“You can count on it,” I assured him.
For a beat, neither of us budged. His eyes dropped to my lips before drifting back up to meet my eyes. Someone called his name, breaking the spell tethering us together. Suddenly, everything was moving again, everything but us.
Reed took a step back, but his eyes lingered on me. He looked like he wanted to say something. I hoped that he wanted to expound on my question, but instead, he smoothed his jacket and held up a finger to someone in the distance.
“See you around, gorgeous,” he said, winking before rounding me to head inside.
I shuffled away, dedicating my focus back to my notes and the reason I was there in the first place, to get Nicholas talking. He had refused all interviews and used his well-dressed, well-spoken watch dog to keep the press at bay. They couldn’t manipulate me into forgetting the facts.
There was a pattern. People lied, but patterns didn’t lie, no matter how suave or convincing Reed and Nicholas thought they were under scrutiny. I would get my story, if it was the last thing I did.
Long after the cameras had stopped flashing, the gala morphed into a stuffy room filled with soft music and chilled champagne. The event was in full swing, but I could still feel the weight of her attention as if her eyes were still on me.
I shouldn’t have been thinking about her when I was supposed to be soft shoeing my way into some deep pockets. It had been mere months since I’d fought through the media storm and smear campaigns that threatened to sink a business that had taken us years to build from the ground up.
Everything I planned to say tonight went out the window as soon as I saw her. As elusive as she was to the media, I’d been following her quiet come up for years. Faith worked as an investigative journalist and had written up some impressivepieces over the years. She helped expose a human trafficking ring a few years back. I expected her to go big time after that, but she was still working behind the scenes for some reason.
Faith falling back into my orbit hadn’t been by chance. The moment our eyes connected, everything I had struggled to keep at bay over the years came flooding to the surface. She was here for a reason.
This time, I wasn’t letting her get away. That was where I messed up before. I didn’t let her go because I didn’t know how much she meant to me. I let her go because I did. Reed Fuller III and my mom picked my wife to be when I was thirteen years old.
The members of The Force sometimes tried to keep the money and business in the family by arranging for their children to get married. My brother and I were automatically in the pool. I probably could have kept Faith on the side for as long as I wanted to. At the same time, I didn’t know how to hold on to her without losing everything else that I thought I needed.
The closer I got to my impending wedding date, the more guilty I felt for leading Faith on. I loved her, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t deserve to be dragged into our madness. When I decided that I was no longer going on with the program, my mom intervened and made sure that I had to let her go.
Now she was back, and I felt like I owed her the truth. The way she stood up to me made me proud. My baby had really come into herself. It wasn’t the questions that she asked me. I had been asked hard questions, especially since Darius’s arrest. It was the way she demanded her answers without backing down. It was the way she didn’t let me get away with skirting around the truth. Not that I was competitive, but I had never been one to run from a challenge.
Faith was more than a challenge. She felt like she knew the answers to her questions already. There was no need for me to feed into the narrative that Cashville was still operating illegallywhen we had already been cleared by everyone who mattered. What about the customers, though? I was still working on getting our numbers back up from the fallout of the scandal. There were a lot of people who thought that there was still something going on, and rightfully so.
Darius and his buddies had been running a multi-million-dollar scheme right under our noses. Not that I thought everything about the business was on the up-and-up, but I would have never expected his ass to be dealing with the mafia. Either way, there was nothing left to hide.
Tonight’s event was supposed to be one of our ways to show that we were still the same people who had given away hundreds of scholarships and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to charities around the city. We just wanted to remind people of our integrity. Now I was wondering if it all came off as performative as Faith said it did.
“That could have gone better. Your girl ain’t subtle at all,” Sawyer said, walking up behind me out of nowhere. I looked back to find him dividing his time between his phone and scanning the room. I finished my drink before giving him my full attention.
I shrugged. “It could’ve gone worse.”
“Don’t let her get in your head. She’s niggling you on purpose.”
“You know I’m good,” I said, only partially lying.
I wasn’t as fucked up about the questions as much as I was about the person asking them. It was my real wife. I thought it had been noble to let her go all those years ago. I never even tried to go after her.
She deserved a good, clean dude who wanted a family and kids and all the things a girl like her needed to live happily ever after. My baby deserved the white picket fence, the dog, kids, and all that. She just didn’t deserve to have to deal with me. Isacrificed my temporary bliss for her long-term happiness, but now she was here.
Her coming back felt like a sign. Back in college, I couldn’t be the man she needed. Things were different now. Faith was back, and I wasn’t letting her get away from me again. For years, I resisted the constant urge to go get her. Now she had come back to me. She fell right in my lap. That had to mean something.
It really didn’t matter if there was some divine source behind us running into each other or not. She was here now. I needed to see her again. Casually, I turned and scanned the crowd, knowing damn well the press was more than likely still outside. It was a private event, but I was wondering how to change that. Some of the press got inside. I needed Faith on that list.
“She got under your skin on purpose.”
“She didn’t get under my skin.” I shrugged.
“I can’t tell. I guess you deserved that. You kinda did fuck her over.”
“Go to hell,” I mumbled.
I didn’t bother cursing him all the way out. My eyes landed on Faith, making me disinterested in the conversation. I didn’t have to explain myself to Sawyer. Faith was the only person in the room who deserved an explanation, not that it would matter at this point. Many of the members of the press left after the red carpet to get a rush on posting their thoughts on the event. Faith was still here.
