“He offered! I hadn’t expected anything.” I was mad enough at the insinuation, madder still when I realized it might not just be something he was considering now. “Have you thought that all along?”
“He clearly despises you, as does his wife. I’m trying to understand his motivation. Why did you even go to him first if you didn’t want him to fix it?”
“Oh. Because you assume I always need someone to fix things for me. That I can’t take care of anything myself.”
He didn’t deny it.
My hands clenched into fists in my lap. “I’m so fucking mad at you right now, I can’t even begin to express it.”
“That makes two of us.”
We’d been mad at each other before and worked it out through some rough sex, but this was different. This couldn’t be solved by his cock.
I wasn’t even sure it could be solved by words, and yet, I took a deep breath, and tried. “I went to Hudson because he’d been my friend. And after I’d involved his family like I had in our fucked-up battle, it seemed only fair that he be the person who knew first.”
“So it was out of compassion that you went to him. Not exploitation.”
He was taking my confessions, things he’d suggested he thought I should put behind me, and using them against me. Spinning my words to show me in my worst light.
My chest ached, like my heart was splitting in two.
But maybe this was my due. We’d never fully addressed The Games with Hudson. Maybe there were still demons for me to exorcise here, and maybe these were things Edward needed cleared up too.
I sighed. “Compassion is probably giving me too much credit. I went to him because I needed him. And I think it was because of his own guilt about the situation, that he stepped up and offered to claim it as his.”
“Not because he cared for you.”
This was harder to admit for some reason. “Maybe that, too.”
“He would have married you?”
“I don’t know. It was assumed that we would.”
Edward’s jaw tensed. He picked up his drink again and threw the rest back. “But he was looking for a different kind of partner. Not a wife. One who would participate in his cruel games.”
“He wasn’t looking for a partner at all,” I insisted. “He hadn’t even told me about his experiments. I had to guess. And none of that came up until I lost the baby. He never intended to invite me into that, whether we’d gotten married or not. Whether I’d had the baby or not.”
“Except that he did invite you into it.”
“I invited myself. You know this. I’ve told you this.” My frustration was growing, despite my best intentions. “I was sad and distraught and tired of feeling things, tired of not knowing how to cope, and I just wanted it all to end. Can you try to understand that? And there was Hudson, stone cold and stoic, and I desperately wanted to be like that. So I asked him to teach me. I begged him! It wasn’t him at all. It was me. All me.”
“Was it all you? You’re sure he didn’t manipulate you into that position?”
I hadn’t ever considered that before, and the question gave me pause. When I thought about it, though, I was certain I knew the truth. “I’m sure.”
Edward was determined to see the worst. “But he knew you were hurting. Agreeing to anything with a woman who is in that state of mind is irresponsible.”
“Seriously?” I stared at him incredulously. “Because a woman can’t know what she wants for herself? I knew, and I went after it, and we became a team, and those terrible things we did? They made me better.”
“They made you an emotionless dragon.”
“Is that any worse than being a vengeful devil?”
My words hung in the air, and I regretted them almost immediately. They were honest, but they weren’t productive, and I didn’t want to be fighting, I wanted to be fixing.
“You’re right that it didn’t help long-term,” I conceded, not entirely withholding my anger from my tone. “I get that now. It was a survival technique, and you already knew this about me when you decided to love me, so don’t act like I’m suddenly not good enough because I had a rocky past.”
“I never said that.” It was the softest he’d spoken since the discussion began.
I matched his mild tone. “It feels like you’re saying that.”
For a moment, he looked like he might yield. Like he might set down his fury and wrap me in his arms instead.
Then the moment was over, and he went hard again. “You’re displacing. That’s how you feel about yourself, not me. I don’t have a problem with your past. My problem is with your present.”
The accusation surprised me. “What bothers you specifically? That I don’t want my husband to go to war with someone who got me through a terrible time? That I want to put the bad parts of my life behind me?”
Without answering, he changed gears. “Why did you and Pierce fall out?”
I looked away and shook my head, frustrated that this whole conversation, like every conversation, was on Edward’s terms.
But I’d known who he was when I’d fallen in love with him, too. “He didn’t want to play anymore. And I did.”
“He quit his own game?”
“His sister intervened, I think. Because he had someone who could see he had fallen down a hole, someone who loved him, and she pulled him back out. I didn’t have that someone, though Hudson tried to get me to quit too, but I couldn’t. It was all I had. I didn’t know how to be without it.”
I looked back at Edward, the man who had been my confessor through so much of my past sins. Once again, I confided my wrong-doings. “I was lonely without him. I tried to rope him back in a few times. He’d taught me well, you see, and I used it against him. Or I tried. Nothing worked until Alayna. I was there when he first saw her, and I’d never seen him like that—lit up and interested. Over someone that wasn’t a potential pawn. He’d gotten better enough to be able to start feeling like that, which I couldn’t understand, but I could observe.
