Falling for Fate (39 page)

He’d barely made it down the stairs when she caught up with him.

“This is what you do when the going gets tough, right? You bail. I don’t even know why I’m surprised.” Her voice was thick with hurt and laced with an edge of panic.

Dean whirled around to face her. “No.
This
is what I do I find out the woman who spent the weekend attached to my dick is engaged to another man. I’m not going to fucking fight your fiancé for you, Fate. Jesus. We agreed to have the one weekend and we did. Now, we’re done here.”

Christ.
He’d never been so deeply affected by his own words before. It felt as if someone had shoved a fist through his chest and was squeezing every organ within reach.

“I’m not—” she cut herself short and stared intently at her hands. “We’re done here,” she repeated softly, glancing up at him for confirmation.

He didn’t answer, just gave her a curt nod.

Her mouth turned down and the dimples he usually loved to see when she smiled appeared. He watched her make a serious effort to swallow. “Okay. Well, that clears that up. Thank you for the weekend. As I said before, I had a wonderful time. Goodbye, Dean.”

He briefly closed his eyes, unable to watch the emotions swirling with the memories they’d made that weekend playing out across her face.

“Look, we work together. It wasn’t really going anywhere anyway.” Especially since she was probably getting married sometime in the relatively near future. “Let’s just call it what it was and move on. No harm, no foul. Though your fiancé might disagree.”

Her lips remained firmly pressed together. She nodded her head in agreement. “That’s what I was trying to tell you before. About Trevor.” Fate took a deep breath and squared her shoulders.

Dean tensed at hearing her fiancé’s name on her lips. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, cutting her confession short so that he wouldn’t have to hear it again. “Like I said, we’re adults—we both know what this was. We had a good time. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Her eyes widened and he could see what looked like the beginning of tears forming in them. But she blinked quickly and they were gone. “You know what? You’re right. You couldn’t be more right. Take care, Mr. Maxwell. I’ll see you at work.”

Like hell she would. He was already planning to be in as many meetings as he could work into his day in order to avoid her.

“Take care, Ms. Buchanan. Best of luck with—” His waved a hand toward where he assumed her fiancé was still waiting at the top of the stairs.

She jerked her head upward and turned away from him. Dean didn’t have it in him to watch her return to another man, so he made his way to his car and got in without looking back.

“Goddammit!” The tension swelling in his chest finally broke free. His hands slammed against the steering wheel so hard that it was a miracle he hadn’t done serious damage to himself or the car. Or both.

Dean drove to his apartment, practically squealing his tires into the parking garage below it.

He’d gotten exactly what he’d wanted.

One weekend with her, no strings.

Yet…he felt as if he’d lost something.

That piece of himself that he’d given to her felt permanently removed—as if he’d had a limb amputated and could still feel the phantom pain from where it used to be. Retrieving his phone from the console, he glanced at it. For a brief flash of an instant, he wished they’d been the kind of people who snapped photos of themselves with their phones. Then he’d at least have something concrete to hold on to. As it was, all he had were memories—chest-constricting, mind-blowing memories that now felt as if they had the power to suffocate him.

Every step he took toward the elevator was another foot of distance he put between the man he’d been with her at the beach and the man he really was. He scoffed out loud at the idea that one weekend could really change a person. Who had he been kidding? He wasn’t the relationship type. He never would be.

This was for the best,
he told himself, riding up the twenty-one floors to his penthouse. She would work things out with her fiancé and get married and move on with her life just as he’d said she should.

His apartment greeted him with a kind of empty familiarity he’d never paid attention to before. He avoided the couch, where he’d rubbed her petite little feet the night he’d caused her to lose her job at Lux. Lowering into his favorite reclining chair, he worked to reclaim the Dean Maxwell who didn’t get caught up, the one who didn’t pay attention to how many different types of smiles a woman had or get lost in the pleasure in her eyes when she ate for fuck’s sakes.

His cell phone buzzed where he’d laid it on the coffee table and he leaned forward to pick it up. A part of him wondered if it was her and he strangled that part until it was limp and lifeless when he saw that it was his dad.

“You don’t need to remind me of our previous conversation,” he said in place of a greeting. “It’s done. There’s nothing going on with Fate Buchanan. It’s handled.”

“Um, Mr. Maxwell?” a hesitant female voice interrupted.

“Who is this?”

“This is Regina Harken,” she informed him. “Your father’s assistant.”

Great.
So he’d just told a Maxwell Medical employee about his relationship with Fate. Just another wonderful occurrence in his world today.

“I see. My apologies. I thought you were—”

“I’ve been trying to reach you all morning. Your father’s in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Mt. Sinai, Mr. Maxwell. He told me it wasn’t necessary to call anyone, but I thought you should know.”

“F
ate, hear me out. Please.”

After Dean had practically burned rubber leaving, Fate had sat wounded in the stairwell until Trevor had coaxed her upstairs. He carried her bag into the apartment and stood with folded arms against the breakfast bar.

