ja—ace!”
A moan came from outside the shot. Then JC sat up into the frame, and my stomach began to churn with undefined anxiousness. I already knew he’d gotten married. I’d known he was drunk. Why did he think I wanted to see it? To prove just how wasted he’d been?
Too bad I’d never recorded myself with Chandler. I could send that to him to prove just how lonely I’d been.
Or I could just turn this off. But I didn’t.
“I’m up. I’m up,” JC said. “Is it almost time?”
I studied him as well as I could on the small screen. His hair was rumpled and his tie loose, and his lids looked droopy. I knew the suit he was wearing. He’d had it on when he’d left me in New York City, begging for me to marry him later that day. My chest squeezed at the memory. At the sight of him here, in a chapel, with another woman.
“It’s past almost time. It is the time. It’s the middle of the time.” Her words were slurred and whiny. “We’re in the middle of the thing and you decided to lie on the floor.” She hesitated, her brow furrowing. “Or maybe I should join you.”
The man with the binder sighed. “No, no, please. Why don’t you stay standing? Mr. C? You should stand as well.”
Even drunk, JC hadn’t shared his name. This was strangely satisfying. Like, I may not have been special enough to have learned it, but neither was this woman.
“I’m up,” he said, clutching onto the woman—what was her name?—using her for support as he climbed his way to a standing position.
“What the—are they…drunk?” Laynie asked tentatively.
“Hammered.” Completely blitzed. There was no way a ceremony with two people so obviously intoxicated could be legal. And if they didn’t have JC’s name, he couldn’t possibly have provided proper documentation required for a marriage.
Was this what he wanted me to see? That the wedding wasn’t legit?
Maybe I was jumping to the wrong conclusion.
Once he was on his feet, it took a couple of minutes for the presider to get JC and his bride-to-be into place. “Now. Don’t move,” he said when they were positioned. “We were just at the exchanging of vows, Mr. C. Shall we try again? Repeat after me, I, JC.”
“I, JC,” he repeated, his body swaying.
“My God, he’s adorable,” Laynie whispered.
My frown deepened. An adorable ass.
“Take this woman, Tamara Stone.”
Ah, that was her name—Tamara. Bitch.
“Take this woman.” JC paused, waving his hand at the presider who’d tried to prompt him again. “Take this woman, Gwen.”
My heart stuttered in my chest.
I’d heard him wrong. I had to have.
But then Laynie was nudging me. “He said Gwen! This is right out of an episode of Friends.”
“It’s Tamara, remember?” His bride reminded him. “Ta-ma-ra.”
JC shook his head. “I’m marrying Gwen. I want to marry Gwen.” His eyes widened as if just then realizing where he was or who he was with. He spun around, scanning the room. “Where’s Gwen? She was supposed to meet me at the airport. I thought she’d come.”
His tone was filled with yearning and bewilderment. Sorrow. The mournful adoration he infused in my name—it pulled at me, tugged at something low in my chest. That place inside where I hid my regret for not having said yes. For not having been brave enough to leap and trust he’d be there when I landed.
My eyes blurred and I couldn’t see the screen clearly anymore.
“Maybe we should do this another time,” the presider said, shutting his book.
“Sure, sure,” Tamara agreed. “This was just the practice anyway. Right, babe?”
I didn’t know how or if JC responded because the presider, who had walked toward the camera, reached past the lens and the screen went black.
“Hmm.” I bit my lip, holding back the tears, and stared at my cell long after it went dim, trying to decide how I felt about what I’d just seen. On the one hand, relieved. Because he hadn’t gotten hitched after all. Because even smashed, he’d been thinking of me.
Not just relieved, but touched. Moved by the emotion this man had felt for me.
On the other hand, I was now more confused than ever.
Dammit.
“He was going to get married?” Laynie sounded as baffled as I felt. At least her confusion made sense.
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