Page 42 of Sweet Surrender

She didn’t look convinced. “I guess you won’t want to hear about the call I got from Jacob Dalton first thing this morning, or rather, from his agent.” She was angry again, nostrils flaring with every breath. “He asked me point-blank if Jacob could get out of the contract because they aren’t sure we’re the right fit.”

“That son of a bitch!” I slammed a hand against my desk because out of everything, that was the straw that broke the camel's back. “He fucking hits on me at lunch, then has the nerve to act like he can’t believe I get involved with a client?”

“Maybe that’s exactly why he did it,” she pointed out, sounding tired. “If you were going to abandon your ethics, you should’ve abandoned them with him. You know how these things go down.” At least there was sympathy in her voice.

“I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry,” I mumbled, folding my arms on the desk and resting my head on top. “I will never stop hating myself for this.”

She kept me hanging for a moment or two before sighing. “I don’t want you to hate yourself forever. We’ll get through this. I know we will. It’s just… a lot.”

That was putting it mildly. She sounded less like she wanted to kill me, anyway, which was a huge relief. I could hold onto that.

“I’m going to go out there to see if anybody has any questions or concerns.”

No, don’t worry about it,” she insisted when I began to rise from my chair. “Keep combing through those photos. Maybe send them over to Noah. He might be able to recognize somebody you would otherwise overlook.”

It wasn’t that I hadn’t considered that yet. I had already run through countless options in my head. For twenty-four hours, I had worried myself sick, answering phone calls from my parents, from Rose, the twins. There was a point when I wanted to throw my hands into the air and give up, to tell everybody to check in with each other rather than bothering me. But I was an adult, and as such, I had to face the music.

That didn’t mean, however, that I wanted to reach out to Noah. It wasn’t exactly like he had kicked me out of his penthouse, but that didn’t make the aftermath any easier to swallow. I had heard Ari. At least I had heard how angry he was, even if I couldn’t make out the exact words he used before Jules called me in a panic after seeing the photos online. I was sure when he looked at me, he saw the origin of all of his troubles. He had taken a huge risk with me, and it had blown up in our faces. And now, all the work we had done to clear up his image may as well have never happened.

That was how it felt, anyway. Time would tell if it was true. In the meantime, there was nothing I could do but put on my big girl panties and type up an email to him.

Got some photos from the sports clinic. Thought maybe you could recognize somebody who might have taken those shots of us…

That didn’t feel like enough. What could I say? Should I thank him? No, that would come off so corny, not to mention a little patronizing. Thanks for the best sex ever. Yeah, that would make everything better. What was I thinking?

… I hope things have calmed down a little from yesterday. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.

Sienna Black

CEO

Momentum Public Relations

I sent the message before I could overthink it any further, then resolved to step out of my office for the first time since my arrival. I needed to face the team. I needed to be a leader, no matter how much I wanted to crawl under a blanket and never come back out.

I stood, straightening out my suit jacket, smoothing down any errant flyaways before stepping away from my desk, only to be halted by my ringing phone. Even now, my heart leaped when I saw Noah’s name on the screen. Was I trying to have my heart broken? I took a single, shaky breath before answering. “Don’t tell me you already saw somebody in those photos.”

There was a brief pause before he replied. “I haven’t opened the file yet. I wanted to talk to you. Yesterday went all wrong.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. No, I couldn’t do this. There was no giving in. No working things out. “It went the way it had to. We’re both adults with big responsibilities. You were right.”

“What about everything else?”

“There is no everything else,” I reminded him as gently as I could while my heart twisted and burned. This was so fucking unfair, but then life wasn’t fair. “We both worked too hard and too long to be irresponsible now. I think all of this can be handled and cleaned up, but that doesn’t mean we can pretend none of it happened and go back to how things were before those photos came out.”

“Can we at least talk?” he asked, quiet, hesitant.

So unlike the Noah I thought I knew.

So unlike the Noah who’d broken my heart all over again by letting me down gently yesterday morning.

I looked out the window at the view I loved so much, willing myself to get through this without breaking down. “We’re talking now.” He was determined to kill me, wasn’t he? How many times had I wished he would regret hurting me? How many times did I imagine him at my mercy, begging for a chance to be understood, asking for my forgiveness? Reality wasn’t nearly as satisfying as my fantasies, but then a lot of water had passed under the bridge since then.

“I have to go,” I told him, biting my lip, fighting through the regret that threatened to steal my voice. “I need to do a little damage control around the office. Do yourself a favor and look through the photos. Drake Thomas is out of the country,” I added. “So I doubt he was behind this.”

“All right.” Disappointment hung heavy in his voice, but that wasn’t my problem. I couldn’t manage the way he dealt with this. I could only manage myself.

And I was having a hard enough time of that without taking on the burden of his feelings. I was having such a hard time, in fact, that it took a few minutes to catch my breath after ending the call. There was something terribly final about it, and painful too. Somewhere along the line, I had gotten much too involved with him, so much so, there were tears threatening to spill onto my cheeks when I imagined never touching him again.

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