Page 134 of Take What You Want

I can’t lose her. Not when I finally just got her back. Earned her trust. Broke down those final walls.

I barely make it to the garbage can before my stomach revolts and I retch over and over again until there’s nothing left inside.

34

JANE

As soon as I turned my phone back in when I landed in LA, I had an email from Chester’s assistant, stating he wanted a meeting with me the following morning at the LA office. It took me by surprise, since I had just seen him at the party. But come the next morning, I got dressed and went to the expansion office.

Although when I step inside, Chester isn’t the one seated behind the front desk.

“What are you doing here?” I ask Liam, who leans back in the swivel chair.

“Thanks for coming,” he says.

Why is he thanking me for coming? “Where’s Chester? I got an email from Lisa that we had a meeting this morning.”

He steeples his fingers beneath his chin and bats his eyelashes at me. Does he think that look still has the same effect on me that it used to?

“Did you know that Lisa recently got dumped by her fiancé?”

I glare at him. “You slept with Lisa just to get her to email me, tricking me into thinking Chester wanted to talk? Don’t youthink if you have to go that route, you should know I don’t want to talk to you?”

He bats a hand at me. “I didn’t sleep with her. Please, I don’t need to do that to get what I want.”

I drop my purse on the front desk with a heavy thud. I lean forward on my knuckles and stare him down. “And what do you want, Liam? Why are you here?”

“We didn’t get a chance to talk the other night. Not when your guard dog couldn’t keep his paws off you.”

“We have nothing to talk about,” I say, ignoring his jab at Nikolai. I’m not going to indulge him.

“It doesn’t need to be like this,” he states.

“Like what?” I don’t hide my annoyance.

He gestures back and forth between us. “This animosity. This tension. You didn’t need to run to the other side of the country just because I started working at the same place.”

Is he fucking kidding me? “You think Iranto the other side of the country because ofyou?” I laugh. “Oh God, you haven’t changed.”

He clenches his jaw and straightens the front of his shirt that fits him in all the wrong places. Just because something’s expensive, doesn’t mean it looks good. He needs to learn that lesson.

“I moved here to pursue bigger opportunities. And I found them. None of that has anything to do with you. Do you really think I’d let you hold so much power over my career when we aren’t even together anymore?”

“So it’s just ironic timing that you moved shortly after I started?”

“The timeline is irrelevant. What matters is that I did what was best for me and I’m happy.”

“Are you?”

“Yes,” I say. “And honestly, Liam, I hope you find someone that makes you happy, too.”

He leans on the desk and plants his chin on his knuckles. “I’m surprised you found happiness with someone who has a very public girlfriend who is not you. Does she know he attended a party, feeling up another woman, this weekend?”

I push my shoulders back, hackles rising, knowing where he’s going with this. “You signed an NDA. You can’t talk about anything you saw at that party.”

He grins, flashing me a row of perfectly straight white teeth. “Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t get an eyeful. He was quite over the top with. Like he was overcompensating.”

I can’t even imagine how I ever thought I loved this guy before. How I ever let him dictate how I felt about myself and gave him that kind of power over me.

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