by Zara Cox
I cleared my throat and fired up the video app on my phone. In a dark gray room, across a desk and two chairs, two men faced each other.
I pointed to the younger man. “Do you know him?”
She set her laptop aside. “No. Should I?”
“His name is Eric Vasiliev. He works for Baitlin Tech.”
She blinked. “Baitlin was on the list I gave you.”
I nodded. “He’s also Sanjeet’s roommate.”
Alarm widened her eyes. “Okay. Who’s the other guy?”
“A friend of mine. He’s in law enforcement. He did me a solid.”
“How?”
“He interviewed the remaining people on the list, helped me fill out a few blanks.”
Her breath caught, hope filling her eyes. “Are you saying... Have you caught my stalker?”
I smiled. “Yes. You don’t need to worry. They’re in custody. And your algorithm is safe.”
Relief drenched her face. She covered her open mouth with one hand. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.
I wanted to touch her so badly my hand burned with the need.
She took a few more breaths, and then her gaze returned to the screen. “Did Sanjeet have anything to do with it?”
“Not directly. But he unwittingly started the whole thing. Eric saw what he was working on during a FaceTime call and asked a few questions, enough to get an idea of what you were working on.”
“But Sanjeet was just a third of the team, and the others didn’t know about each other.”
I hit the second video in the folder. “They didn’t, but she did.”
Lily stared at the video, hurt and anger flashing across her face. “Miranda?”
“Yeah. She had access to you. All she had to do was listen and watch and tell Eric when to strike.”
“But...why?”
The throb of anguish in her voice cut through me. I wanted to absorb her pain. “Money. She was dating Eric. They hatched the plan together. All they had to do was destabilize the team, stalk you in the hopes of you making a mistake. If that didn’t work they were going to move to outright blackmail to get the code. They had a bidding war going with six countries.”
“She told your friend all of this?”
I nodded. “We got it all on tape.”
“Oh, my God.” Her eyes filled with tears.
Unable to hold back my need, I reached for her. She flinched away, jumped to her feet and paced to the window.
I threw my phone on the coffee table, swallowing the boulder of pain in my throat.
After a minute she swiped her eyes. When she faced me, her face was a controlled mask. “So it’s over. I can leave?”
Every ounce of power concentrated in keeping my jaw clenched just so I didn’t have to answer. But the part of me that yearned to give her what she wanted forced my head to nod. “The police will need a statement from you at some point, but with the confession they have it should all be straightforward.”
Then, unable to sit still, I surged to my feet. “Lily—”
“I want to leave. Now. Please.”
No. Hell, no.
One look at her face showed my firecracker was back, ready to rain fire and brimstone on me if I didn’t grant her wish.
“Lily, we need to talk.”
She shook her head. “I need to pack.” She darted down the hallway so fast she was a blur.
I followed because, fuck it, I was tired of feeling like shit.
I knocked. At her silence, I entered. She was holding a top, staring blindly into her suitcase. I took another moment to memorize her face.
Her head snapped up, and her face tightened. “What do you want, Caleb? We said everything that needed saying last time.”
“No we didn’t. I have more to say.”
She looked mutinous for a moment, and then her cute chin lifted. “Fine, let’s hear it.”
My fists tightened, the magnitude of my need an overwhelming weight pressing me down. But I pushed ahead. “I don’t want you to leave. We’re not done. Hell, we barely even started. I want you back.”
A look flashed through her eyes but it was gone too quickly to read. “Wanting me back suggests you had me in the first place. Did you?” she queried almost carelessly.
“What?”
She threw the top into the suitcase. “Let’s forget that for a minute. You want me...back...for how long?”
I frowned. “Lily—”
“A week? A month? Two months?”
I shrugged. “It’s something we can figure out together.”
She laughed, an acid-tipped sound that whipped blades through me. “How? What criteria would you use? When the sex isn’t so hot anymore? When your next exciting case came up?”
“If you want a time frame I’m not going to give you one,” I snapped with more heat than I’d intended.
She paled. I reached out. She flinched. This wasn’t how I’d intended it to go. At all.
“Lily, I—”
“Why did you become a fixer, Caleb?” The question walloped me from left field. Her voice was wooden but her sharp eyes were prying beneath my veneer.
I didn’t want to be analyzed. Not while this rawness lived inside me. “Why the hell not?” I snapped again.
“That’s not an answer. Shall I tell you what I think? You enjoy the control it gives you. But more than that you enjoy the transient nature of your work. You don’t have to invest in the long-term. You go in, all guns blazing, you fix whatever’s wrong. And then you leave. Don’t you?”
I stared at her, trying to summon fury and detachment. All I achieved was a widening of the chasm between us. Fuck it. “Yes,” I threw out.
It was the truth, after all.
She whirled to face the window, then almost immediately turned back again. “Well, there’s your answer. You can’t guarantee anything beyond your next fix. That’s what you live for. That’s all you’ll ever care about. But you know what else you can’t guarantee? That your neat record will hold out. Sooner or later you’ll have to accept that some things can’t be fixed.”
