Page 80 of Falling for the Bad Boy
Trinity
“What are you talking about? Not the only thing you’ve lied about? What’s that supposed to mean?” I scrambled to my feet and reached for my shirt.
He stood and tried to grab my hand. “Let me explain. Can we talk for a minute?”
“Talk fast.” I clamped my arms around my stomach while he struggled to pull his pants on.
“Will you sit? Please?” He gestured to the couch.
I slumped onto the cushion as a niggling feeling began to pulse in my stomach. Oliver was too good to be true. I’d known it from the start. What other secrets could he be keeping?
The cushion sank as he took a seat next to me. Nervous about what deep, dark lies he might be about to reveal, I shifted away.
“Just tell me.” I risked a glance at his face.
His eyes had lost that hint of humor he always seemed to carry with him. The slump of his shoulders, the hard set of his jaw—it was going to be bad. I could tell.
“I want you to know that when I agreed to help Wyatt, I didn’t know you. Not the way I do now.” He glanced down at his hands, his cheeks taking on a slight shade of pink.
“What do you mean? You’ve been helping Wyatt since before we met. You work at his bar.” I shook my head. It didn’t make sense.
“Yeah. But he asked me to help him with something else.” He gulped in a breath of air. “God, this is hard.”
I waited, my stomach twisting and turning while every awful possibility of what he might say drifted through my head. “What did he ask you to help with?”
He lifted his head, his gaze connecting with mine. Pain mingled with regret in the depths of his eyes. “When you first took over the building, Wyatt was pissed. He’d planned on buying it so he could expand.”
“I already knew that.” The pressure around my heart eased a bit. “He low-balled Mr. Hopkins, and he said he wouldn’t have sold to him even if his retirement depended on it.”
“Right.” Oliver took my hand, his fingers closing around mine in a firm grip like he was afraid I’d yank my hand away. “So Wyatt figured if Hopkins wouldn’t sell to him, then maybe he could buy from you.”
He was talking in circles. “But I never offered to sell. I have no intention of leaving.”
He captured his bottom lip with his teeth and waited like he expected me to have a moment of enlightenment.
“Just tell me what you need to say. I’ve got a million things to do today like figure out where my yarn shipment is, get the samples I need finished up, and so much more.”
His gaze dropped to the cushion while his thumb brushed over the back of my hand. “Your yarn isn’t coming.”
“Of course it is. The shipment just hasn’t been delivered yet.” The knot in my gut tightened.
“The shipment was refused.”
“That’s crazy. I wasn’t even here. Who would have refused delivery?” I waited for him to say something. He looked at me, his mouth turned down, a sadness in his eyes I’d never seen before. “Wait a minute… you were here.”
He didn’t respond, just glanced at his hands.
I slid my fingers out of his grip.
“You were here that day.” Even as the knot grew tighter and tighter, I waited for him to deny it. “Oliver, what did you do?”
His teeth worried over his lip as he flexed and unflexed his hand into a fist. “I didn’t know you like I do now. Wyatt said he’d make me a partner… he offered me a work visa.”
“In exchange for what? Sending all of my inventory away?” I couldn’t share space on the couch with him for a moment more. “I’ve got to go. I need to fix this.”
“That’s not all.”
“What do you mean that’s not all?” I whirled around to face him, tears threatening to spill over. How could I have been so wrong about him? I’d shut out my family, turned my back on my parents, and for what? For a man who’d been lying to me from the start? “I’ve got to go. I can’t be here anymore.”