“I took advantage of that.” My voice cracked suddenly, the gravity of what I’d put Hudson through hitting me squarely. “It makes me sick, what I did. Makes me literally taste bile. I used his attraction to Laynie to bring him back into The Game. I coerced him into hurting her. And when that wasn’t enough, I tried to unravel them in other ways, and part of it was simply because I didn’t know how to give up on an objective. Hudson had taught me that too. But a bigger part of it was me trying to hold onto something that had never really been mine. Had never really been real, even.”
I swiped at the tear on my cheek with the back of my hand. Crying always had an effect on Edward, which made me more conscientious of trying to hold the tears back. I didn’t want to manipulate him. I wanted to come together honestly.
Turned out I needn’t have worried. My tears didn’t faze him in the slightest. “So you kept at him, kept pecking away at their relationship, and in order to get you to stop, he got Glamplay to sell him their Werner shares.”
There was no amusement in my chuckle. “It’s funny, isn’t it? I got his father involved when I slept with him. He got mine involved when he bought those shares. Karma, man.”
Edward’s brows raised as I stood slightly in order to reach the tissue box on the ottoman then settled when I was back in place. After dabbing my eyes, I went on. “It worked, of course. Not just because I didn’t want my family’s business to fall apart, but because that was when I finally got it. Hudson had gone to extremes to put me in my place, and from everything I’d learned from human behavior in our years together, I realized he’d done it. He’d truly fallen in love.
“That was a big deal, you see. I’d wanted in on The Game because Hudson didn’t have feelings about anyone. When he fell in love, it made everything that we did seem futile.”
Whoa.
I huffed out a long breath. I’d never articulated that before, not out loud. Not in my head. But that had truly been what had ended us, hadn’t it
? Hudson had shown me that The Game didn’t work. It was still possible to feel things while playing them, and so what was even the point?
Still, like a hamster on a wheel, I’d kept on, praying he was wrong, hoping to one day play my way out of feeling any guilt for everything I’d done.
It had all been in vain.
The only reason I eventually changed and rebuilt and learned to accept myself was because I’d met Edward.
I wanted to tell him that, and I started to, but he spoke first. “He fell in love with Alayna and that was devastating. Because you were in love with him.”
“What? No.” I was appalled. “Where did you get that? Are you actually listening to me?”
“I am. Very intently, and what I hear is that you were so in love with him, this man that was all you had, that you tried to break up his relationship, and when that didn’t work, when he went to extremes to get rid of you, you still held onto him by continuing with his games.”
“The Game was all I had. Not him. I still played because it was all I was good at. It was all I knew.”
“And then, years later, when you’re supposedly in love with me, you still choose him. Choose to protect him instead of opening up to me.”
I shot up off the couch. “Because you said you were going to go after him! I didn’t choose him over you.”
“Choose to keep me in the dark about someone who might be after both of you because of things you’d done,” he continued, his tone rising. “Someone who might be a threat to the mother of my daughter, because you still are more concerned about his safety than our family.”
The lightbulb finally went on. “Is that what this is? You’re jealous?” In another situation I might have been flattered. Right now, I was livid. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“This isn’t jealousy, Celia. This is rage. This is betrayal. This is me questioning every vow we made to each other and doubting the very foundation of our marriage. It was one thing when A was a distant ghost in your past, but to discover he is in your life now, that you are still interacting with him, that you are continually choosing him—”
Cleo’s wail broke Edward off mid-sentence. Honestly, I was surprised she hadn’t woken up sooner. Our voices had certainly risen in volume. It was a good thing that it was only her wall against ours, or we might have had management knocking as well.
“I’ll get her,” I said, unsure if it was the worst or the best time to put the conversation on pause. On the one hand, there was so much left to be worked through. On the other hand, upset as we both were, it was probably a good idea to take a breather.
I left the door slightly ajar when I went to Cleo’s room, hoping Edward might follow. Her presence was always calming. Even when she was upset, she put things in perspective. Forced us to recognize what really mattered.
But Edward didn’t follow.
I wiped my own tears before I picked Cleo up and hugged her to me, tight. “I’m sorry, baby,” I said, kissing her head. “Mommy and Daddy just got a little mad at each other. It’s going to be all right.”
I didn’t know that, though. I doubted things would be all right tonight, anyway. And when I heard the heavy slam of the door in the suite next door, and I realized that Edward had left, I worried it might never be all right between us again.
Thirteen
Edward
I left because I needed to think.
Problem with thinking was that it meant feeling as well. The hotel bartender was helping with that.
Or, he was until he announced last call and left me with a tab that could have bought an entire bottle of cognac.
“One more,” I said, handing him back the bill so he could adjust the total. “And I’ll charge it to my room. Twenty-seven-oh-five.”
“Got it, Mr. Fasbender.”
I threw back the remains of the glass he’d poured the last time he’d been by, and tried once more to organize my thoughts.
Hudson Pierce was the enemy.
Hudson Pierce had been the enemy all along.
What should I do about Hudson bloody Pierce?
