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“You know what’s really funny?” I muttered, forcing my wrists out of his hold. The action was going to leave me bruised, but that was the least of my worries. “What really gets me?” He frowned in confusion, waiting for my reply. “You didn’t even need Lindsey to get your vote. All you had to do was suck up to my stepdad, and he could have gotten you any vote you wanted.”
“What—” he started, but I spoke over him.
“My stepdad is Malcolm McIntire, Cash.” It took a moment, but I knew it wouldn’t be long. Even if he hadn’t followed his own dad’s career since he said he left, everyone knew who Malcolm was. My stepdad might not have been a politician, but with all of his businesses in the public eye and needing government support for some of his drug research studies, he had a good seventy-five percent of Washington in his pocket. One whisper from him in Congress’s ear, and Cash’s father would have had his vote overnight.
Dawning realization and then defeat flooded his eyes as I stepped back. Grabbing the handle of my carry-on, I turned and walked away.
And this time, he let me go.
Chapter 13
Cash
With blood rushing through my ears making me deaf to everything around me, I watched Amara walk out of my apartment. This was the biggest fuck-up of my life. I was losing the only person who had ever seen the real me and still loved me. In the world I had grown up in, finding someone with real emotions, who cared with their whole heart, was rare.
A soft, chilled hand touched my arm, and I swung around to find Lindsey standing there. She’d washed the soap out of her hair but was still only wrapped in a towel. My gaze skimmed over her from head to toe, taking in the long, damp ringlets of hair framing her face. She had the kind of body any man would crave. But not just any man would do for this chick.
I’d known the type of guy she would want and had used the skills I’d learned from infancy to charm my way into her life. I wined and dined and made her feel special. But if she had been falling for me, she had fallen for a guy who didn’t exist. She didn’t know me, not the real me. And if she did, what little I knew about her told me she wouldn’t have ever given me the time of day. The real me didn’t want a spoiled little daddy’s girl who would hang her own friend out to dry when she’d lost her father because “Daddy said I couldn’t.”
Girls like Lindsey Connors had been a part of my life from the moment I drew breath. I was pushed at them just as often as they were pushed at me, and if my parents had their way, I would have already been on my way to marrying one just like Lindsey—if not Lindsey herself. It was just one of a hundred other reasons why I had walked away from my family. I wasn’t allowed to be myself. I had to play a part and hide who I was.
The instant I’d set eyes on Amara, what little attraction Lindsey might have held disappeared, and all I saw was my dreamer. If Gigi hadn’t turned up the pressure, making me feel like the stress of Dad not getting this bill of his passed might actually kill her, I wouldn’t have seen Lindsey again.
I stuck to the plan, played Lindsey along until I met her father tonight, and over the course of an expensive dinner, tipped the scales in Harden Mathias’s favor. As I shook his hand after picking up the check for our meal, I’d breathed a sigh of relief. It was over. I could drop this game with Lindsey and tell Amara the truth.
I would have confessed everything to her because there was no hiding it. Finding out that the girl who meant everything to me was best friends with the girl I was manipulating had been karma for all the bad shit I did to help my father’s career in my youth. But I’d made sure neither one of them found out about the other. Amara wasn’t supposed to find out this way, goddammit.
I would have told Amara every damn detail, and she would have forgiven me, because I would have made sure she realized that I loved her more than fucking anything or anyone else on the planet.
But it seemed like karma was still trying to punish me, and I deserved it. Everyone who knew the old me would have been cackling up a storm at the justice of it all.
Fuck if I would accept it, though.
Maybe I did deserve this shit, but I wasn’t going to let it come between Amara and me. Nothing was going to take her away from me. Especially not the preppy, stuck-up bitch standing in front of me now.
There was a coy, pouty look on her face, and when she spoke, her voice grated down my spine. “Was it really just to get to my dad?” she asked in that annoying little-girl voice that some chicks thought was sexy.
“Yep,” I told her honestly in a cold, hard tone. “Get your clothes on and get out. My job with you is over.”
She huffed softly and stepped in my path when I moved to walk around her. “Oh, come on, Harden. I know our time together meant something to you. You sent me flowers every week, and you were so considerate. You listened when I told you some of my deepest secrets. Surely, what we have is more important than fucking around with a girl like Amara Marks.”
“Let’s get a few things straight, bitch.” Her eyes flashed fire at me, but she was too much of a follower to rip into me. That alone was enough to show me she was nothing like Amara. “Anything that was going on between us was never real. It was a game I had to play to get what I wanted. I don’t care about you. You’re annoying as fuck, actually, and if my grandmother hadn’t asked me to do this, I never would have looked twice at you.”
Her chin trembled, but her tears didn’t even faze me. She could have broken down at my feet right then, sobbing and pleading, and it wouldn’t have bothered me. I prowled into her space, and whatever she read in my eyes had her dropping the pout and taking a step back. “Amara is my girlfriend, my future, my fucking everything. I love her. She is all that you will never even hope to be in life. She has strength and confidence and the kind of heart that makes anyone who is allowed inside of it the luckiest bastard on the planet. So, get your shit and get the fuck out of my apartment, because if you get in my way, I will destroy your world.”
There was fear in her eyes, but she flipped her wet hair in my face as she turned away, acting like she wasn’t afraid of what I could do to her precious lifestyle. I could destroy it all. She was too concerned with her image, with making her father happy.
All it would take was a whisper in the right ear that Congressman Connors’s daughter was stalking and chasing after me, and it would all come crashing down. I would make the world know she was unstable, and Connors would flip out to do damage control. Lindsey would be under lock and key out of the public eye, and whatever life she had here would be over.
“Whatever. You’re not worth my time anyway. Dirty rockers aren’t my thing.” She stomped back to my room and slammed the door.
I remained where I was, waiting for her to come back out. I wanted to be pissed at her, at Gigi, at the fucking world. But in my gut, I knew I had no one else to blame but myself. I did this.
And I would fix it.
With her wet clothes back on, Lindsey looked like a drowned rat. She stormed past me and out the door. As soon as she was gone, I grabbed my phone and started calling Amara. It went straight to voice mail, and I had to swallow the sudden knot of emotions that was choking me as I left a message.
“Baby, don’t leave me. Come back. Please. I love you.”
