Page 43 of Enemy Boss

I have no doubt that he can and will make me bend to his will and say that I love him. I am going to hold out for as long as I can though, and even if he beats me senseless and makes me say it to stop the pain, we will both know that I don’t mean it, that I’m just saying it to save myself from a beating.

I have spent most of this encounter trying my best to placate Ross and keep him calm and that has gotten me nowhere and I feel a spark of anger and rebellion bloom inside of me, and I decide that if this bastard is going to hurt me, I am going to hurt him first. Maybe not physically. Even the bite I gave him did little more than make his skin red and piss him off. But mentally and emotionally, I know how to cut him to the bone, and I give him a small smile that he must take for agreement, because he smiles back at me encouragingly.

“Say it Max,” he whispers.

“I will never say those words to you Ross. Not because it’s too soon, or because I am afraid that I will scare you away. I won’t say those words to you because they are simply not true. I don’t love you. I love Cullen,” I say.

I can see that my shot hit home. I see the pain in Ross’s eyes, and for a moment, I feel a stab of pain too, because telling him I love Cullen reminds me that I have lost Cullen. And I didn’t even tell him how I truly felt about him. But now isn’t the time to go down that tangent.

“You had better keep that name out of your damned mouth girl because you and him are done. You are with me now and nothing and no one will keep us apart this time,” he says.

He leans down to kiss me, and I turn my head to the side. His lips rub against my cheek and even that sends a shiver of revulsion through me, but it’s better than him getting to put his lips on mine.

“Don’t fucking test me here Max,” he says, and he grabs my face in his spare hand. He comes in from beneath my jaw, his hand angled so that I am half choked, and he squeezes my cheeks hard enough to hurt me, and also hard enough to make my lips pop out in a parody of someone puckering up their lips for a kiss.

When he comes in to try and kiss me again, I try to turn my head away, but I can’t do it. He holds me in place, and I can feel his hot breath on my lips, and I know it’s only a second until his lips touch mine. I squeeze my eyes closed because I can’t bear to see his face so close to mine, and tears spring from my eyes and slowly run down my face as I wait for the moment something breaks inside of me.

Chapter 32

Cullen

The moment I see the email from Bill Bryson with the attachment of Max’s email and her notes from the meeting we had with Mr McPherson, I feel like something inside of me has died. I can feel myself hyper-ventilating, the pain shooting through my chest and stomach. She has betrayed me. The one woman I really thought I loved and who loved me in return has been acting this whole time. I take a moment to concentrate on slowing my breathing and as I do it, the pains across my torso and abdomen ease off. I am still shaken to the core though and although the breathing exercises calm me enough that my body doesn’t react in such an intense way, emotionally, I am still a wreck.

When Bill had first called me and told me he had received an email from a member of my staff stabbing me in the back I didn’t believe him. Especially when he said that the name of that member of my staff was Max, the last person at the company I would think would want stab me in the back. But he told me that he had proof and that he would send it to me. And now he has, and he has ruined everything. I want to just pretend none of this has happened, but as nice as it would be to just not have to deal with this, I know I have to because whether I like it or not, I can’t unsee what I saw.

I try to tell myself that while Bill wasn’t lying about the email, that it isn’t necessarily true that everything between me and Max is a lie, that maybe I’m missing something. I’m pretty sure I’m not missing anything, but I keep holding onto the hope that I am, that she will have some sort of explanation for the email, something that will make it ok. Something that we will both end up laughing about in the years to come. Or even something that doesn’t quite make sense that I can choose to believe will do.

I can’t think of anything that it could be that could explain everything without it ending in me being betrayed, but I have to have hope. And I force myself to hold onto that tiny shred of it and I hope against hope that she has something, anything that I can cling onto so that I can convince myself that I haven’t been duped by her after all, and that everything that we have is real.

I need to stop thinking and do something physical to try and distract my brain. I get up and I pace up and down my office, back and forth, back and forth. I do this for about fifteen minutes, but it doesn’t really do anything for me except make me feel dizzy. I stop pacing and leave my office. I go to the breakroom because people in the company will think I’m crazy if they see me just pacing around the corridors and I am not ready to go back to my office yet because I feel like I still can’t think straight. I grab a coffee and drink it standing up in the breakroom. The caffeine seems to help me feel a bit better and I head back to my office. For all I know I will still have the same problems when I go back there, the last thing I want is someone coming into the breakroom and trying to talk to me. Even though I feel better than I did five minutes ago, I’m hardly in the mood to pass the time of day with someone. I need to think, but clearly and logically, not chat.