He looked out of place in her kitchen. He didn’t belong here, in her new life. She wanted him to leave, but the crushing encounter with Dean had left her weak and disoriented.

Trevor was still talking. Something about his family and the wedding, but she wasn’t really hearing him. She was only hearing Dean’s voice telling her that it wasn’t really going anywhere anyway.

It certainly felt like it had been going somewhere. She felt as if she’d been constantly gravitating toward him since the second she’d walked away from Trevor. The weekend together had seemed like finally arriving where she belonged.

“Fate. You with me? We need to figure this out.”

She glanced up at the man who was standing across from her and growing irate. “We have nothing to figure out. Whatever you’ve been going on about, I’m sure you can handle it yourself, Trevor. You’re a big boy. I have faith in you.” She didn’t really, be it seemed like a trivial detail at this point.

“No. I literally can’t. She put them in both our names, Fate. So unless you want to be forever invested in the family business of a family you’ve made it clear you have no desire to be a part of, we’re going to have to meet with the lawyer and get this handled.”

There was no point in pretending she knew what he was talking about. She sighed, wishing he’d leave so she could just go curl up in her bed and try to figure out a way to heal from the wounds Dean had inflicted upon exiting her life.

“I’ll sign whatever you want, Trevor. Just mail it or email it to me or something.”

He walked over to where she sat and dropped to the seat across from her. “I have no idea what’s going on with you, and frankly, I get that I have no right to know anymore. But you need to focus on what I’m telling you. I need you to meet me tomorrow at the offices of Greenburg and Leshkovitz at five thirty. I’ll text you the address. I tried to leave their business card, but your roommate tore it up and threw the confetti in my face on her way out.”

Fate let out a short laugh at the mental image. “Gwen’s a little on the dramatic side.”

“She’s a little on the psychotic side,” Trevor said dryly. “She made multiple threats involving my genitals. Anyway, all they need is your signature on the paperwork and we’re done.”

Done must’ve been the word of the day.

“I wasn’t exactly functioning on all cylinders when you explained—”

“Shares of my family’s company, Fate. My great-aunt handles those and I stood to gain a great deal of them when I got married. You did too. They were already in our name. My great-aunt took a leap of faith and had it handled already. She didn’t expect the wedding to get called off.”

“Yes, well, I didn’t expect to find you fucking my best friend in the wine cellar at our rehearsal dinner. Life is full of disappointments.” Her voice was devoid of emotion.

It made a lot more sense now, why he’d been so overeager about marriage. And his great-aunt Lindy had always liked her, so of course it had all been about what he’d stood to gain.

“Fate, I know how it seems. And I hate that you and I ended things the way that—”

“Stop. Seriously. The truth is… Well, the truth is I’m mostly over it.”

She did a quick physiological evaluation. No racing pulse or throbbing headache or white-hot flash of anger burning through her. Nope. She had nothing left for Trevor, not even any residual heartache over his betrayal.

Trevor opened his mouth to say something, but she stood up. “Actually, I’m completely over it. And I’ll meet you tomorrow after work and sign the papers.”

He sighed with obvious relief.

“But the next time you introduce yourself to
anyone
as my fiancé, I’m sic’ing my psychotic roommate on you. Got it?”

He nodded as he stood and followed her to the door. “So that guy was—”

“None of your business, Trevor.”

“For the record, not that it matters now, but it didn’t mean anything—what was going on with Melissa. It was just sex, Fate. Nothing more.”

If she’d still cared, his admission likely would’ve made it worse. “I think it was more than that to her.”

His eyes were hard when they met hers. “I wanted you. Only you. She was just persuasive and convenient.”

“Wanting and deserving are two different things. You may have wanted me, but you didn’t think I was worth waiting for. I think I deserve better than that, and honestly, I hope Melissa has realized that she does too. In fact, I’ll be happy to explain to your aunt Lindy that if she’s making marriage a condition of stock shares in the company, then she’s doing some poor woman a horrible disservice.”

Trevor’s eyes lightened. “Would you?”

God, he was serious. “I would be glad to. It almost feels like my civic duty.”

Fate opened the front door, expecting him to leave. He paused halfway out, stopping entirely too close to her.

“We could’ve had a good together life, Fate. I still believe that. I would’ve given you anything you wanted.”

Except your heart, your fidelity, and permission to be myself.

But Trevor Harris had never done well with abstract concepts such as those. He expected his future wife to be happy with fancy clothes, dinners, and jewelry and not much else.

“I’m sure you’ll make some materialistic woman very happy some day.” She patted him on the chest. “You just needed to find one who shares your avaricious nature. Best of luck to you. Buh-bye now.”

“That guy make you happy?”

Yes.
Yes, she realized right then that Dean had made her very happy. Right up until his grand departure. But that was how it worked, wasn’t it? The men in her mom’s life had always made her light up until they left and took her light with them.