Break Me (4 page)

“You’re the best,” the girl said. She took Zoey’s duffel out of her hand and set it down. “We don’t need to bring this with you. It’ll give him the wrong idea.” She pulled Zoey down the hallway, and then stopped at Alex’s office door. It was firmly shut, unlike the previous morning, when she’d wandered down this hallway to find him in the gym. “Now, you go in and do your thing, I’ll get Sophia to make you a cup of coffee to go. I’ll leave it on the table by where we put your duffel.” Claire gave her a friendly smirk. “I wouldn’t want to interrupt the two of you.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Zoey said, but the girl had already turned and was walking away, giving a little “toodles” wave over her shoulder. Zoey sighed. Maybe this was why she heard all the horror stories about siblings, right along with the great ones. Getting fixed up by your little sister had to be a horror to end all horrors. She reached out slowly and tapped her knuckles on the office door.

For a moment, Alex didn’t answer her. In a way, silence from him would be the perfect answer. She could just slip away, and if later on he wanted to know how she could have left without saying something—well, she tried, he’d just been so busy that he must not have heard her, and she didn’t feel comfortable just barging in.

Just as she’d convinced herself that she’d waited long enough, though, the door opened. Her heart twisted as she looked him up and down.

He wore suit pants and a button down shirt, but no tie, and the shirt was undone at the top. His hair was too short to really be ruffled, but stubble stood out on his jawline. His eyes seemed puffy, his lower lids dark from lack of sleep. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses were perched on his nose, completely and totally incongruous with the sexy Wall Street wolf persona he’d always seemed to cultivate.

“Claire, I said I was—” he checked himself, and there was a long moment before a friendly grin turned the corners of his mouth up. “Sorry, Zoey. I thought you’d still be asleep. What time is it?”

“About 7,” she said, trying not to shift from one foot to the other like a nervous school girl. “I need to get into the office. Turn in a couple of articles.”
You’re painfully close to babbling. Hush.

“Of course,” he said. He was looking at her, but his gaze seemed far away. It ached to see him like this. She wanted to be the woman in magazines who could—Jesus, whatever people did for powerful men to help them recharge and go back out into the world and do powerful men things. Drop to her knees and give him a blow job, or be content to sit in the corner with his legs spread. Whatever it was that would make this work. It would probably even be worth it, at least for a while. But when it stopped being worth it, she’d be invested, and she’d be breaking everyone’s hearts when she left. Now—now, she could just go. Just head out. They’d be sad to see her go, but they’d forget about her. It probably wouldn’t even take long. “Let me call you a car.”

“Not necessary,” she said. “I’ll grab a cab from here, it’s not far.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding, still distant. “Sure. But let me give you money for a cab—”

“Alex, stop,” she snapped, and God help her, but that was when his eyes finally turned towards her, hurt at her tone, but at least he was looking at her, listening. “I’m not trying to get your money,” she said. As soon as the words were out, she knew it was completely the wrong thing to say. He reeled a pace back from her, as if she’d slapped him across his perfect cheekbone. “I just—I need to go to work.”

“Of course,” he said. There was a long, heavy silence between them, and she cursed Claire for suggesting this. She cursed herself for going along with it. “Will I see you tonight?” he asked, finally.

It would be easier to say yes, and then text later to break the date. Say she got caught up in work, or was too tired, or anything else. But Zoey hadn’t taken the easy path when the hard one was available. Not ever. “I don’t know. I need some time to relax. To breathe.”

She watched the wall slide down over his features, and she tried not to let the ache in her heart take hold. She was doing the right thing. She believed, thoroughly, that she was doing the right thing.

“Wait, for just one minute, please,” he said. He turned back to his desk and picked up a rectangle of card stock. “Let me see your phone, please.” She passed it to him, then watched as he took a picture of the business card. “I’ve already spoken to my lawyers. I’ll let them know to contact you directly. You won’t have to speak to me again if you don’t want to.”

Jesus
. “Alex—”

“I have a board meeting to get ready for,” he said, his face tight and closed as he passed her phone back. “I had a lovely time with you. Well, all things considered. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, Ms. Gardener.”

And his office door closed in her face.

CHAPTER SIX

Alex leaned against the office door, his eyes squeezed shut, listening for all he was worth. He wasn
’t entirely sure if he was listening for her footsteps to walk away, or for her to knock on the door again. Hell, he didn’t know what he would do in her position, when someone shut a door in his face for having legitimate concerns and reservations about watching a murder and then having their skin broken because their Dom lost control. Would he knock again, ready to take a second emotional beating, or would he walk away?