Ruin him, was the usual answer to questions like these, and it did keep returning as an option, but I could never hold onto the thought long enough to conceive of a viable plan because every time I tried to imagine what he deserved, I had to consider, not only what he’d done, but what had been done to him, and that brought me time and time again back to focusing on Celia.
And with Celia came the emotions, bleak and drenching like a torrential downpour. She’d deserved what he’d done to her, hadn’t she? Why did that make me so enraged?
I’d known about her past. I’d overlooked her sins even if I hadn’t forgiven them. I’d destroyed the woman she’d once been and had paved the way for her rebirth. Her history hadn’t mattered.
It still didn’t.
So why was I so utterly shattered?
Nothing had changed, really. Hudson owned as many shares of Werner now as he had yesterday. He still owned them for the same reason. Celia had still had a partner in her crimes. The anger I’d felt about her secrecy regarding that partner had already been dealt with. It shouldn’t matter that the man she’d protected had a name that I already knew or that it had been a man who shared such an extensive history with her. It shouldn’t matter that the man had been the first that she’d loved.
Except that it did matter.
It mattered very much.
Because, as I’d said so blatantly to her before I’d left the room, she’d chosen to honor her bond with that arsehole above the bond she had with me. Because not only had she once had feelings for Hudson, but it was also quite evident that she still felt something for him, be it romantic in nature or something more complex, and that feeling had obviously meant more to her than complete transparency in our marriage.
Because no matter what I did to Hudson, even if I ruined him completely, it wouldn’t make Celia any more mine. Which was what I wanted more than anything, if I was honest—to own her heart completely. To be her one and only master, the man she not only loved above all others but at all.
That felt outrageously juvenile to admit.
I drowned the emotion with a long swallow from my newly filled glass. Then, I pushed it away and signed the tab before standing. Too quickly, it seemed, since the floor teetered as I did.
“You need help to your suite, Mr. Fasbender?”
The bartender was trying to be helpful, but it took all I had not to snap his head off for the inquiry. “I’m fine,” I said tightly.
Besides, I wasn’t going to my suite. Too much alcohol had left my head—and my heart—more muddled than when I’d first come down. When the room finally stopped spinning, I headed instead to the front desk.
“Do you have any rooms available?” I asked.
“We do. How long will you be needing it, sir?”
I gave him the most honest answer I could. “I don’t know.”
I woke to my mobile ringing, the volume seeming much louder than usual as the normally gentle chirp sounded like a gunshot next to my head. With bleary eyes, I looked at the screen, half expecting to see Celia’s name before I silenced it. She’d texted the evening before, several times, and each one I’d ignored. The only reason I even looked was to be sure it wasn’t Jeremy asking questions about her journals since I’d texted him last night to have them shipped overnight.
It wasn’t his name on the ID, though, or Celia’s. I glanced at the time before I answered. Why the hell was Leroy Jones calling me at eight in the blasted morning?
“It’s early,” I said instead of hello. It was even earlier in Albuquerque where Leroy worked for the FBI.
“It’s not early in London,” he said, decidedly more chipper than I was. “From the tone of your voice I’m guessing you’ve forgotten what day it is?”
It was Monday. Beyond that I was having a hard time even remembering where I was. A few more blinks, and my head cleared although the pounding throb at my temple remained.
I sat upright, regretting it as soon as I did. “Ron’s sentence has been announced?”
“Yep. Ready for this? Twenty-six years.”
“Twenty-six years,” I repeated, dumbfounded.
“Twenty-six years. It’s more than we’d hoped for.”
“What does that mean as far as the US is concerned?” There’d been talk of extradition to face charges in the States, but that decision had been put on hold until the trial in the UK was over.
“It’s more than we could get on the evidence we have here,” Leroy said. “Statute of limitations has long passed for Celia, and the couple of leads we have with recent victims don’t hold a lot of weight.”
“So it’s a closed case.”
Leroy misread my subtext. “He’s going to be locked up for the rest of his life,” he said. “Does it matter if it’s in your jails or in ours?”
“No, it’s good,” I said, meaning it. “Celia will be happy about this. I’d be happier if he’d gotten life, but I’m not displeased with the outcome.”
“Think you can put this behind you now?”
“Not sure I’m good at putting anything behind me.” It was a little more honest than I’d meant to be. “As for Celia, I’m not sure this is something you ever get over, whether justice is served or not.”
“No, I’m sure that’s true. I’m not going to hear some mysterious account of the douchewad hanging himself in prison, am I, or getting taken out with a shiv?”
I chuckled, then winced as the sound echoed too loudly through my skull. “If you do, I won’t be behind it. Man deserves to spend the rest of his years suffering. Death would be too merciful.”
“Tell you what, Fasbender. You ever want a side job taking down motherfuckers like Werner on the down low—aka, outside government jurisdiction—let’s just say I can make that happen.”
I managed to smile. “Good to know I have the right kind of friends. I’ll even honestly consider it before telling you no. Thank you for the news.”