Great Exploitations (Crisis in Cali)

by Williams, Nicole

  “Sorry. It took me a long time to get here.” I smiled when they motioned me through the curtain into the cabin.

  Henry was standing in the aisle when I pushed through the curtain, looking as if he’d been pacing again. When he saw me coming toward him, his entire face relaxed into a grin. “You got my note.”

  I lifted my shoulders. “I got your note.” I didn’t stop approaching him until my arms were wrapped around him and I’d dropped my head to his chest. His arms pulled me closer. “I’m sorry, Henry. I’m sorry for what happened, and I’m sorry that I ran out on you that day without waiting for an explanation, and I’m sorry for just about everything since.”

  His hand rubbed my back in slow, forceful circles. “I didn’t show all of that to you in hopes of getting an apology. I showed it to you in hopes of this.” Henry’s arms tightened around me.

  It was the most comforted I’d felt in years. “Well, you got both.” My voice was muffled against him, but I knew he heard me.

  “Since you’re here with me now, I will gladly accept both.” When plane engines fired to life with a whir, Henry gave me one last squeeze before leading us to a pair of plush, oversized chairs in the back of the plane.

  “When did you figure out what had happened?” I asked as I settled into my seat. “You know . . . when did you find out your mom had—”

  “Hired the same agency you would one day work for to drug and fake-screw me in order to break my fiancée and me apart?” There was a note of sharpness in his voice as he snapped my belt into place before taking his seat.

  I twisted my tongue into my cheek and nodded.

  “As soon as I woke up with the worst hangover of my life, I knew something was wrong. I didn’t remember much of what had happened. I just had this image seared into my mind of your face breaking before turning and running.” Henry’s hand reached for mine as he continued. “The girl was gone, but an envelope of photos rested on the nightstand. They filled in the black areas for me and explained why you’d run away, but since I barely knew the girl in the photos and I knew how insanely in love with you I was, I knew foul play was involved.”

  “You were insanely in love with me?” I angled myself toward him.

  His eyes flickered to mine. “I still am.”

  His penetrating look and words made it difficult for me to hold his gaze without shifting in my seat. So I shifted and asked, “What happened after that? When did you finally put it all together?”

  “It took me two years to acquire all the pieces to prove what my mom had done. Since my search for you had come up empty and I could hardly murder my mother and claim self-defense, I focused my anger and energy on taking down the agency that’d had a hand in ruining my life.”

  I peaked an eyebrow. “This all happened while you were busy putting together a multi-billion dollar company as well?”

  He gave me a sheepish smile. “I didn’t sleep much.”

  “To do what you’ve done in this little time, I’d also guess you figured out a way to slow time.”

  The corners of his eyes creased. “Time moved slowly enough back then—I wasn’t interested in slowing it down anymore.”

  The plane started to roll down the runway, slow and steady. I had yet to thoroughly process what had happened over the last twenty-four hours and where the plane was heading, but nothing seemed more important at that moment than patching together those dark pieces of our pasts. “Your whole plan was to expose and bring down the Eves?” As I asked it, I realized I’d not been the only one bent on revenge for five years.

  “That was my plan, yes. In the back of my mind, I think I was hoping that wherever you were, whatever you were doing, if you’d only just catch a clip of the evening news or glance at a front-page article or see it stamped across a magazine exposing the Eves and what they’d done to me, that I’d finally be able to explain what had happened and that maybe, maybe you’d come back to me.”

  “You were going to expose them to the whole world,” I stated.

  “I wasn’t going to rest until every last person in the English-speaking world knew what the Eves were and how they operated.” His fingers curled around the armrest whitened as he gripped it.

  “And is this the part where I assume you figured out I didn’t only know about the Eves but was working for them?”

  After a moment, Henry nodded. “You didn’t just work for them. You were their best.”

  I tightened my grip on his hand, just in case. “And this made you feel . . . ? Copious amounts of rage? Betrayal? Disbelief?”

  “Relief,” he said softly. “I felt relieved.”

  My eyebrows came together. “How could you feel relief when you figured out I was working for the same entity that had ruined a chunk of your life?”

  Henry stopped staring out the window at the passing runway, and he looked into my eyes. His eyes were warm, as if they’d never known a care in the world. “Because I’d found you.” He held our hands up in indication. “The only reason I’d set my sights on outing the Eves was because I couldn’t find you, and I had to vent my need for justice somewhere or risk self-imploding. I couldn’t find you, so I found them . . . finding—ironically—you at the same time.”

  I could do nothing more than shake my head in amazement. “I don’t think I have enough lifetime left to work out that irony.”

  “Whatever lifetime is left, all I know is that I want to spend it with you.” Henry was already smiling, but when the plane’s tires left the runway, it deepened.

