Page 57 of Caught Between Two Billionaires
“You scared me,” I say, soft and serious.
He looks up at me. “Same.”
That shakes a silent laugh out of me. “Okay, but I wasn’t the one acting crazy.”
“No, you were the one holding his hand. The whole damn play, that’s all I could see. There could have been an explosion on that stage, and I wouldn’t have noticed.”
My cheeks feel hot. “That’s a shame, because it was an amazing play. About love and betrayal and redemption. About doing what’s right, and all the ways we pay for it.”
“That’s what I saw, too.”
He’s talking about Sutton holding my hand. Is that the love or the betrayal? Maybe it’s the redemption, being saved from the terrible pattern we were in.
“I didn’t come to your condo to have sex with you.”
He smiles a little, his eyes closed. “Didn’t think so. You restrained yourself plenty of other times when I didn’t smell like liquor and hadn’t just ruined your nice business deal.”
“You couldn’t hear that from the back.”
“No, but I saw the way Sutton looked. What did you have to promise them?”
“Some book restorations. Saving the carving behind the library. It doesn’t matter now. She looked pretty pissed about the fight.”
“We’ll push the deal through.”
“How?” I ask, almost soundless.
He hears me anyway. “I don’t know.”
“If you’re fighting the rich old ladies of the historical society, who’s going to buy the designer purses and overpriced shoes when your mall opens?”
He doesn’t answer, and I realize he’s fallen asleep. A lightweight, my Christopher. Or maybe he just drank his weight in vodka in that box.
The linen closet looks downright pathetic with only a spare sheet and a mismatched blanket. I take them both because I’m already shivering in the condo. The thermostat looks like it would require an airplane pilot to navigate, so I cover Christopher with both of them.
He snores. Not very loud, but enough that I notice. A rumble in his chest. That’s an intimate piece of knowledge I never had before, not even when we shared a bed that first night. I was too out of it after my dip in the bay to wake up. Or maybe I heard him and just didn’t remember.
It’s possible that I snore, that he heard me do it that night.
This was his fall into the ocean. Not a literal tumble with a splash in the salt water, but a fall nonetheless. The lowest I’ve ever seen him. How could I not help him back up?
Part of me wants to search his cabinets and drawers to ferret out his secrets. The other part of me realizes that there wouldn’t be any lying around. He’s a man who holds it all behind those dark eyes, locked behind a thousand doors, each as opaque as the next. What would it be like to get behind them? Maybe I’m only now resigned to the idea that I won’t ever know.
His bed is just as modern and impersonal as the rest of the condo, a low-slung floating platform that feels like a boat adrift on the ocean. That’s where I curl up beneath a heavy down comforter. The pillow smells like him, something ineffable I recognize even if I can’t name it, and I drift asleep to the comfort of it.
The shine of the boardroom table reminds me of the flat white of canvas. It’s a place with promise, where something can be made that wasn’t before. Money, usually.
The first time I was here I was too busy being pissed at Christopher to appreciate the room. In the half hour that Sutton makes me wait for him, I have the time to study the cherrywood table that matches the walls. Made from the same trees, I think. I have the sudden sense that they were built by hand—by Sutton’s hand. That he sawed and sanded these boards. Put whatever this glossy stuff is on top so a sheet of paper can fly all the way across, no friction, all inertia.
There’s a kind of romance to that idea, that he would have carved this boardroom himself.
He’s angry at me, something I would know even if he hadn’t given me the message through the receptionist that he would be handling an important phone call before joining me. Even if he didn’t enter the room with his blue eyes flashing and his body vibrating with tension.
I would know he’s angry because of the way I left him. The way I chose Christopher. At least that’s how it would have seemed to him, and maybe that’s how it is.
He drops something on the table, and just like that, it glides a little. Magic. “Our construction permit which has been on hold for two weeks, finally got reviewed. And denied.”
Of course it did. We pissed off some of the most important people in the city last night, as well as each other. So much for diplomacy. “Did you by any chance make this table yourself?”
