“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Marco raised his eyebrows. “Since when do you not want to talk about women, Elijah? Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Can we just drink?” he asked. “That’s why we came here.”
“We came here because we haven’t seen you in weeks,” Jeremy countered. “I can’t tell you how shocked I was that you picked up the phone at all, Elijah. I’ve tried calling you quite a lot recently. I was starting to think I was just getting completely blown off.”
“No,” Elijah said. “I’ve been busy, that’s all. And I don’t want to talk about Stephanie.”
The phone buzzed on the bar next to him.
“That’s probably her,” Marco said. “Go on, take the call. Tell her to come out. We’d love to meet her.”
“We’ll be good,” Jeremy pledged. “We’d both like to meet her.”
Elijah picked up his phone. He hadn’t heard from Stephanie since leaving her house the other day, and he wasn’t sure whether he was happy about that or not. Everything that had happened between the two of them felt unresolved, and that made him anxious. But at the same time, he didn’t want her chasing him around trying to force the conversation that he was so unready to have.
He glanced at the alert on his phone, intending not to open his texts. He didn’t want her to see that he’d read the message and decided not to respond. And he definitely wasn’t ready to respond.
But the message wasn’t from Stephanie. It was from his father.
Call me immediately.Short and to the point.
He should have known this would happen. He hadn’t been able to resist firing off an accusatory text after he had learned the truth about Stephanie. His father was aware that Elijah knew what had happened and he was trying to reach out to explain himself. That was why he wanted Elijah to call. He was sure of it.
And he wasn’t going to do it. If he was uncertain about Stephanie, he was downright furious with his father. Paying a woman to spend time with him—how could his father have done that? What had Elijah ever done in his life to deserve that?
Well, I have embarrassed him before.
He knew that was true. His behavior had, from time to time, been a problem. He knew he’d gotten too drunk at companyevents and caused a scene. He had been photographed in public places, and that had caused PR problems for his father.I was never the well-behaved son he wanted. I can admit that.
It burned him all the more to realize that his father’s scheme had worked exactly as it must have been intended to. To think that he’d spent his time wandering around farmers’ markets and having quiet movie nights at home with the woman he was seeing… of course that was exactly what his father had always wanted, and exactly what he would have ordered if he could have placed a custom request for Elijah’s behavior.
He set me up with a woman he thought would tame me, and she did.
He hadn’t minded at all when he’d believed it was real.
“Are you going to call her?” Marco spoke up.
“It isn’t her,” Elijah said. “It’s my father. He wants me to contact him.”
“Oh, don’t dothat,” Jeremy said. “It’s Saturday night.”
“No, I’m not going to,” Elijah assured him. “I have no intention of getting dragged into whatever he wants from me, don’t worry.”
“I did think you might have turned into a little more of a workaholic than you used to be,” Jeremy confided. “The fact that we haven’t seen you in such a long time… I mean, who knows how you might have changed? You’ve definitely turned into a commitment sort of person. I never thought you’d be one to settle down.”
“We’re back on this? I told you that I didn’t want to talk about her,” Elijah said. “And I’m not settling down.” He was goingto have to tell them something—they weren’t going to leave it alone. “She wasn’t who I thought she was. She was using me.”
Marco and Jeremy exchanged glances. “She didn’t seem like that type,” Jeremy said after a moment.
“Yeah,” Elijah said bitterly. “I didn’t think so either. But here we are.”
“How do you know that’s what she was doing?”
“I found an email thread. She’s been talking to my father all this time,” Elijah said. “I’m sure that’s what he wants to talk to me about now. He was paying her to spend time with me.”
“Oh, lord.” Marco signaled the bartender. “Every time I start to think I might actually have respect for Oliver Norcross, he proves me wrong. Why would he do something like that?”