The raw ache intensified. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
She sighed. “It doesn’t matter. I just know that I don’t want to be your next fix, Caleb.”
Somewhere beneath the roaring in my ears, I heard the sound of her suitcase zipper and the echo of her footsteps down the hallway.
Moments later an engine started, revved, then slowly faded away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Caleb
One month later
“WHY ISN’T THE Landon file on my desk? I asked for it twenty minutes ago. What’s going on?” I snarled as Maggie hurriedly slammed her laptop shut.
“Nothing!”
I eyed her, the irritation that had been living beneath my skin for weeks threatening to erupt. “If you want to watch porn, do it in your own time, not on company property. And seriously, I thought you were a much better liar than that?”
“Okay, first of all, ewww. Second of all, double ewww!”
“You have five seconds to fess up before I fire you for inappropriate use of office property.”
With a long-suffering sigh, she opened her laptop, and hit Play.
The sweet, sexy voice that lived in my dreams flowed through the speaker. Heart lodged in my throat, I rounded Maggie’s desk.
And there she was.
Lily. Giving another interview.
I’d taken pains to avoid all forms of tech news since she left me in Lake Tahoe.
I tried to summon the anger I’d carried with me since she walked out. All I managed was the ashen aftertaste of a poorly handled situation.
I don’t want to be your next fix...
I snorted under my breath. Lily Gracen had proven that she was one
long fix, one I couldn’t get away from whether I was awake or asleep.
She’d burrowed herself firmly beneath my skin, made it so I couldn’t take three steps before she crossed my mind. I wasn’t sure whether to be pissed with her or feel sorry for myself for allowing her close.
Some things can’t be fixed...
Ironically, in letting her smudge the lines, she’d forced me to redraw my rigid boundaries, forced me to examine the hard chains I’d wrapped around myself since my mother died. A few had been rusty, surprisingly easy to break, letting me breathe easier than I had in a very long time.
Some others not so much.
All in all, she’d forced me to examine far too much. Which was why I was still leaning heavily in the pissed column.
And there she was, without a fucking care in the world.
Stunning in customary black. With...a pair of stylish, boxy glasses perched on her nose.
Holy fuck.
That last day in Silicon Valley, sitting in the passenger seat of her cramped-as-hell little car, watching her laugh while wearing those saucy shorts, I thought she couldn’t get any more sensational.
I just discovered she could.
“Umm...boss?”
I scowled. “What?”
“Just checking that you’re breathing, is all.”
I wrenched my gaze from the screen. “I’m not paying you to sit around watching online videos all day, Maggie.”
She nodded sagely. “Then I guess you won’t want the thing I just sent to your phone.”
My scowl deepened. “What thing?” I pulled my phone from my pocket.
It was an invitation to a black tie event. Hosted by SDM. Five thousand dollars a plate. Starting at 8 pm. Tonight.
A tremble rolled up my arm and down my body. “Why the hell did you send me this?”
“Because I’m terrified one of these days you’ll develop actual fangs and claws and all my parents will find when they come looking for me is a dried up husk.”
“Trust me. If I turned feral you wouldn’t be my first choice of a meal.”
I knew someone who tasted sweeter. Glorious, in fact. Someone whose every breath I would die for, given half a chance.
“Fine, but just FYI, this is her last gig for SDM. Who knows where she’ll disappear to afterward?”
The words struck pure dread into my heart, pissing me off even more. I stomped back into my office. “Can’t go. I’m busy.”
“Actually, you’re not. But okay.”
I threw myself into my chair, vowing not to look at the invitation. I lasted five minutes. “Maggie!”
“Yeah, boss, I have your tux right here.”
Great. This was my chance to rectify a few things with Lily Gracen.
Once and for all.
Lily
The terrace of the Griffith Observatory was great for many things, including its stunning views of nighttime LA. But decked out in spotlights and caviar towers and champagne fountains, it was magnificent. That was before the celebrities and Fortune 500 CEOs who’d flown in from around the globe added their dazzle to the occasion.
After two weeks of hard publicity, tonight was the official launch party stroke fund-raiser for SDM’s compression algorithm. And my final appearance as the ambassador for the most talked about development in the tech world. After tonight I was free. I’d never need to set eyes on Chance Donovan, or my stepfather again.
Even though the latter thought brought a pang of pain, I was okay with it. For the first time in my life, I could truly move forward with no baggage.
I closed on the sale of the abandoned drive-in movie theater today, and immediately applied for permission to convert it into offices. I was starting my own tech company and even though I was scared spitless, I was also excited.
If nothing else, starting a company from the ground up would take my mind off thinking about Caleb.
Whoever said time healed all wounds was a dotard. With every passing day, the hole in my chest grew wider, deeper. There were times when I feared the thing could just expire from the brutal trauma it endured daily, simply because it craved one night of perfection that would never be repeated.
But did you make absolutely sure it couldn’t be repeated? Or did you shut the door because you were hurt and never looked back?
