Page 80 of Tempt

“You’ve got my attention,” I said as the black screen lit up with her smiling face. She was in her office at the university.

“Sorry about the secrecy but I wanted to make sure you were alone.”

Which was why I was nervous. Elizabeth had something specific she wanted to tell me and by the look in her eyes I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to like any of it. “Well, I’m alone now.”

“You can go ahead and open the package.” She gave me a second to pull the tab and get it open. “I finished doing the full history of that building you’re renovating for Theo. I’ve sent you two versions of it.”

Oh, this couldn’t be good. Elizabeth was about as blunt and open as anyone I’d ever met. If she was taking all these precautions, she had something serious to say. “Okay?”

She cleared her throat and started fidgeting. “It was all very normal, cool old stuff. Nothing terribly interesting. Until I got to about fifteen years ago. By that time the building had been pretty abandoned for a while and was being used by transients. Then it became a drug den. Somehow it stayed under the radar and no one realized it had become completely taken over by one of the biggest pushers of cocaine in the UK.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I knew Elizabeth well enough to know all of this was just preamble to the really big bomb.

“The book with the blank cover? Flip to page one-twenty-five.”

I held the two books in my hands as a feeling of dread washed over me. One book had a historical photo of the building on the cover. The other, like she said, was simply black. I set down the book with a cover and opened the black one.

My heart thudded in my chest as I stopped on the page in question. On it was photographs and news articles. I immediately recognized the beautiful headshot embedded in the newsprint of one article titled,Heiress OD’s in Drug Den.

It was Nicki.

I covered my mouth to hold in whatever gasp I knew was about to come out of me. I wanted to somehow stem the tide of shock I was feeling. “What is this?”

Elizabeth leaned into the camera. “Theo’s sister overdosed in that building. She was technically dead when the paramedics arrived, but they were able to revive her. From what I could tell, she went to rehab after she recovered, then art school. You know her, right?”

I nodded. When Nicki said her past was bad, I hadn’t imagined it being like this. I’d had no idea. Not a clue.

Was this why the building renovation was so personal to Theo? The puzzle pieces were starting to come together, but there were still a lot of holes.

“There’s more. Turn to the next page.” I took a breath before I did it. The moment I saw the headlines everything else fell into place.

“Three weeks later the building was raided and Dan Christie, along with all his accomplices, was taken into custody.”

The same fucking building? All the blood drained out of my head. I didn’t know any of this. Why didn’t I know any of this? “Why didn’t he tell me?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “You feel like shit right now, don’t you?” I nodded. “He didn’t want you to feel that.”

I glared at her as my heart sank into my chest. She knew full well how much I hated it when people decided what I should feel. “Why is he renovating this building? This is so fucked up…”

Elizabeth cocked her head to the side. “I’m pretty sure you don’t want to hear my answer to that.”

She was right. I didn’t want to hear it from her. “Why did you tell me this?” She could have kept it quiet, let Theo tell me. Instead she chose to drop this on me.

“I wanted to tell you face-to-face next week, but I couldn’t keep this from you for that long. You’re in deep with this guy, and while I completely understand why he kept this stuff from you—and I know it’s exactly whatIwould do in his shoes—I thought you needed to know what you were in with, considering everything that’s going on.”

I’d gone numb at some point. My mind was completely detached from my body. My head was a foggy wasteland and putting facts together seemed impossible—like a dream you don’t really have any control over.

She was right—I was in deep. Too deep. “What’s the second book?”

“That’s the official version. It doesn’t contain any of the articles I just showed you.”

I held a book in each hand like some sort of twisted version of Lady Law. I was incredibly glad I’d been able to tell Elizabeth everything about Theo. There were no secrets between us, and right now that was what was saving me from falling into a dark abyss of loneliness.

“Are you going to be okay?” She knew I wasn’t.

This was a lot to digest. Considering everything that was going on and how deeply it affected me, I was shocked that Theo had kept this a secret. What else had he kept to himself? He said he’d tell me about his past when he was ready, but this wasn’t the same thing. This building connected us. It was my work and his past intersecting. This lie-by-omission felt hugely important. “What do you want me to say right now?”

She shrugged. “I think you want me to hug you.”

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