Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Alpha Males (84 page)

***

She woke to the sound of shattering
glass.
 

Her eyes snapped open and her heart was
instantly racing.
 
She didn’t even
know where she was at first, and then it all came back to her.

Another loud crash from somewhere in the
house.
  

What if there’s been a break-in?
 
She thought, imagining masked intruders
with guns throwing everything that wasn’t nailed down into giant duffel bags.

In her mind’s eye, Red was on the floor,
his head bleeding from where they’d hit him.
 

She heard a wild scream, a shout of rage
and pain.
 
It was primal, like an
animal.

Nicole crept out of the theatre room, her
hands shaking with terror.
 
Down the
hall, she couldn’t see what was happening, but she had an idea where the sound
was coming from.
 

“Oh, god, oh god, please don’t let them
hurt me,” she whimpered.
 
She
contemplated hiding, but couldn’t bring herself to cower like that.
  
What if Red was in trouble, what
if he needed her help?

Finally, the sounds got louder, and she
knew she was close.

There were shadows on the wall from
inside the dining room.
 
Nicole
crept toward the doorway, leaning just far enough to peek inside and see who
was in there.

It was Red, and he was alone.
 

He was wearing only his silk black boxers
and he was glistening with sweat.
 
There was broken glass all over the floor, pieces of china and dishes
everywhere.
 
He’d torn the room
apart.
 

Red Jameson was a maniac.
 
Terrified for her life, Nicole turned
and ran past the dining room, hoping to get outside and down the road before he
could catch her.
 

But Red must have heard her footsteps,
because a moment later he was chasing.
 
“Nicole!” he shouted.
 
“Nicole, wait!”

She turned and looked over her shoulder,
horrified at the sight of him.
 
He
was a madman, his curly black hair blown backwards as he ran at full speed to
catch up.

Near the foyer, he caught her arm and
stopped her forward progress.
 
Nicole turned and tried to fight him off, screaming as loud as she could
for help.

“Nicole,” he said, quieting his own voice
and trying to get her attention.
 
“Calm down.
 
Honey…”

“Please leave me alone.”
 
She tried desperately to pull away, but
Red was far too strong.
 
He held her
effortlessly, as if she were a child.

“I’m sorry,” he said.
 
“I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t care.”
 
She glared at him. “I want to go back to
my apartment now.
 
Please.”

“Let me explain.”

She shook her head, closing her eyes
momentarily.
 
An image came to her
mind, of him throwing wine glasses against the wall and screaming.
 
She didn’t want to be with him here
alone, not after all of this.

“I need…I need to go home.
 
Immediately.”

He must have seen, from the look on her
face, that she meant it.
 
“I’ll take
you now.
 
Just let me change.”

She looked at his feet.
 
“You’re bleeding.”

He glanced down.
 
“Oh.
 
I must have cut myself from all that
glass.”
 
He tried to laugh.
  

“I don’t want you to drive me
anywhere.
 
Please call me a
car.”
 
She hugged herself,
retreating from his nearness.

“Nicole…” he tried once more and she
turned her head.
 
Red sighed, a deep
sigh that sounded as though it came from the very bottom of his beleaguered
soul.
 
“I’ll call a car.
 
It should be here in minutes.”

“I’m going to wait outside,” she told
him, already walking away.
 
“Please
stay in here.”

“Of course.”

Suddenly, she felt a pang of regret that
resonated in her chest.
 
A pang of
remorse for how she was treating him.
 
She didn’t even know what had caused his outburst.
 
Perhaps he’d gotten terrible news; a
death in the family, someone was paralyzed.
 
She had no idea and hadn’t bothered
asking.

But then she remembered how oddly he’d
been behaving all night—the coldness with which he’d treated her.
 
Even during their sexual interplay, he’d
called her slut and treated her far too roughly—cruelly, when you got
right down to it.

She deserved better than this.
 
No matter how beautiful the house, no
matter how wonderful the pond and the scenery, the cars and clothes and
money.
 
She wouldn’t be treated so
shabbily at Red’s bizarre whims.

Outside, the air had grown very cold and
she shivered uncontrollably.
 
Nicole
didn’t care about the chill night air, though.
 
She only wanted to get in that town car
and go back to her old apartment where it was reasonably safe.
 
The most dangerous person there was a
bitchy roommate who would just be happy to say, “I told you so.”

The black car slid up to the doorway not
ten minutes later.
 
Nicole got
inside and told the driver her address, to which he merely nodded and then the
car glided away.

She looked back at the house as they
left, and her heart truly sank.
 
Red
was in there somewhere, alone, looking out at her as she went away.

For the first time since deciding to
leave, she realized she was abandoning her fiancé, running away from someone
she had meant to spend her life protecting and honoring.
 
She’d known Red had problems, but she
hadn’t realized it would be like this.

It was too much.

Nicole arrived home about an hour later,
thankful when she entered the apartment that Danielle appeared to be in her
room, asleep.
 
