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He opens the door of his truck and I climb in, fighting the desire to burst into tears. He grabs my hand after he starts the engine, but his face is strained.
“Are you really okay?”
That concern in his eyes undoes me. I want this so much, wanthimso much, and it’s starting to feel like it’s never going to work out. He didn’t promise me the fairy tale and between his ex and mine and the fact that he’s still planning to move...it’s hard to see how we’ll wind up with one.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I can’t believe I got you in a fight tonight.”
“You didn’t get me in a fight. Iwantedthat fight. I wanted it more than I’ve ever wanted a fight in my entire life, and I still want it. Are you sure he didn’t hurt you?”
“I’m sure.”
He cradles my jaw in his hands and kisses me. When he starts to lean away, I grab his collar and pull him to me. His mouth on mine feels like relief, like a cure, but he backs away again, leaning his head against the seat. “Lucie, keep kissing me like that and I’m not gonna be able to stop.”
“I don’t want you to stop,” I tell him. The bar is only thirty feet away, but it’s too dark for anyone to see inside his truck. I climb over him. The steering wheel is at my back and my left knee is propped awkwardly on the center console and I couldn’t care less. I unzip his jeans, and he lifts his hips justenough for me to shove them and his boxers down. He reaches between my legs and stills.
“Thong?” he asks hoarsely.
“You can’t even see it, unfortunately.”
“Fuck,” he says, pulling it to the side as he thrusts into me. “The idea of it’s enough.”
I ride him hard and fast. I’m not sure what happened to the girl who always put herself last, because there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m doing this entirely for myself.
“Holy shit,” he groans. “What’s brought this on?”
I say nothing because I can’t tell him the truth: that it’s starting to feel like the odds are stacked against us. That they’ve always been stacked against us.
And that maybe we weren’t meant to wind up together after all.
32
CALEB
Lucie and I file our disclosure paperwork with HR on Saturday morning. Beck and I search her car for a tracker, and I have her phone wiped for the second time—though my tech guy finds nothing on it.
Harrison can’t ask for a restraining order because if he gets one, Jeremy has no reason not to press charges against me for throwing that punch.
It already feels like I’m failing her somehow, and then I get a call Monday morning thatguaranteesI’m going to fail her. It’s the call I’ve been waiting on for weeks—the meeting that will change everything. But it means I have to cancel our weekend away and I’ll be gone most of the weeks that would have led up to it.
I text Lucie and ask her to come down to my office.
“Close the door,” I tell her.
She takes the seat across from mine with her brow furrowed. “What’s up?”
“I finally got invited to Brad Caldwell’s compound in Maui.”
The light in her eyes grows dim. We haven’t discussed what happens after the merger goes through—how soon I’ll have toleave, how we’ll see each other when we’re on different coasts. A piece of me has just been hoping for a miracle, though I don’t know what it would be.
“Isn’t that a good thing?” she asks quietly. “It means the merger’s going forward?”
I nod. “Yeah. That’s pretty much the final step of this whole thing. But he wants to meet over Fourth of July weekend, so I’ll need to cancel our trip, and I’m going to be gone a lot between then and now. I’m leaving tonight for India and I should be home within a week, but I won’t be able to help with Henry’s project much.”
Lucie flinches. She hasn’t even complained, but I already want to remind her that I never promised anything.
“Okay,” she says, taking a deep breath. “You’ll still come to the show though, right? On the twenty-second?”
I pinch my brow. I’d rather not commit, but I guess I already did. “Yeah.” I slide her the phone that just arrived. “That’s for you. Jeremy’s still tracking you somehow and just because we haven’t found spyware doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
