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“You hurt me,” she said once they were both seated, facing each other.
“I know, and I won’t forgive myself for that.”
“Do you understand?” she asked. “I thought you were my friend.”
“I am,” he said. When he took her hand to his lap, she pulled it away. “Rainie, please, we have to figure this out… I can’t lose you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know who you are. I know nothing about you. We weren’t friends. We were… I don’t know. You took advantage of me. Of my trust.”
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“You just told me that you knew the day Lance showed up here. You could’ve told me then; you could’ve told me that week. Instead…” Exhaling a laugh, she pushed the hair from her face. “Instead, you let me come over here and climb into your bed.”
“I didn’t…” Sealing his lips, he took a few breaths. “I know it’s bad. I didn’t want to hurt you. I thought if I told you…”
“At least now I understand why you didn’t want to talk about the breakup. Because it didn’t really happen. All this time I’ve been worried about your wellbeing. Worried that you were hurt or upset and bottling up how you felt, but it was a lie. You were snickering at me behind my back.”
“No,” he asserted, his shoulders straightening. “I struggled with this every minute. It was impossible. I didn’t want to lie to you, not for a second, but I knew the minute I told you that you’d… you’d pull away from me. And I know why. I hurt you, and that was the last thing I wanted.” Scooching closer, he scooped a careful hand onto her cheek. “Every minute I’ve spent with you, I’ve fallen deeper… Baby, Rainie, it’s been agony to want you so bad and think that… to never have a chance with you.”
“Is that why you told me?” she asked, toeing off her shoes to pull her legs up onto the seat at her side. “For sex? You thought you’d tell me, and I’d just shrug it off and fall into bed with you? You’d sacrifice everything I thought we had for a potential orgasm or two?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. His eyes narrowed. “You know me, Rainie. You know I would never treat you that way.”
She pushed his hand away from her face. “I thought you would never lie to me. No, I thought my Alex would never lie to me. You, whoever you are, I don’t know you at all.”
“Everything between us was real. What you felt, you told me on Saturday that you felt something for me. That was real.”
“I felt something for my friend,” she said, enunciating the words. “That was about security and care. That was about the love I had for my friend, for the security I felt because I trusted you. I won’t ever be able to trust you again.”
“You will,” he said. “Because I will never lie to you, about anything, never again. You have my word, and that’s not something I give lightly.”
“Last week I didn’t think you’d lie to me, and it turned out everything was a lie.”
“No,” he said. “One thing you thought about me was a lie. Just one…”
Except his tone sort of trailed off and his focus drifted toward the television. Not exactly the most confidence inspiring move.
But no way, nu-uh. She wasn’t letting him get away with that.
Getting closer, she put a hand on his cheek to bring his attention back around. “Alex?”
There was a brief moment of nothing, then his jaw moved to grind his teeth and the set of his brow changed.
“Xander,” he said, widening her eyes in question. “Most people call me Xander… And it’s not Payne either, it’s Gauge. Xander Gauge.”
Shock relaxed her arm as her fingers slipped from his jaw. “Oh my God.”
“Lance and I made a deal… I broke up with the woman I was seeing, which led to a discussion about my relationships… About the kind of relationships I had and the women I had them with.” What the hell was this? When would the hits stop coming? She couldn’t believe it, couldn’t take it all in. “What I do prevents me from dedicating myself to a woman in the way she deserves… I say that but it’s an excuse. Work gave me the excuse to put romance and my personal life on the back burner. Have you ever heard of Venture International Incorporated?” Her response was a loose shake of her head. “That’s not a surprise, most people haven’t. We’re an umbrella corporation, basically the parent company to a vast number of other companies and brands.”
“Venture…” she breathed out the word.
“Yeah,” he said. “Seven, is what we call it colloquially. V-I-I. Investments and acquisitions are what we do. We buy smaller companies and turn them into bigger ones or merge them with current operations. We also buy ailing larger companies, those who have lucrative assets or valuable intellectual property.”
It was like her head was underwater. “You’re not a consultant… You work for this Venture?”
“I own this Venture,” he said, another shot of contrition in his gaze. “When I was a teenager, a friend and I created some software… basically an algorithm that read metadata and organized it efficiently… It was more sensitive than anything on the market. Boring. Uninteresting… Until the big leagues got wind of it… There was a bidding war and they eventually bought it.”
“They bought your software.”
