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Beck and Harrison jump in the fray, Beck blocking Jeremy from continuing the fight while Harrison turns toward us and groans at the sight of Caleb’s arm around me, holding me close to his chest. “Well, if he didn’t know you two were together before, he sure knows it now.”
Beck wraps a hand around the back of Jeremy’s neck, forcing him toward the door. “You just assaulted a female in my bar,” he says. “Consider yourself permanently banned.”
“You’re lucky your friends jumped in,” Jeremy says to Caleb as he walks out, rubbing his jaw.
“Let’s see if you’re so brave outside, asshole,” Caleb replies.“I guarantee you’ll regret it when you’re searching the parking lot for your teeth.”
Harrison pushes a hand through his hair. “No one’s fighting in the parking lot. And you and I need to talk. This changes things at the office.”
God. Could dating an employee have repercussions for the company, or the merger? Probably.
Caleb’s lips press to the top of my head. “Can’t it wait?”
“No, Caleb. We need to get ahead of it, in case he presses charges. Which is why you shouldn’t have fucking hit him in the first place. What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that he just wrenched my girlfriend’s arm and I was sick of his shit, and you’d have done the same goddamn thing in my shoes.”
Harrison’s shoulders sag. “Perhaps, but we still need to strategize.Now.”
“It’s okay,” I say, stepping away, holding up my phone. “I want to check on the twins anyway.”
“Use my office,” Beck says. “It’s quieter in there.”
I open the office door, wandering toward the desks in the corner while I wait for Molly to pick up.
“Hey,” I say when she answers, “how are my babies?”
“Yourkidsare fine and asleep, though they knew less about applied physics than I anticipated. How’s it going? Have you shown him the lingerie?”
“I doubt I’ll be showing him anything. Caleb just punched Jeremy, among several other developments. I assume Jeremy won’t try to come by the house tonight and we’ll head home soon, but don’t let him in, okay?”
“As if,” she scoffs. “I didn’t want to let him into your house when you still lived with him. But—ah—it’s so romantic. I wish Michael would punch someone for me. I mean, before your wedding, when it will definitely happen.”
I rub my eyes. “No, not romantic. Potentiallyproblematic.And I also learned that Caleb’s ex was apparently the world’s sexiest human—like Marilyn Monroe, but not dead—so I may have lost the confidence to show him the lingerie.”
“If you really want Caleb to prove he cares, have you considered faking your own kidnapping?”
I laugh and let her go just as Beck walks in. He’s frowning, worried, but I’m not the object of his concern—it’s the photo hanging on the wall just a few feet away, a photo I hadn’t even noticed before, one he clearly just remembered was here and didn’t want me to see.
In it, Caleb’s sitting on a barstool, with Beck standing there waving a dollar bill. And between them, sitting on the bar itself, is a woman who must be Kate.
She has red hair falling nearly to her waist, almond-shaped eyes and a coy smile. Her dress is shirt-length and barely that, showcasing endless legs crossed seductively. She’s beautiful, but it’s not her beauty I find distressing—it’s something else. Some indescribable quality I don’t possess—sexuality andconfidence. In any movie, she’d be cast as the seductive bad girl, the one no man can resist, which is pretty much what Audrey has already told me about her. It’s basically what Caleb said too.
“I guess that’s Kate,” I whisper.
“Don’t try to convince yourself that it was some great love story between the two of them,” he says, still staring at the photo. “Kate tends to get exactly what she wants, and she wanted him. End of story. They had nothing in common.”
“They must have hadsomethingin common.”
“They hadonething in common,” he says, his voice gravelly, laced with anger, “and without that one thing, they wouldn’t have lasted an hour.”
I’m sure he thinks he’s reassured me, but in reality, he’s done the opposite. As I follow him back to the bar, I’m onceagain fighting the mounting sense that I just can’t match up to her.
“You ready?” Caleb asks.
I nod and say goodnight to his friends before we head outside together, his hand on my back the whole way as if Jeremy might be lurking around a corner.
“Ride home with me,” he says. “No point in trying to hide it all now anyway.”
