Page 20 of A Christmas Maker

I glare at him without an ounce of amusement. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Annoying you.”

“You have a girlfriend. Go annoy her. Hell, go fuck her and get back to work.”

Aillard sits up, his blond head smiling as he raises his middle finger in salute. “Actually, Whitney is holed up at work. Something about having an author come by for a signing and she told me to go away and bug someone else. I don’t have any meetings for the rest of the day and couldn’t focus, ergo I come to you.”

“Why not King?”

“Because King’s assistants would throw a viper at me if I dared interrupt him. Apparently only Emilia has the right to walk in there. Therefore, I am stuck with annoying you. Although you seem ridiculously stressed out. What are you reading? It’s not one of the shitty tabloids, is it?”

“It’s Bex’s charity list.”

Aillard hops off the couch immediately and walks over, calm as can be like he didn’t just pounce on my couch like an eleven year old boy. “No shit?” He bends forward and scans the paper before whistling low. “Damn, that’s a lot of charities. She really volunteers with all of them?”

“I’m pretty sure this is her main job, and speech writing is actually a hobby,” I sigh.

Aillard pauses in reading the dossier to look at me. “Did she email this to you or did you go to her office and pick it up?”

“I…went to her office and saw her.”

He steps away from my desk, taking one of the chairs in front of it. “Alright, that wasn’t part of the plan. The plan was to only meet up during volunteering so that way neither of you would be inconvenienced.”

My lips compress. This is the touchy part of using Bex as a scapegoat for the things going wrong in my life. “I wanted to see her.”

Understatement of the year. There’s just something about Bex that leaves me tangled up in knots. She was the nostalgia I missed when reminiscing. When I think back to my regrets, her face is the first to pop up. Not Jessica. Bex and I may have only been together for a summer, married at the end for two months, a total of five months together, yet it feels like I lived a lifetime with her.

“She’s the same but she’s different,” I murmur, not realizing I said the words aloud until Aillard responds.

“She’s got a backbone now.”

“I told her the whole story of what happened.” I set the highlighter down. “I don’t know what I was expecting her to say. Maybe it was karmic justice for humiliating her, but she just felt bad for me.”

“She’s a good person.” The rest of his words go unsaid,that we broke.

“I loved her more than all the years I ever loved Jessica,” I muse. Perhaps I never loved Jessica at all. She became an obligation. Something to tend to without much emotional input. And teenage love is far different than adult love as I found out the hard way.

“Should we have found an alternative way?” Aillard carefully asks. He slowly leans forward, placing his elbows on his knees. “King and I were under the impression this relationship was water under the bridge.”

Of course they did. Because Thorin Ravenscroft isn’t allowed to be brutal. He isn’t allowed to smear his soul with black ink. I wasn’t in the business of allowing myself to say the things I desperately wanted back then or now.

It’s times like this I wonder what type of friend I would play if I could be myself. King is ruthless in his endeavors, Aillard heartless in his business. I have to be the peacekeeper, the romantic, the pure one.

Except my personality is an illusion. Only one person has seen behind the mask. That’s the real reason I cling to the anger of my friends choosing for me to get rid of Bex. I didn’t have to pretend with her. I didn’t have to be something I’m not. She saw the devastation I willingly caused as a mogul in the hotel industry and chose to stand by me.

Bex Hastings is a lot of things.

A philanthropist, a carer, a perfectionist, a model citizen.

She also knows how to live with a stained, ink-smeared soul.

Mine might be due to ensuring my family’s business flourishes, but her tarnish came from clawing her way out of depression into the light to be whole again after the devastating loss of both of her parents in her life.

“I’m not sure where you got that information,” I say evenly, referencing Aillard’s belief that removing Bex from my life was an easy feat for me.

He looks taken aback by my words. He licks his lips, a twitch in his cheek giving away his nervousness. “I’m pretty sure she hates all of us.”

She would. “We gave her enough to hate, don’t you think?”

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