Descended (The Red Blindfold Book 3) (23 page)

“Now, Brooke, I’m
busy, and –”

She turned to face me.
“Your brother called me.”

I frowned. “Pierce?
Why?”

“Well, first of all,
we’re friends.”

Acid boiled in my
stomach. “Friends? Come on, Brooke. He just uses you when he wants
to stir shit up.”

“That’s not true.
Believe it or not, we actually like each other.”

Why? I almost asked.
Because you’re both crafty and manipulative takers who enjoy the
hell out of sowing chaos? “That’s great. Now, I have work to take
care of and so do you.”

Her expression stayed
cool and calm. “And I’ll get to it in a minute, once you explain
to me what you’re doing with that Jane woman. From what Pierce
said, she’s not exactly an asset to your reputation.”

That fucking
son-of-a-bitch. “He’s got his opinion and I’ve got mine. In
this case, mine is the one that counts.”

Her cold eyes didn’t
budge from my face. “He wouldn’t go into all the details, but
apparently she has a very loose relationship with the truth.”

“I’m sorry –
what?”

“She told him she
lost her memory.”

I felt like I’d
swallowed rat poison. “So?”

“So…what kind of
person says that to someone she just met?”

I sat back in my chair
and crossed my arms. “She does have an unusual sense of humor.”

“She was the same way
with me,” Brooke said, chin lifting. “I couldn’t pin her down
about anything. This is the woman you take to a party and introduce
to your investors? Reputation is everything for you, Drex. You know
that. You’ve had trouble enough with yours as it is.”

It was all I could do
not to hurl my paperweight into the wall. “Look,” I said, “what
I do on my own time is my business. I don’t remember giving up
control of my decisions to you, your father, or anyone else.”

She almost smiled. She
wanted
me to get
pissed off and defensive, and I was stepping right into her devious
trap. “You wouldn’t be angry if I hadn’t struck a nerve,” she
said.

“This isn’t angry,
this is busy. This is me with a lot of responsibility on my
shoulders. This is me with employees and investors depending on me.
Now if you don’t have anything better to do but disparage my
girlfriend –”

Brooke couldn’t have
looked more shocked if I’d slapped her. “So this woman who
appears out of nowhere and makes up wild stories is your
girlfriend
?”

I shrugged. “She’s
whatever I say she is.”

“Does
she
know that?”

“Of course. Now, we
have two openings coming up and a lot of publicity to coordinate. I’m
surprised I have to remind you of that.”

Brooke’s eyes shot
fire across my desk. “I’m only trying to help the company.
Your
company.”

“This isn’t help,
it’s gossip, and it’s a waste of time. If you’re too occupied
with spreading rumors to work, I can appoint Ruby to your position.
This morning.”

Her eyebrows shot up.
“You’d give a personal assistant my job? She’s twenty-four. You
can’t be serious.”

“Nobody works harder
or cares about this company more.”

“You know what?”
Brooke said with an imperious head-toss. “I don’t think my father
would like the way you’re speaking to me.”

I leaned back in my
chair. “Fuck him.”

She gasped. “Excuse
me?”

I’d cared too long
about Scott’s opinion, and it stopped today. “I’ve never toned
down the truth, and I’m not going to start now.”

Brooke stood with her
arms at her sides, fists clenched. “Wake up, Drex. I don’t have a
problem with the truth,
you
do.”

With a flip of her hair, she turned
her back and walked out.

My concentration was
shot for the rest of the afternoon. I stared blankly at contracts and
had to force myself to pay attention during conference calls. Yeah, I
was fucking furious at Pierce, but he was just being his young,
stupid self. I hadn’t expected better from him.

What really bothered me
was something else. Something I could hardly stand to think about.

Maybe Brooke was right,
after all. I didn’t want to hear what she said because it really
was
the truth.

I didn’t want to know
how it sounded to other people, because it sounded insane. It sounded
like bullshit to Pierce, to Brooke, to the police. Even Jane knew her
story was far-fetched and insane.

Apparently, the only
person who’d fallen for it completely was me.