I keep wondering when Max was planning to leave, both her role at the company and her role as my girlfriend, and for a few minutes. I wonder briefly if I should try to beat her at her own game and not let on that I know she has been playing a game here with me. I could see then what exactly her end goal is. Although I guess that her end goal is pretty obvious. She must have figured that she could use the information to leverage herself a deal at Cyber Safe. But what she hadn’t counted on was Bill being a moral sort who wouldn’t act on something like what she had sent him, and she definitely wouldn’t have counted on him giving me the head’s up about one of my staff sabotaging me like this. She probably saw herself going to Cyber Safe in the next few days, announcing who she was, and being offered a position and a huge corner office on the spot.

Whatever end game Max has and whatever game she is playing, I decide I’m not going to stoop to that level, and I’m not going to hide from this. I am self-aware enough to know that telling myself I want to see how far she will go with it is just a way out for me, a way to put off the inevitable and it has gone way past that now. I’m going to have to confront her. It’s the only thing I can do. And the longer I leave it, the harder it will get to bring it up, and at some point, she will leave, and I will be as blindsided as I was this morning, only this time, I will have no one to blame for that but myself.

I’m still clinging on to that tiny little ray of hope I have left that there will somehow be a reasonable explanation for it all, but if there isn’t, then at least I will have the satisfaction of letting Max know that I knew all about her little act before she was ready to spring the truth on me, and that she was no longer going to be able to play me like her favorite tune on an old guitar. It was a small victory, but it was a victory all the same and if I lost everything else, I would take what tiny victories I could get.

With the decision made, I scrawl a note for Max: ‘Come to my office immediately when you get in’.

It is cold and to the point, but it is also impersonal enough that if another member of staff happens to see it, it doesn’t give anything personal away. I don’t want this being the next bout of office gossip no matter what the outcome is. I take the note and put it on Max’s desk where she can’t miss it, and then I go back to my office.

I keep thinking of this morning, how Max and I were together and how we even came together. Surely, she can’t have been faking that the whole time we were fucking. I know she wasn’t. She could make all the right noises and pull all off the right faces, but no one is a good enough actress to gush the way she does when she comes. So yes, she probably did genuinely enjoy the sex if nothing else.

And after we had sex, I told her to have a half day off because she was doing a good job and the whole time, she was double crossing me. God, I am such a frigging idiot. I might as well have just bent over in front of her and said, here have at it, take every shred of my dignity.

She must think I’m so fucking stupid, so blind to not see what she was doing right under my nose. I suppose she’s not wrong. I was blinded by the way she made me feel and for once, I listened to my heart instead of my head. That was a big mistake as I always feared it would be. I will learn from it though and I won’t make that same mistake again, not with her and not with anyone else either.

I look at the clock and nine minutes have passed since I last looked at it and it feels like at least an hour or two has passed by. I guess it’s going to be a long morning waiting for her to get into the office so that we can hash this thing out but there’s really nothing I can do except wait now. I could call her and tell her to get her ass in here, but that might give her the head’s up that I’m onto her and give her time to come up with some sort of story. I don’t that. I want to get her actual reaction when I confront her with this, and I want to be able to see her face and her body language, not just hear her voice. It is much harder to do the right expressions and display the right body language than it is to just lie with words. She’s obviously good at it, or I would have seen it before now, but now that I know what I’m looking for, where before, I had no reason to doubt her, so I wasn’t looking for the signs of lies.

By the time I’m expecting Max to be showing up, some of the pain I had felt at first has given way to anger which I think will help me confront her in a logical way rather than in an emotional way.

I keep thinking about how I had helped this girl when she needed help. How I had taken a chance on a stranger and given her a job and how I had overlooked the fact that she made mistakes on important things at first. And then I had given her my heart and she had crumpled it up like scrap paper and thrown it away. How could she do that to me? And how could she still look me in the eye knowing what she had done? How had she let me fuck her this morning before work knowing it was all an act and that the game was going to be up soon enough?

I didn’t much like feeling angry like this, but it was better than the broken feeling I had experienced earlier. Especially when it came to be time to confront Max. I feel like I’m more in control of my emotions now which means I’m less likely to break down in front of Max or to believe any more bullshit just because I so desperately want to believe in her, in us.

A light tap at my office door comes as I sit staring at the invoice I’m meant to be checking over and approving. I have had it open for over half an hour now and it’s literally a two minute job, I just can’t focus on it.

That tap on my door tells me that Max is here, and I’m both relieved that we are about to get this over with and nervous that it will go badly. But at least once it’s done, I might be able to concentrate enough to complete simple tasks again. I take a deep, steadying breath and I force my face into a neutral expression, something I learned to do for meeting with clients when I needed them not to know what I was thinking.

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