One Night (5 page)

“That doesn’t make this okay,” I said, but my arms dropped to my side. William could tell he had a way in and he took it. He took three steps toward me and I didn’t back away.

“You have no idea how good it is to see you again,” he said. He reached for me again, and I almost let him succeed at his attempt. At the last second, I stepped away.

“No, William. We can’t do this.” I stepped around him, keeping a wide berth. “You’re my boss.”

“We were lovers first,” he reminded me. “Doesn’t that change things?”

“Maybe it does,” I confessed. “But we still can’t do this.”

He wanted to protest, to debate it more, but I didn’t let him. I yanked open the door quickly to cut off any further discussion on the topic.

I didn’t get much done the rest of the day. Fortunately, because I was so new, I didn’t have a lot on my plate yet. I was relieved when Tara stopped by and interrupted my thoughts but then she mentioned the happy hour.

“You’re going tonight, right?” she said.

I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see William again. But I knew that even though it was an optional activity, I was expected to make an appearance. “For a little while,” I said reluctantly.

So at 5:00 sharp, Tara and I headed down to Clark’s Pub. William was nowhere to be seen and I began to hope that he might not show up. After an hour passed, I finally began to relax. A few drinks and another hour later, I was actually enjoying myself. And then I saw him.

William was standing near the bar, talking to one of the female attorneys from my department. She was laughing at something he said, and her hand grazed his arm. I was over twenty feet away but I could still recognize the flirtation behind her touch.
She was pretty, but William didn’t seem very interested. He was looking around the room, searching for someone. I had a pretty strong feeling that he was looking for me.

“Excuse me,” I said to the group around me. “I need to use the ladies’ room.”

I took a guess that the restrooms would be at the back of the bar, but I must’ve made a wrong turn. Somehow I ended up outside, on a small fire escape.

“Shit,” I said, hoping the door hadn’t locked behind me.

I reached for the handle but it was jerked out from under my hand. Before I could react in any way, William stepped onto the fire escape and grabbed me.

“William-” I tried to prote
st but his lips stopped me. He pressed them against mine with longing desire. I gave into him, parting my lips so that his tongue could enter. He tasted like scotch, and I wondered briefly if he was drunk.

His hands skimmed my body, all the way down to the hem of my dress. He slipped his hands underneath the fabric and lifted my leg so that he could follow its curve up my thigh. “I’ve missed you,” he said, after pulling away slightly so that he could look into my eyes.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” I said. My mouth was saying one thing, but my body was saying another. I wanted William. He knew it, and I knew it. My body was already throbbing with anticipation. With a very great effort, I pushed him away.

“What do you want from me? Whatever you want, I’ll do it.” William sounded desperate and confused. I knew that I wasn’t handling things right. I needed to be firm.

“As long as I’m working for you, I can’t be with you,” I said, wishing that my voice would stop shaking.

William took my hand and threaded his fingers through mine. “I could fire you,” he said with a soft smile that let me know he was only kidding.

“You could.” I lifted our entwined hands and kissed his knuckles. “But that probably wouldn’t bode well for us having any kind of relationship afterward.”

“Probably not,” he admitted. “You could quit.”

“Do you want me to quit?” Not that I was willing to do so. I liked my new job a lot, and I wasn’t willing to quit a job simply because of a guy.

“No. Don’t quit.” He sighed in defeat. “I think we’re out of options.”

“Yeah.” Yet somehow my body was closing in on his again. “I should go back inside.”

“Just stay a few more minutes,” William said. He pulled me to him and put both arms around me. “We could be together just one more time,
then put this behind us.”

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea, William.” We both knew that one more time was likely to lead to two, then three
, and so forth. Self-control was not our strong point around each other. “I’m going back inside. You should wait a few minutes before following me so we don’t draw suspicion.”

Walking away from William was almost impossible, but somehow I managed. My legs shook as I walked back to the table where I had left my coat.

“Are you leaving already?” Tara asked.

“Yeah.
I’m not feeling so good.” I spotted William returning to the bar but he didn’t look in my direction. “I’m going to make it an early night. I’ll see you on Monday.”

“Have a good weekend,” Tara said. “Oh! Don’t forget the holiday party is next week. You should probably line up a date.”

I had completely forgotten about the holiday party. There was no way I could go to that if William would be there. We couldn’t be in the same room together and especially not when we would both be dressed up with unlimited booze floating around. It would be way too similar to the circumstances that had put us together in the first place. In the past twenty-four hours my life had gotten very complicated. So much for leaving the past in the past.

CHAPTER FIVE

I spent the following week at work trying to avoid William as much as possible. We had a few meetings together, but always with other people in the room. It wasn’t until Thursday that I found myself alone with him in my office. He had stopped by spontaneously to discuss a situation with one of Gravity’s newest clients.

“Legally, we aren’t allowed to do that,” I told him, after he sarcastically suggested we destroy evidence of a Senator’s affair. “He was doing this using his government email.”

“Yeah, yeah.
I know.” William was leaned back in the chair across from my desk, looking a little too comfortable for my liking. It was already after seven, and I was pretty sure everyone else had gone home for the day.

“Surely this is something we can discuss in the morning,” I said, not being at all subtle.

William ignored the hint. He sat forward abruptly. “Why do you hate this guy so much?”

“Senator Wilkinson? Oh, how about because he was having an affair with his 22 year old intern for starters. Did you want me to continue?”