  That’s when I realized that I was in a plane heading to some destination I didn’t know. “So where are we going?” I leaned over him to peek out the window. Other than seeing that we were going up, I had no idea where we were. “Exactly?”

  Henry’s grin turned a hint mischievous. “That’s a surprise.”

  I could handle our destination being a surprise. Not much about this past day hadn’t been a surprise. “How long will we be gone? I’ve got only about a few hundred things I’ll need to take care of once we’re back.” Things like deciding what to tell G, figuring out what to do with my future, possibly cleaning out my desk at Callahan Industries since dating the boss seemed like a rather giant conflict of interest.

  “How long would you like to be gone?” he asked.

  It was an easy answer. “Forever.”

  Something glinted in his eyes. “That’s what I had in mind as well.”

  I waited a minute for him to add something to that statement. I waited for the dead seriousness in his expression to iron out. After another minute, it still hadn’t.

  “Are you serious?” When I peeked out the window again, all I saw were the wisps of clouds as we passed through them.

  “When it comes to you, to us, I’m always serious.”

  “Where we’re going . . . you have it in mind to stay there forever? As in to move there and live there and one day die there?”

  He nodded. “Sounds perfect.” My mouth was dropping when he noticed the shock on my face. “Or for as long as you like. I’ll leave the duration of our stay totally up to you. As long as I get to be with you, I’ll go wherever, whenever.”

  When I realized he was serious about leaving it all behind, everything, I took a few minutes to think seriously about it. The concept was appealing on a level I couldn’t quite grasp, but our lives weren’t so simple to leave behind. “You do realize you’re the CEO of one of the largest IT companies in the world, right? How could you just walk away from that?”

  “Because I’m walking away with you.” His fingers squeezed mine.

  “Henry, be serious—”

  “Believe me, I am being serious. As serious as I’ve ever been.” If his words didn’t convince me, his expression did. “I’ve had nothing but time to think about this moment, and believe me when I tell you I only dared to dream it. If you think that, against every odd and probability, I’d waste my chance to live it for real, you must not remember the man who meant it when he said nothing was more im
portant than you.”

  With each moment that passed, it became easier for me to accept that he was being serious. “But what will happen to Callahan Industries if you just up and leave? What will happen to all of your employees? They’ll be out of jobs, and sub-par software will flood the market if your company shuts down.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not going to shut down Callahan Industries. I might be selfish when it comes to you, but I’m not so selfish that I’d put thousands of people out of jobs just like that.”

  I exhaled. “So you’ll be flying back and forth between the Bay and wherever we’re heading right now?”

  He shook his head again. “No, of course not. I’m handing over the control and daily management of the company to a certain person I introduced you to—”

  “Max—your number two.”

  “Now he’s number one.”

  “But . . .” That was all I could conjure up.

  “It’s done. Max will oversee Callahan Industries as the new CEO, and I’ll play an omniscient sort of role by checking in every once in a while.”

  It took me a few breaths before I could say anything. “You’re leaving it all behind. Your company, your family, friends . . . your fake wife.” I raised my eyebrows. “You’re leaving it all behind to be with me at some to-be-determined dot on the map.”

  Henry’s face ironed out as he leaned across my seat. His lips brushed mine once, then twice. “I’m not leaving anything behind.”

  NOT A DAY had gone by when I hadn’t thought about that flight. The one where we’d both taken the proverbial leap, chosen each other, and left everything else behind. Of course, making the leap was one thing, and living with the repercussions of the leap was something else. But in our case, the repercussions were few and far between.

  Henry had far more to deal with than I did. True to his word, he checked in with Callahan Industries every once in a while via conference calls and emails. His family had been shocked, in every definition of the word, to discover he’d faked a marriage to get back to the girl they’d tried to permanently rid him of years ago. He’d had one last conversation with his mom on the phone, and after that, they seemed to leave him alone. I wasn’t sure what he’d said, but whatever it had been, his family had finally accepted that Henry and I couldn’t be separated, despite their best attempts.

  It had been difficult at first to realize that we were the only people who seemed to be rooting for us, but after a while, I’d stopped caring about what others thought and focused on what Henry and I thought. I’d talked to G once since I got on that plane with Henry and left the country, and I had said nothing more than two words—I’m out. I didn’t wait for what was her surely appalled reply or her reminder that we were working the biggest Errand of our careers or for her to beg me to come back. “I’m out” was all the good-bye I felt I owed her, especially after learning that she had, albeit unknowingly, been part of the reason Henry had been ripped away from me to begin with.

