by Sara Celi
“I wish she could have. It would have been nice to get her advice.” I smiled at him. “Speaking of which, we have most of the engagement party planned. I met with the staff at Flagler yesterday, and it looks like we can get everything that we want on the menu, even the sushi and caviar bar. Plus, The Groove Electric is available, so they’re coming up from Miami. I can’t believe they are going to be the entertainment.”
For the last ten years or so, The Groove Electric had cultivated a reputation as one of the hottest cover bands in South Florida. They played for political fundraisers, entertained presidents, and partied on New Year’s Eve with hundreds of well-heeled guests at The Breakers Resort. Booking them for a private party had been quite a coup.
“Also, Mom is looking into having the flowers flown in from Paris. She says this florist she knows has the most beautiful roses in the world, so—” I broke off because the expression on his face had changed. “What? What’s going on?”
Ashton didn’t reply. He just studied me, and it was then that I really noticed how tired he appeared. Two thick, dark circles rimmed his brown eyes, and his chalky, white skin didn’t hide the blood vessels in his face. He’d also lost even more weight in the last month.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not. I’m in hell.”
“What? Why?”
He sighed. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to tell you this. Trying to think of something that will help to soften what I’m about to say. And I’m at a total loss for words.”
“Just tell me. I’m sure it’s…”
“You can’t marry Trevor McNamara,” he announced. “I can’t let you do this, Ainsley.”
“What?”
His words, and my question, echoed across the room. They carried their own weight. Their own implications. Their own meaning.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
“But—the wedding is planned, Ashton. We’re having an engagement party soon, and we’ve already paid the deposit. It’s all done.”
“Then undo it.”
“Why should I?”
He sighed. “I have some bad news about Trevor. Some really bad news.” He paused. “He’s not what you think he is.”
“You have no idea what I think of him.”
“Oh, I have my suspicions.”
I crossed my arms. “Come on.”
“Have you slept with him?”
“That’s none of your business.” I scoffed. “So, no comment.”
He blanched. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
I shrugged one shoulder.
“Jesus, Ainsley. You have no idea how serious this is. I mean it—you can’t marry him. This can’t happen, and I have plenty of reasons why.”
I swallowed the dry lump in my throat. “Forgive me for having a hard time believing you right now.”
“If you don’t believe me, then believe this—”
Ashton opened the door on the side of his desk and pulled out a thick, overstuffed manila folder that resembled the one I’d seen weeks before at the meeting where he and Trevor made the offer they’d convinced me that I couldn’t refuse.
He opened the front and took out a few large black-and-white photographs, which he then handed my way. “See for yourself.”
The photos showed Trevor having dinner with a woman who looked about the same age as me. She was laughing at something he said, and the way she tilted her head toward him told me she trusted him, that she liked his company. The next photo showed them getting in a black car, and the third showed them outside what looked like an apartment complex on the upper East Side. A few more photos showed them together, and in one, they looked like they were having a heated and intense discussion.
“So?” I handed the photos back to him.
“Her name is Olivia van Hewitt, and at one point, he almost married her.” Ashton shifted through some more of the paperwork in the file folder. “They had a tumultuous relationship. And while on vacation in France about two years ago, she made a report with the police. She accused him of physical abuse while on a yacht they’d rented.” He gave me some pages of a French police report. “Photos are attached.”
My French was rusty, but I still managed to make out the narrative in the police report. After a night of heavy drinking, Olivia told police that Trevor had become upset when she didn’t prepare the breakfast croissants he liked. According to her, he threw a plate against a wall near her head, then broke a chair and a table. He allegedly hit her several times and she tried to fight back, but she said she “feared for her life.” The accompanying photo showed a thin woman with streaked eye makeup and a large welt just below her right eye.
I looked up from the pages. “She later dropped the charges. And they broke up.” I paused, wondering why I hadn’t heard about this. This was huge, monumental even, and I’d known nothing about it at all. Was I dreaming? “This never hit the media over here, did it? It was completely buried.”
My thoughts raced. This wasn’t the Trevor that I’d come to know, the man who seemed so funny and generous behind his tough businessman exterior. This couldn’t be real.
Right?
“I’m sure there is an explanation,” I insisted, my tone desperate and hollow to my own ears. My thoughts began to race, going over every small detail of my interactions with Trevor. Nothing he’d done gave me any clue that he might be capable of something so serious. Even that night at the Whitney Museum—he’d been aggressive, yes, but that didn’t mean he was an abuser. “There has to be more to this. There has to be.”
Ashton scrubbed his face with his hand. “God, this has been such a mistake.” His jaw hardened. “I knew it… I knew it…”
“Knew what? About him?” My voice rose as questions spilled out of my mouth. Maybe I had been deceived. “Then why did you suggest I marry him in the first place? Ashton, if you—”
“This is my fault. I-I don’t—” Ashton pinched the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb. “I convinced myself that I should just trust my instincts on this one, and I didn’t bother digging into his past before I suggested that you marry him. I was so blinded by our situation, and the failure of our finances, that I didn’t vet this properly.”
