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As one, we stop moving and look at the screen.
“Turn it off!” Ella snaps. Her expression is humiliated and angry.
Whereas mine is just full of rage. I snap, moving fast to grab the journalist by the shirt collar and slam him up against the hard granite wall.
“Why the fuck are you bothering us?” I demand to know.
“Easy, easy!” he insists. “If you think that I don’t have a copy of the video stored in the cloud, you’re smoking something. And I’ll tell you right now… I have it on a dead man’s trigger. If I don’t check in and deactivate the device once a day, it will automatically release your video to every single news outlet in the world.”
I grit my teeth, slamming him against the wall again. “You’re a dead man.”
“Ehh… I think I’m going to be okay for as long as I have this little video. I may not have obtained it through honest means. But that won’t mean a thing to the journalists who receive it. You’re a big, bad guy. There are plenty of people out there that would love to take you down.”
I slam him against the wall again, thinking about whether or not it would be better just to beat the living daylights out of this guy, right here and now.
But Ella’s hand on my arm and plaintive whisper convince me otherwise.
“Keir. Please don’t.”
I slide her a look. Her brown eyes are full of unshed tears. Letting the journalist go, I put my hands up and back away. I look squarely at the man, wishing that looks really could kill.
“Is this blackmail, then?” I grit out.
He smiles. “Meet me here tomorrow at one p.m. Bring ten million dollars. Then we can talk about disarming the dead man’s trigger.”
I tense, bucking at the back. He pales but smiles at both Ella and I, doffing an imaginary cap. Then he takes off and heads out of the building.
“Fuck!” I mutter a curse.
“Yeah, no shit,” Ella says. She crosses her arms, looking at me like I’m a rabid dog. “You’re married?”
I squint, not really wanting to explain myself to a girl I just met.
“It’s complicated,” I answer, at last.
Her reply is instant. “Fuck off.”
“Yeah, you weren’t exactly forthcoming about who you were either.”
She screws up her face. “The two situations do not even vaguely compare with each other. You can fuck your former employee’s daughter. I can’t fuck a married man. And we both know who is going to get all the blame if this comes out. I’m a young Black woman and you’re a married Scottish tycoon. The battle lines have been drawn between us since the dawn of time.”
She’s right, of course. It’s a race and gender thing, and she’s on the losing end of the equation for both. But I don’t have to tell her that.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll pay the blackmail. This will never come out.”
Ella sizes me up for a moment. Then she evidently finds me lacking, because she shakes her head.
“Pray to god you’re right. Now I’m leaving. And I think it would be best if you didn’t follow me.”
Then Ella stalks out the glass doors and into the early morning, disappearing as though she was never here.
But in my heart of hearts, I know that she was. Hell, I can still taste her, still smell her on my clothes. And given the chance? If we lived in the same city… if I didn’t have Isla to care for…
If I wasn’t technically married…
If Ella wasn’t too young for me, too immature, too likely to care more about partying than people…
If it were just a physical thing, I would absolutely be drawn to Ella over and over again. But of course there are tons of reasons why I can’t just do what my body wants. There are other people in the world, people that depend on me.
