Page 106 of Say You Will

“He’s a prick,” Henry says.

I nod. “He absolutely is. Only a prick would pretend to want to date me so he could get his hands on a company. What kind of asshole would do something like that?” Sarcasm drips from my tone.

Henry narrows his eyes. “I didn’t pretend anything. If all I’d wanted was the company, I’d have left your hotel room, gone back to the wedding reception, and found one of the other fifteen names on Spencer’s list that I refused to even considerbecause they weren’t you. Don’t pretend I’m anything like him.”

His answer doesn’t soothe me. It infuriates me. “When I wouldn’t date Lawrence, he offered me a job. Did I tell you that?”

Henry shakes his head, but never loses eye contact with me.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it? The way when he failed to get me away from you one way, he turned to a job he coincidentally needed someone like me for. Even at the time, it sounded ludicrous.”

Henry’s eyes flare.

“It makes me wonder,” I say.

Henry shakes his head slowly. “Don’t.”

I toss the iPad to the bed. “The job you offered me felt out of nowhere too. You have other departments, but somehow I’m miraculously working from your penthouse and your office?”

He looks away.

I pull my own hair in frustration. “You created a job to keep me close. Nothing has been real.”

“Have you been working? Have you assisted me in expanding my businesses into new markets? The answer is ‘yes.’ So, your job is real. What difference does it make what inspired me to tackle those markets?”

“I’m such an idiot. I thought I was proving my mother wrong. That I didn’t need her help or anyone else’s. I let you step right into her shoes. Now, it’s not my mother who controls my health insurance and finances. It’s you.”

He scowls. “If I’d wanted to do that, I have far more effective ways at my disposal. I’ve never held your employment over your head in any way, and I never would. If you stop working for me, your company will send you out on another job somewhere else. I wasn’t controlling you. I was giving you the tools to become independent, not holding you back. I gave you a ladder, not a cage.”

“This is you acting the part of savior? It’s not about what you can get from it, at all?” I ask sarcastically.

He runs his hands through his hair and squeezes his temples. “I didn’t lie to you,” he snaps. “My cards were on the table on the very first night. A person can want more than one thing at the same time.”

“Did you put Jonny up to making the engagement announcement to buy yourself time with your grandmother or pressure me?”

“No.” One clear, concise, furious syllable.

“Where did Jonny get the picture of us?”

His eyebrows lift. “I don’t know. Not from me. If I had to guess, he called my mother sometime after breakfast that morning and made her year when he told her we were getting married.”

He looks so sincere.

“Did you orchestrate having someone shoot at us to manipulate me?”

He stares at me for five long, cold seconds as every ounce of emotion and warmth bleeds out of his expression, until the man who stands before me looks like an utter stranger. This is the face his enemies see.

His eyelids drop to half-mast, and he rakes his gaze from the top of my head to my feet, and back up again. “This is what you think of me? Who you think I am?”

I look away, inexplicable shame flooding through me, as if I’m the one who’s hurting him. “I want you to take me—” I falter. I’d almost said “home.” But I don’t have one of those and never have. “Back to New York. I’ll go to a hotel.”

He straightens. “A hotel isn’t an option. If you have an alternate solution that doesn’t put your life at risk, I’m open to discussion.”

My mother.It’s what I’ve done every other time I got into trouble in the past five years. She’s on the other side of the country and has plenty of security, but I won’t go back there. Never again. “Whoever shot at us wasn’t after me. They were after you. You can stay here and have someone pick me up. No one will follow or remember me.”

“You don’t know that.”

I narrow my eyes. “Of the two of us, which one is most likely to inspire someone to commit murder?”

---