Page 176 of Beautiful Liar

“Yes. For now. Eat, Quinn.”

He polishes off the meal in record time. I return the tray to the kitchen. He takes another dose of his pills, and I grab a blanket and return to my lounger. We watch normal TV until we fall asleep.

The pattern continues for three days, then I move to the guest bedroom. Quinn doesn’t put up a fight, but his eerie silence, the tapping finger against his thigh, and flashing eyes tells me he doesn’t like the idea.

On Friday morning, I’m awakened by a knock on my door. I jerk upright, disoriented. I push my hair out of my face and croak, “Come in.”

He enters, carrying a tray. And he’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with a baseball cap tucked into his back pocket. Over the past couple of days, signs of the streamlined, athletic lover who captivated my every breath have re-emerged. He may look a little gaunt, but Quinn Blackwood’s presence in my bedroom still had the power to make my belly quiver.

“You’ve been out?” I ask to cover the rampant thoughts and emotions zinging through me. One of which is that, now he’s better, I needed to think about making plans to return to Vancouver.

He nods, and my gaze is drawn to his square jaw. He shaved off his beard yesterday, but his lower face is covered with a designer stubble that makes my thighs clench with the need to experience its roughness.

“Was in the mood for fresh bagels. I slathered yours with cream cheese, just the way you like it.”

He waits until I sit up and sets the tray down before taking a seat opposite. I salivate at the smell of warm bread and he smirks as he passes me a bagel.

“Eat.”

His dominant side has been creeping back in over the last forty-eight hours too.

I finish the bagel, coffee and juice he sets before me. My breath catches when he leans forward and brushes the corner of my mouth.

“Cream cheese,” he states, before he licks his thumb.

Heat spikes through me. I watch hunger grow in his own eyes, and I know our impasse is coming to an end. Once our meal is finished, he sets the tray to one side and pins me with those piercing silver eyes. I clear my throat and focus on what I need to say.

“We need to clear up a few things.”

He nods. “Yes.”

“The whole Q thing. It was a little more than just a film to you, wasn’t it?”

Pain slashes across his eyes. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Maxwell and his friends were part of the group who bid for those types of films. I set the first one up as bait. Maxwell was the highest bidder of Q’s first production and every one after that. It gave me a kick to take his money and donate it to charity, while I knew I’d humiliate him eventually with the irony of what he was paying for.”

My heart aches but I nod. “Okay, I understand how things rolled with Q and Lucky. I’m not really upset about that.”

He breathes out. “Okay, but I still want to make it up to you. Will you let me?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

He nods again.

I clear my throat and continue. “You and Elyse…Sully offering me a job, me working at Blackwood Tower, did you—?”

“No. That was total coincidence. The ad I placed in the magazine was our only link. I didn’t orchestrate anything else. You started working at Blackwood before you came to me…to Q.”

The knot inside me eases a touch. “And getting evicted from the motel? Did you have something to do with that?”

His gaze drops and his jaw flexes once. “Yes. The moment you said yes to Q, I saw you as mine, in every way. I couldn’t have you living there. I needed to remove you from that vile place.”

“What if I hadn’t come to you?”

“I would have found a way. I’m not going to apologize for wanting you safe, Elyse. I will apologize for the way I did things. For not coming clean later, when I realized I didn’t want you to end up as collateral damage in the shit storm I created. What I did to you was wrong. So wrong. But…I was caught up in a decade-long, twisted game. Reason had long ceased to matter.”

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