Those lingering questions were the reason I hadn’t erased his last message from two weeks ago from my phone. Or maybe I was just a glutton for punishment.
Had he moved on? Was he currently buried neck deep in a new exciting case?
“I have no idea what it does, but I hear it’s revolutionary. What did they call it again?”
“They called it the Angel Algorithm,” a deep, magnificent voice said.
Dear God. His voice...
“Why Angel?”
“Because it’s the creator’s middle name,” Caleb replied.
“Oh, how special,” the female guest gushed.
“I couldn’t agree more. She’s one of a kind.”
Heart in my throat, I turned around. He stood six feet away. Resplendent in a black tux and snowy white shirt. His face looked a little thinner but the designer stubble and slightly windswept hair worked for him so splendidly, I couldn’t have pried my eyes off him if an earthquake cratered the ground beneath my feet.
The crowd seemed to part between us, and he loomed, magnificent, over me. “That was right, wasn’t it?”
Breath totally depleted, I nodded. “Short for Angela. Chance let me name it.” After witnessing the code that would make him and his company billions, he’d been so ecstatic he’d allowed me to name it. Regardless of how our relationship had begun, it was ending on my terms, with an achievement I was proud of. I’d chosen to let go of all grudges.
“It’s a beautiful name.” Caleb’s voice was a little gruff, his eyes a fierce blue that blazed over me from my crown to my feet and back again. “Hello, Lily.”
“Hi,” I whispered.
“You look...incredible.”
“Thank you.” In honor of tonight, I’d gone a different way with my clothes. Dressed top to toe in white, the only splash of color were the red soles of my white platform heels. Diamond-and-pearl pins secured my slicked back hair, and even the choker around my neck was white leather.
Caleb’s eyes lingered there the longest, setting my body aflame. “Lily, can we talk?”
Say no. Save yourself more heartache. “Yes.”
Relief drenched his face. He started to reach for me. Someone bumped into me, sending me one stumble forward.
“Okay, enough of this shit,” Caleb growled. He relieved me of my half-finished champagne glass, meshed his fingers with mine and tugged me through the crowd.
“Where are you taking me?”
“You’ll see.”
“But...I can’t leave the party.”
“You’ve given Donovan the algorithm. You’ve done his speeches. You don’t owe him a thing. Besides, we need to revisit our last conversation in Lake Tahoe. There are a few things I never got around to saying.” He gripped me tighter as I navigated the steps to the lower level, then increased his pace again.
“God, I haven’t missed this bossy side of you at all.” I tried to project irritation but the wild hum in my veins wasn’t anger. It was...joy.
“Sure you have. Or you wouldn’t be hurrying to keep up with me.”
He was right. I would go anywhere with this man, but at what price?
“I still want to know where we’re going.”
“We’re here,” he replied in a hushed voice, then pushed the door open.
I entered, and gasped. “We can’t be in here,” I whispered halfheartedly. But my excitement tripled as I gazed up at the stunning constellation splashed across the planetarium roof.
His fingers trailed up my wrists, my arms, to
cup my shoulders. I redirected my gaze to his, saw the raw emotion stamped on his face.
“I’m fucking pissed at you.”
I gasped. “What?”
“You heard me. But God, I’ve also missed you. So much,” he confessed raggedly.
I stopped myself from blurting out that I’d missed him, too. “Have you? You were shitty to me.”
His face clouded with pain. “Believe me, I know. I’d do anything to take it all back.”
My throat clogged. Excitement faded and harrowing pain rushed at me. “Would you? Why?”
“Because you didn’t deserve it. Not a single one of the things I threw at you.”
“Are you sure? Because there’s no shame in admitting you don’t have room in your life...for me.” It hurt me to say it, but it needed to be said.
He shook his head vehemently. “That’s not—”
“I saw how devastated you were when you told me about your mom. You blame yourself for her. You moved heaven and earth for her and she still died, and after that you were never going to become so wrapped up in anyone else. Am I right?”
He stared down at me for the longest time. Then he exhaled harshly. “Yes. I’d love to say I fought hard to shut people out, but...after she died, it was easy to close the door, to bottle the pain and become the lone wolf no one depended on. Until Kirsten.”
My heart twisted with pain for him. For me. “And she let you down, too.”
His mouth tightened. “I don’t want to talk about her. She’s not important. Not anymore. She was just another crutch I used to distance myself. The option to walk away on my own terms before things got heavy with anyone was mine alone. I was okay with it. Until I met you. You forced me to take a long, hard look at myself.”
My lungs flattened. “Caleb...”
“Walking away from you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, Lily,” he confessed forcefully.
Remembering brought more pain. “Then why did you?”
“I let my guard down with you. My instincts warned me about Miranda but I saw how close you were to your team. To her. I knew you would be hurt if it was her and I didn’t want you to experience that pain. I hesitated when I could’ve acted sooner. Then the breach happened and all I could think about was that I could’ve lost you. In the end I did anyway by pushing you away, when I should’ve pulled you close.”