House of Payne: Steele (30 page)

“Did she give up my sketchbook?”

Steele couldn’t stop the wince. That was another item she could add to her long list of losses. “What I got was the approximate time of the theft. That bitch didn’t know it, but when PSI took over the security for House Of Payne, we installed CCTV cameras on all the common areas. Normally the video gets dumped on a weekly cycle, and since the disappearance of your sketchbook happened almost two months ago I thought there probably wouldn’t be a chance of getting the proof we needed. But then I remembered my boss had culled all the video from that particular day—the day you got crashed into—because he wanted to see where our security failed in stopping those paparazzi from getting in. Come to find out, PSI had high-res video of Dizzy sneaking into Twist’s booth after your brother left it to take you to get your hand glued back together. When she comes back out, she’s got your sketchbook, plain as day.”

“Wow.” She was quiet for a moment as she mulled that revelation over. “That explains why she never had an activewear line, since I had the inspiration for that line when I was separated from my book. But… my God, that’s so
stupid
. Why would she make the same designs I’d sketched out when she knew I was going to make them? Didn’t she think anyone would notice?”

“She didn’t care if anyone noticed. Remember what she said? Show both designs and let the people choose which collection was better? She genuinely believed that what she’d made was better than your original concept, to the point where she thought no one would care. Worse yet, she’s done this before,” he added, and watched her eyes widen in surprise. “Three times, in fact. She’s had labels under the names of Isadora D, J’adore Isadora and Designs by Izz. Each time she’s pulled something like this—plagiarizing the work of more talented designers. We found this out during our background check on her, which explains why she was always so jumpy whenever she had to deal with PSI. Apparently she believed we were unaware of her background, so she feared us discovering it.”

“But you did discover it. Why didn’t her background disqualify her?”

“Because Payne’s a decent guy. He didn’t want to hang her for past mistakes, so he gave her a fair chance. He’s regretting that decision now.”

Essie shook her head, as if she couldn’t quite make all the information fit into her brain. “If she keeps getting caught, why does she keep stealing other people’s ideas? That’s just stupid.”

“No, it’s hubris. Remember my buddy Luke? He’s our resident shrink—military-trained and worked at the Pentagon as a criminal behavioral analyst and forensic profiler before joining the private sector. He pinned her right away as a classic narcissist. She’s got this overblown, entitled sense of importance, to the point that in her view, everyone on the planet is here to serve her, and whatever she does is going to be blindly adored. In her mind, she wasn’t even stealing from you. You were just a stepping stone that was there to inspire her greatness—her words, not mine—as she put her own spin on your designs. She’ll probably never be able to understand why she’s getting tossed from the competition while you get to stay in the hunt.”

“I don’t care about the hunt anymore.” She loosed a gusty sigh that made the cat on her lap stir grumpily. She petted it with gentle hands and it settled back down with a purr so loud he could hear it. Lucky cat. “Did she at least give my sketchbook back?”

Damn it
. “No.” He took a deep breath. “She burned it.”

She closed her eyes and sharply turned her head. She looked like she’d been slapped. Probably it felt that way, too.

That tightening in his gut got worse, creeping all the way up into his chest. “Sweetness, I tried—”

“I know, and thank you for that.” She opened her eyes but kept her face averted from him, instead looking out into the night-washed alleyway. “It’s no biggie. I just wondered.”

“You don’t have to cover with me. Anyone else, I can understand you not wanting to show what’s going on inside. But you don’t have to do that with me.”

“No, really, it’s okay. I’ve been without it for a while now. I miss it, but being without it has taught me that I don’t need anything but myself to, you know… keep on keeping on. So that’s what I’m going to do. Keep on keeping on.”

“Nothing in this world is stronger than you.” He heard the words come out of him, and though he was startled to hear his thoughts out loud, he didn’t regret them. They were the truth, after all. “I brought you something.”

She gave a little sniff, and when she at last turned back to him he saw a glimmer of tears in her eyes—tears she wasn’t going to let fall. “You didn’t have to.”

“I know better than you what a man has to do when his lady’s had a shitty day.” He unhooked the plastic bag that dangled from his wrist and held it out. “Take it.”

She didn’t move. “You’re not my man. I’m not your lady. We’re not together anymore. To put a finer point on it, we were never together in the first place. I just didn’t know that at the time. My mistake.”

“We’re going to get to that in a bit. Take it.”

“No.”

“Essie—”

“I said
no
. If I take it, that means I’m saying deep down I think there’s a snowball’s chance we’re still together. I don’t, so I can’t.”

He held the bag higher. “You’re wrong.”

“Which part am I wrong about? That we’re not together anymore, or that we were never together in the first place?”

“Both. Take it, or I drop it on the cat.”

She snatched it out of his hands, then stared at it like it was a dirty bomb about to detonate. “Shit.”

“Might as well see what it is.”

She closed her eyes again and muttered something he was glad he couldn’t hear, before reluctantly reaching a hand into the bag. Confusion crossed her face when she brought out a leather-bound, mid-sized three-ring binder.

“I couldn’t remember what kind of paper you had in your old sketchbook—plain, or graph or whatever, so I bought every kind they had available that would fit. If I still didn’t get the right thing, you can tell me what you need and I’ll get it for you. The hot new designer for House Of Payne can’t be without a sketchbook.”

“I haven’t won that stupid contest yet, and I’m thinking of shoving the whole fashion show contest debacle straight up Payne’s ass even if I do win.” She stared at the leather surface of her binder in her hands. “You really bought me a new sketchbook.”

“Yeah.” But he had bigger fish to fry than his most recent purchase. “You know why you want to turn around and kick Payne in the ass, don’t you?”

