Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) (45 page)

Hope

It had taken me a while to start unpacking. By the time I’d finally gotten into the apartment, had seen my mother’s furniture and my mother’s dishes and the easy chair I’d sat in with Karen to snuggle when our mother had been dying, I lost it.

I’d veered between weepiness and conviction ever since I’d climbed reluctantly into the car behind Charles. Some show of independence, being driven away by him, having him carry my suitcase up the four flights of steps to the apartment. I’d said no, and he’d just looked at me, hauled my suitcase out of the trunk, and started walking. Short of trying to wrestle him to the ground, I’d been stuck.

But after that…there was just too much emotion. Too much pain, too much anger, too much fear. Too much of everything, and no Karen, and no Hemi.

Well, of course not. I’d
left.

It didn’t seem to matter what reasonable story I told myself. I’d closed the door on Charles, tried to hold it all back for about ten seconds, and then the first sob had escaped anyway. After that, all its friends had come to the party, and before I knew it, I’d been lying on the musty sheets of the bed that had been mine for so many years, sobbing my eyes out, crying until my throat was raw and my face was swollen and my heart was wrung dry. Crying more tears than there were in the world.

For a dream. For my hopes. For my beautiful, tender man and my proposal on the beach. Every time I thought of Hemi dropping to a knee under the huge, ancient tree, the sound of the wind and the waves filling my head as he looked up at me and told me he loved me, that he would be mine forever…I lost it again.

After that, I’d love to say that I staggered to my feet, raised my arms to the sky, and made some Scarlett O’Hara declaration about never being weak again. I’d love to, but it would be a lie, because what I’d actually done was fall asleep.

I woke up groggy with heat and thirst, disoriented at the sight of the jagged crack in the faded off-white paint of the ceiling, so familiar and yet so completely wrong. It took me a few seconds to remember what had happened, and more than a few minutes of pressing a cold, wet washcloth to my eyes to come to terms with it.

A break. Not a breakup. I was still wearing Hemi’s ring. I hadn’t flung it at him and flung myself into the night. I had taken a reasonable, rational
break.
I had to get it together, for heaven’s sake. Or for Karen’s, and Hemi’s, and mine. I’d taken a break because I wasn’t thinking straight, because I was too emotional and everything was confused, and I needed some time to get myself back on track. That was all.

Step One. Unpack.

I was doing that, thinking that I’d have to go to the corner store to buy some yogurt or something to settle my stomach, already missing the luxury of a stocked refrigerator, when I heard the banging on the door.

My buzzer hadn’t sounded, though. I set the stack of T-shirts in the drawer, crossed the room, and stood beside the door. “Yes?”

“Let me in.”

Two guesses. “I don’t want to talk now,” I said, pressing damp hands to my skirt, which was clinging to me in the heat. The shower I’d taken back in the luxury of Hemi’s penthouse was no match for New York in late July. “I’ll call you in a little while. I was always going to call you. You’re busy. Go back to work.”

“Hope. I’m done playing games. Let me in.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’m not done, because I’m not ready to let you in. And I’m the one with a key.”

“What the bloody hell is this all about?” He was losing his famous cool, that was obvious even through a couple inches of cheap door. “I told you we’d talk tonight!”

“Hemi,” I said, “you
blackballed
me. Do you think I can just let that go? I know you want me there, but I can’t be that close, not right now. I
can’t.
You said I had this apartment to go to if I needed it. Well, I need it. I need a break.”

“I didn’t mean you to actually
use
it!” His roar came straight through the door and actually made me step back. “It was a bloody
gesture!”

A sharp voice from farther away, now, accented with Chinese. “You wake the baby! Be quiet!” Jessie Lim. And baby, who was indeed wailing.

An elderly voice, then. “I’ve called 911. The police are coming. Get out of here.”

I sighed and opened the door. Hemi, of course, didn’t do anything as obliging as falling inside. He’d had both hands outstretched, clutching the door jamb, and now, he straightened up and glowered at me.

“Hi,” I said to Mr. Rodriguez. “I’m fine. Sorry.”

He peered doubtfully at me and went back into his apartment, shaking his head. Jessie, on the other hand, barely looked at me, because the baby was in full Wail Mode now. She just stepped inside her apartment and shut her own door with a little too much slam.

Which left me with one outraged, deserted Maori multimillionaire, practically breathing fire now, his perfectly cut black suit barely managing to contain his muscles, as if he’d burst out of it at any moment. And, yes, I got that even though he was standing perfectly still, only his rapid breath and the stony set of his features betraying his emotion.

“Come in,” I said. “But we’re sitting on the floor.”

He stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Why,” he asked through set teeth, “are we sitting on the floor?”

“Because it’s by the door.”

“It’s dusty,” he said, and I almost laughed.

It was true. The apartment looked like someplace where nobody had been living for a couple months, and it smelled like it, too. It smelled like old wood and old fabrics and must and faintly like mildew. I’d had the choice of running the air conditioner and attempting to do battle with the humidity, or opening the window. For the moment, I’d settled on opening the window, because the smell was making me sick.

“Well, if you’re going to be a princess about it…” I said, and watched Hemi’s outrage ratchet up another notch.

