Worth the Fight (Accidentally on Purpose) (7 page)

Emmy was standing near the bathroom door, pulling her slacks down over her thighs. The pants dropped to the floor a second later, leaving her clad in a pair of green cotton panties and her white blouse. I should have turned away and went back to the dining room, but I was frozen in place as she began to unbutton the blouse. She peeled it off and that also fell to the floor at her feet. A moment later the matching green bra was off, but when she started to pull off her panties, I somehow made myself walk silently away.

I forced myself into the kitchen to start cleaning up ima
ginary messes. I tried to ignore the erection in my lounge pants and prayed that Emmy wouldn’t see it when she came out of the bedroom. I had to get my head together. There was no denying that Emmy was attractive, and even when my dislike for her was at its height, I couldn’t ignore that fact, but I had to put things in perspective. Anything beyond friendship for the two of us would be disastrous. Even a roll in the hay would be unacceptable – enjoyable – but unacceptable. The fact of the matter was the cheating and withholding Lucas from me were too big of infractions for me to be anything but Emmy’s friend.

I reheated dinner again and had just set it down on the table when Emmy came out of the bedroom dressed in flannel p
ajamas. I was glad I didn’t have to drag her out by her hair.

She looked hesitant to sit down with me. The only time we sat at the table together was when we were with other pe
ople, never alone.

“Are you ready to quit yet?” I asked her, hoping she wouldn’t say that she was done after one day.

“I was ready to quit when I walked in the door.”

“Sorry,” I said sincerely. “There just hasn't been time to set up.”

“Kacey and Craig both could have been helping with that,” she said in her all business tone.

“Maybe so, but in Craig's defense, he's one paralegal working for four attorneys.”

“Fair enough. I think Kacey worked more today than the total time she's been with you.”

“I guess Steve and I should have handled her better,” I admitted. “I think she thought this would be a free ride because Steve's her uncle.”

“You can't afford free loaders. I think she will work out though. I need to ask you if it's okay that I hire a cleaning company to come in and clean three nights a week.”

“I can't afford it,” I said, trying to hide how much it bot
hered me that I couldn’t afford to hire more help. I prided myself in taking care of my employees and my family, but the truth was that money was getting tight. I didn’t really want Emmy to know how tight, especially since I had vowed to take care of Lucas.

“I can,” she said quietly. “I'll pay for it.”

Was she serious?

“No, I can't let you do that.”

She spoke as if I had not just answered her in the negative, as if I had not spoken at all. “And I want to hire a few more people. You need at least one more paralegal.”

“There's no money for that,” I patiently reminded her.

“There's my money,” she said casually.

“No. I won't do that.”

Hell no, I wouldn’t do that. I was the man of this household and there was no way I was going to let my – or the mother of my son support us.

“Let's be frank,” Emmy said before forking some pasta into her mouth. I waited patiently for her to finish chewing and continue with her frankness. “If your firm doesn't get its shit t
ogether, you're going to drown. Chicago is full of other small firms that already have their shit together and that’s where the clients will go. I can even help you bring in upscale clientele, but you have to have your shit together first.”

She was right. I didn’t want her to know how bad off I was, but Em knew her shit. Why she chose to work for others when she could easily be the boss was beyond me. Taking her money, however, was a huge matter of pride for me. I could probably convince her that she really couldn’t afford to help me.

“I know your family is well off, but do you personally have that kind of money? I doubt it,” I said to her.

“You don't know that. We've never discussed my finan
ces before.”

“So, let's discuss them.”

She looked at the bracelet on her wrist. I had seen her wear it before, but it always seemed like it was weighing her down. She would fidget with it often, frowning and sighing. Before I moved back to Chicago, I had never seen the bracelet b
efore. I imagined that Kyle had given it to her, and that bothered me more than I would expect.

“I am a trust fund baby,” she said, glancing warily at me. “I've been getting an ‘allowance' dumped into an account every four months since I was eighteen. My parents paid for my ed
ucation, my car, and all of my needs until I got out of college. I've always worked and saved most of what I earned. My family doesn't flaunt their wealth, and unless you looked a little deeper, you probably didn't know that we not only have our one 'plantation' in Louisiana, but several spread out in other states.  Your cotton undershirt probably originated on one of my family's farms. My father is highly invested in oil and a couple of other resources. The bar I love so much? It's mine. I own it, and it does well.”

