Page 49 of Undercover
And I’d had it. Completely. “You’re sorry?” I burst out of my chair so abruptly it spun away from the table and clattered into the wall. “You’resorry? That’s just fucking great. I’ve been sitting here waiting to be able to go home to my own shower and my own bed—” My voice wobbled, and I couldn’t meet his eyes, dropping my gaze to the scratched table. My bed. Where I’d been with Alec—fuck, that morning. It felt like something that’d happened twenty years ago, waking up with him wrapped around me. I hadn’t even changed the sheets yet. It’d still be rumpled from our last round.
“Gabe, please. I needed to see you, and I thought I’d be done the same time as you. I got a phone call I couldn’t wait to take.”
My hands were shaking. I shoved them in the front pocket of my hoodie, hoping he wouldn’t see. I still couldn’t look up to find out what might be in his expression, in his eyes. I might crack if I did. “I don’t give a fuck about your phone call. I want to go home. And I don’t want to see you. You used me. I kind of even understand why. But I can’t—”
“I didn’t use you.” He moved in my peripheral vision, striding around the table until he stood right next to me, close enough that I could smell leather and coffee and that scent of him I’d drowned in last night, composed of pheromones and lust and intimacy. Until I could feel the heat of his body, a seductive contrast to the air-conditioned chill of the police station. “I started to. I meant to use you, yeah. To spend enough time with you to get an in at Middleton Marine. And if it’d only gone that far, then—”
“But it didn’t only go that far.” I stepped back. I had to get away from him. He sounded sincere, pleading even. Desperate. And why wouldn’t he? He’d acted like such a fucking douchebag, making me think he wanted me for myself. Who wouldn’t want absolution for the way he’d behaved? But he wanted forgiveness for his sake, not mine. “It didn’t,” I repeated quietly, and finally, finally managed to glance up.
Alec had his fists clenched at his sides, and he leaned forward like he was fighting with himself, one part straining to reach me, the other part keeping the first on a tight leash. His face looked ghostly under the crappy lighting. Drained. Pale and with sunken circles under his eyes, like all the willpower that’d kept him going all day had seeped away in the last five minutes.
“There’s nothing I can say that’ll excuse what I did. But I wanted you from the start. Ilikedyou from the start. Nothing that happened between us—last night, was about anything else. Just me and you. Not the case. I swear to you that’s the truth.”
“I know,” I said. And I did. I really had taken some time to think about it, sitting there gazing into Officer Brown’sI Like Big Busts and I Cannot Liemug. “But it’s not about the fact that we had sex.” Alec’s eyes widened, and his mouth opened. Nope, not his turn. I cut him off with, “It isn’t, and if you think that’s the problem, too bad, because this is about me, not about you. I would’ve taken you home with me the day we met, so it’s not like I need to trust someone to fuck him, okay? And that’s maybe a problem, but whatever. You let me think all the other stuff, the hand-holding and the ice cream and the taking it slow, were about me, about valuingme. And it wasn’t. It was aboutyounot feeling like a dick, like you would if you fucked someone you wanted to use for information.”
Alec visibly flinched, taking a step back, almost a stumble. Yeah, I’d hit that nail right on the head. It gave me a vicious, self-destructive pleasure. More than anything, I wished he could convince me otherwise. The pathetic, needy part of me that didn’t believe I deserved self-respect kept whispering,It doesn’t matter, let him talk you out of being angry, maybe he’ll like you enough to fuck you again and pretend he likes you a little bit more.
But no, fuck that. I was done being that guy. And it hurt so much to stomp on the tiny little embers of hope still flaring inside me that I knew it had to be the right thing to do.
“It was—okay, I’m not going to insult your intelligence by trying to tell you you’re wrong,” he said hoarsely. “But you’re not completely right, either. Yeah. I would’ve slept with you a lot sooner if I hadn’t been trying to do the right thing. But I still would’ve wanted to do all that. Be with you. Get to know you.”
“You could’ve trusted me.” It all came down to that, in the end. “You could’ve told me the truth.”
“Yeah?” he shot back. “Dave was one of my main suspects. That, or the whole company being shady. Would you ask someone to inform on his own family?”
“No, but I wouldn’t lie about everything from my job to my last name to—I mean, do you even have a sister?”
“I didn’t tell you everything, but I didn’t make anything up except my job, and you know the truth about that now. I promise you. Everything else you know about me is real.” He’d moved forward again, a hand reaching out to me. God, he was big. He loomed over me in this little room. I took another stumbling step back. I’d run out of conference room soon, and end up cornered.
I snorted derisively, sounding, for a moment, just like Dave. Dammit. “And what I know about you could fill…pretty much the side of a coffee mug. Or maybe a single page, if we’re being generous. But you know everything about me, right? Ran a background check?” The look on his face answered that question clearly enough. “I don’t know you. And I don’t trust you. I’d started to trust you!”
That came out in an anguished wail, all my exhaustion and stress and broken-hearted misery bubbling up to the surface at once. Horrifyingly, I felt tears forming at the corners of my eyes, my eyelids prickling and burning.
If I cried in front of Alec, I’d have to go jump off a pier into Lake Champlain.
“Gabe, please.” His brows drew together in what could’ve been concern. Fuck that. “Let’s—we’ll talk later. Let me take you home. Do you want to call someone to come over and—”
“If this weren’t such a fucked-up situation, you know who I’d want to call? The guy I’ve been dating. The guy who knows what kind of ice cream and wine I’d want to deal with this shitshow, the guy who could hold me all night and still be there in the morning.” I stopped, panting for breath, my head swimming. I needed toget out of there. “You’re not taking me home. You’re not taking me anywhere. Don’t call me. Don’t come anywhere near me. I’ll see you at the trial, or whatever, but other than that—leave me the hell alone.”
I escaped around the other end of the conference table, squeezing awkwardly between the chair at the end and a sideboard. My hoodie caught on the chair, and it took me a second of yanking and cursing to pop out of the gap between the furniture.
That was too much, and the tears started to come out for real.
I ran for the door and flung it open. Alec came after me, calling my name, but I charged down the hall, a startled young officer jumping out of my way, and ran straight into Officer Brown. His hands landed on my upper arms, steadying me. God, I wanted to lean into his broad chest and cry. He seemed like someone’s dad. I could work with that. Even someone else’s dad sounded great right then, since my own sure as hell wouldn’t be comforting me.
“Gabe, you okay? What’s—did he do something to you?”
I looked up to find Officer Brown glaring over my head, presumably at Alec.
“No, but I need to go home. Right now.”
“Yeah, kid, you can go home. C’mon. I’ll drive you.”
He steered me out the front of the station, into the cool, fresh night air, almost too cold on my burning cheeks, and into the front seat of his cruiser.
The ride home passed in a blur. I didn’t even give him my address; he must’ve remembered it from all the times I’d given it for various forms over the course of the evening.
I thought I thanked him, but I wasn’t sure. I barely got upstairs and into my condo before I collapsed, sliding down the door and landing in a huddle on the floor, my forehead on my knees. I couldn’t face my bedroom. Or my bathroom, no matter how much I wanted a hot shower to get the fear-fueled sweat of being kidnapped and the funk of hospitals and police stations off of me. All I’d think about would be Alec’s fingers sliding through my wet hair, caressing the nape of my neck, as his cock pushed into my throat. The way he’d made me feel: powerful and vulnerable, desired and seductive and…not loved, maybe. But close.
