Taking the Score (20 page)

Chapter Twenty

The door to the penthouse slammed hard enough to rattle Emma’s teeth. She rushed out to meet Brody and then questioned if that was such a good idea.

Anger had re-formed his handsome face to stone. Furious, he stood before her, heat and menace rolling off him in lethal waves.

“I’ve been calling you for the last hour,” she said. “Tell me you didn’t do anything stupid.”

“I did what I should have done from the beginning. Paid that prick off.” He waved a hand, dismissing what he obviously wanted to say to the west wing. “You’re free and clear.”

She swore the room spun, the penthouse’s sterile surroundings pressing in on her. Free and clear? If only it were that easy. She’d replaced a financial shackle for an emotional one. Where was the joy at getting out from under Ray’s thumb, at paying off Daisy’s debt? With Brody’s fury at having to bail her out, this didn’t feel like the end of her problems.

“You weren’t supposed to do that. I didn’t want to owe you.”

“That’s what you said.”

His words shivered through her uncomfortably. There was something about his tone that struck her as off, in a world where everything was off. He paced, hands on hips, evidently working to keep his temper from unfurling. He needed to let it out. If they had any chance, the air had to be cleared.

“Just say it, Brody.”

Those gray eyes were flat discs of fury. “He planted you here, didn’t he? He saw an opportunity, and he put you in my bed. Maybe the second I walked in that club.”

The chill in the room turned sharp, a blade of pain that sliced her to pieces. “No. It just looks like that.” He was supposed to see beyond the surface. See the real her.

“I saw the video on your phone, Emma. I saw the text messages between you and Grigson.”

“I didn’t know there was another camera.” At his forbidding expression, she rushed on. “I didn’t know that night, but later, he told me. He wanted me to use it to blackmail you.”

No response, and her heart clenched. “I refused to do anything to hurt you.”

Passion and fury warred on his face as agonizingly long seconds passed, the two of them facing each other like gunfighters at high noon. The moment held in pained suspense until he walked over and cupped her jaw. Stroked it with a gentleness belying those storms in his eyes.

Relief made her dizzy. He understood.

“It’s okay, Emma,” he whispered, his breath sweet. Drugging. “I forgive you.”

She blinked as if that could change the words into something comprehensible. “You—you forgive me?”

“You needed money, were desperate. You’ve been living your whole life on the make. You don’t have to do that anymore.”

She jerked back out of his grasp. “You think I’ve been playing you? After everything I said?”

His brows snapped together. “Baby, we’re all playin’ each other. This is the game of life.”

The game of life? This—this—asshole! “You’re going to put two and two together and come up with ‘We’re all getting screwed anyway’?”

“And you’re going to pretend Grigson didn’t insert you into my life without expecting you to do your duty? You said yourself you’d do anything for your sister.”

She had said that, but betraying Brody had never been an option.
Running.
That’s what she’d planned to do. Remove her poisonous presence from Brody’s golden life.

The raging silence between them smothered her to the point breathing was barely possible. What she felt was raw and hurting. She had trusted him with her body and her love, and he took it and burned it to ash.

Tears thickening her throat, she headed back to the guest room, every step a mile because the journey was the equivalent of ten football fields. She grabbed a hanger from the closet and walked into the bathroom, where she stripped and changed into the clothes she arrived in five days ago. Her overwashed underwear. The thrift-store suit. Those chunky shoes. She left the clothes he’d bought for her on the vanity and deposited her newer, sexier lingerie in the bathroom wastebasket. In a daze, she donned Ms. Strickland and left that other girl—the one who’d made the cardinal error of showing her real self to this man—in a fetal heap on the carpet where he’d made love to her.

Extreme Makeover: Life Edition, Part
…damn, she had no idea.

Back in the bedroom, she found him pacing. On seeing her appearance, his eyes flew wide.

“Emma—”

“Maybe you should frisk me to see if I stole the silver. Grabbed myself some of your nerd dolls to sell on fucking eBay.”

“Dammit all to hell, wouldn’t you rather I told you the truth about what I’m thinking than keep it festering inside? Are you seriously taking offense because I want you to stay, warts and all?”

“What would I be staying for, Brody? Hot nights with the billionaire, who’ll be sleeping with one eye open because he doesn’t trust me not to stab him in the back.”

“How do you want me to answer that? Tell you I can overturn the habits of a lifetime, forget every lesson I’ve learned from my parents, the women I’ve known—”

“And me, Brody. Don’t forget me. I’ve done nothing but lie to you from the moment we met. Enhanced my résumé, omitted telling you about my second job, kept my true reason for needing money from you, probably faked all my orgasms, too. Of course you’re not going to trust me. What have I done to earn your trust except worked my ass off and loved every single moment that we’ve been together? Yes, I’ve told lies but sometimes the lies are necessary to break water, Brody. Sometimes a little white lie is the difference between drowning and breathing.”