The shock I felt would have knocked me on my ass if I wasn’t already sitting down. I didn’t go to that bar very often with Emmy, but I knew she spent a lot of time there. It irked me a little that she had failed to tell me that she owned the place. I dated her for about eight months and we were friends for a few years before that. Why was it such a big fucking secret that she owned the bar? I wanted to ask her about that, but she wasn’t finished telling me about her apparent significant personal wealth.

“When Donya was modeling, she paid me to handle her finances,” she continued. “Then other models paid me to handle their finances. When I first started working at Sterling, I bought stock as soon as I could. I sold it soon after I left, and they were doing extremely well.”

She paused and looked at me as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to continue. I was pretty sure there wasn’t much more she could tell me that could further shock me. I was wrong.

“I also left with...with compensation,” she said hesitantly.

“Like a severance package?” I asked. I was still trying to recover from everything else she had just told me.

“Something like that.” She paused before taking a deep breath and rushing her next words. “Walter Sterling paid me to go away.”

I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly. I thought she said that Walter Sterling paid her to go away, but that would be a bribe. Emmy obviously didn’t need a bribe, nor was the Emmy I knew
that
morally corrupt to accept one, but when she looked at me for a reaction, I realized she had really said what I thought I heard her say.

“Are you fucking serious?” I exploded. “You took a bribe?”

“Yep,” she said. I could tell that there was more she wasn’t telling me. “I was going to return it, but after...after what happened before I left Jersey, I decided to keep it. I haven't touched any of it.”

What the hell did happen? Was she going to tell me what Kyle did to her? It had to be something significant if Walter Sterling felt it necessary to bribe her.

“What happened?” I asked leaning forward.

She softly shook her head, closing me off from that part of herself. I was disappointed, but I didn’t want to push her, even though I felt kind of angry with her for taking a bribe, for hiding the bar from me – from hiding her wealth from me.

“I don't want to talk about that,” she said. “My point is, I want to help you and I'm perfectly capable of helping you. You should let me.”

Fuck.

My brain was in overload with all I had just learned. As much as I wanted to focus on the secrets that were withheld for all of this time, there would be more time for that later. I had to seriously consider what she was offering. It seemed even more important to me now more than ever to be the one to support my son, and Emmy to some degree – whether she needed it or not. Yes, it was about my pride, but I always believed that men should be the primary support for their families, and regardless of Emmy’s large bank account, I didn’t want to be upstaged. If I took a loan, which was already chipping away at my pride, I could get the firm to the level it needed to be to succeed. I could then pay back the loan and continue to support Lucas and Emmy.

“A loan,” I forced myself to say. “Everything you spend, I pay back, with interest.”

“No interest.”

“With interest,” I said firmly, unwilling to yield on this.

“One percent.”

What? One percent? One percent was like peeing in the ocean and she knew it.

“Eight percent,” I said.

“Two and a half,” she countered.

“Seven and a half.”

“Four.”

Her stubbornness was going to drive me fucking crazy.

“Six and three quarters,” I insisted, trying not to lose my patience.

“Five percent is the highest I'll allow,” she said with finality. “You're being ridiculous.”

“You're being too generous,” I argued.

She was quiet for a moment. She looked at me and quietly said “I feel like I owe you something.”

After the way I had treated her for the past few months, she actually felt as if she owed
me
?

“You gave me a kid, Em. You don't owe me anything.”

“What if he grows up and turns out to be a loser?”

I tried not to laugh, because I knew she was rather ser
ious.

“Then I may insist on some compensation. Until then, you don't owe me anything. So, I'll accept a capped loan, with five and a half percent interest.”

“Capped? I don't know how much I'll have to spend in your crappy office,” she said doubtfully. I loved that she didn’t feel any need to be polite about the state of my office.

“Then I suggest you set a budget, Miss Grayne,” I said to her.

“Fine,” she said. She stood up and collected our plates. I followed her into the kitchen. I pulled a beer out of the fridge and leaned against the counter as she started to load the dishes into the dishwasher.

“You agreed to that too fast.”

“No, a budget is fine.” She said too easily and began to wipe down the counters and stove before getting a beer.

“So, what kind of budget did you have in mind?” I pro
dded.

“Oh, I don't know,” she said with a shrug. “Not much.”

“I don't believe you. How much is not much?”

“Well...” she started slowly. “You need more staff, more equipment and furniture, advertising, and money just to fun
ction for your clients.”

“How much, Em?” I demanded.

