Page 11 of Sucker
Landon
The campus is closed to visitors, so I’m forced to wait until morning to go after her. I scared her. I came on too strong, offered too much and held on too tight, too soon. Of course she ran.
I can’t believe I was crazy enough to ask her to marry me.
Dating rules 101 say you never even hint at the L-word until the three-month mark, and I hit her with a wedding proposal on thefirst night.Rookie mistake. My only excuse is that I’ve never felt so strongly about a woman before. I didn’t know what to do with all that emotion.
Now I have to try to fix it because I can’t afford to let her go. Life won’t be worth shit if I don’t have her in it.
Armed with coffee and donuts, I make my way on campus as early as I’m allowed and knock on her dorm room door. A short blonde answers who I’m assuming is Juliet, the owner of Willa’s fake ID.
“Can I help you?” she asks through a small opening in the doorway.
“I’m here to see Willa,” I say, holding up the donut bag and coffees.
She looks me up and down then closes the door. I hear stage whispering on the other side, then the slide bolt sounds, and the door sweeps open.
“Don’t get any of your man juices on my bed. Keep it to Willa’s side of the room,” she says, taking one of the coffees and the entire bag of donuts before she brushes past me.
“Ah, OK,” I say as I watch her walk away before turning my attention to Willa, my angel. “Coffee?” I hold up the tray, and she smiles from where she’s sitting on her bed in a pair of Tweety Bird pajamas. She looks adorable, and I think I fall a little harder each time I look at her. Her hair is piled up in a messy bun on her head, and her eyes look all puffy from a night of crying. But she’s still beautiful, still perfect. I think I’d love her with snot running out of her nose.
The thought strikes me hard for the purity behind it.I love her.
“Thanks,” she says, taking the cup from me as I sit across from her on her bed. “I guess we should talk, huh?”
“We probably should have done that part first, but yeah, we should talk. Why don’t you start with why you left last night?”
She presses her lips together, her eyes watering as she bounces her shoulders. “I was overwhelmed.”
“I scared you off, didn’t I?”
“What? No. No. You were—are—amazing. And what I feel for you…it’s intense, and it came out of the blue, and I suppose, I just needed some time to wrap my head around it. I’m supposed to hate you. I mean, I’ve always been told you were the bad guy.”
I nod slowly. “Because of your dad?” I suppose it’s to be expected.
She nods. “He says you cheated him out of the company so you could keepThe Round Tablefor yourself.”
“I see. I suppose I should ask why you took a job with the company under a different name?”
“I wanted to see the original coding. I wanted to prove my dad wrote it. Well, at least part of it, anyway.”
“He didn’t,” I say quickly, trying to keep my cool because I don’t want to badmouth the guy to his daughter. But it sounds like he’s done a lot of badmouthing about me. Willa deserves to know the truth.
“No?”
“No. I wrote the program. Actually, I wrote all of the programs.”
“I don’t understand.”
I wipe my hand over my face, trying to choose my words carefully. “Your father was my best friend, Willa. For a long time, I ignored his problems and did what I could to keep the business afloat. But the better the company did, the bigger his problems became until there almost wasn’t a company at all. I had a decision to make—buy him out, or go bankrupt. I bought him out.”
“What?” She frowns, and it’s obvious she’s never heard the full story.
“I have the paperwork that I can show you if you need proof. We dissolved the partnership fair and square, I paid him, and even took on all the debt he accrued in the company’s name. When my program took off, he came to me with his hand out. His bad reputation meant he couldn’t get work in the industry, but he had a student loan and no way to pay for it. So, I helped. He had you to worry about, and I couldn’t live with myself knowing he was struggling to provide for you while I was making millions. But the more I helped, the worse he got. I gave him money, but he burned through it, so I set up a trust but he’d spend every cent the moment it was released to him. I tightened up the rules and nothing I did was enough to make him stop. In the end, I had to walk away. But, I could never walk away from you. I know I wasn’t present in your life, but I made provisions to make sure you’d have what you needed—as much as I could, anyway…”
I stop and take a breath, seeing the way her eyes go wide with realization. “The scholarships?” she whispers.
I nod. “You were always so smart. It was the only way I could be sure you’d make a life better for yourself. I was always the anonymous benefactor. And I was fine that way because that’s all the power I had, but then you sought me out, and well, I saw how beautiful you’d become and…Fuck. I fell in love with you.”