Where the eff was her damn cat? Heart slamming wildly, she looked around for that curmudgeonly piece of shit.

“So you admit you’ve lied?”

“Yes, but not about what happened at the club and not about us. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. More like plastic. But I’ve fought like hell. For me, for my sister.” She walked back toward the living room, eyes blurring with tears, which was really inconvenient. She needed to find Kevin. Now.

“And you know what else,” she said, spinning to face Brody. “I don’t need your fucking forgiveness. I don’t need your approval. You want to know how I was going to fix this mess with Ray? I’d planned to run. Leave Ray and you and this skin that doesn’t fit behind.”

He blanched. “You would have left?”

She would have loved him forever if he’d let her. But enough sentimentality.

“Yes, I would have left. I didn’t want you to pay that debt because it would always be between us. And not only is the money between us, but you don’t trust me. All I’ve ever wanted is you. I may be poor and trying to pick up the rubble of my world, but I’m not afraid to live. There’ll always be something holding you back. Live in your penthouse, surrounded by your white walls and furniture. Live in your asylum, if it keeps you safe to retreat here. Where you don’t have to get your hands dirty or let anything impinge on your well-ordered life.”

A barely audible mewl alerted her to Kevin. She hunched down, which she noted was much easier in these low-heeled shoes, and found her cat under the Barcalounger.

“Come on, Kevin, we’re out of here.”

Kevin decided now would be a good time to play at statue.
Please, kitty, I’m barely holding on by my fingertips here.

The least empathetic animal in the universe heard her silent plea and crept out into her arms. Fighting her tears, Emma picked him up, barely managed to unfold her aching body from the ground, and marched out the door of the penthouse.

Chapter Twenty-One

“Where the hell is the oolong?”

Serena’s eyes widened at Brody’s abrasive tone, and she looked around for someone to defend her from the cranky, tea-deprived brute looming over her desk.

Not her desk.
Emma’s desk.
Serena was merely filling in until they could hire someone Brody could shout at on a more permanent basis.

“Well?”

“I don’t even know what that is,” Serena whispered, her mouth in a wobble.

“It’s fucking tea and my fucking client happens to like it!”

Brody looked up to find the entire staff, including Hunter and Flynn, staring at him with not a small amount of pity.

“I can go get some.” Tears sprang into Serena’s eyes and she sniffed in Flynn’s direction. “Do they have it at Starbucks?”

“Basketball court,” Hunter said to Brody. “Now.”

“Smythe-Osborne will be here in thirty.”

“So how about we get into fightin’ mode on the hardwood? Beat Cross’s lame ass. Feel a shit-ton better.”

That sounded like the best idea he’d heard in days.

Ten minutes later, Brody was taking his frustration out on the boards instead of the poor, innocuous assistant whose only crime was that she wasn’t Emma. He bounced the ball several times. Then several more.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Flynn took a slug of water. “Got it.”

“I could waterboard S-O with that tea and he’d still dick me around.”

Hunter rolled his shoulders and wisely kept his mouth shut.

“This is your fault.” Brody pointed a finger at Flynn. “You and your strip club recommendation and your flavored condoms and the land of sensual taboo.”

“Yup.”

Unappreciative of Flynn’s mature acceptance of the blame, Brody turned his ire on Hunter. Standing before him was the definition of self-made man. Born and raised in a Texas trailer park, Hunter’s childhood was filled with pain, misery, and death. But he was a survivor, through and through, just like Emma. Character always outs.

So does assholery, Kane.

Brody glowered at his friends. “Why aren’t you telling me what a dick I was to Emma?” A week of telling himself wasn’t enough; he needed the condemnation only true friends could dispense.

What in the fuckity fuck of fucks had he been thinking? On his way back from paying off Grigson, that video—and Emma’s prior knowledge of it—had fueled his fury. Deep down, he knew she would never have used it against him. She’d had chances. Not once had she come out and asked for the money.

Then he told her he forgave her, as if it was in his power to give.

He’d treated her like she owed him, and that his trust was this special reward she had to earn. All along, she’d resisted his help because owing Brody instead of Ray would be no different in her eyes—and he’d proved her point a million times over. She’d confided her brokenness to him and like the class act he was, he threw it back in her face. Assured her that the nature and circumstances she’d worked so hard to overcome were insurmountable.

Brody had thought he was over Kerry. He wasn’t over shit.

God, he was so damn spineless a new genus of invertebrates needed to be invented. Fuckheads like him were never more righteous than when in the wrong.

