The Billionaire's Pledge (8 page)

“I’m sorry,” he said, catching his breath. “Damn it.
Shit
. I can’t. I’m sorry, Savannah, I just can’t. It’s not your fault.” He put his hands on the counter and leaned down, as if steadying himself to keep from collapsing. “I’m sorry,” he said again. 

She stood there, panting, mortified. She felt like she’d been slapped. Embarrassment raged through her body. It was hard to speak, but she forced some words out. “I don’t—what’s wrong? Didn’t you…Why won’t you tell me?”

He shook his head, which was hanging down over the counter. “Please go. It’s not your fault. Just go and…I guess I’ll see you later in the week. We can go over the presentation, the mock-ups, whatever.” He looked utterly defeated.

She shook her head in disbelief. Nothing made sense anymore. “Zac—”

He straightened a bit and held up both hands, palms facing her. “No, there’s nothing more to say right now.”

“Zac, we walked here, remember? You’re just going to kick me out and make me walk twenty minutes back to my office to get my car?” She felt desperate. Her eyes burned with the urge to cry, but she fought hard to keep her composure. Normally she had no problem taking long walks, hikes, or even hard runs. But this was different. This felt like a walk of shame she couldn’t stomach, and something she didn’t deserve. She’d done nothing wrong.

“Oh, hell,” he said with a pained expression. “I forgot. Take my car. I’ve got another one in the garage.” He fumbled around on a desk beside the counter and finally held up two keys on a chain. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Here, you can borrow this one. It’s parked around the side. You can drive a stick, right?”

“Of course.”

He handed her the keys and she took them—being careful not to touch his skin with her fingers—even though she really didn’t want to borrow his car. Right now, she was just desperate to figure out what had gone wrong. But her anger was rising like a tide and drowning out her embarrassment and frustration. 

She stood there in his kitchen, looking at Zac. He leaned against the counter, arms folded across his chest, staring in the direction of the island where he’d opened the wine so impressively just hours before. His face was locked in a stoic mask, his jaw set and eyes hard. She watched his eyes, but they never wavered, never moved. Her father had gotten like this when he was upset. She recognized the signs—Zac had shut down, closed off his emotions and communication to protect himself from opening up and getting hurt.

She knew it was probably pointless, but she made one last effort to get him talking. She should probably drop it, but the words gushed out anyway.

“Just tell me what’s going on,” she said. It felt like begging. “It would be a lot easier. I thought you were attracted to me. I thought you liked me. We were kissing and then—what happened? Did I do something you didn’t like? All that stuff you said earlier, all that flirting. Was that just your way of amusing yourself?” 

She’d built up a tremendous head of steam now and she couldn’t stop herself. All the pent-up frustrations of her life of rejection came pouring out. Now she was feeling mean. But still, Zac never moved. If she’d never met him before, she might have assumed he couldn’t hear a word she was saying.

She kept going. “You like to wrap a girl around your finger like a plaything…and lead her on…and then kick her onto the street? Does that give you a thrill? All your money and you can’t get it up? Well you did for me. Guess you like being on a fucked-up power trip, huh?”

She wiped sweat from her forehead. She wasn’t even sure of everything she was saying. She was so angry she couldn’t think straight. But if she thought she’d upset Zac, she was wrong. Finally he moved a little. His eyes focused somewhere else, but still not on her.

He took a little breath and let it out. “Please just take the keys and go. I’m not into having a conversation about this right now.”

Savannah finally realized she had to accept what he was saying, and she gave up trying to communicate. Just like a man to get all tight-lipped when things got difficult. She’d thought Zac was different. She’d been wrong.

She sighed. “Okay.” It felt like acknowledging defeat in battle.

He merely nodded, almost imperceptibly, and said nothing.

Savannah let herself out and walked to the side yard to find the car. When she got there she found a bright yellow Lamborghini, obviously the car she’d seen earlier. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she said under her breath. It didn’t even look like a real car. It looked like something from a sci-fi movie, or a concept car, or a 3D rendering created in some distant future and sent back in time to the present. The door unlocked as she reached for the handle—apparently reacting to the keys in her hand—and it opened upward rather than out, with a faint swishing sound but with no effort from her. 

