And she lied.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Well, maybe it was a half-truth.
Cate closed her eyes even though he couldn’t see her face. She just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t be brave like he was, she couldn’t risk losing him forever, and deep down, part of her believed that he would never love her back, not because he wasn’t able, but because she wasn’t good enough. She hated that that was still there, that little seed of evil, that thing that made her not trust her own heart.
And then she tried to tell the truth, and remembered she’d been lying to Soren all along.
“Jason did that,” she said. “Made me not trust my own judgment, or my own…I don’t even know what. I wasn’t really sure he was gone from my head until just the other day. I thought about you, actually, and then about Jason, and the way he treated me, and it just seemed so insane.”
Tell the truth with
lies
, Cate
.
Jason wasn’t some abstract concept. He’d been in her office. He was still her husband. And Cate was in love with Soren Andersson.
She curled in on herself.
She just didn’t have the courage. Not at that moment. Not when she’d just alleJasoowed herself to see how much she had to lose, how much she loved this man, how important he had become to her. Cate told herself she would do it, she would tell him the truth, she would tell him she loved him, she would tell him she’d been hiding Jason from him, not because it was shameful, but just…Jesus.
She would tell him, and she’d have to trust that he’d understand. She would. Just not right now.
Cate didn’t have the strength to tell the truth yet. She didn’t have the strength to give up this one night of closeness, this first night where Soren was nearly hers, where she could believe everything would be perfect.
Because it would be.
She believed that. She hoped for that.
But if she didn’t have the strength to speak the complicated truth, then she just wanted to feel it instead.
So she turned in his arms, and let him kiss her. Let him pick her up and carry her back in through the skylight, arms around his neck. Let him set her down on his bed, eyes dark above her, mouth hungry, hands rough. Moaned when he lashed her limbs to the corners of the bed, cried out when he bit at her breasts, and screamed his name when he entered her, finally, obliterating everything else.
They were not careful at the airport. Soren took responsibility for that. He hadn’t been able to keep his hands off Cate since she’d shown up at his mother’s house, and he’d forgotten what it could be like at LAX, and he should have known better.
So that was where they’d gotten the photographs.
Cate in his arms.
Cate’s face as he kissed her.
Cate’s smile as he helped her off the plane.
They were all very sweet pictures. But the headlines had been obscene. Cate was now his “lady lawyer lay.” It pissed him off that, if they were going for the alliteration anyway, they’d gone with “lay” over “love,” as though Cate were just another fuck. She was also the woman who was into whips and wins (not the best headline of the bunch), and they’d managed to talk about spankings a whole lot in the accompanying text, without ever once confirming whether Cate was in fact pro-spanking. Which was good for them, or
Soren
would have gone berserk.
The general impression was that Soren had seduced another hapless victim into being his sex slave. And this time the woman in question was his famous, hot lawyer, the one who’d been arguing that Soren’s reputation had been unfairly maligned.
The media reaction was to go
batshit
crazy.
And it got even more insane when a man named Jason Whittier gave a very pissed-off interview.
Soren felt his blood rise just thinking about it. He was waiting for Ford and Adra in one of the loun? sfont>
still
hurting Cate.
Her husband.
Not her ex. Not some distant ghost from the past.
Her lawful husband.
Soren never should have let Cate drive off in that car without telling her. She’d said she had something big she was working on for his case, something that was going to end the madness, something she’d had waiting since before she followed him back home. And stupidly, arrogantly, so fucking stupidly, Soren had thought:
That will give us both
time
. They both needed a breather. Let Cate be sure of what she wants. They had all the time in the world.
They hadn’t talked. He hadn’t told her.
And now he was staring incomprehensibly at the smarmy face of one Jason Whittier, the man who had hurt Cate, and the man that she had lied to him about. Soren needed to talk to Cate more than he needed food or water. He needed to tell her that he didn’t care. He needed to tell her that she was the only thing that mattered to him.
He needed to tell her that he loved her.
Why hadn’t he fucking told her?
Because he was afraid it wasn’t true? No, he knew, he knew it with more certainty than he’d ever known anything else; he knew it like he knew his own goddamn name. The way he felt about her pumped in his blood,
was
his life-blood, she was his life now. He
laughed
now, because of her. She had switched him fully on.
She had taught him that he could love.
Had he just been afraid of it?
Of finally finding something stronger than he was?
Did it matter? Whatever the reason, he should have told her. He needed to tell her.
And she wasn’t taking his calls.
Her secretary, Verna, assured him that Cate was fine. But that was all he’d gotten. He was losing his fucking mind.