The implication of his admission hung in the air between us.
“I won’t let you do this. You can’t marry him. I won’t allow you to sacrifice yourself to a man like this.” He sneered. “A man capable of behaving this way.”
“Why now?” I managed. “What made you discover all of this now?”
“My attorneys were doing the usual due diligence on the final steps of this merger, and I asked them to look a little bit further into his personal life.” He wrinkled his nose. “This is serious. He’s ruthless, Ainsley. Remember that. He’s the kind who will do anything to get what he wants.”
“Some people would say the same thing about us. And about our father.” I rubbed my eyes, feeling the beginning of a headache. God, this was such a mess. “We didn’t get here because of our business genius—apparently our father was more focused on winning than he was on building a solid company with a good foundation. We didn’t wind up with all this to lose just because someone in our family happened to reinvent the wheel. We were willing to do anything to get it, and we have.” I massaged my left temple. “Hell, apparently you were willing to do anything to keep it.”
“Are you defending him? After all this? Are you making excuses?”
“No.” I crossed my arms, attempting to squelch the nausea and rotten butterflies pitching around in my stomach. “I wouldn’t defend this kind of behavior. But I don’t think—”
“I don’t like the look of this. Neither should you. In fact, I hate it.” He tapped his fingers on the paperwork. “Frankly, there is a lot here to be very concerned about. I know that I mortgaged you in exchange for this merger, and to save our company, but I’m not willing to do that now. I won’t allow you to marry him. Not someo
ne like this. I’ll do everything that I can to stop it, if need be.”
I blanched. I didn’t want Ashton trying to step in and “fix” my love life. I could handle it on my own. But how would I handle this disaster? Confusion warred with logic in my head. Was this man I’d been spending all that time with—and making love to—truly a monster? “It just doesn’t seem like the Trevor that I know. He hasn’t been like that with me. He’s… he’s different now. He’s not—”
“Stop and consider this from all sides, Ainsley. A lot of time has passed. You hardly know him. Hardly. He’s only shown you what he wants you to see, and I am sure that he’s been on his best behavior for most of the time that he’s been around you. I would be, too. With all that’s at stake, that can only be expected. He wants you to like him. Don’t you see?”
I shook my head, fighting for Trevor, despite the possible ringing of truth in Ashton’s statements. “But this is—”
“This has all been a sick game to him, and I’m certain that as soon as you marry him, things are going to change. Whatever mask he’s wearing, he’ll drop it.” He got up from the desk, moved around it, took a seat in the empty chair next to me, and reached for my hand. “I’ll tell him the deal is off this afternoon. We can do it together if you want.”
“No.” I blinked, suppressing the sting of tears. “I-I want to do it. Just me.”
The corners of his mouth turned downward. “I’m just… good god, I’m sorry that I ever got you mixed up with someone like this.”
I looked down at his fingers, then back up at him. I could barely form thoughts in my head, much less spit out my next words. “And… and if I break it off, then… then what? If we drop this deal, the company will go under. How many times have you said this is our best option?”
“Many times. I know that.” He glanced around the room at the office he’d inherited. “That fact kills me inside, but there’s nothing we can do. I’m not going to let you chain yourself to a monster like this.”
I opened my mouth, then slapped a hand over it, fending off the bile threatening to rise up and choke me. My mind still raced, flipping through the little details I’d had with Trevor, the comments he’d made, and the small expressions I’d seen when it was just me and him. It felt like a war was going on inside me because the truth was, I wanted to be with Trevor. I was doing this willingly, and I had been for a while. I straightened my spine. However, I had to remember… what I’d just read was serious, and not to be dismissed. My respirations picked up and my pulse thrummed in my neck, speeding up the faint brewing anger beneath the surface. I refused to be taken advantage of or fooled by the devil himself. Before making any decisions, I needed to get to the bottom of this, to talk to Trevor, and to do some “due diligence” of my own.
“Let me speak to him,” I insisted. I’ll kill him if it’s true. “He might have a good reason for this.”
“A good reason? There’s no good reason for abuse, Ainsley. None. Full stop.”
“I just don’t—” I dropped his hand and regarded the folder full of so much damning information about someone I’d come to care about over the last few weeks. “This isn’t who he is. There must be a reason for all this. I feel it.”
Ashton scoffed. “I don’t.”
“That’s where you and I are different.” I stood from the chair. “Let me talk to him and see what he says. Give me a few days, okay?”
“Two. I’ll give you two days.”
“Fine,” I said to Ashton. “I’m sure I’ll have a good answer by then.”
But even as I said this to Ashton in the most confident tone I could muster, I knew that I couldn’t be so sure.
I had 236 emails to read, a dinner meeting to attend, and five other appointments before my day could end. But at that moment, none of that mattered to me. What mattered were the dozen black roses sitting in the middle of my desk, along with a card written in deep-red ink. My assistant said the delivery had arrived when I’d been at lunch.