It seemed like hours before he heard her footsteps. They walked quietly away. He tried to tell himself that was good, that walking was better than running. Not that it made any difference to the sinking feeling in his heart.

He made himself walk back to his desk and refocus on his laptop. Nothing that Brianna had sent him made any sense. He knew it would have yesterday. He would have had these numbers and figures memorized, been chuckling to himself that she even thought he needed reminders about the various drafts of profit margins from different sectors of the company. But today, he stared at the charts and graphs and dense paragraphs of analysis she’d sent him and he couldn’t find a single point to make to the board.

Twenty four hours ago, he’d had something special. Now, he had nothing. The situation was salvageable, right up until that last dig. But he’d gotten the last word in, and now he was done. She’d never speak to him again. Fuck, he hadn’t even asked her how her hip was doing. He should have asked to see it, made sure that it looked better today than it had last night.

He never should have put her in the situation he had last night, that was the real truth of it. He should have gone in the shower and had a good wank—or spanked her with his hands and left the implements out of it, you couldn’t really hurt someone with an open palm—or, God, the merry-go-round of guilt just kept spinning. He did his best to step off and refocus, but the most recent attempt didn’t go any better than the many that had led up to it. He hadn’t ever managed to go to sleep, after they’d moved back to his bed. He’d laid there, holding her, hating himself every time she whimpered in her sleep, and had eventually gotten up, thinking that some work would obliterate him enough that he might get some rest.

No such luck.

There was a delicate tap on the door, and his heart leapt into his throat. “Zoey?” He called out, hating himself even as he did it, and not caring how it made him look or sound. Desperate, needy, whatever it was—it didn’t matter. He stood, meaning to go to her, even if it meant chasing her down the sidewalk—no, not really, that would be stalkerish and inappropriate, but he’d come up with something—

Claire stood in the doorway, holding two cups of steaming coffee. “Well,” she said. “That answers my question about how that went. Sit down, big brother, and tell me what you did wrong.”

He sighed, scrubbing his hand over his hair and glancing at the time. If he moved quickly, he had just enough time to thoroughly punish himself with an ice cold shower before he had to be in front of the board. At least it might give him enough impetus to fake awakeness for an hour. Going up against Olivia without his mind in proper order was a mistake of the highest order, but he couldn’t skip the meeting he’d called. “Claire, I have to get to work—”

She made a scoffing sound that only a teenager could pull off with any real sincerity. “Brianna put the meeting on your calendar, which you insisted I sync to my phone so that I’d know when you would be home. For ‘safety reasons.’” She made little air quotes around the words, a feat when she was still holding two very full cups of coffee. He relieved her of his, an act of kindness and generosity, he was sure. “Your meeting isn’t for two more hours. Sit down, and tell me all about it.”

His office had two wing back leather chairs in the corner. He hated them, and sat in them as little as possible. He honestly spent as little time in this office as possible. His accountant assured him that having a home office was a necessary business expense, so he accepted this intrusion of his work life into his home, but he’d kept the ugly and uncomfortable chairs for only one reason. They’d lived in the old man’s office as long as Alex could remember, and whenever he was granted actual time to speak to his father, he’d been forced to sit in those damned chairs. They reminded him of who he was—and who he was not. Who he would not become.

“Fine,” he said, pushing his laptop closed. “I’m not going to get this information any more stuffed into my brain than it already is. But let’s sit in the den. I’ve had enough of this office.”

***

Claire whistled through her teeth when Alex was done relating a PG rated version of the last 48 hours to her. The kid had gotten caught up in the corporate espionage angle, and had very kindly completely skipped over the bits where he got flustered, trying to figure out to explain just what he and Zoey had fought about. But then, she probably wanted to know about as much as he wanted to talk about it.

“Nice job, big brother,” she said, her tone completely sarcastic. “I think you could have made that worse, but I think you would have had to exert some serious effort.”

He forced himself to chuckle. Laying the whole story out for Claire—skipping the parts about the relation that Cindy had to them, and glossing over the part where Zoey had watched the woman die in front of her—reinforced the part where he’d acted like a total ass. “I really screwed up. It’s been an intense couple of days, and I was wrong to push her.”

“You were,” Claire agreed. “But give her a little bit of time. She’ll come around. And you have a perfect opportunity to make it up to her Friday night.”

