Beautiful Scars (15 page)

Chapter Nine

She was sleeping.

Marc told himself he shouldn’t be prying, but he’d showered. Made himself a peanut butter sandwich—he really hated peanut butter, but there wasn’t much else and he wasn’t leaving, so he made do.

He hadn’t meant to pry exactly, but when he’d gone back into her room, just the sight of her hit him hard and that song that had been dancing in the back of his head for weeks, months…it just kind of exploded and he’d sat down to root around for some paper and accidentally knocked over some of the bills he’d noticed earlier.

It had been an accident.

Now he was stuck there, half sick with the bills she was still struggling to pay.

Shit, this didn’t make sense. He had a dozen people who’d told him they loved his web design and they’d contacted his designer. She was the one who’d designed it, so why wasn’t she able to cover these better?

Okay. It was something he’d figure out.

For now, he just had to…

“Hey.”

Closing his eyes at the low, husky sound of her voice, he dropped the pen and blew out a breath.
Level out, Marc. Gotta level out now.
It didn’t matter that he was half-sick thinking about what she’d been living with the past few years, and it didn’t matter that his head all but wanted to come apart under the sheer, unimaginable weight of what she had to deal with on a daily basis.

All that mattered was that she was awake and they needed to get through the morning, have that talk he knew they needed to have…and he needed to do it without screwing it all up again.

And he wasn’t going to be able to if he got all caught up in what he’d just discovered.

Picking up the lyrics he’d been working on, he turned around and smiled at her. It probably wasn’t much of a smile, but he could blame that on the fact that he was hungry, that he needed coffee…and damn…

She sat there with the golden light streaming in through the faint slit in the curtains and he didn’t think he’d ever seen anything more beautiful.

“Fuck, you’re beautiful,” he said gruffly.

He’d said that to other women. Most of them either blushed or smiled and said thank you.

Chaili sat there and snorted. “Whatever.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and sat up, winding a sheet around her body. “What are you doing?”

He held up the piece of paper. “Music. Song’s been eating at the back of my brain for a few months and it’s finally coming free. Wanted to jot it down. I swiped a piece of paper.”

“That’s fine.” She winked at him. “You can leave fifty cents on the table to cover it.”

Crooking a grin at her, he folded the paper in half. “Fifty cents? Damn, paper is really going through the roof these days.”

“Maybe it was a very important piece of paper.” Rising from the bed, she came toward him, the sheet trailing after her, parting to reveal a long, leanly muscled thigh. He found himself staring at her leg, at the slit in the sheet where the cloth parted, wanting to tug it farther apart, see just a little. There was something almost painfully erotic, beautifully sexy about her clad in nothing but that white sheet. “Man, I bet you were a hit at toga parties in college.”

Chaili laughed. “Sure I was. Half the jocks wanted to butter me up and see if they could get me to do their term papers for them. The others wanted to see if they could get in my pants.” She reached out and trailed a finger down the sheet of paper. “Maybe I could let you have the paper for free…if you’d let me see what you’re working on.”

As the dull flush started to creep up his neck, he shrugged and passed it off. There weren’t too many people he’d shared his stuff with early on, but Chaili had always been one of them. Unable to sit there casually while she read it, he reached for her, fisting his hands in the sheet and using it to tug her close. “We still need to have that talk,” he said hoarsely. “I was kind of thinking about ordering some lunch in. Us having that talk. Or we can go out to my place and I can cook for you.”

She lifted an eyebrow, a mocking smile on her lips. “I kind of value my stomach lining, sweetheart. I’ve had your cooking before. You burn macaroni and cheese.”

“Hey.” Swatting her on the ass, he tipped his head back, stared up at her. “I’ll have you know I figured out how to cook. Had to, unless I wanted to live on take out or frozen pizza. I had a friend teach me.”

“A friend, huh?” She went back to reading, the smile on her face softening. “This is going to be beautiful, Marc. One of your best.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah.” She gave it back to him and bent down, brushing her lips against his. “As tempting as it is to spend the day with you, I need to get some work done. I had a new client contact me with a rush job and I need to at least get the design roughed out for her.”

“Dinner, then.” He continued to hold her waist even as she tried to turn away. “You can’t go all day without a break, right? Besides, there’s nothing here to eat besides peanut butter and ramen noodles.”

“I’ll have you know I love ramen noodles.”

He gagged. “I don’t know how you can say that with a straight face.”

Well, she loved the price of them. She could stretch her money a hell of a lot further with stuff like peanut butter, ramen noodles, macaroni and cheese and pasta. Not exactly the healthiest diet, but it wouldn’t last forever. She hoped. Shrugging, she said easily, “Hey, to each their own.”

Tugging his wrists away from her hips, she headed over to her dresser. “I need to shower and get to work if we’re going to do dinner.”

She rummaged through her closet, wishing for the hundredth time there was something a little more
wow
to wear. A lot of her stuff she’d sold in yard sales or on eBay after it became clear that her body just didn’t wear styles the way it used to. It would be nice, she thought wistfully, to have the money and go out, go shopping without worrying about price tags so much, without worrying about budgeting every last penny.

“Have you gotten much business your way from doing my site?”

She frowned, tugging a shirt off a hanger. “No. Not really.” Of course, she hadn’t been doing his site for well over two years now. Weird time to ask her that, she mused, reaching for a wrap skirt. She’d made that herself, solid black, and paired with the bright, splashy fabric of the shirt she’d picked out, it softened the long, lean lines of her body, gave her a little more feminine look.

“Huh. Sorry. I woulda thought…well. Never mind.”