“Holy shit,” she muttered, climbing in. 

She gave one last glance at the house. The kitchen window was only a few feet away, facing the driveway. She saw the back of Zac’s head, still not moving. She watched him for a moment, then started the engine and backed out into the street.

***

Driving the Lamborghini, she felt like the pilot of a space ship, and when she passed a man on the sidewalk she saw him staring open-mouthed at the vehicle. The engine rumbled and roared even when floating along the street at twenty miles per hour. She drove to her office, switched to her Toyota (it had never seemed so shabby and boring), and drove home.

Her anger over the strange events in Zac’s kitchen faded quickly, like a firework that bursts and then disappears, but it left an aftershock of emotion that she knew would remain for hours. 

She took care of Ginger and gave her some pettings. Ginger rubbed against her leg and made silly cat noises. Savannah got out a pint of Chunky Monkey ice cream, sat on the sofa, and ate it with a large serving spoon while staring at a picture on the wall, an abstract drawing she’d done in high school. She couldn’t watch TV. She couldn’t read a book. There was too much going on in her mind. She recalled Alicia’s words a few hours earlier: “
Eating a pint of ice cream while you stare at the wall?
”

Jesus, she had been right after all.

Ginger came over and curled up on her lap and started purring loudly. It was good to have a friend here, someone she could touch without fear or worry. She stroked Ginger’s back, rubbed her face, and ate some ice cream.

After a few bites Savannah put down the ice cream and got out her cell phone and Zac’s business card. She grabbed her phone and started typing a text to Zac. 

She typed:
Sorry. 

For a long time that was the only word on the screen. Savannah had always been one to apologize quickly after a fight. She’d been that way with Charles, too, as if everything were somehow her fault, even when he raged at her for reasons she could not understand. Her ability to say she was sorry with such ease was a blessing and a curse, because while it smoothed over arguments, some men would take advantage of it and never end up apologizing themselves or even realize that they had something to be sorry for.

She decided that “Sorry” was all she was going to say about the craziness that had happened near the end of the evening. But she wanted to add her thoughts on the rest of the “date.” She hit the space key and started typing more.

Thanks for a nice dinner, and for listening to me talk. And all the nice things you said. And even for the kiss. It was nice, too. Shoot me an email about the project.

She stared at the message, re-reading it a few times before finally hitting Send. She set the phone down and picked up the ice cream and jammed the spoon in deep and hard to get a big mounded bite. As she placed it into her mouth she was shocked to hear her phone chime and vibrate—was Zac already writing back? She gobbled down the bite and picked up the phone.

She read:
I let you get too close to me. It was wrong. 

Her heart fell. She had been hoping for something positive, something encouraging. Something like, “No need to be sorry, I loved the kiss.” Instead, she stared at the words. 

I let you get too close to me. It was wrong. 

She read them over and over.

I let you get too close to me. It was wrong. 

It was wrong. 

WRONG.

Her face flushed with anger. What was so wrong about it? Wrong with
her
? Was a woman never supposed to come on to a man? Damn it, he’d led her on…he’d invited her to his house, bought her ice cream, made her dinner, flirted with her…he was the one who’d asked how she’d lost her virginity, for Christ’s sake! That wasn’t something you asked someone you didn’t want to sleep with. This guy was a real piece of work. Money and privilege had gone to his head.

She could see he was typing more. His next message finally came in:

It was a mistake. There are things about me I’m not ready to share. I can’t see you again anytime soon.

A million possible responses flashed through her mind. Her whole body was raging with frustration. But finally she managed to calm down and sent back just an
OK
and returned to the ice cream. Except now it tasted like cold, creamy cardboard.

CHAPTER 12

The next day took on a strange feeling of unreality.