“He’s a creep, sure. But I think something else is bothering you.” William stood up and placed his hands on my desk, leaning forward. “What is it?”

I really didn’t want to go down this road with William. Not tonight. “You read his file. You should know exactly why I don’t like our client.”

“I know why I don’t like him. I want to know why you don’t like him.” William didn’t seem ready to back down anytime soon.

“He hits his wife.” I closed the file on my desk and stood up. “He’s a wife beater.
And a cheater.”

William flinched
, and straightened his posture abruptly. My words had rattled him. “There’s nothing in his file about him being abusive.”

“It’s not spelled out in his file. But that doesn’t make it any less true.” I explained to William that I had done my own research once we had agreed to take Senator Wilkinson on as our client. The medical records for his wife had been plentiful, and completely consistent with having an abusive husband.

“You’re sure about this?” William’s jaw clenched and unclenched fitfully.

“I’m sure.”

“Why are you so sure?” William held up a hand to stop the bitter tirade I was about to unleash. “Look, I believe you. But if he is an abusive prick, there’s no way we are keeping him as a client. I won’t represent someone like that. So when I tear up our agreement, I need to know we’re right about this.”

I took a deep breath, wondering if what I was about to confess to William would be better left unsaid. People looked at you differently when you told them you had been on the receiving end of a Senator Wilkinson. “You know I had a shitty ex-boyfriend. Paul? Lana told you that, right?”

William nodded stiffly, as if he could sense what I was about to say.

“We were together four years. I never saw it coming. You think there will be signs, you know? I always did anyway. I would hear these stories about women in these horrible relationships and I would think
, you had to know he was like that. People don’t just change suddenly. But I was wrong. Sometimes they do change. Paul had never been violent. Never. But then one day, he got pissed and he beat the shit out of me. I left him immediately, but I couldn’t move on.” It had taken me six months to be able to walk down the street without looking over my shoulder. I stepped around the desk and moved closer to William, wanting him to feel what I felt.

“I started seeing this counselor. It helped.
Just talking about it helped. And she recommended that I begin volunteering at this shelter for women and kids that are escaping abusive relationships. I’ve been helping out there on weekends ever since, so I know what a battered wife looks like. I know how they act, and how they try to hide it. I’ve watched footage of the Senator’s wife and I’ve seen her medical files. He beats the shit out of her. And apparently he also cheats on her. So yeah, I hate him.”

I had never seen anger like I saw in William’s eyes right then. “I’ll kill him.”

“The Senator?”

“Paul. If I ever see him, if he ever comes around you again, I will kill him.” William’s hands were clenched into tight fists.

I had promised myself I would stay away from William. We would work together, and that would be it. Nothing else. But we were both worked up now, and I didn’t want to see that anger in William’s eyes anymore. I let my hands rest on his fists until he relaxed them, and then I slipped my hands inside. “Don’t say that, William. Don’t be like him. You’re a better man than him.”

William pulled his hands away. “I’m wouldn’t be too sure of that. You barely know me, Livy.”

“I know you well enough.” But the words rang false even to my ears. I had known William less than two weeks. I had known Paul for four years and had still missed such a huge part of his character. Maybe William really wasn’t the man I thought he was. But some part of me just couldn’t believe that could be true. I wanted to believe in William because I needed to be able to trust someone again. That’s when I finally admitted to myself that I needed William.

“We can finish this in the morning,” William said. He opened the door to my office. “You should go home. It’s late.”

“Yeah.” I couldn’t move. I could barely speak. I had finally admitted to myself that I wanted to be with William, and he was finally letting me go.

“Will you be attending the holiday party tomorrow night?” William asked, very formally.

“I’ll be there.” The words came out strained.

“Good.” William nodded. “I will see you tomorrow.”

As hard as it was to sit in the same room with William the next day, it was even more impossible for me to imagine not seeing him at all. William Connor had gotten under my skin.

He looked strong and confident when he told Senator Wilkinson that
, sadly, Gravity, Inc. would not be able to help him with his current situation. The other members of Gravity’s executive board were not happy with the decision and made their feelings known the minute the Senator was gone. In addition to paying well, Senator Wilkinson’s name was likely to draw a lot of attention to the company. They didn’t care that Wilkinson was a philanderer; it was par for the course in this line of work. William hadn’t told them what I had said the night before about the Senator’s wife. He was keeping that information between us.

“Steve, I get that you are mad. But this is my company. My decision is the final decision.” William didn’t raise his voi
ce or pound his fists on the conference room table. He had a way of exerting the power of his position without making other people feel small. “You’ll just have to trust me on this one.”

“This is a big mistake,” Steve Anderson, the Chief Operating Officer, said one last time. “But it’s your call.”

“Cheer up, Steve,” William said. “I’ll buy you a drink tonight at the party.”

Steve smiled reluctantly. “You’ll be buying all the drinks tonight, Connor.”

As the others left the room, I hung back. “William?”

He looked up at me with tired eyes. His decisio
n today had been more taxing than he let on. “Yeah, Livy?”

“Last night you said I barely know you. That I couldn’t know you were a better man than Paul.” I looked directly into his eyes. “You were wrong. What you did today, turning down Wilkinson, that’s my proof. The way you treat your employees, that’s my proof, too. You’re a good man, William Connor. Accept it.”

He smiled sadly. “Thank you, Olivia Harris.”

“Anytime.”
I turned to leave but William stopped me.

“About tonight…” He thought twice about what he was about to say. “See you at the party?”