Page 14 of 7 Nights of Sin

Chapter 5

Caro

It was another late night in the office. I'd finally gotten the information I needed to set Kevin up with some interviews and got him a couple of appearances at women's shelters and children’s homes. Places that would make him look good to be seen at.

There wouldn't be big photo ops, nothing staged or planned out, but I would slip a word or two to people I trusted to get the pictures out there. They'd be candid, which was best for something like this, and it would make it seem like it was something he was doing out of the goodness of his own heart. Not just because he needed the good press.

I typed up more of the plan, letting it all unwind in my head. It was as good a plan as I'd ever come up with, all things considered, and it still fucking rankled that I was using it to help Kevin, who had very much dug this hole for himself.

He was so frustrating.

One minute it seemed like he really did care about what was happening and how it could affect him, and the next he was laughing it off and getting dangerously close to flirting with me.

I didn't know what he wanted, but I knew I was stronger than he was. I could outlast him easily and do my job without succumbing to whatever game he was playing.

And then we could go our separate ways and never have to see each other again.

I hit the enter key on my keyboard with a particularly vicious jab of my finger, right when Sam came to poke her head in.

"I knew I'd find you here," she said. "It's late, Caro."

"I know." The clock at the bottom of the screen said it was closing in on ten. "To be fair, you're still here."

"This office won't run itself," she responded with a wry smile. "You seem like you're in a mood. Did something happen?"

I leaned back with a sigh. Admitting that Kevin was getting under my skin felt like admitting to a failure, which I hated, but I was tired of having it in my head and not being able to get it out.

"He's driving me nuts, to be honest," I grumbled.

Sam came all the way into my office and closed the door. "What is it about him that you don't like so much?" she wanted to know. "Is it the bad boy image or something? Maybe he reminds you of someone?"

I snorted. "He reminds me of himself. I knew him. In college. We dated." Making those words come out of my mouth was harder than I'd expected. I hadn't talked to anyone about being dumped by Kevin since it had happened. Most of the time I tried to forget about it, but now that he was going to be a fixture in my life, at least until I fixed his fuck-up, it wasn't going to be so easy not to think about it.

Sam was staring at me, eyes wide. "You dated Kevin Porter?"

I shrugged a shoulder. "That was before he was important. He was just playing college sports and dreaming big dreams." In spite of myself, a wistful little smile spread over my face. "He was different then. Or I thought he was."

"What happened?" Sam asked.

"He dumped me. Simple as that."

"There has to be more to it than that."

I shook my head. "I don't know. We were happy, or I thought we were. It was getting close to graduation, and I knew he had big dreams. I knew he wanted to go pro. I knew his career meant a lot to him, but he knew that about me, too. And I had been planning so much for how we could make it work. I had charts and lists and flight schedules for how it could all work out so we could have what we wanted and stay together. And then three days before graduation he called me to his apartment and told me it was over."

I shrugged again. At the time, I'd been unbelievably hurt. He'd laid it all out, how we just wouldn't have time for each other and he needed to focus on making it big. All the time I'd been spending trying to come up with ways to make it work, he'd been coming up with reasons it wouldn't.

In the end, I didn't even tell him about my plans. What would have been the point? He'd made his thoughts on the matter perfectly clear, and it was obvious he didn't see even a chance that things could work out. He wasn't even willing to consider it.

He'd made me feel like a burden. Like someone who was standing in the way of the things he wanted. So I'd just left after that, and we hadn't seen each other again.

I told Sam the short version of it, leaving out the hurt feelings and the fact that I'd spent the run up to graduation sobbing my eyes out over my broken heart.

Looking back at that made me feel stupid, and I didn't want to bring it up.

"I'm so sorry, Caro," Sam was saying, and the soft look on her face echoed her words. "You deserved better than that."

"It's fine, Sam. I was twenty-one and I thought I was...in love, I guess. But everyone has a story like that, right? It's not important."

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