Alex gave her a long, rueful look. He thought he could have made it more hound dog, but he would have needed to make a serious effort. And invest in some costume makeup. Possibly floppy ears. “What’s happening on Friday?”

She made an astonished, angry sound as she slapped him on the upper arm, and he fell back laughing. “You shit,” she snapped. Her eyes were laughing, but she managed to keep her expression tight and angry.

“As if I could forget my darling little sister’s eighteenth birthday.”

She jabbed him with one pointy finger. “I wondered, the way you’ve been lost to everything lately.”

“A last opportunity to humiliate you in public by playing the part of the overbearing big brother? Never going to let that pass me by.” He winked at her, and she poked him again.

“The point is,” she said, with extra emphasis on the words, “That I invited Zoey, and she promised to be there.” Claire batted her eyes, and Alex took a moment to be worried, not on Claire’s behalf, but on behalf of everyone who she might bat those lashes at in the future.

A cold dread settled through Alex’s belly. “Claire. Olivia made Friday’s party dressy. Do you think Zoey has something to wear? I won’t have her embarrassed in front of—”

Claire already had a hand up. “You think I didn’t think of that, oh grand high brother? I’ve got this under control.”

He narrowed his eyes as he studied her. “Claire, I wasn’t kidding when I used the term 'house arrest.' I got in touch with Cindy Walden about how she was going to vote on the board, and now she’s dead. I want you where I can protect you.”

“And yet, you’re planning on heading out to your fancy board meeting in an hour,” she said. “I don’t see you calling up that bodyguard detail for yourself.”

When she crossed her arms and leaned back like that, she looked so much like their father that it would have driven him back a pace, if he’d been standing. He was being overprotective, but hell, he was the only person that had ever bothered to even try and protect her. He had more than the average amount to make up.

It was like they had the conversation silently. He told her that wasn’t the point, and she said it absolutely was, and she wasn’t a child. He countered that she actually was, legally, for four more days, and she resisted the urge to prove him right by stomping off to her room and slamming the door. And they didn’t speak for two days, and she finally decided that it wasn’t worth the fight. But it all happened in those couple of moments, as he met her gaze and waited for her to speak.

“Fine,” she said, finally. “I’ll stay on lock down until Friday night. But Saturday morning, I am going out with Lucia and Maggie, and you can’t make me stay in.”

“After this morning, kiddo, it may all be moot anyway. Just chill for today, okay? And we’ll talk tonight.”

She gave him a stubborn chin, but the look in her eyes as she stood and gave him a hug was positively childish. “An excuse to kick back my heels and Snapchat my friends all day long? How can I resist?”

“You can’t fool me,” he replied. “I know damned well you worked on physics all day long yesterday.”

She gave him one last glare as he stood. “I’m going to need to reconsider if this cultivating a sister in law scheme of mine is actually as good of an idea as it sounded like in my head.”

“You do that,” he said. “I’m going to shower and head in to work. If I can, I’ll come home after the meeting is done.”

“I won’t wait up,” she said, grinning. “Just in case you decide to swing by Zoey’s place. Make it up to her.”

“I couldn’t do that,” he said. And then the possibility filtered into his mind and made him grin. “I couldn’t do that, right?”

Claire shrugged. “You’re the one who’s all experienced in the ways of love,” she said, drawing the word out into a mockery of pronunciation. “But it seems like maybe part of the problem is that she thinks you’re a rich snob, and that you’ll get sick of her and throw her out like last year’s jeans.”

Alex found himself staring at his little sister. “I’ve been wearing the same jeans for four years.”

The look Claire shot him was endlessly patient. “I know that,” she said, and he thought that she was exerting a real effort not to finish the sentence with ‘you big, dumb dolt.’ “But think about what she sees for a minute. You’ve got more money than she’s had probably in her whole life, you buy her new clothes that cost as much as her rent, you leave her in your penthouse with your housekeeper. What’s she going to think?”

“Oh,” he said, his voice dropping in surprise. He had to think about it for a few minutes. Because there was part of him—and not a small part—that felt like, if she couldn’t see him for who he was, then what was the point anyway? Shouldn’t she be trying to see past his money to find out who he was?

Sure. And then what I showed her was an out of control Dom who was going to micromanage every second of her life.

“Shit,” he said.

Claire nodded. “There it is. Go get ‘em, tiger. Or, you know, whatever I’m supposed to say before a board meeting.”

“It’ll do.” He leaned forward and kissed her quickly on the forehead. “Thanks, sister.”

“No problem, big brother.”