“Not really. You were all the way over at the culinary building, and I was stuck at the business school, with… him.”
“I’m sorry this is happening. I really am. Dahlia told us someone from Knight’s Capital would show up to have a conversation with you. It sucks that they really did.”
“I know, but of all the career professionals who work there, did they have to send him?”
“Please, please, I’m begging you. Go down there and speak with him.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking me to do,” I say frankly.
“I agree. I don’t know.”
“Sorry if I’m coming off like a bitch, Em. This is one situation where I can’t help myself. I have to be a cold-hearted bitch right now… or I’m just gonna fall apart,” I say, my voice sober from the frank admission that brings a tear to my eye without my intending it to. “If I told you what he and his friends did to me, you’d…you’d hate him too.”
“You know what? You’re right.” Emily takes off the oven mitt and grabs her phone and keys. “You don’t have to put up with his harassment. And neither do I. I’ll tell him that what they’re asking of you is unreasonable. I’ll say your answer is no and demand that he leaves before someone else in the building calls the cops.”
She opens the door but all of a sudden, stops abruptly. Turning to face the wall-mounted speaker, she presses the button to call down to the main floor. “Hello? Mr. Mitchell?” She calls out, addressing Caleb by his last name. After waiting a few moments for him to answer, she says, “Are you there?”
“Actually, I’m here,” says a deep, familiar voice that’s alarmingly close to the front door.
I bolt upright in the armchair and scamper off toward the bedrooms. Hatred and anger rise to the surface. I’m shaking. My heart is pounding hard in my chest. Heat crawls up my neck to my cheeks, and my hands ball up into fists so tight that my nails may draw blood from my palms.
No.
Just no.
He has some nerve reaching out to me for help, but coming up to my front door without my agreement? He’s crossed yet another line.
If I have to lay eyes on this man even one more time, I may end up physically hurting him.
I listen from behind the hallway partition as Emily politely tells him that it’s not a good time. Dammit, she’s way too polite. And she doesn’t threaten to call the cops.
“Your name is Emily, right?” he asks her, laying on the charm. His voice is thick and sweet to the point of syrupy.
“Yes, I think I may have seen you at the fundraising gala that night at Rockefeller Center.”
“Right. You’re the chef Dylan’s been raving about.”
I roll my eyes as Emily lets out a shy little giggle at his compliment, but smile when she reiterates that he really should leave. “It might be a good idea for someone other than you to approach my friend,” she tells him. “I don’t know what went on between the two of you, but you really hurt her badly.”
“You’re right,” he answers, and I hear his voice break or croak from where I stand. “That night was…what I did was reprehensible. I don’t expect her to ever forgive me. All I can tell you is I’m still working hard every day to forgive myself for the person I was back then.”
Jeez, does Caleb Mitchell have to sound so honest, vulnerable and remorseful right now?
“See, I hear you, but… I don’t know,” Emily answers with some hesitation. “It’s late. Try to get in touch with her during the day, or on the weekend. Okay? Enjoy your night.”
I mistakenly assume that Caleb steps back into the landing and sneak a glance around the partition.
God.
My eyes land on his big broad frame taking up almost the entire doorway and my heart leaps. My knees go weak, forcing me to curl my fingers around the thin wall to keep myself upright.
I really shouldn’t have looked.
Why did I do that?
And why in hell does he have to look so devastatingly handsome?
I read somewhere that hate is a passion on the same wavelength as love. That when you honestly hate a person, the chemicals and neural circuits around in your body behave very much like they do when you’re madly in love. That judgment and reasoning are abandoned, switched off in favor of irrational behavior such as rage or physical arousal.
At the moment, I fucking hate that I read that somewhere.
Emily starts to close the door, but Caleb gently places a hand on the other side. “I have no right to ask anything of her, but can you do me a solid and let Rose know this visit isn’t about me? I’m here because I’m trying to be the kind of friend my friends deserve. I’m here to help people who were wronged. And yes, I understand that from your friend’s point of view, I was on the other side of a similar coin. I’m not able to change the past or what I did to Rose, but I can stop bad things…maybe worse things, from happening to a lot of innocent people. Rose is instrumental in our firm’s ability to protect those people. This hits a lot closer to home than I can share, but just know that some people close to me, including Knights Capital partners close to us… have lost family before their time because of the actions of at least one subsidiary of Levine Holdings.”
I hate the idea of facing him. Still, every instinct in me compels me to step into his line of sight.
“Fine,” I say across the room in a voice I barely recognize. “I’ll help. Give Emily as much of the details as you can, and leave your phone number. I’ll be in touch. Please just go now.”
Why the hell am I committing myself to do this?
And for him?
Well fuck me.
Six
Rose
I wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. I’m shaking. My covers are damp and tangled around my lower body.
That nightmare is back. I haven’t had it in years.
Pushing my bedsheets off my legs, I stumble to the bathroom and wash my face. As I look into the mirror of the medicine cabinet, a flash of an image lingers from the dream.
Caleb’s face.