She shrugged. “I guess...one and a half million.”

I choked on my beer and she watched me with mild amusement. If I didn’t have to address this million dollar shit, I would have done something else to amuse her. It had been too long since I saw a genuine sign of amusement out of her. “One and a half million dollars!”

“I can do two or three,” she said in a high voice, trying to stop her lips from forming a smile. Now she was fucking with me, but if I let it go she would seriously try to spend two or three million dollars. Who the hell in this day and age just had a few mil lying around? Apparently my baby’s mama.

“I thought maybe a hundred grand, at most two fifty,” I objected. “Not over a million!”

“I said I can do two or three!” She threw up a hand.

“You're crazy,” I said, shaking my head. “Two fifty, and no more.”

“What's wrong with one mil?” she asked.

“Did you ever consider the possibility that I won't be able to pay that back?”

“You will,” she gently insisted.

“You're insane,” I said with a frown. Borrowing money from a bank was one thing, but borrowing this kind of money from Emmy despite her financial situation made me uneasy.

She sighed and looked at me with pleading eyes. “I really want to do this, Luke.”

“It's a lot of money, Emmy.”

She shrugged and proceeded to stare me down. I stared back, trying to look as formidable as possible under the circumstances, but her pretty brown and green eyes burned into my own eyes and straight through my head. Shamefully, I looked away first.

“Okay,” I said grudgingly.

“Okay,” she said, trying to hide how triumphant I knew she felt.

“Can we have pie now?” I sulked.

“Of course,” she said, and then it happened. She gave me a full blown smile that made the shame I felt in taking her money well worth the price.

Chapter Eight

Emmy attempted to slip back to her old ways. The fo
llowing night after Lucas was asleep and the kitchen was clean, she silently began slipping into the bedroom without so much as a glance at me on the couch. It pissed me off a little bit, because we had a great working day together. So much was accomplished and we even had lunch at my desk together. Even though we were working throughout the meal and nothing personal was discussed, it was nice to be around her without heavy tension or the energy it took to ignore her and forget her name. We even ate dinner together again – takeout pizza, wings, soda, and leftover pie for dessert. She was on the quiet side, but we were talking, bullshitting about nothing in particular. But now she was trying to just slip away.

“Hey,” I said to her just before she stepped inside the bedroom.

She paused and looked at me with some apprehension. I guess I didn’t blame her. I knew she wasn’t quite used to our sudden burst of comradery. It was going to take some time for her to trust that I wouldn’t revert back to being a complete and utter assfuck. Now that I had her attention, how was I going to keep it? Make up some fake task for her to help me with?

But lying never got us anywhere before.

“You don’t have to crawl back into your cave just because the boy is asleep,” I teased.

“Oh…” She looked taken aback, but at least she was meeting my eyes.

She looked at the floor between us.

Damn.

“We’ve had a rough few months,” I said with my hands held up in defense. “It’s mostly my fault, and I’m sorry. I just…I think we can be friends and I think Lucas needs to see that we’re friends. I don’t want to teach my son how to be a cold bastard like I was to you. Even if we’re not together, he should see that we’re at least together as far as he is concerned, not two separate entities that don’t communicate. I don’t want that for him and I don’t want him to grow up believing his relationships have to be just as dysfunctional.”

She met my eyes again. Her own eyes were wide with surprise and apprehension. At the office, Emmy was in beast mode, putting everyone to work and making grown ass men like me quake with fear. She didn’t look fearful then and def
initely showed no signs of weakness, but the moment we walked through the door at home she started to shrink back to that docile, wounded animal.

“I…” she started, but then bit her lip.

“What?” I prodded, trying not to show my frustration.

Her eyes glistened. Surprised, I took a step towards her. Was she about to cry?

“The heels I wore the past couple of days were my pre-pregnancy heels,” she said, blinking up at the ceiling. “My feet are too fat for them still and I have blisters all over my feet. I was about to go in the bathroom and soak them.” She sniffled. It was pathetically cute. “And maybe cry a little.”

I really shouldn’t have laughed, but I couldn’t stop m
yself. I threw my head back and laughed harder than I had in months, maybe longer than that. It felt really good to laugh so genuinely hard, and with Emmy.

“I’m sorry,” I said through some final chuckles as she glared daggers at me. “The things women do to look hot in a pair of heels.”

A blush rose in her cheeks but she didn’t respond.

“Okay, go soak your sore feet. Wear flats tomorrow.”

