Page 20 of Wicked S.O.B.

He stares at me for a long, raw minute. Then he strides across to where I’m waiting. His fingers slide into my hair to cradle my head. One thumb traces my lower lip with slow, concentrated purpose. “Are you sure?” he presses, and I hear the note of uncertainty in his voice. From a man like him, a man who outwardly has everything—power, money, success—but is inwardly wracked with a million merciless demons, it shakes me to the roots of my soul.

I grip his wrists, feel the erratic pulse pounding through him. “A thousand percent.”

“Fucking promise me, Elyse,” he demands roughly.

“I promise,” I deliver immediately, the words rushing over his thumb, which I kiss to seal the vow.

He swallows and leans forward to rest his forehead against mine. He doesn’t speak, and neither do I. We just breathe in the promise for a minute before he lets me go and heads for the door.

“Quinn?”

The way he pauses for a moment before he turns around makes my heart stutter in alarm. “Hmm?”

I feel like a fraud for asking the question, but I can’t help myself. “Are…are we good?”

“We will be when I find a way to keep my heart from beating when I’m not with you. For now…you think about me every fucking second we’re not together, and I may just survive.”

Words fail me in that moment. He stays in the doorway long enough to see the tears falling from my eyes. Then with a solemn look that tells me he sees and acknowledges how he’s tilted the earth beneath my feet, he turns away and shuts the door behind him. A minute later, I hear the front door to the apartment close.

More tears fall while I sit on the edge of the bed, crying happy, terrified tears. If anyone had told me this time last year that I would be so hopelessly, fatalistically in love with a man as complex and devastating as Quinn Blackwood, I would’ve laughed myself stupid.

But here I am caught in the eye of a raging storm of love, while knowing deep in my bones the worst devastation is yet to come. Will we emerge from it whole? I have no idea but I’m up for whatever I have to do to make it to the other side.

I’m dying to call Dr. Freeman and ask his advice but instead I head to the shower and indulge in a twenty-minute top-to-toe scrub.

After breakfast of coffee and a bagel I abandon after two bites and the long call to a supremely ecstatic Petra is taken care of, the day stretches long and boringly in front of me. Quinn and I crave our privacy too much to have a live-in housekeeper, but the concierge offers a daily service. I’m in no mood for company today, even the discreet professional kind, so I cancel it before I email my instructor for the segment of the class I missed yesterday. But when it arrives, I’m not in the mood to study.

I wander restlessly through the apartment, going from one stunning view to the other until even the magic of New York City wanes under the gravity of my apathy. A stint at the piano is pathetically woeful after the way Quinn played it yesterday, and the TV holds very little appeal.

The conversation with Quinn and my own guilty conscience is weighing too heavily on my mind for me to concentrate on anything else.

You think about me every fucking second we’re not together…

But I want to do more than just think about him.

On a wild whim, I rush into the room Quinn uses as his office when he works from home and where I study when he’s not around. A quick Internet search yields the result I want. A first phone call with a tentative, slightly embarrassing request, and a second, quicker phone call, and I’m all set. My heart races a lot at the thought of what I’m about to do, but what the hell?

We both need this.

I throw on a gray jumper dress and my favorite pair of black Manolo thigh-high boots. A darker gray scarf threaded with pink and silver seams and a black leather biker jacket completes my outfit. I sling my purse across my body and call down to Lionel to bring the car around as I wait for the elevator. The scenario I’m playing in my mind would’ve been perfect if I took the subway, but with my stalker problem, I have to concede to being safer than sorry.

The reminder makes me hesitate when the elevator arrives. Should I even be doing this? Am I compounding my eventual reckoning with Quinn by piling on my sins? Because he’s going to be super-pissed once I confess this stalker problem to him.

Fuck it.

We wouldn’t be together in the first place if I let terror stop me from doing what needed to be done. Resolute, I step into the elevator and press the button for the ground floor.

“Good afternoon, Miss Gilbert. Traffic doesn’t look too bad this morning. I’ll have you there in no time.”

I smile in response. “Thank you, Lionel.”

“My pleasure, Miss Gilbert.”

I slide into the backseat, and he shuts the door after me. The first stop is taken care of very quickly, and I emerge from the shop clutching a bag containing everything I need.

The wild fluttering in my stomach escalates as Lionel races me toward Wall Street. The imposing sight of Blackwood Tower brings a barrage of nerves. Even more so the narrow alley and side entrance where Lionel drops me off.

“What time would you like me to pick you up, Miss Gilbert?”

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