Page 31 of Abduction
“I can call you a car,” I offered her. I didn’t want her to ever feel like she was stuck around me. Seemed like she got enough of that from her fiancé as it was. If she needed to get out of here, I would make sure she could.
“That would be good,” she agreed, and she shuffled a little closer to the store, putting a few more inches between the two of us. As she held the book bag to her chest, I could see the bracelet dangling delicately from her wrist. It looked perfect on her. She was well-suited to decadence, though I was sure she would have argued with me on it.
She deserved more than what that guy was giving her right now, and I could see it. She couldn’t. She had probably been beaten down by him for so long that she thought this was what she deserved, to be cheated on and lied to while he went out with his new girl. He didn’t know what the hell he was missing. She was an amazing woman, even I could tell that in the short time we had spent together, and he was going to lose her to someone sooner or later.
I just had to hope that someone turned out to be me.
I called a cab from the private hire company we always used, and they told me they would be there in a few minutes. She was gazing out to the street, into the rain, and I could see how pale she had gotten. She was feeling guilty. I wished I could convince her she didn’t have a thing to worry about, that her man was doing much worse right now, but I doubted she would have believed me. She was beating herself up for just that kiss.
Or maybe more. Maybe it was everything we’d done before that was fucking her up. She’d been having such a good time with me, she’d let me take her out on a date, buy her that bracelet, show her how much fun she could have been having, and now, we’d kissed, and we’d made it more real than she ever would have wanted. Good—I needed her to see how good life could have been, if she didn’t spend all her time worrying about what the man she was supposed to marry was up to.
I doubted she would keep things up with him much longer. She could see now how much fun the two of us would have had together, and it would play on her mind, go around and around until she came back to me for more.
“Can I get your number?” I asked her. I wanted us to have a line of communication in future, so I didn’t have to sneak around at her university to bump into her, but she shook her head.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to see each other again,” she replied, her voice aching with sadness. I didn’t want her to feel this down on herself, but I got it. If she had never done something like this before, fooling around with someone when she was dating another person, I could see how it would get to her, make her feel as though she was doing something she should be ashamed of. I didn’t know how I was supposed to pull that emotion away from her, convince her she had nothing she needed to feel bad about. Yeah, maybe she hadn’t gone about it in the best way, but she was just reminding herself that there was a life outside her cheating man.
“If you’re sure,” I replied. I knew we would run into each other at least once more. I didn’t believe in fate, but we had already been thrown together a bunch of times as it was, and I could see it happening again before we were done with each other.
“I am,” she replied, and she looked down at the bracelet on her wrist. “I can give you this back, if you want.”
“What?” I asked, confused.
“The bracelet,” she replied, sounding sad. “You can get your money back for it, if you want, if you think it would be better...”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I replied.
“I don’t want you to think I’m just trying to use you,” she admitted. “Maybe it would be better if you took this...”
“Amber, I told you,” I reminded her. “This is about you remembering what your worth. It has nothing to do with me now. It’s yours. Okay?”
She managed a smile. I could tell she was relieved. I might have been an asshole in other ways, but I wasn’t going to snatch back a gift I had given her just because she didn’t want to go home with me. If anything, I respected her even more for it. She was sticking by her principles, and not everyone would have done the same when presented with what I had to offer. She really was going to be a good lawyer, if she had such a strong sense of sureness about who she was and what she wanted. What was right.
The car arrived, and she paused for a moment before she climbed in. There was so much more I wanted to say to her, but I didn’t even know where to start. If I could have found the magic word to get her to come back to my place, spend the night and forget about her shithead of a fiancé, I would have said them then.
But I didn’t. And I didn’t want to push her beyond what she was comfortable with. I knew we would see each other again, and I got the feeling she knew it, too.
I watched her climb into the car, and she lifted a hand and waved through the window before it pulled away. I could have gotten the address she was headed to from the driver, but I knew it would have been an overstep. If she wanted to leave now, I would let her. Give her some time to clear her head, and she would come back to me eventually, wanting more, needing more.
Once the car was out of sight, I pulled out my phone—and cursed under my breath when I saw the time. I had missed my meeting with Tommy, after I had told him a million times over I was going to be there. I had a half-dozen missed calls from him already, and I was sure he was chewing glass right now over how pissed he was. I could see there were messages waiting for me too, but there was no need to open any of them. I didn’t want to deal with it right now, not when I knew what they were going to say.
I peered up to the sky, to see if there might have been a break in the clouds, but there was nothing. I could have called a cab to get home, but I wanted the time to myself, space to think about everything that had happened with Amber this evening.
I would just go right to my father’s place and talk to him in person. I was sure I could get him on my side if I explained the situation in full, that I had just gotten distracted by a woman.
I felt a stirring of worry in the base of my stomach. For all my father had tried not to spoil us when we had been kids, he had made sure to do what he could to keep us in line. The old-fashioned way. Sometimes, that meant lifting a hand to us, or worse, and I wasn’t sure if he was above it now. I had been fucking up a whole hell of a lot lately, and I wasn’t sure how much more grace I could expect from him.
My father wasn’t a patient man. And he had put up with a lot from me in the last few weeks. I had been distracted, not on my game, and now, I had let down Tommy when he needed me. I was going to pay for this, whether I liked it or not, whether I wanted to admit it to myself or I didn’t.
As long as I had gotten Amber home safely, I had to take some comfort in that. The taste of her lips was still playing on my tongue as I started the long walk to my father’s place, intending to talk this out with him and try to put it to rest.
If Amber really did plan to stick by her words and never see me again, then he had nothing to worry about. I would be able to re-direct my focus and get back to reality again. But if I kept seeing her around, if I kept noticing the same worried, over-thinking look on her face, there was no way I could just step back and let it happen. I needed to help her. Someone needed to be there for her, as she tried to get away from her cheating fiancé.
Even if my father would have preferred that my attention stay on the family business, there were more important things in this city demanding my attention right now. And I wanted nothing more than to be able to put them right.
Once and for all.
I arrived outside his front door and took a deep breath. He wasn’t going to be happy with me. I had been failing the family for too long now, making everyone around me look like a fool, and if there was one thing he would never put up with, it was being made to look stupid. I didn’t blame him. I knew how hurtful it must have been, how frustrating, to see me fucking around without actually sticking by anything I had promised them.