“I don’t own any flats,” she said with an aggravated sigh.

“Take some time off in the morning to go shoe sho
pping,” I said and sat down on the couch.

“There’s too much to do,” she waved the idea off.

“I’m your boss,” I reminded her. “I am commanding you to go shopping for sensible shoes to be worn in the office.”

An eyebrow raised and a hand went to her hip. “You’re not my boss.”

“You work for me. That makes me your boss.”

“I work
with
you,” she said. “I am doing you an enormous favor by making your pretend office into a real one, and I don’t get paid,
Mr. Kessler
. Therefore, I do not work for you and you are not my boss.”

She was right. Furthermore, she was my benefactor. So technically it was I who worked for her. She kind of
owned
me.

But pushing her buttons to make more of that snarky girl I used to know ease out of her dead shell was fun.

“If you don’t do as I tell you, I will fire you.”

“Fire me and your piece of crap office will eventually get flushed,” she challenged.

“Is that the best you got? Crap and flushed? You reason like an eight year old.”

Flustered, she blurted out “Your mom!”

She disappeared into the bedroom while I sat on the couch laughing at her.

About an hour later Emmy sat her ass down on the other end of the couch. She propped her feet up on the coffee table with a small sigh.

“What are you watching?” she asked.

“One of those international real estate shows. This one is in Paris.”

“I didn’t know you cared about these kinds of shows,” she said, looking at me.

“I usually don’t,” I shrugged. “This one is in France though. It made me think of your time there. Where were you in France?”

“Not too far from Burgundy,” she answered casually as if I knew the difference between Burgundy and any other French town.

“I guess that means nothing to me since I’ve never been to France.”

“It’s a little more than three hours outside of Paris,” she explained.

“Did you like it out there?” I tilted my head to look at her.

She looked at me for a moment before answering. “I guess so. The area surrounding the home I was staying in was…pretty.”

“Who were you staying with?” I felt like an ass for not knowing any of this sooner.

“Helene and Marcus – they are friends of Donya’s.” She gave a small smile. “They were very kind.”

“Did you enjoy your time with them?”

Her smile faded to a frown and she looked away from me. Her eyes focused on the flat screen in front of us.

“I wouldn’t say that,” she said and gently cleared her throat.

I never asked why she had gone to the French countryside. I never asked because until recently I never cared, and I didn’t think much about it again. But I should have asked. She was pregnant with my son while she was there, and I should have wanted to know everything she did while she was carrying him inside of her.

“Why did you go there?” I asked her.

She didn’t look away from the television, and she was so quiet for so long I wasn’t sure if she actually heard me. Then I saw her chest rising and falling heavier than it should have been, and with her damp hair pulled back in a ponytail I was able to see the pulse racing in the sensitive flesh below her ear.

“I had to get away,” she said just above a whisper. “I needed to be somewhere…unfamiliar.”

I felt an uncomfortable weight in my chest. It was beginning to dawn on me why she sprinted across the sea.

“What did you have to get away from, Emmy?” I asked, though I should have been asking from whom she had to get away from.

She let out a heavy, weary sigh. “From life. I had to get away from life,” she said as she got up off of the couch. “I’m more tired than I thought I was. See you in the morning.”

She disappeared into the bedroom again. I sat on the couch staring at the door, surprised by the anger that had rei
gnited inside of me. Emmy has kept so much away from me and she was doing it again. She thought by shutting herself in that damn room that she could just cut me off and not tell me anything. I had the right to know what happened to her, who or what chased her pregnant ass all the way to the fucking French countryside where she spent I don’t even know how long with strangers, without her family and friends.

I pushed my hand through my hair and sighed with fru
stration. I kept telling myself that this was about Lucas – what his life was like in the womb, but honestly, it was about Emmy, too. I wasn’t over what she did, not by a long shot, and though my change in heart towards her was rather sudden, it was genuine. I cared to know whatever her struggles were, but I was pissed off that she chose to run away instead of humbling herself and coming to me for help. Did she really think I would turn her away if something terrible had happened?

I hope Kyle Sterling breaks your heart and makes you choke on it.

The words bounce around in my head and answer my question. Yes, she probably did think I would turn her away, even if something terrible had happened. Even though I knew Kyle Sterling was probably somewhere in the equation to blame, I had to accept the fact that my own words may have had a severe impact on Emmy’s decisions thereafter. I had to accept the fact that I may be just as much at fault as anyone else.