I didn’t say anything else, just lowered myself to the floor with my back against the wall, grateful to be sitting again in the stultifying heat, and after a second, he did the same. Not right next to me, because there wasn’t room. At right angles, which was better anyway. I put my arm around my knees, the full skirt of my sundress falling around me, and Hemi shoved one knee up, rested a forearm on it, and studied me, still silent.

“If you weren’t so pretty,” I said, “that wouldn’t be nearly as effective.”

I got a Force Ten on the outrage meter for that, all flaring nostrils, burning eyes, and hard-set mouth. He held still, though, as always, and after a minute, he said, his voice at his most controlled, “I could say the same thing.”

“Right,” I said. “So…I left.”

“I noticed.”

“And I’m sorry,” I went on. “I know you’re…very busy, and that you’re under a lot of pressure. And that I left Karen there, and I’m worried about that, because you know how she’s been. She needs supervision. If you don’t want her, please, just tell me. I want her, you know I do, but she didn’t want to come.”

“Of course I want her. And I
am
very busy, and yet I’m here. Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

“All right,” I said cautiously. “Why?”

His expression didn’t change at all. “Because I love you. Because that was apparently more important to me than handling the real crisis I’m facing. Because I need you to come home.”

The real crisis.
Which wasn’t me. “And if I do, what changes?”

“Well, I don’t know. You decide to be reasonable? You realize that I
am
battling a crisis, and that I need you there? You realize that your sister needs you, and that you can’t just run away?”

“So…” I said slowly, “is that it?” The disappointment was a weight in my stomach.

He sighed. “And I should have told you about the article. I was putting out fires. You don’t stop to talk when you’re putting out fires. I’m still doing that, and yet I’ve come after you all the same.”

I studied him. My heart had been galloping since he’d showed up, the ridiculous dream insisting on springing to life. “Why, exactly, are you here?”

“To take you home. Why do you think?”

“And then what?”

“And then we forget this happened. You come back to work, and everyone sees that it’s business as usual, that it’s Anika trying to stir the pot and nothing more.”

“I quit,” I managed to say.

He gestured impatiently with one bronzed hand. “I rescinded it. Simon knows you weren’t yourself. I explained. And yes,” he added when I stared at him, because I’d apparently lost the power of speech, “he wants you back. I told him you need more feedback, and he promised he’d give it to you, and higher-level assignments as well. So you’re all good.” He got to his feet and put a hand out to me. “Time to come home.”

“No,” I said.

He stared down at me. “What d’you mean, no? You told me what the problem was. I listened, and I heard. I fixed it. You want to be a member of the team? He’ll make you a member of the team.”

“What if I want to work for somebody else?”

“Say who,” he answered promptly, “and I’ll make it happen.”

“No. What if I want to work for somebody outside Te Mana? I can’t, right? Because the word’s out not to hire me.”

He sighed. “How would that look? It would look bad to the industry, and bad to everybody in the company, too. It would look bad—or it would look good—to Anika. It would be letting her think she’d win. We’d be as much as admitting there’s something wrong with your employment, when we know there isn’t. The only way to face things like this is head on. Ride them out, and that’s what we’re going to do. You want to help me? This is how you help me.”

“For how long? For a month, six months, until you work this out with her? Until you win, or you settle?”

“I’m not settling. There’s a year to work it out, and that’s it. It has to be done in a year. Until I win.”

“So you need me to be there to give you…face…for a year?”

He hesitated for a damning moment, then said, “You said you needed skills. In a year, you’ll have them, and there’ll be no problem.”

“You said in our agreement that I could quit if it didn’t work for me. You said you wouldn’t give me a hard time. You signed it.”

“We weren’t in this situation then.”

“We weren’t in this situation when you told everybody not to hire me.” I was getting agitated again. My hands were in my hair, tugging at it. “That thing Karen said. If you love something, let it go. If it was meant to be yours, it’ll come back to you. You’ve got to trust me to come back. If you don’t, why would you want me?”

“I told her,” he said, “and I’ll tell you. That’s rubbish. If you love something, hold on. Hold hard.”

I looked at him. At the face that could look so emotionless, but hid a soul as deep and complex as the sea. At the man who’d held me while I cried to leave this apartment, and had cared enough to give it back to me. At the lover who’d infuriated me and enflamed me and overwhelmed me since the day I’d met him. At the heart I’d thought was mine.

“I can’t,” I said, and felt the pain of it like somebody had severed some vital part from my body. “Not now. I can’t stand to say that, not to help you, if that
would
really help you. I can’t stand not to be there for you. But you won’t let me help you in the
real
way. You won’t talk to me about what’s going on with Anika, or with the company. You just want me to be window dressing, and somebody to…to have sex with, and you don’t want me to do anything else.”

“Because those are the things I need from you,” he said. “I want you to do what I need.”

The moment stretched out as he looked at me. So sure I would say yes. So sure I would agree.

“No,” I finally said. “I’m sorry, Hemi. No. Not until I’ve found a way to have something else. Something I can do myself. I can’t do it like this. You hold too hard.”

Hemi

When Eugene came into the gym on Tuesday afternoon, my fourth day without Hope, he asked, “We waitin’ on Miss Little Bit?”

“No,” I said. “She’s not coming. Let’s go.”

He studied me. “Now, what’s got you messed up this time?”

“Nothing that’s going to affect my workout. Go.”