She turned around, saw him sitting there at the desk, running the sheet of paper through his hands. Back and forth. Dragging his thumb and forefinger down the crease. Turn it. Down the edge. Turn it. Down the crease. He looked…blue, she decided. Something about the way he sat there, head down, shoulders slumped.

“You know, I’ve had fantasies about those hands of yours.”

She watched as his hands stilled, watched as he lifted his head just a little and stared at her through his lashes.

A hungry light glinted in his eyes. “I thought you needed to get a jump on work,” he said gruffly.

“I do. I just wanted to mention that.” Grinning at him, she brushed by him, paused by her dresser for a pair of panties and then headed out to the hallway.

Just before she left the room, she glanced back at him and saw that he was watching, still with that hot, hungry look on his face. “So we’re doing dinner?”

“Yes.”

Marc waited until the shower came on.

Then he turned back to the desk.

She was going to kick his ass for this, but damn it, the sheer magnitude of the medical debt she had was killing him. He remembered, damn well, what it was like to pinch pennies, scrape together just enough to pay the bills, to try and figure which ones it was okay to skip for a few weeks and which ones had to be paid.

He also knew why she was living on ramen noodles and peanut butter. He’d done the same damned thing. And why in the hell wasn’t she getting some business from doing his website? He had a fucking awesome site, and it was because of her, although he wasn’t too hot on some of the updates that had been done on it the past year or so.

Maybe he’d talk to her about that. In a few days. Nice and casual like. Tell her he wanted something different and offer a bonus or something if she got it done by a certain date… She seemed really big on meeting deadlines, so if he offered her a bonus?

Something to cover some of these bills?

He studied them. Shit, she’d see through him in a heartbeat if he covered them all.

But he’d figure out something.

Once he’d committed the figures to memory, the doctor’s offices to memory, he left her bedroom and went to the living room. It served as her office too, the sleek, powerful computer set-up in the corner the one thing that was clearly
not
set up with budget in mind. It was all power, all efficiency and workhouse.

He booted it up and went to his website, thinking about making a few notes.

But then he felt like somebody had kicked him in the chest.

Down at the bottom was something he hadn’t noticed before.

Website maintained by BG Enterprises.

What the mother fucking…

Hissing out a breath, he clicked away from the website as he heard the shower go off. She wasn’t doing his site anymore.

Damn
it.

He knew that had been a decent chunk of her income. She’d once even teasingly mentioned to him that she needed to start sending him a better Christmas gift, since he was her number one client.

How in the hell had this happened?

And who in the
fuck
was BG Enterprises?

“Who in the fuck is BG Enterprises?”

Not entirely sure his manager would get to it in a timely manner since they were on a break, Marc had called the one person he knew would get him the info. Ilona.

“It’s your website design company, I believe,” she said, yawning into the phone. “Marc, buddy, you do remember, you’re supposed to be on vacation. And normally, when
you
are on vacation, I get a bit of a vacation too, right?”

“Screw the vacation. How in the hell do they get to be my website company? And they didn’t design it. That’s Chaili’s design. They just tacked a bunch of cheap-ass shit on top of her design. And it
sucks
, by the way. Fire them. Hire her back. Wait. We can’t just do it like that…” Sitting in his car, parked in the garage, he dropped his head against the steering wheel. The first time didn’t do anything to inspire a genius method of handling this, so he did it again.

But by the fourth hit, genius still hadn’t attacked and his head was hurting. “Okay, Ilona. I need to find out what happened. How they ended up doing the job
I
hired
her
to do years ago. And she was doing a damned good job of it.”

“I can answer some of that,” Ilona said. “But you’re going to be pissed.”

“I’m already pissed. When did it happen?”

“Two years ago.” Off in the background there was a clatter, and then she said, “Give me a minute.”

He all but bit through his tongue to demand answers, listening to her talking in a low, soft voice. Her kid. She had a child from a previous marriage, a girl that Miguel adored. The clattering continued for a few more seconds while he continued to think. The answer came to him abruptly.

“Lily.”

The clattering cut off almost as soon as he said it and Ilona said softly, “Yes. Lily. She’d emailed me about getting some stuff added to your site, so I emailed Chaili, the way we always did, although I wanted to talk to you because a lot of it was big-time stuff. You told me to talk it over with Chaili. She knew what worked for you and what didn’t. We were in Tokyo at the time. Chaili ended up emailing me… I think Lily was being a bitch to her but she was as nice as she’s always been, told me some of the stuff you were asking for just wasn’t going to work well with your current website design but if you wanted it, she could do it. It would just take a website redesign. It would be a few months to get everything completed.”

“And you told her…?”

“I said not to worry about what Lily was griping about. You’d let Chaili know if the site needed an overhaul. Two months later, the site was taken over by BG Enterprises.”

“And you didn’t point this out to me because…?”

There was a pause. “Marc…I did. I emailed you about it twice, and you didn’t answer. I called you about it and asked if things were cool with you and Chaili, and you didn’t seem to know what in the hell I was talking about. I asked about the website, and you said, and I quote,
‘I have you and Lily to handle that shit for me, remember?
’ So I asked if you were aware of the changes with the website and you said,
‘Not too crazy with the photo shit, but if that’s what people want, fine.’
Then you hung up on me.”

Somewhere in the back of his mind, the vague memory bumped free and if it were possible, he would have kicked his own ass. He would have done it, and done it happily. “You weren’t calling about the stupid photo gallery, were you?”

“Nope. I was trying to tell you somebody else had taken over the site and done a shitty job of it.” She sighed. He could practically see her shoving her hand through her hair, tugging at it the way she did when he’d done something that had her
really
frustrated. “I take it you just now figured it out, didn’t you?”