Danielle was a night
owl who could just as easily have been up watching some late night infomercial,
scarfing down ice cream.

But the apartment was dark and quiet and
Nicole was happy to tiptoe into her old room and close the door behind her
softly.
 
Then she took off her dress
and slid into bed, naked.
 
She was
happy to be back, in a way, although exhausted.
 

As she lay there, drifting, she thought
of Red.
 
The way he’d looked when
she told him she didn’t want him to drive her home.
 
His expression had been one of total
devastation.

She didn’t want him to hurt, ever.
 

Nicole drifted off to an uneasy sleep,
where she dreamed she was wandering down dark hallways in a maze that moved and
changed.
 
She needed to wait for
certain passages to connect with one another before she could walk
forward.
 
Eventually she became
confused and lost, wandering in circles.
 

She wandered and wandered until the night
finally ended and she awoke.

When Nicole’s eyes fluttered open, light
was streaming in through her bedroom window.
 
And she could hear Danielle out in the
common area making noise, which meant the hour was rather late.
 
Danielle never got up before seven.

Springing out of bed, Nicole grabbed her
clothes for the day and started for the shower, hoping against hope she could
keep the questions and explanations to a minimum.
 

When Nicole left her room, Danielle was
humming to herself and making a sandwich for her brown bag lunch.
 
She looked up, saw Nicole, and went back
to making her sandwich.
 
Then she
seemed to have a delayed reaction of pure shock.
 
Danielle looked up again and shrieked.
 
“What are you doing here?”

“I’m back,” Nicole sighed, trying to
smile bravely.

Danielle stepped back from the counter.
 
“You’re back, back?”

“Yes.”

“Not just for a day or two.”

Nicole shook her head.
 
“No.
 
I’m back.
 
And I’d rather not talk about it right
now.
 
I’m late for work.”

“So you still have a job.”

For the first time, Nicole wondered.
 
She might not have a job, actually.
 
After all, she’d sort of dumped the CEO
last night, and what were the chances he would let her keep working at his
company after that?

“I think I have a job,” Nicole replied
slowly.

“You think so?”

“We’ll see.”
 
She started for the bathroom.
 
“I better get in the shower before they
have even more reasons to fire me.”

Danielle watched her go, still looking
completely dumbstruck.

***

It seemed as though life was always
unbalanced, Nicole thought.
 
On the
one hand, her relationship with Red seemed to have imploded—again.
 
On the other, things at work had somehow
improved overnight.
 

Remi swung by her desk that morning and
said hello, asked how Nicole liked working for Edward.

Nicole was honest and admitted that she’d
rather have kept working for Remi.

Remi said, “Maybe I can arrange that,”
with a little smile.
 

Later, Remi dropped by and invited Nicole
to have lunch with her, which she immediately agreed to.

During lunch, Remi apologized for being
so horrible.
 
She told Nicole that
her mother had fallen ill the past weekend and she’d been so upset about it,
she’d obviously taken her anxieties out on Nicole.
 

They made up, and Remi once again
promised to see if she could convince Edward to let Nicole come back to work
for her.

That greatly eased Nicole’s mind.
 
Meanwhile, she tried her best to work
diligently on the tasks Edward had assigned her, which were plentiful and dull.

She wasn’t sure whether she was hoping to
see Red again or not.
 
Part of her
definitely wanted to make sure he was okay, the other part was scared of what
he might say to her if they did run into each other.

But she didn’t see him.

In fact, she didn’t see him for a full
week.
 
Nicole had no idea if he was
even in the building at all, but if he was, he certainly didn’t set foot in her
neck of the woods.

Other people started to notice that Red
wasn’t coming around her desk.
 
There were those furtive looks again in Nicole’s direction from her coworkers,
only now the looks were pitying, as if people already knew what had occurred
and assumed she was dumped.
 
Women
especially were inclined to give her a sad face and tilt their heads just so,
without uttering a word.
 

They knew how to make her feel low.

She stopped wearing the engagement
ring.
 
It was at home, packed in
tissue paper and stuffed in the tip of one of her shoes in the back of her
closet.
 

Things had even returned to normal
between her and Danielle.
 
Nicole
got the distinct impression that it was far easier to have friends when you
were scraping the bottom of the barrel.
 
Then everyone could feel superior and act really sorry for you, instead
of wondering why you’d gotten something they hadn’t.

She was becoming cynical, and she hated it.

More than that, she was confused and sad
and lonely. She missed Red.

She missed his calls, his humor; the way
he looked at her and made wry comments and little observations about things she
said or did.
 
He was so attentive,
so watchful over her.
 

She wished again and again that somehow
she could have erased that first night at the house when everything had gone so
inexplicably and horribly wrong.

Nicole still didn’t understand what had
happened.

The weekend came and went, and Nicole
spent the majority of it on the couch with Danielle, watching television and
trying to act like she was fine.
 
However, the nights were long and mostly sleepless, as she went back in
her mind to the good nights with Red, and the way he’d looked at her and
touched her.