  After that first week of issuing good-byes, our lives had quieted down significantly, thanks in large part to the place Henry had brought us. It was a small, quiet island in the South Pacific—in other words, heaven. The locals were kind and friendly, and the scenery took my breath away every morning. I awoke to a turquoise lagoon bordered by a sparkling white-sand beach hedged by palm trees. That was the view from our bedroom window. Our home wasn’t overly extravagant, but Henry had splurged on one thing, and that was the location. Our location would have outdone the best tropical post cards. I should know—I’d stared at plenty of them as I’d gone from airport to airport.

  We had only been on the island for a month, but my life as an Eve felt like a lifetime ago. Every morning I woke up, it felt further and further away, almost as if it had been a dream. Memories were blurring, images were fuzzy, was almost as if I’d sleep-walked through five years.

  I might have wasted five years in an anesthetized state, but I was doing my best to make up for it. Each day on the island was a new adventure, a fresh start for me to become the person I wanted to be, instead of the person I’d let revenge and anger mold me into. Each day was a chance to experience life with the person I loved and who loved me back. Each day was a gift. A few months ago, the days had been more like tasks, but everything was so much clearer now.

  Today was a Tuesday. The days of the week didn’t mean too much down here other than what day the open market was on and what day Henry had a note in his calendar to call and check in with Max. But today was a special Tuesday. A special day.

  A day that had been a long time coming. Over five years coming.

  I hadn’t worn white, and he hadn’t worn a tux. Very little about our ceremony had been traditional, as neither us nor our relationship were, but we’d held on to the traditions of exchanging vows and rings.

  That’s what I was staring at as the sun started its slow departure into the ocean.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you so happy.” Henry was sitting across from me on the blanket we’d laid on the sand to celebrate the occasion with some champagne and a sunset. Molly was snoring on her side at our feet, having taken rather well to island life.

  I finally looked away from the band circling my finger and smiled at him. “That’s because I never have been.”

  Henry was lying on his side, staring at me like one admired the sunrise. “I never thought you’d be so happy to become Mrs. Callahan. My mother is a Mrs. Callahan too, you know.”

  Not even the mention of Henry’s mom, or the thought of what she’d done to break us apart, could dampen my mood or smile. She’d tried, but she’d failed. “Your mother is one kind of Mrs. Callahan, and I’m another kind. Besides, I’m Mrs. Henry Callahan . . .” I bit my lip to keep from smirking. “And there’s only been one before me.”

  Rolling his eyes, he pulled me down beside him. My champagne spilled onto the blanket, but I didn’t move to save it.

  “There’s been no Mrs. Henry Callahan before you.”

  I shook my head as he rolled over me, his face hovering above mine. “Just how much did you have to pay her to pretend to be your wife that whole time and keep silent about it?”

  He kissed the tip of my nose. “A sum of money so large, it would boggle your mind.” He kissed me again. “And worth every last million.”

  I laughed, moving my hands to frame his face. Every time I looked at Henry, I was reminded of our story. Our love story. It hadn’t been conventional or traditional or maybe even ideal, but it was ours. Though it had torn us apart, it had also brought us back together. It was ours and ours alone, and for that, I’d forever be grateful.

  “So where, Mrs. Callahan, would you like to spend your honeymoon? The South of France? Rio? Cape Town?”

  My thumbs skimmed down his cheeks. “I’m spending my honeymoon right now, right here. I’ve seen enough of the world and its people to suffice for five lifetimes. How about we spend our honeymoon here, together?”

  “I like the way you think.” Henry’s hand went to the bend of my waist, squeezing it in a way that stopped my breath. “Now, Mrs. Callahan, can we get to the wedding night part of our marriage? It was the main reason I said ‘I do.’”

  My eyes closed when his lips moved to the base of my neck. “It was the main reason I said those words as well.” His body slid more over mine, causing a sigh to fall from my lips. “Plus I do happen to be insanely in love with you.”

  Henry stopped kissing my neck long enough to smile at me. “You stole the words right from my mouth.”

  As Henry made love to me that night, I wondered if that was the end of our beginning or the beginning of our end, but what I realized later, after he’d fallen asleep in my arms, was that it was neither—we were continuous, as infinite as the night sky above us.

  Our bodies might not have been, but our love would always be forever.

  Thank you for reading GREAT EXPLOITATIONS (Crisis in Cali)

  by NEW YORK TIMES & USA TODAY Bestselling Author,
<
br />   Nicole Williams.

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  Other Works by Nicole:

  CRASH, CLASH, and CRUSH (HarperCollins)

  LOST & FOUND, NEAR & FAR, FINDERS KEEPERS

  HARD KNOX, DAMAGED GOODS

  UP IN FLAMES (Simon & Schuster UK)

  GREAT EXPLOITATIONS

  THE EDEN TRILOGY

  THE PATRICK CHRONICLES