As she went through the motions of a normal day, Savannah couldn’t stop thinking about last night. Had all of that really happened? Had she really said those things to Zachary Cushman? Had she really touched him, kissed him, aroused him?
Zachary Cushman
, for Christ’s sake! He wasn’t just some random guy, he was
the
guy. It was like knowing she’d kissed the president, or a rock star, or one of the guys who started Google. It was a weird secret to have, and it didn’t seem real.

She headed down to the shop, dreading the thought of seeing his Lamborghini parked in front, fearful that she’d run into him as he came by to pick it up. But when she got there, it was gone. She checked her phone: it was only 8:33 a.m. He must have come by early to make sure he avoided her. 

Or maybe I dreamed the whole thing. Ha! Yeah, right. That kind of silliness doesn’t happen in real life.

Inside, she spent an hour going over her work for Zac and making a few tweaks, but her mind wasn’t in it. She was on auto-pilot, and that never resulted in good work. Instead, she checked her email. Amidst the usual random spam and Facebook updates and such, she found another note from Charles. Oh, God. She thought she’d heard the last of him after telling him he couldn’t come out to Hood River.

baby baby!! Can’t cancel THAT ticket! no-re-fundo, ya know?? Be just like ol times. I still love you. I LOVE you, Savannah! when you see me youll know. I’ve held the rains down in Aaaaafrica…

see you on twenty-two!!

She shook her head and re-read his bizarre gibberish several times. How the fuck had she ever gotten together with this maniac? What was she supposed to do? 

And why in the name of all that was holy was he mis-quoting that old Toto song?

She knew he could easily find her, and even if she ignored his emails and didn’t pick him up at the airport, he would still show up at her door. For a moment it occurred to her to call the police, but what could she really say? He hadn’t actually done anything. He was thousands of miles away. There was nothing they could do. Even if he were here, it wasn’t like she had a restraining order.

Her brain was buzzing. The weight of her past pressed down harder than ever, and the enormous debts loomed into her mind as big as Charles did. And that led her back to Zac and the project. She needed it, desperately. But she dared not get back in touch with Zac. Not yet. They both needed time to cool off, to regroup and maybe figure out what had happened last night. 

She regretted sending the “Sorry” text. It now felt wimpy and foolish. She should have waited until she’d had more time to think, until she’d slept on it. Just thinking about it made her take a breath and let out a big sigh.

Over and over, she played through what had happened. She knew he liked her. That much was obvious. And she liked him, too. She knew that. She also knew that he had enjoyed the walk to his house, the ice cream cones, and the dinner. She could tell he’d been having a good time. They had flirted. He had flirted with her. Asked her intimate questions. 

But there was something he was hiding. Something he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell her. A secret? Something in his past? He’d told her a lot but kept something back. It made sense; after all, it was only their first date. She wouldn’t have expected him to tell her everything. But then to utterly reject her at the end…after allowing her to touch him and accepting her kisses and even making out with her…it didn’t add up.

Maybe she’d been too aggressive. Maybe she’d come on too strong, and seemed too overtly sexual. Touching him like that. Kissing him. Perhaps he was used to being the instigator in his sexual relationships, and a woman starting something had scared him somehow.

She went back to some of the articles she’d bookmarked about Zachary Cushman, and read them again, looking for insights she might have missed the first time. But there was nothing. The articles were all on the surface, never going more than an inch below the top of the ocean, when she knew there were depths underneath that must have been beyond the reach of daylight. Hell, she felt like she knew him better than anyone who’d every interviewed him, and she’d only been around him for a few hours.

She walked to the coffee shop and peeked inside, half-expecting Zac to be there reading some of his books, but he wasn’t. She went in and found Elaine at the counter as usual.

“I had dinner with him,” Savannah said, wondering if it was smart to reveal even that much.

Elaine started preparing the standard latte and raised her eyebrows high. “Oh, reaaaaally…?”

She clearly wanted to know more. Savannah had brought it up, so it was only fair to say something. “It was nice. We got ice cream from Mike’s. Went to his house. He cooked for me. It was nice.” She felt stupid repeating the trite phrase, but her mind wouldn’t allow her to say anything more substantial. Elaine was a friend, but this was too personal. Plus, she felt it was only fair to respect Zac’s privacy.