As if I hadn’t done
that enough in my life. Seen a woman in need and stepped in to help,
damn the consequences. Take Mia, the girl whose education I’d
helped fund because she seemed sweet and down on her luck, and she’d
grown up in lousy circumstances way too similar to mine. And how had
that turned out?

After four years of
purely platonic generosity, she had her college degree and an
unhealthy obsession with yours truly. It had taken four months of
stern talks and changing my number before she’d finally given up. I
hoped to hell she’d found somebody to care about her.

I should have learned
my lesson then, but I hadn’t. Not by a long shot. Apparently, I
still had something to prove, to myself at least.

I wasn’t like my
father, a user and abuser of people who didn’t do anything unless
it benefitted him. Yeah, my rise to the top hadn’t been
by-the-book, and I’d stepped over a lot of bodies on the way, but I
wasn’t Elijah. I could care, I could give. I just had to keep doing
things that convinced me of that.

Unfortunately, caring
and giving almost always came at a steep price. It was one thing to
keep bailing out my father and brother, but a woman I’d found
walking half-naked down the street? A stranger whose past wasn’t
just mysterious, but nonexistent?

She was more than a
blank slate. She was someone who knew how to get to me, suck me in,
and keep me there.

The worst part was that
Pierce and Brooke had pointed it out. But in the end, what difference
did it make? They could point out whatever they liked but it didn’t
change the facts.

Jane had her slender
fingers firmly embedded in my heart. I might like to say she was
mine, but the plain truth was, I was hers.

While Drex was at work,
I went out for a walk. It was a stunning late spring day, warm for
May, with a soft breeze blowing from the west. It was much too
beautiful to ruminate about my hours at the police station, or
Brooke, or my embarrassingly abrupt departure from Scott’s party,
but it took an hour of pavement-pounding before my head started to
clear and Drex’s wise words returned to me.

All
we have is today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring, if it comes at
all.

I stopped at the
grocery store on my way back and lugged the bags seven blocks to
Drex’s building. One of the doormen, Danny, insisted on helping me
up to the apartment.

I got into the
elevator, and he followed. He was an inch shorter than I was,
freckled, with a thick neck and gleaming bald head. “You’re a
good friend of Mr. Cougan’s, huh?” he asked, punching the top
button.

“Yes, I am,” I
said. If he only knew
how
good. My face was turning red just thinking about it.

He tipped his head back
and rocked on his heels. “Great guy. Everybody here thinks the
world of him.”

“I can understand
why.”

“To look at him,
you’d never know successful he is,” Danny said. “He doesn’t
show it off. I worked in this building almost a year before I heard
about that little girl he found.”

“Little girl?” I
gave him a blank stare.

“He must have told
you about it. Happened just a few years ago. It was big news around
here.”

“Um, right. I
remember now.” I felt too on-the-spot to admit that Drex hadn’t
said anything. I was completely in the dark.

“Amazing, isn’t it?
Mr. Cougan’s our local hero, living right here on the top floor.”

“Yeah. It’s
amazing, all right.”

“But he’d never
bring it up himself,” Danny said. “That’s just the kind of
person he is.”

Yes, it was. He was so
busy taking care of me that he’d left out major parts of his life,
parts other people knew about but I didn’t.

And no wonder. You
could only trust a person like me so much. I understood exactly why
he’d kept it quiet.

So why did I have a pit
in my stomach and the silly urge to cry?
I
wanted to know him that well. I wanted to be a person he didn’t
have to coddle and worry about. For two weeks he’d been the only
thing keeping me off the street, and we both knew it.

What a contrast between
me and Brooke. He’d never had to take her to the emergency room or
the police station. He’d never had to save her from herself and a
bunch of drunk Bandidos. She’d never needed a handout, food,
clothes, or a place to sleep.

She might not be the
best at her job, but she wasn’t dependent on strangers. She wasn’t
a liability, a danger to his reputation. But for some reason, Drex
didn’t seem interested in her. When he’d looked at her at the
party, I’d seen nothing romantic in his eyes.

