Page 391 of Tormented Billionaire Romance Series

“We’re not going out,” I corrected him. “We’re just going to lunch.”

“Fine,” he allowed. “You going out for a personal lunch with Corinne? That’s something I’m not so sure about.”

I rolled my eyes slightly. “What’s to be sure about? We’ll eat, we’ll talk, we’ll come back to work. That’s all.”

“Eating and talking is all well and good. The question is whether you’ll come back from that lunch with Corinne looking the way you looked when I walked in here.”

I just sighed at him. It had always been Leo who did the most worrying in our partnership.

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When we walked out of the lobby together and started down the street, something happened that I hadn’t been expecting — something that froze my blood, and I could only hope that Corinne could not see the way I suddenly felt.

It started with her innocent question, “Where are we going? Aren’t we driving there?”

“We don’t need to drive from work to this place,” I said. “It’s walking distance. You’ve probably passed by it yourself. It’s this little gourmet sandwich shop where I like to go.”

“Okay,” she said. “You know, after we went to Ben’s, I found this really nice little coffee house where we should go sometime.”

I didn’t think anything of her remark at first. I just said, “Really?”

“Mm-hmm,” she replied. “It’s actually not far from the gym. It’s this cute place with, like, pastel-colored walls, and there’s this woman who works there, her name is Kathleen. She’s really friendly and looks like a model you’d see posing at a car show or something…”

That was all it took. Just hearing the name,Kathleen, and Corinne’s description of her, I knew exactly where Corinne had been and exactly whom she met there. I felt as if someone had attached electrodes to my heart and turned on the juice. In that instant, I couldn’t breathe. If I’d been holding hands with Corinne, I would have probably crushed her hand in shock.

What could I do here?It was another maddening coincidence like Corinne moving onto the same block as Ben and meeting him while she was out grocery shopping, but this time, it was worse.In a city the size of Cincinnati, how did something like this keep happening?This time it was the woman that I was going out with, unknowingly running into my ex at a place that she might end up visiting again. My insides felt like freezing water running down sheets of ice.

Staying calm, I weighed my options and decided there was only one thing to do. In this situation, honesty was the best way to go. I had to come clean with her or run the risk of Corinne going back to Kathleen’s coffee shop and getting friendly with her, and the two of them talking about past relationships. For what I had to do next, we both needed to be sitting down. I decided to wait until we got to where we were going.

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We got to the sandwich shop. I got us a couple of hoagies and a couple of bottles of iced tea, and a table. Once we were comfortably seated, I decided there was no time like the present.

“These look wonderful!” Corinne said, preparing to take a bite out of her hoagie. “You have good taste in lunch places.”

“Um…thank you,” I said with trepidation for what I had committed to doing and was now about to launch into. “Listen, before we start, there’s something I should probably tell you.”

On the brink of her first bite, she looked innocently over at me. “What’s that?”

“You remember the funny little coincidence of you already knowing Ben before I brought up going to his gym?” I began, seeing that as the best way to set this up. Before I could get another word further along, another rude jolt to my nerves came in the door.

His voice turned up the juice on those imaginary electrodes wired up to my heart. I could have jumped up and keeled over. Right behind Corinne, with his biggest, most devilish smile, who should come swaggering in but Kane.

Of all places, of all times,Kane!

I felt too sick to eat. Whyhim?Whynow?

“Hey, hey, hey, Elijah!” he called, walking swiftly to our table. “Stepped out for a bite, did you? Who do we have here?”

As I looked on with a pit opening up in the bottom of my stomach, Kane came around the side of our table to get a look at Corinne. Having no idea who or what was now confronting her, she looked up at him. A question scratched away inside my head,Can I just die now, please?

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” he asked Corinne in that way that he had of getting too familiar with women too quickly. This was the kind of behavior that had gotten him called out for harassment.

Her eyes darting back and forth from Kane to me, she said, a bit tentatively, “Um…hi. I’m Corinne.”

“Corinne!” he crowed as if he’d known her for years. He offered his hand and said, “Put ‘er there!”

Smiling politely, not knowing quite what to make of him, Corinne shook hands with Kane. The thought of him touching her, even in such an unassuming and unaggressive way as a handshake, made me want to jump up, tear him away from her, and pound him into the floor of the sandwich shop.

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