Dammit. That’s why I had quit my job at his family’s department store. It’s the same reason I avoided him all through college. I didn’t want to see him earlier either. He’s a living, breathing, walking, talking reminder of what happened to me.
But I looked.
My eyes stole a glance at him at our front door, and somewhere deep in my subconscious, it all came flooding back. No wonder I had the nightmare again.
Returning to my room, I dry off my face and hands with my towel hanging over my closet door. In just those few seconds with my eyes closed, more images return. I take a seat on one side of my bed and look over at the picture box window, the only source of natural light in my room. My curtains are partway open, letting in the white glare of the nearby streetlight.
I don’t want to remember, but I have no control of the dream anymore. It’s back. A waking nightmare I can’t shake no matter how hard I try.
And I hate Caleb for it all over again.
The events of that night don’t happen in order. This nightmare was almost the same, with a different ending.
The kids from my school give me strange looks at my locker. As I walk down the hall before my first class, some of the popular girls speak under their breaths. All I hear are snippets. My name. The words ‘slut’, ‘drunk’, ‘trash’, and sometimes, ‘whore’ thrown in somewhere.
A bunch of guys from the football team pass by just before I turn to walk into my classroom. They smile at me, but there’s one who points at my face as though I don’t matter enough for him to speak behind my back. He talks to the rest of them about the pictures. Someone asks, “Which pictures?”
The loudmouth boy answers that they’re all shots of me at the party. “Everyone’s sharing them. It’s her my fifteen minutes of fame, and it’s all over social media.” He pulls out his phone and passes it around.
That’s when Caleb appears in the dream. Someone hands him the phone and he
turns it toward me. He shows me myself. A picture of me, but it morphs into me in real life and leaps out of the phone, mimicking the position I was in when whoever snapped the photo. I look down at the floor in the hallway of my high school. I see myself sitting there. Not quite sitting, as my legs are stretched out to the side, and one hand props me up a little, as though I was on my side and am trying to get up.
At that point, my awareness moves to my second body, the one on the ground. My limbs are numb, so heavy. My hair is stringy and damp, clinging to the sides of my face and neck. I can’t keep my eyes open. Then I see that I’m literally half naked. The knee length wool skirt I had on is bundled around my waist. My candy-cane patterned holiday stockings are down around my ankles, and I only have a bra on. I go by touch around me, feeling for the rest of my clothes. I look up but everything’s blurry.
Everything but Caleb.
There are so many pairs of eyes around him. Voices are garbled, words are jumbled. I pick up the laughter, the teasing as they call me a drugged-up piece of trash. A slut who can’t handle her liquor. When my eyes focus, I follow the nearest voice. All those words are coming from somewhere near Caleb.
I ask the voice why he’s lying about me. I want to shout that Caleb brought me here. He let this happen to me, but my words come out sounding like the scratchy sounds of a DJ messing around on a turntable. With only my eyes, I ask why he was so kind to me just that one time before the store party, was it to get me here? He grins, and the voice near him continues to tell the guys that I was a good fuck. I stress to him that he’s lying, that no one fucked me, but it’s no thanks to him. The voice admits that I would’ve been a good fuck if the old man of the kid whose house they partied at didn’t show up and stop shit from happening.
In the dream, I’m pushed back into my clean, fully dressed body, except I’m no longer at school. I’m stretched out in a hospital bed. A nurse walks into the tiny private room. She tells me I’ve been here for a few hours, that I may have been sexually assaulted. I need to undress so she can get a rape kit done.
The room blurs, and when my eyes focus again, there’s a female police officer sitting across from me with a cold metal table between us. She asks me what I remember. I tell her about the holiday party. About ending up at the house party. I had a drink. The person told me it was punch, but everything got weird after I took a few sips. The room turned on its side somehow.
She asks me how often I drink and do drugs. I reply that I never do. That I didn’t know what was in the Dixie cup.
She asks me why I was drinking. That I’m underage and shouldn’t have been around at the party. I feel hot tears run down my face as she speaks. She tells me it’s not the time to cry. That I should be ashamed. That my parents would be heartbroken if they were alive. That I’m lucky my rape kit came back negative. That there was no evidence I was touched. She warns me that if this happens again, my next stop will be juvie.
My foster mother is in the waiting area of the police station when I leave the room. She tells me that her other children are home alone with her husband and she has to work the next day. That I can’t get myself into trouble again because it’ll be too disruptive to the rest of her foster children.
But her face softens for a second. She cups my cheek for a minute and says she’s sorry they hurt me. That it’s not my fault. That the cops would never treat me this way if we weren’t working class. She asks me if I remember anyone specific from the night. If I tell her the same thing I told the police and the nurse. No. I don’t remember. No one was familiar. My foster mother tells me that if I remember anyone specific, she’ll help me find a good lawyer. That we can sue someone because of where it happened. Some rich guy’s house.
My dream takes me back to school then, and I’m sitting in my classroom. For some reason, Caleb is sitting in the seat in front of me. He looks back and tells me I’ll ruin his life if I talk. That one ruined life—mine—is one too many. He presses a finger to his lips and breathes out the sound ‘shhhhh.’