“Well?” he snapped when neither of his buddies had the common decency to be pricks about his behavior.

“You seem to be doing a fine job on the self-flagellation,” Flynn said. “But it’s time you stopped taking it out on the staff at the office. We can’t afford to lose any more employees, especially as we just lost the best one.”

Brody slapped the water bottle out of Flynn’s hands.

Discomfort tightened Flynn’s expression, and Brody immediately regretted his temper tantrum. Losing the woman you loved sucked ass, a fact Flynn knew better than anyone.

“I think the Crown Point development is a bust,” he muttered. “Nigel just likes being wined and dined on the company dime.”

The boys didn’t disagree.

S-O would be seated in Brody’s office in fifteen minutes, playing his usual mind games. Well, Brody was done with games. If that limey asshole was still around when Brody showed up thirty—no,
sixty
—minutes late for their meeting, then they could talk.

“Let’s play ball.”

The slump in the ass-dented sofa happened to be right at the small of Emma’s back and to compound the discomfort, there was a broken spring. She turned over, but slid farther into the seat cushions. Rather than take this as an opportunity to search for loose change to buoy her life plans, she leaned over to the coffee table and checked the time on her phone.

Two thirty-seven a.m. On cue, the front door opened with an uncharacteristically cheery, “Honey, I am home.”

Emma smiled despite herself. That one never got old.

Katerina closed the door of her apartment—and Emma’s crash pad for the last two weeks—and went straight to the cozy kitchenette. She fished a couple of shot glasses out of a cupboard and brought them into the living room with a bottle of raspberry vodka as shotgun.

“It’s two thirty in the morning,” Emma murmured, feigning just-woke-up energy levels.

“What do you care? You have no job, no home, no prospects.”

That never got old, either. Sighing, Emma swung her legs off the sofa and sat up straight to get drunk off her ass. “Pour away.”

They knocked them back together and flipped them over on the coffee table, already riddled with dried rings commemorating their late-night girl talks over the last two weeks.

“Good night?”

Kat patted her purse. “The clients were extra drunk.”

Emma did not miss that in the slightest.

“No handsome billionaires to whisk me to paradise,” Kat added wistfully.

That was Kat’s way of saying Brody hadn’t stopped by the club to find Emma. Which was just fine. She didn’t need a handsome billionaire to rescue her. She’d been rescuing herself since the age of eight.

Daisy had completed her ninety days and was staying with a friend in Philly. Getting organized was Emma’s number one priority before she could bring her sister back to Chicago—find a place for them both to live, a job to support them, the girl she used to be.

Except she wasn’t sure that girl existed anymore. Brody had torn her apart in his effort to figure her out. All the puzzle pieces that made up her whole were lying in a broken mess, because he needed to see the inner workings.

Emma Strickland sat on a wall. Emma Strickland had a great fall…

She worried that he might be the only person who could put her back together again.

“Kat, do you ever think that maybe you wouldn’t want to always be a stripper?”

She considered this with her customary gravity. “I know this body will not always be beautiful. But I have Roth IRA that will help with retirement.”

“You have your life all worked out.”

Her friend shrugged in that oh-so-Romanian way. “I have few wants. I learned a long time ago that you can only rely on yourself. That pleasure cannot last. This body cannot last. But…” She looked off into the middle distance. “I understand that there are people who work better with someone else. This man, he wanted to take care of you, make you his woman.”

“While he refuses to trust me. While he wants to run the show behind my back.”

“You are annoyed because he did something nice for you.”

“Because it came with strings and my requirement to bow down and kiss his ring.”

Kat frowned. “There are always the strings. This is how it goes with relationships. With love. His instinct is to care for you with the tools he has. Money, influence. Yours is to go into the situation expecting it to fail.”

Fucking Eastern Europeans and their searing wisdom. “I didn’t. I didn’t have any expectations at all.”

“You did. You have”—she waved a hand—“the anti-expectations. You thought because he was your boss, it would never work. Then you thought because he had money, and was willing to pay your debt, it would never work. Then you thought because he has no trust for women, it will never work. These are, what you say, first world problems. Accept that this man loves you in his own way, imperfect as it is right now, and teach him how to love you the way you need.”

Was she creating barriers where none existed? But her hearing was just fine.
I forgive you
, he’d said. How could they move forward with that distrust between them? She could overlook the fact that he was her boss and that he’d paid off her debt to Ray, though his habit of making decisions without her input really chapped her ass. But if he was always waiting for her to betray him…

Hurt people hurt people, and she wasn’t sure which of them would hurt the other more. One thing she did know was that this ache in her heart would eventually fade, because the only way out was through.