Page 83 of Twisted Truth

“An apology?” she says with a knowing smile.

“Uh, yes. How did you know?”

“Most of the men who come in are here for apology flowers.”

“Ah, I see,” I say, like an idiot. The pretentious asshole side of me burns at her comment. I’ve always prided myself on not being the same as everyday men. I might have been born a Langford, but I’ve also made my own way and carved my own path, even among my family and the other elite. I have always pushed myself to be better, to be more, than the men around me. And now, here I am, buying apology flowers for my girlfriend like every other dumb fuck.

But Matthew was right about one thing: since I’m AsherLangford, they can’t be everyday apology flowers like all those other dumb fucks. They must be incredible.

I spend the next thirty minutes with the florist, picking out the perfect arrangement and writing an apology on the card. The arrangement is too lavish to be done by the end of the day, so I purchase a second, less extravagant one to be delivered to my penthouse tonight. The nicer arrangement will be delivered to her at the office in the morning.

As I’m riding back to the office, I text Ella for the third time today, asking if she’s okay. She won’t answer those texts. She hasn’t answered any of my texts all weekend. She was gone all day yesterday, and she left early for work this morning.

I haven’t seen her since Saturday night.

She’s clearly avoiding me, and I’ve got to figure out how to get her to accept an apology, because we can’t keep this up. We live in the same penthouse and work at the same company. The problem is, I can’t do everything Matthew told me to. I just can’t. The only reason Matthew even knows about that night is because I got almost blackout drunk around him a year ago, and for some reason started spilling all my traumatic stories. No one else but my family knows, and it has to stay that way. For me. For my grandfather’s memory. I’ll just have to think of a way to get back into Ella’s good graces without elaborating on why I was so off Saturday night. And I have to keep from behaving like that again.

The sooner we can end this, the better,I remind myself. Ella can go her way five million dollars richer, and I can go mine, with all my shares intact. I’ve just got to get her to decently trust me in the meantime.

24

ELLA

Ileave work late; it’s almost seven by the time I climb into the car. It’s been an awful, awful day. First, I had to walk onto the PR floor with every coworker aware of the bad press Asher and I received yesterday and today. And it only got worse as the day went on once major entertainment shows picked up and reported on the story. My team may be the only team directly working on Asher’s public image, but the rest of the floor represents different aspects and companies of Langford Holdings in PR and marketing, and they all know what a cluster-fuck of a night Saturday was.

And I got all of their curious glances, judgmental expressions, and loaded body language over it all day.

My team handled the news more tactfully, but still had no shortage of questions. Questions I had no answers to because I didn’t know myself. And that didn’t go over well. Through a frustrating, and mostly unproductive day, the only thing we definitively agreed on is that we probably course-corrected too hard with the dress. It was beautiful, and the open back gave it some sex appeal, but it just wasn’t enough, and it fell flat in the photos.

We can fix the dress problem at the next event, but none of us have any idea on how to fix the fact that Asher wanted nothing to do with me and hardly talked to me the whole night. Emily again suggested we needed to get to know one another better, but I shut her down hard. There’s no way I’m doing anything like that again.

The car door opens, and Asher climbs in.

Lovely. I didn’t know he was still here as well.

“How was your day?” he asks, quietly, as Andrew shuts his door.

“Not my best,” I say in a flat voice, looking out the window as Andrew climbs in and starts the car.

“Same. How was the team? Were they . . . upset about the press?”

“They were, yes. We spent the day putting out what fires we could.”

“How did that go?”

I shrug. “It should blow over; these things do. But we’re now scrambling to figure out how to move forward.”

“Ella, please look at me. What do you mean?”

I roll my eyes before turning my head to look at him. “I mean that besides the dress being a bit of a dud, I have no answers for what went wrong on Saturday night, so that leaves us with no answers on how to avoid it again in the future.”

“It won’t happen again.”

I let out a derisive laugh. “I can’t be sure of that.”

“You can. I got an earful about it today from Matthew. I know Saturday was my fault, and I’m sorry.”

I sit in surprised silence for a moment. “Thank you, I appreciate that.” The words sound anything but appreciative, but I’m doing everything I can to stay civil and neutral.