My nightmare used to end there. Every time, I’d wake up to the sound of Caleb shushing me.
Every time until now.
The dream I just woke up from had a different ending. After Caleb turns to look at me, he doesn’t press a finger to his lips. He says that I’m the only one who can help his rich successful friends.
A wave of disbelief comes over me.
I know that it’s just a dream.
Half of what happens in my sleep didn’t really take place in real life.
Most of it is just my mind distorting pieces that bother me, adding fiction and drama to fact.
But honestly?
I still blame Caleb.
He didn’t have a hand in what happened to me, but he didn’t stick around to stop it either.
And I just agreed to help these people where Caleb works?
Am I fucking for real?
I must’ve been out of my mind when I told him to give Emily my number.
I remember that I left my phone in the living room earlier when I bolted from the room to get away from him. It’ll need to be charged for sure. I leave my bedroom and find the phone where I left it. It’s in the chair I was sitting in before he showed up. As I flip it around to unlock the screen, it lights up with a text he must’ve sent right after he left here. There are only five words.
Caleb: Thanks again. Will call tomorrow.
Fuck.
I can’t do this.
I won’t. Not with him.
He has no fucking right to ask anything of me.
Seven
Caleb
I stand at the wall of mounted glass shelves installed in Joseph’s office. He and his older son, Jace discuss Mont Blanc, Levine Holdings, what to do about Gerald, and how much exposure our firm is willing to take on, in order to have a clearer picture of our situation. He’s referring to Rose, which is the reason I intentionally stay out of the conversation. I check out his collection of golf memorabilia. From recent medals, signed golf balls, and vintage Masters programs, to framed flags and multi-entrant autographed Masters’ badges, they rest in their spots at perfect distances from each other, individually glowing under soft LED lights. My eyes wander over to his hand carved mahogany desk. One file folder sits there, its label reading ‘Mont Blanc – Levine Holdings – RB.’
Rose Burnell.
It’s not like Joseph to allow anyone in the firm he founded to be this blatant about subterfuge. If this file contains what I think it does, its presence alone on our premises puts all of Knights Capital at risk.
I take a seat in the second guest chair next to Jace, nodding here and there, but unwilling to engage. Joseph answers a phone call that comes in on his landline, and I make use of his switch of focus to check the time on my phone. The third phone and counting. My assistant was a doll and picked it up for me on her way into work this morning. I even have the same number. It’s close to midday.
As I sit there, giving it a few more minutes before he ends the call and wraps up our meeting, I check for messages. As usual, there are a few new ones from women still trying to pin me down.
None of them is from her.
I shouldn’t be surprised.
She could barely look at me last night.
My suspicion is Joseph called me in to advise that one of the other partners will take on responsibility for liaising with her. He hasn’t made the point yet, but my guess is it’s imminent.
Dylan is the only one who knows about what went down with Rose. He’s a vault, so I’m positive no one else at the firm knows. I need to keep it that way. He wasn’t with me that night that it happened, but he learned about it later, much later on.
Thank fuck that disaster was contained back then.
A big downside, though, was that Justice wasn’t served. If it were, I might still be behind bars.
A prickle of guilt begins to surface, but the sound of Joseph setting down the phone handset cuts the moment short.
He level
s his gaze at me. “I want one of you to loop in with legal again, so they’re ready if needed.”
“Done,” Jace answers beside me.
“Good.” Joseph reaches behind him for his suit jacket and stands, putting it on. He looks down his body and smooths out his pocket square, then glances at me. “Let’s hope this doesn’t come back to bite us in the ass.”
Jace stands as well. “We can blame it all on Gerald. He put us in this position.”
I tuck my smartphone into my pocket, following them as they start toward the door. “Am I still the point of contact for her?” I ask. Up to this point, we haven’t come out and said her name out loud.
Joseph keeps walking, his hand raised for a brief farewell. “You and Jace work out those details. Enjoy your lunch, young men.”
Jace turns to face me, with eyebrows raised. “Oh, right. About that…Yes, you’re still the point person, but keep Dylan as your backup if things become dicey. Can you handle it?”
“Sure. Between the two of us, we’ll figure it out.”
“Dylan can shed some light on the subtleties of the type of information that’ll help. And you, well, you have some history with her, right?” I nod but he doesn’t wait to learn more. “Keep it tight. Manage it. Quietly.”
“Will do.” He hurries back to his office, leaving me standing like a lost puppy in the hallway.
I walk off in the opposite direction toward Dylan’s office. We need to have a talk. Another ambush on my part at Rose’s place is only going to put us on even shakier ground. His assistant informs me that Dylan’s at an all-day risk assessment meeting. Returning to my office, I send him a text and quickly learn from his swift replies that his meeting isn’t all that critical.
Me: Dude. Where the fuck are you?
Dylan: Working. Meetings.
Me: Where?
Dylan: Offsite to avoid distractions. Like this.
The Billionaire and The Virgin Intern Page 3