“Gee, let’s think. I got lured away from a great-paying job with the promise of an even better-paying job, but by the time I got here that asshole turned it into a fucking three-ring circus, with me and the others as the tutu-wearing dancing bears. He made us publicly fight for a job like a bunch of morons, I lose my savings and my dignity while working my fingers to the bone for
nothing
, while he rolls in the dough, thanks to all the free publicity.”

“I’ve talked to him about how you got the shit end of the stick on that, and I believe your brother has too. So has Scout. It sucked that it happened, but you’re not going to have a lot to piss and moan about on that score when all is said and done.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Why didn’t you say no?”

She looked up. “What?”

“All those months months ago, when this crazy contest began,” he expanded when it looked like she was once again thinking of biting chunks out of him. “You could have told Payne to go fuck himself after screwing you out of that job offer, gone back to Texas and probably gotten your old job back because you’re the best at what you do. But you didn’t. Why?”

“Because I don’t have a crystal ball. I couldn’t see into the future to know how long this dumbass process was going to take, or how much it would cost at the end.”

“Wrong. You didn’t tell him to go fuck himself because you’re a fighter who had a challenge waved like a red flag in front of her, and you couldn’t resist it. This same instinct to fight when the odds are against you is also the reason why you’ve got a thing for kicking Payne’s ass now.”

She gave him a dirty look. “I’ve got a thing for kicking his ass because he jacked up the job I was supposed to get when I first got here, and because he yelled in my face and accused me of stealing my own damn designs. I mean, what the hell was that all about?”

“That was a calculated move on Payne’s part. He knew exactly what he was doing when he did that.”

“What do you mean, calculated?”

“Remember, he knew Dizzy’s checkered past, along with Scout and the rest of the security detail. But he still wanted as much proof as he could get that she was the one who was trying to pull a fast one. You noticed Luke was in the office, right?”

Her frown turned into a scowl. “Yes.”

“Luke knows human behavior better than anyone. He’s the one who suggested that Payne get in your face, then Dizzy’s, so that he could get assess your natural reactions. I didn’t like it, but I knew what Luke would see when you were confronted—total bewildered innocence.” Then he grimaced. “If anything, I’m the one who should be pissed. Luke was laughing his ass off when I couldn’t stop myself from reacting when I saw how horrified you were at being accused of stealing.”

She let that soak in for a while before she looked back out into the darkness with a crabby little “
hmph
.” “It was offensive and thoroughly unacceptable. I’m never acknowledging that dick’s existence again. Either of them. They could be on fire and I wouldn’t bother to spit on them to put them out.”

Cute
. “The truth is, you’re not pissed at Luke or Payne. Well, you
are
, but not to the level of being fine with watching them burn alive. No, that level of pissiness is reserved for me.”

“Oh?” Her attention swung back to him, and the fire in her amber eyes sizzled over him. “You think I’m mad at you for befriending me, wooing me, seducing me, asking me to trust you, and promising that you’d never hurt me even emotionally, all the while knowing there was no way you were prepared to handle things once the inevitable happened and I fell in love with you?” The scoff that burst from her burned the air, it was so acidic. “Yeah. Good guess there, Steele. I
am
mad at you. But there’s nothing I can do about it except steer clear of you, and tell you to do the same until…”

He waited a beat while her words hit him like invisible blows. “Until?”

“Until I stop dying inside whenever I look at you.”

Had he thought her words before were painful? He hadn’t known the meaning until now. “I never meant to hurt you, sweetness.”

She flinched at the name but didn’t look away. “I believe you. In fact, I believe I never really entered your thought process at all. You saw me as someone who was scarred and screwed up like you, so I guess that made me easier to approach. You extended yourself to me in a way you haven’t extended yourself to anyone in years, and I can understand that. I understand the need to see if you’re still attractive to the opposite sex after going through everything you have, I really do. But in all that rebuilding of your confidence and making yourself feel good about what a sexy beast you are, you missed something. You never gave a thought to what you were doing to me. That’s not right, Steele. None of that is right.”

“What’s not right is every fucking word you just said.” Temper sparked white-hot, and it took everything he had to rein it in. “Are those the crazy-ass conclusions you’ve come to while I was doing my damnedest to get my shit sorted out? That I’m some kind of heartless fuckwad who used you to stroke my bruised ego because my ex kicked the shit out of me while I was down?”

“Sad to say, that’s exactly what I think. Don’t forget, I know what it’s like to live day after day with the thought that no one is ever going to want you because of what’s happened to you. Because of what you’ve become. I know what it’s like.”

“You don’t know a damn thing,” he grated, still furious, but this time half of that fury took direct aim at himself. When a man handled his woman so badly she was left with no choice but to believe the absolute worst of him, that wasn’t her fault. It was
his
. “You’ve turned everything we’ve shared into some shallow ego trip on my part, and nothing could be further from the truth.”

She shrugged and looked away. “Whatever.”

Goddamn it
. “You were right, okay? I was locked up inside myself. You brought me back to life, back into the world, and after being dead inside for so long, it took me a while to figure out what was happening. I couldn’t believe what was going on inside of me—I thought it was lust or need or even obsession. Maybe a part of me didn’t want to believe it, I don’t know. I don’t even care. What I do know is that I’m not going to let you take the most miraculous thing that’s happened to me in
years
, and turn it into a self-absorbed, ego-stroking fuck-frenzy.”

She was still for so long, he could almost believe she’d turned into a statue. Then she shook her head. “You haven’t convinced me that it was anything else.”

“Then I need to work on my communication skills.” Swinging both legs out onto the fire escape he pushed to his feet, put a hand on the metal stair railing and leaned into her space until they were eye to eye. “I just said that I not only lust after you, need you and am obsessed with you, but you’ve brought me back to life. Giving you up now is like giving up air. No way in hell am I going to do that.”