I thanked Danny for his
help with the groceries and shut the apartment door. I’d known it
before, but now it was clearer than ever: Drex wasn’t just
successful and beyond smoking hot, he helped people. People like me.

As long as I was here with him, I
would do everything I could to deserve it.

That night was the
chef’s night off, so I decided to cook.

There was nothing I
could think of that said
thank
you
like making a meal just for Drex. I couldn’t
remember any recipes – or even being in the kitchen, for that
matter – but there were at least twenty cookbooks lined up neatly
on a shelf in the pantry, and a few were simple enough for a
beginner. Maybe I’d never made dinner before, but it couldn’t be
that hard to measure out some ingredients and throw them all
together. Could it?

As it turned out,
peeling and deveining thirty shrimp was messier than I expected. One
hour with a paring knife in my hand gone, only two more until Drex
came home. I halved grape tomatoes, chopped garlic, minced parsley,
poured a cup of white wine, and somehow got a little of everything on
the slate tile floor. Diesel did her best to lick up the mess until
the dog walker rang up to take her out. For some reason, being alone
only made me feel worse.

“Where did you learn
to be such a slob?” I muttered, going down on my knees to wipe the
floor. As I was standing up, I banged my head on the edge of the
counter and dropped the dirty paper towels on my foot.

With a hard sigh, I sat
on the floor. Did everything have to be so hard? Couldn’t I even
cook dinner without drama?

Everyone else Drex knew
was living their life while I was struggling with the basics. He was
out building a business, and I was wondering if I’d ever boiled
water or made an omelet.

I dropped my
parsley-flecked hands and looked – really
looked
,
for the first time – at where I was.
Boo-fucking-hoo
.
Here I was, feeling sorry for myself in the gleaming stainless steel
kitchen of a spectacular penthouse apartment, where I was cooking
dinner for my extremely hot lover. Things could be a whole lot worse.
If anybody knew that, it was me.

“Buck up,” I said,
getting to my feet. “You could be sleeping on a park bench right
now.”

By the time Drex came
home just after six, I’d mopped the floor, set the table, and
changed into a red sundress. With the addition of a black apron I’d
found hanging in the pantry, I could actually be mistaken from twenty
feet away for a semi-domestic goddess.

“I thought we were
going to order takeout tonight,” Drex said, surveying the
countertop covered with prepared ingredients in small glass dishes.
“What did I do to deserve this?”

“Nothing,” I said,
going up on tiptoe to kiss him. “Everything.”

He looped a strong arm
around my waist and squeezed. “Whatever it was, I should do it
again.”

“Don’t say that
until you’ve tasted my cooking,” I said. “Which you’ll be
doing in half an hour.”

“I can’t wait. And
by the way, you make that canvas apron look like skimpy lingerie.”

“Yeah, right,” I
said, playfully shoving him toward the dining area. “Now get out of
my kitchen or you know what I’ll do with this.” I held up a metal
spatula.

Grinning, he spun out
of the way. “Better a spatula than a cleaver.”

He was back five
minutes later, looking so casually gorgeous in jeans and a heathered
blue t-shirt that I shivered. He didn’t even have to try. Sexy was
just who he was. No wonder all the single women in Houston were
smitten with him. They couldn’t help it any more than I could.

While I sautéed the
shrimp, Drex poured the wine and put jazz on the SoundDock. I could
get used to this, and I was already doing just that. His apartment
wasn’t just a beautiful place to stay for a while. It was starting
to feel like home.

When I carried the
platter of shrimp into the dining room, the lights were dimmed, the
candles flickering, and the view of the sunset was stunning. Drex
pulled out my chair, and I sat across from him at the long, burnished
wood table.

“To not eating fried
rice out of a take-out box,” he said, raising his glass. “The way
I always do on Jason’s night off.”

Our glasses made a
light ringing noise when they touched. The moment was so perfect, I
wished I could freeze it and relive it again and again.

I served Drex first,
then myself. “What do we have here?” he asked. “Besides a
beautiful presentation?”

“Shrimp with
artichokes, garlic, and tomatoes. It couldn’t be simpler.”