Cate was hiding again.
Which meant the only thing Soren had left was how he was going to deal with Jason Whittier.
“How you holding up?” Ford asked as he entered the room. The man was back to his blond James Bond-looking self, unbuttoning his suit coat as he sat across from Soren with that casual confidence that had women fawning over him.
Soren just looked at him, and Ford’s face fell.
“I see,” Ford said. “What can I do to help?”
“We’re waiting on someone,” Soren said.
“Who?”
“Me,” Adra said. She was paused in the doorway, her hand on the knob. Her eyes locked on Ford.
“Get over it,” Soren said roughly. “Both of you. Right now. I need you for this, so I need you to get over it.”
Ford couldn’t tear his eyes away from Adra, either. The pain and lust on both their faces would have amused Soren in any other circumstance, but he didn’t have time for it now. He had to help Cate.
“Of course,” Ford said, rising to his feet as Adra walked into the room. She paused and waited for him to pull a chair out for her, the two of them moving in this choreographed dance that neither was aware of.
Soren hoped they worked that well together no matter what the project.
“How can we help, Soren?” Adra asked.
“Tell me everything about this guy,” Soren said. “I don’t care what the truth is, I just want to help her. I want to her to have whatever she wants. Whatever she needs.” He paused, his fists clenched tightly. “Even if that’s not me.”
Ford and Adra looked at each other.
“She needs to get away from Jason Whittier,” Adra said.
~ * ~ * ~
Cate looked out the window of the bland hotel room she’d chosen for this meeting and told herself she would not cry.
She would
not
.
She had gotten off that plane and nearly run away from Soren, preferring to live in this fantasy dream world where he was always on the verge of telling her that he loved her, and where Cate hadn’t lied to him. Where she’d been strong enough to tell him the truth from the beginning, to own her past, to admit that she loved him and wanted him. She’d had the case to deal with, and she’d been happy about it—her investigator Rubin had come through, and Cate had everything she needed to nail Mark Cheedham and
Daniella
Collins to the wall.
Cate couldn’t fix Soren, she couldn’t fix whatever their situation was, and she couldn’t fix the fact that she’d lied to him. But she could damn well fix this case, and that she was going to do.
She’d
relished
it. She would come back to Soren with this case, and maybe…
She couldn’t believe she’d actually thought that way. It hadn’t been conscious, but Cate knew the moment she saw those newspaper headlines that she’d been thinking that somehow she’d fix this one thing, and then all her other mistakes wouldn’t matter. That everything else would magically come togeallines ther.
It was childish. It was inane.
And now it didn’t matter anymore, because he knew she was a liar.
She’d teased him about his honesty rule. She’d mocked it even, albeit gently. And she saw now that she had done that because she knew she was breaking it. It was a high, harsh standard, but Soren had serious reasons for it, and she’d failed it. Did it matter that she had good reasons for lying to him? Didn’t most people have good reasons for doing bad things? That’s what made them so easy to do. It was the rare, Cheedham-like person who sat there and tried to think up ways to screw another human being over. The rest was just people rationalizing because they were afraid, or hurt, or because they wanted something, until it seemed ok to do something that would hurt someone else.
Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. But it had been weak, and selfish, and if she were in Soren’s place, she didn’t know what she would think. The thought that she might have hurt him had come too late, and now it was all she could think about.
And what was worse, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to face him. Didn’t matter that she knew it was childish or inane, she wanted to be able to tell him that she’d at least done this for him. Soren had changed her life just by being Soren, by sheer force of will, by being the one to show her who she really was. And that she’d felt loved. Even if he never said it, even if he didn’t…
He’d taught her it was at least possible. He’d taught her what being loved
should
feel like.
She had to give him something back. She
had
to. And she was too much of a coward to face him empty handed.
So, once again, Jason Whittier had found a way to hurt her. She almost had to hand it to him for this one. Points for style, at least. Jason probably thought that his blackmail leverage was all the more valuable now, but he wasn’t counting on one thing. She didn’t care if she never tried a case again. She didn’t have anything to prove anymore; now she just had the rest of her life to figure out. And the only thing she really cared about was making it up to Soren.
Cate Kennedy was about to kick some ass.
“Ms. Kennedy,” Mark Cheedham’s oily voice rang out from the doorway. “Very cloak and dagger.”
The man was smiling. Cate had let him think she was about to make a settlement offer, on the condition that she arrange to transport Mark and his client to a secret meeting location. She had no doubt that otherwise the place would be awash with media, and Mark would have a field day.
“Given the press attention, it seemed prudent,” Cate said.