“I didn’t know what to do with it,” Nancy said when I arrived at my office after a few frantic texts from her. “The delivery man refused to take them back, and I didn’t want to make a scene.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “You did the right thing.”
Alone in my office, I read the card for the tenth time.
Roses are red
These are black,
You think that you love her
But she’ll never love you back.
Women like her never do.
After a deep breath, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed a number I hadn’t forgotten, no matter how hard I’d tried. She picked up on the second ring.
“Oh, my god,” she said without greeting me. “The roses worked.”
“No, Olivia, they didn’t.”
“Then why are you on the phone?”
“Because you clearly don’t get it. Still. After all this time.” I sighed. “Stop calling me. Stop texting me. Stop emailing me. And stop sending me flowers. It’s not going to work.”
“What do you mean?” She let out some high-pitched laugher. I pulled the phone away from my ear, punched it onto speaker, and put the phone on my desk. “I think it already has worked, honey. You called me.”
“Only to tell you to leave me alone. To stop this. If you don’t, I’m calling the police.”
I sat in my desk chair and cursed myself for the thousandth time about what could only be described as an “Olivia situation.” I should never have allowed myself to become involved with this woman.
Never.
There weren’t many ways that I could describe what an epic disaster my time with her had been. Words didn’t really bear it out. It had been a mistake from the start, and unequivocally, the worst decision I’d ever made. Three years since the relationship ended, and she still wanted to control me.
“You can’t love her,” Olivia purred. “I saw photos of you at the International Refugee fund gala. Ainsley Ross is not interested in you that way. I’m sorry, Trevor, but she’s not. She hasn’t given you her heart, and even if she has one, it will never be yours. She’s in it for herself, and that’s it. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but someone has to be honest.”
I tightened my jaw. We’d only been speaking for a few minutes, but already she exhausted me. And each passing second only threatened to send me backward into a world I wanted to forget, a time when co-dependency and dysfunction ruled my life.
“You don’t know anything about the way things are between us. Besides, we shouldn’t be talking right now. The restraining order might be expired, but I have no problem reinstating it.”
She demurred. “You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
She cleared her throat. “All I want is for us to meet for coffee. Discuss what we have between us. Besides, I need to formally apologize to you, and my therapist recommends that I do that in person.”
“Meet in person? Hardly. Does your therapist know what it is that you need to apologize for?” I remembered those fateful, unpleasant weeks in the south of France. The whole incident, and the false allegations against me, had left such a rotten taste in my mouth that I never wanted to go there again.
“Yes.”
“Does she know that I had a restraining order against you?”
She didn’t answer.
“Sounds like I just got the answer to my question,” I said. “And either way, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want you to apologize, Olivia. I want you to leave me alone. Don’t ever call me again.”
“But—”
“Leave me alone. Forever.”
I hung up the phone in time for Nancy to ring through on the office intercom system. “Mr. McNamara?” The clipped, rushed tone of her Queens accent spilled from the speaker. “Miss Ainsley Ross is in the lobby, and she wants to see you. Should I send her in?”
My stomach flipped. Perfect timing. “Give me a moment, please.” I deposited the roses in the closet that housed my overcoat and two e
xtra business suits. The card went on the floor next to my shoes. I made a mental note to throw them out later. “Send her in.”
Ainsley entered my office about twenty seconds later. She wore a large black wool coat with a camel-colored fur collar, pointed black boots, and a black dress.
“I didn’t expect to see you today,” I said as I crossed the room, feeling the overwhelming urge to kiss her. Ever since our time together at the rec center, I’d felt my admiration and attraction to her growing at a rapid pace. When I got to her side, though, I reached out to take her by the arm, and she stiffened. My hand fell back to my side. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes.”
Her tone of voice told me it wasn’t. So did the tension building in the room.
“Are you sure?”
She narrowed her eyes at me, then shook her head. “No, I’m not sure. And no, I’m not okay. I'm—”
“Please,” I prompted. “Have a seat.” I guided her over to the dark leather loveseat and two wingback chairs that made up the reception area of my office. She sat down in one of the chairs but didn’t take off her coat.
I took that as a very, very bad sign.
“Obviously, you’re upset.” I loosened my tie and unbuttoned the top collar of my shirt. Whatever was about to happen next, I knew this day was about to turn even worse. “But whatever it is, you can talk to me. You can tell me anything.”
I sat in the black chair across from her. Her tight grip on the arms of the chair told me I dare not go further with my comments, or my questions.
“I’m confused. Angry. Frustrated. And I’m… I’m not sure what to think.” She tore her gaze away from mine and looked at the windows behind my desk for a few seconds, windows which featured a sweeping view of Manhattan through frosty glass. When she turned back to me, her jaw had tightened. “Who in the hell is Olivia van Hewitt?”
My shoulders slumped. “An ex-girlfriend.”
“And what happened that day on the yacht, Trevor?”
Shit. No, fuck. So, she did know. This was about my past. And god, once again, it had come back to haunt me.