Page 49 of So Close

“It’s just—I wasn’t supposed to do that. I made a deal with myself. That I was going to sort myself out, get my life on track, stand on my own two feet,beforeI let anyone in my pants.”

“I can’t imagine younotstanding on your own two feet,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you didn’t see me with Patrick.”

He just couldn’t picture her getting knocked backwards. She was fierce and quick and a match for any man he’d ever met, himself included. “What did he do to you, Auburn?”

She seemed to fold in on herself, and for a moment, he didn’t think she was going to answer. Then she squared her shoulders. “I met him when I was working a weekend at The Nines in Portland. They were understaffed and one of my school friends called me and said they were paying double overtime for good people who could fill in.”

He whistled, and a fleeting smile passed over her face, then vanished. “It was fun for a couple of days, being there, but it wasn’t really my thing. Lots of entitled Silicon Vall—” She slammed her lips shut.

He laughed. “Entitled Silicon Valley assholes?”

She bit her lip and smiled sheepishly. “Let’s just say a lot of guys who thought the hotel staff lived to serve them.”

“Was Patrick one of them?” Although Patrick was a different brand of entitled. He was a New York I-banker who—Trey knew—had grown up Connecticut country-club rich. That was a whole other breed from the guys Trey encountered in the West Coast tech subculture. No better—but different.

“No. He actually called out one of his colleagues who was treating me like shit.”

Trey felt a stab of appreciation, mixed with—well, fuck it. Envy. Because his situation with Auburn up to this point hadn’t allowed him to be much of a hero. The opposite, in fact. But at least he hadn’t done anything calculated to get in her pants. The Patrick Moriarty he knew from reputation was more than capable of standing up for a woman with the sole goal of getting laid. Hell, the Patrick Moriarty he knew was entirely capable of orchestrating an incident just to give himself a chance to play the hero.

You don’t know that’s what happened, he chastised himself.

“He asked me out. Wined and dined and totally, completely snowed me. Talk about being swept off your feet. He got us reservations at exclusive restaurants no one could get into for months. Flew me to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower. Booked us an exclusive nighttime Disney World tour. We did a long weekend in Bangkok. You get the idea.”

Okay, hereallydidn’t like that. The idea of Patrick Moriarty pulling out all the stops to woo Auburn … Trey was still feeling the surge of intense power that went along with what they’d just done—the pleasure he’d given her, but the rest of it, too, the way she’d let him take charge, when she didn’t let him do that in any other arena. And while he had no right to feel possessive of her, at the moment he didn’t want any other man, ever, to haveswept her off her feet.

“He asked me to move to New York. I agonized, but he was so persuasive.” She frowned. “I turned my back on my family. My career. I didn’t realize yet that there weren’t a million other Beachcrests out there. I thought I could find something else similar. I took a couple of jobs in New York hotels—but oh, God, Ihatedthose jobs. Patrick kept saying maybe hospitality wasn’t for me, and I started to think he was right.”

He couldn’t help it; he made a strangled sound of dissent.

“I know,” she said wearily. “I started taking other jobs here and there, but nothing worked out. And by then Patrick was saying, ‘You don’t need to work, Auburn. I want to take care of you. And eventually I got worn down.

“And it wasn’t just that. We lived in his New York apartment. He had people to do everything—cooking, cleaning, shopping—so there wasn’t much I could do to be useful. We almost never socialized. He said he wanted to protect me from the media and how catty people were in his social circles, and that sounded good to me. That wouldn’t have been my scene. But I didn’t realize how small my world was getting.”

“I did a bunch of volunteer work, but he was always saying he thought people were taking advantage of my good nature. He was very loving but also very possessive, so if I spent time with people other than him, it made him jealous. So—”

She closed her eyes.

“So I stopped. I stopped visiting my siblings because it made him so unhappy for me to leave for four or five days at a time, and he was always too busy with work to fly to the West Coast. You see where this is going, don’t you?”

He nodded. His stomach was knotted up from the effort of not cursing out Patrick Moriarty.

“Chiara had tried to tell me from the beginning that he was bad news, and toward the end, she stepped it up, until—I stopped calling her or taking her calls. Because it felt like I had to choose between Chiara’s view of things and Patrick’s, and I couldn’t believe that Patrick, who loved me so much, would—”

She made a small choking sound, and he reached for her, but she pulled away. “Chiara came to New York. She tried to basically do an intervention. Point out to me what had happened, what I’d given up, what I’d become. And I told her to get the hell out, to go away and not come back.”

Her shoulders were shaking, but her voice was still steady. Strong.

“It happened so slowly. That’s my only defense. My world got smaller and smaller and smaller until he filled the whole thing, and I didn’t notice because he never hurt me. He wasn’t emotionally abusive. He was so careful, so subtle, the way he controlled me. He never even really gaslit me. Not until near the end, when I finally admitted I was unhappy and he made it all about me. About how I didn’t know how to be happy or how to see the good in things. He said I’d always let Chiara control me and that she was still trying to manipulate me because she was jealous of my relationship with him. And a lot of other bullshit. He played me like a violin.”

“But you left him. In the end.”

She took a deep breath. “I did. It was Beachcrest that saved me, to be perfectly honest. Carl called me. He said he’d fired yet another crappy manager and that the job was open. He knew it was longer than a long shot …”

Tears were running down her face, and his fingers ached with the need to wipe them away. He knewhewasn’t the one who’d made her cry—but it still hurt like a mofo.

“I wouldn’t have come home for Chiara. Or any of my siblings. Or Carl, even. But something about Beachcrest needing me gave me the courage to take a really hard look at where I was and how different it was from where I’d meant to be. I hated what I saw. I finally saw what Chiara saw, and heard what she’d been trying to tell me. I can’t even explain why. Maybe I was just ready. But what I know is, Beachcrest brought me home.”

---