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“Then let me pay rent for you.”
My heart skipped a beat at the thought and I shook my head adamantly. “No, absolutely not.”
“Why not? I’m offering you a perfectly viable way to live some place nicer.”
“Because you could just disappear at any moment! Or heaven forbid, die. Or change your mind and I would be stuck with a place I can’t afford. I’d be forced to break lease and scramble for another place to live after being spoiled by what you were providing with me!
“Look, I vastly appreciate how kind and accommodating you’ve been with this, but let’s be honest, you’ve had less than twenty-four hours to come to grips with a reality that I’ve been living in for a month. It’s easy to make promises now, but how will you feel two weeks from now? Or a month?
“I mean, the only reason you came here is because you want a divorce! And don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the divorce too, but that’s not exactly the foundation on which we should build a dependency on. Emotions change and are unstable, and the last thing I need right now is instability.”
He didn’t answer for several moments, and I was afraid that I had crossed a line. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so frank with him, but sugar coating something to him just seemed disrespectful. He was a logical man, so I had gone with my gut and given him the practical answer.
“You’re right,” he said finally. “You need to protect yourself.”
Before I could ask him what he meant by that, he was pulling out his phone. I stood, on the opposite side of the car, watching as he dialed someone up with a stone face.
“Yeah, were you able to find someone?”
The voice answered on the phone, just loud enough for me to hear that someone was speaking, but not nearly audible enough for me to make out words.
“Great. Can you email me all that? I need to swing by them right now. Yes… really. Right now.” Another pause and the slightest of smiles crept across his face. “Thank you. I guess I owe you one at this point… yeah, yeah, I’ll remember it come time for the Christmas bonus. You have a good weekend now.”
He hung up and slid the phone back into his pocket. “Alright, hop in.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, somewhere between nervous and intrigued.
“You’ll see,” he answered, getting in himself. “But we’re going to make sure you’re protected.”
What the hell could that mean? I had no idea, but I guess I was going to have to trust him or barrel roll out of his car. I didn’t know what it was about this man that fascinated me so much and made me want to find out exactly what he was planning to do, but whatever it was, I hoped that it wasn’t going to get me killed somehow.
Chapter Sixteen
~Nicole~
I sat awkwardly in the high back chair provided to me, rubbing my stomach to comfort the bubbling within. I didn’t know if my baby was old enough to kick, but it certainly felt like he was tossing about every so often.
“Trevor will be in in just a few more minutes,” a woman said, walking in to hand both of us a sparkling water. What was with rich people and their sparkling water? If I wanted some good ol’ H20, I’d drink some. If I wanted something bubbly, I’d get a damn soda. “Can I get you anything else?”
“No, we’re fine,” James answered, looking much more calm than I felt.
We were sitting in some sort of very expensive looking office, in a building that looked to be filled with offices. There wasn’t a set company name out front, so I guessed that it was some sort of rental space that had conference rooms and offices that business folk could rent month by month as they needed. The cost of some of these places was more than double of my own rent budget, so I couldn’t help but wonder what we were here for.
James had said that this was for protecting me, but what could being here have to do with protecting me? I was terrible with riddles as it were, so it wasn’t like I was going to figure it out any time soon.
Thankfully I didn’t have to wait long. Less than a few minutes later, a man in a button up shirt and a pastel vest came striding in, a cup of coffee in one hand and a briefcase in the other.
“Thank you for meeting with us on the weekend,” James said, standing to offer his hand.
The man just looked at him, raising both of his full hands, before crossing to his desk. “To be honest, I’m not doing this for you, I’m doing this for our mutual friend. He sponsored me through a touch semester of law school, so I figured I owed him.”
