Page 15 of Confusing Cade
CADE
I left without much protest, the door swinging shut behind me with a dull thud. It felt like the right move, even if it stung. I’d insulted Bella, and I knew she was pissed. Her eyes had blazed with that quiet fury she wielded like a blade. Part of me, twisted as it was, liked that I’d gotten under her skin. But as I peeled out of the parking lot, tires crunching gravel, frustration churned in my gut, hot and directionless. I couldn’t pin down why it gnawed at me so much.
The city commission was a pack of insipid idiots. Who the hell thought dragging Isabella Moretti into this would be a PR win? She wasn’t her father. She had nothing to do with his checkered legacy or his shadow. Yet they’d latched onto her name like it was some golden ticket.
I yanked my phone from my pocket, thumbing through contacts as I idled at a stoplight. Just before the light changed, I found the one I wanted.
“Cade,” Frances answered, her voice clipped, like she was already halfway out the door. “What’s up?”
“Bella’s not budging,” I said, gripping the steering wheel tighter as I accelerated through the intersection. “This whole thing’s a waste of time. She’s got no stake in this, and I’m done playing messenger.”
Frances let out a short, dry laugh. “Sorry, Cade, but you’ll need to try harder with Bella. She’s the key to making this project look good to the public. You know that.”
I most decidedly do not know that.
I bit back a curse, my jaw tight. “She’s not her father, Frances. She’s not some PR prop you can just—”
“Figure it out,” she said, her tone final. “We need her. You want things to move forward, make it happen.”
“Do I?”
“David reached out last week,” she said. “He wanted to know if I’d consider helping out with your exploratory committee for... your future.”
“Did he?”
“Just get it done,” she said. “Then we’ll talk.” The line went dead.
Fuck this whole thing.
I tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and drove in the direction of my office. It was less than two miles away, and I certainly had a mountain of paperwork I could do there, but instead, I made a detour to the gym on Dixie Highway. Even though I had plenty of workout equipment at my house, I kept a membership at Fly Fitness for the days when I wanted a change in my routine. After I grabbed my gym bag from the trunk, it wasn’t long before I started hitting the heavy bag hanging from the ceiling in the far corner of the main workout floor. I spent the next forty-five minutes punching, lifting weights, and running on the treadmill. It was my second workout of the day, but at the end of it, I felt lighter and less stressed.
Until a voice called my name as I walked to the men’s locker room.
“Cade Weston?”
I whirled around to find Kyra Matthews about twenty feet away, wiping off a spinning bike at the end of a row. “Kyra? Um... hi.”
She gave the bike seat one more swipe and walked to me. “Been a long time.”
“Not really. I saw you at the fundraiser.”
“But we didn’t talk.” She tossed her used paper towel into the nearby trash can. “You were more focused on Bella Moretti.”
I nodded, flipping over in my mind what I knew about Bella, and an ongoing connection with Kyra wasn’t one of them. “Are you all still friends?”
“Yep, and actually, she’s mybestie.”
“That’s... that’s fantastic.” I considered telling Kyra that I’d just been at a meeting with Bella but then decided against adding that information. “We had a brief chance to chat at the event.”
“She also stormed out after talking to you. She was totally pissed.”
Nodding, I took a bottle of water from my gym bag and sipped some of the contents. “You probably remember that our families have a somewhatinterestingpast.”
“Your father put her father out of business.”
Count on Kyra to keep things blunt and straightforward. Still, it wasn’t exactly a fair comment. The past was more complicated than that.
“Gino Moretti puthimselfout of business,” I corrected.
