Page 228 of Tease Me


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“You should’ve told me the truth,” she said, resting her hand on his chest. “You should’ve walked into the coffee shop that Monday and told me it was a lie.”

“You would’ve been hurt.”

“I would’ve been shocked, yes, it changes the way I look at you. Changes how open I can be.”

“I don’t want it to,” he said with a slight shake of his head, his hand traveling higher. “I want you to be honest with me, and I want you to trust me.”

“Because you want to sleep with me,” she said. “I can’t sleep with you, Alex. I just don’t…” Alex wasn’t even his name. “Xander… It feels weird to say it.”

“I don’t mind Alex. You can call me whatever you want.”

“This isn’t that easy,” she said, pushing his hand from her leg to get up and head into the kitchen. “In the agreement you had with Lance, you were supposed to be gay? I don’t understand what that achieves.”

“No,” he said, twisting around to watch as she went to retrieve wine from the fridge. “I was supposed to live as a regular Joe for ninety days. To commit myself to someone without them knowing about Venture and the money.”

Frowning, she filled a glass. “You were supposed to fall in love?”

“No, it was never about love,” he said, surging to his feet to join her. “They wanted me to understand what a real connection was, I guess.”

“And whoever she was, you were supposed to lie to her,” she said, handing him the bottle when he picked up the stopper. “You made an agreement to lie to an innocent person.”

His shoulders dropped. “When you put it like that…”

“Did you ever think about her? About how she might feel after ninety days? Or did you just assume that ‘surprise! I’m a billionaire’ would erase all your sins? Did you plan to sleep with her? That’s sexual fraud, Alex. You could get into serious trouble for that.”

He put the wine in the fridge and went to his Scotch bottle in the corner. “Lance also brought up how what he’d led you to believe could be bad press.”

“Is that why you didn’t tell me the truth?”

“I knew you wouldn’t go to the press,” he said, pouring his own drink. He paused while putting the cap back on the bottle. “I didn’t care if you did. If exposing the truth will ease any of your hurt, I want you to do it.”

“I don’t want to hurt you back, Alex. That’s not the way I work.”

“I know.” She propped a hip on the counter as he sank into the corner. “Can you forgive me?”

Could she? It seemed so big right then, him, his life, the lie, all of it. “I don’t know… I don’t know how I feel about any of this… Was I her? Was I the one you planned to commit to for ninety days? Is that why Lance led me to believe you were gay? To screw with you? Make it harder for you to get laid?” He inhaled like he planned to say something but stalled, pinging her radar. “Tell me the truth. It’s the only way there’s even a chance of our friendship surviving this.”

“I was attracted to you. From the very beginning, I was attracted to you. I’d just arrived in the city and was going to the apartment when I stopped for coffee. That’s when I met you.”

“You hadn’t even been here yet?”

“No,” he said. “We met and… I wanted to see you again. Yes, I suppose the honest answer is yes, because I intended to pursue you. That was why I asked about your lunch break. Your conversation with Lance happened while I was at the counter after we’d known each other ten minutes. Leading you to believe I was gay was his way of… messing with me. He didn’t know anything about you. None of us did. None of us knew we would turn into… us.”

“You didn’t ask me out,” she said. “There were two weeks between our meeting and the day I met Lance.”

“I was enjoying getting to know you and didn’t want to spook you… Maybe I wasn’t honest with myself about how uncomfortable I was lying to you.”

“About Venture?”

“Right. I wasn’t completely honest with you… But this is all new to me, Rainie. I haven’t had a genuine, organic relationship with anyone for a long time. With dating, my people get a call from some manager or PR company, or I have my people reach out to a woman I might be interested in… I don’t just sit and talk with anyone… except Lance and Ethan and business dominates those conversations.”

That name again. “Ethan?”

“Ethan Atwell, my CFO. Guy’s a genius with numbers… This whole thing’s been a mindfuck since day one. I wanted you like I’d never wanted another woman, but Lance and Ethan were in my head. I wanted it to be real, us to be real. I didn’t want it to be about the money. I didn’t want you to see me as that guy; I wanted to just be myself.”

“Except you didn’t show me your real self,” she said. “You didn’t trust me or give me a chance to develop anything genuine with you because you lied the whole time.”

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