Staying On Top (Whitman University) (26 page)

“I don’t believe anything you say,” he spat, handing over his passport.

“Sir, you need to come with me.” The customs agent had his hand on his hip, over his gun. He spoke softly into the radio on his shoulder, his eyes flicking between Sam and me. “Are you Blair Paddington?” 

I nodded dumbly.

“You’ll need to come with us, too.”

Neither Sam nor I spoke while the rest of the people in the customs building stared at us as though we’d just bombed a village inhabited by kittens wearing party hats. I had almost convinced myself that this had to be some kind of misunderstanding when the police showed up to escort us away.

My legs went numb and my heart pounded in my ears as they put us in the backseat of a police car outside the terminal instead of taking us to a room for questioning. No use pretending this was a simple immigration issue, then. Not if the police had flagged our passports.

“This is fucking fantastic. If you can’t ruin my life by stealing all of my money, you’ll get me arrested so I get fined or suspended from the tour. Or banned.”

“Sam, I swear I have no idea what’s going on.”

He snorted. “Right. It has nothing to do with your penchant for
borrowing
things?”

“Would you shut up?” We were in a fucking police car and he was basically admitting to stealing multiple items. I normally abhorred telling people to shut up, but cripes. This was my territory. No matter how pissed off Sam was, he needed to use his fucking head.

He seemed to realize the same thing, sitting back and pinching his lips together for the remainder of the ride to the police station. It was a dingy, one-story building too close to the ocean to be so depressing—clearly not the main station, which I assumed was in George Town. The inside held a couple of metal desks, a small, square conference or interrogation room, a kitchen with coffee stains on the counters, and a single cell, where they dumped both Sam and I. The walls were cinderblock and the linoleum floors peeled up at the corners. Two wooden benches sat along the back wall of our cell, one end far too close to a stinky latrine.

“Hey, don’t we get a phone call or something?” Sam shouted at their retreating backs.

Neither of them replied, leaving us alone without an explanation for plucking us off the streets like vermin. It could be the sailboat, but I doubted it. The longer I had to think, the more I suspected my dad was behind our arrest. He’d seen the footage from the house in Belgrade, I was willing to bet, and had deduced that, for the first time in my life, I was not going to get the job done. Having us arrested smacked of him taking matters into his own hands, though how he thought it would get him the rest of Sam’s money I hadn’t the slightest idea.

Sam slumped on the other end of the bench, sticking to his plan of not speaking to me. I guessed I wasn’t speaking to him, either, but there wasn’t much more to say. He knew I was a con, that I’d been willing to help my dad steal from him. He refused to hear me when I told him the truth—that the days we’d spent together had changed my mind. 

Changed my life, maybe. 

I didn’t have a clue how to convince him otherwise, and maybe I didn’t deserve the chance, anyway. This had always been how it was going to end. At least we had one good day.

One of the officers returned, a young guy with a sexy British accent, shining blond hair, and muscles that tested the limits of his cheap uniform that would make half the girls at Whitman drop their panties, but he wasn’t looking at me. 

He crooked a finger at Sam. “You have a phone call.”

Sam left without asking any questions, even though a bunch of them tumbled through my mind. First and foremost, who knew we were here? The answer could only be my dad, unless the press had somehow gotten ahold of the information—which, in the age of cell-phone cameras, wasn’t impossible—and why would my dad ask for Sam and not me?

The answer to that question also provided clarity as far as my dad’s endgame in getting us arrested. Sam returned to our cell, a storm cloud of anger obscuring what was left of his “go with the flow” demeanor. He didn’t sit, instead pacing along the front of the cell.

“Who was it?”

“Who do you think it was, Blair?”

I recoiled from the anger in his voice, but tried not to let the hurt show. “I think it was either my dad or that sleazy dude from TMZ.”

The joke didn’t get me a smile, but that was probably too much to ask.

“It was your dad.” He glanced down the hallway, maybe to make sure it was empty, then back at me. In his eyes, it was clear that his pain over my betrayal outstripped his anger, and the knowledge that I’d hurt him punched me in the gut. 

I’d been prepared for his anger, but not this. Not pain.

“He says all I have to do is give you the information he needs and I’m free—no charges, no one will know. I don’t know how he can promise that, but that’s what he said.”

“Sam, no. I’m not taking anything from you.”

His lips twisted, a hateful edge glinting in his smile. “That’s the whole reason we’re together, Blair, right? Don’t wimp out now. I’m sure I’m not the first mark you’ve gotten
close
to in order to carry out your daddy’s twisted games.”

My heart broke, but out of it boiled unexpected, indignant anger. “Hey, asshole, I understand you’re mad. But you don’t get to fling insults at me, or call me names.”

My chin trembled despite my best efforts, and horror replaced the disgust in Sam’s eyes. He rubbed a hand through his hair, looking away from me and then back, opening and closing his mouth a few times before getting words out around clenched teeth. “I’m sorry. You were honest with me before we slept together. I just heard it wrong.”

The tiniest scrap of my hope had somehow survived, and it floated to the surface with his apology.

“I’m sorry, Sam. So, so sorry. I knew you were going to find out how this all started, and that you would be angry and feel stupid, and I should have been strong enough to resist the spark between us so this wouldn’t happen. If I would have known this would hurt you, too, I would have tried harder.” My feet begged me to take steps his direction. A twitch infected my fingers with the desire to touch him, the desire that had somehow become second nature in such a short time, and I hated that I couldn’t give in. Not anymore. “I like you, Sam. I wanted things to be different. But this is what I am. This is my life. I tried to tell you.”

“That things can’t be different for you. Yeah, I get that now.”

“Don’t you think I want them to be? Different?”

“I want to, Blair. I do. I guess neither of us can get what we want today.”

His words bled the remaining strength out of my legs and I flopped down on the bench, letting the tears wash out of my heart and drip out my eyes. It had been forever—years—since I’d cried at all, but it was all that I’d wanted to do since Sam looked at me with hurt and betrayal in his face earlier today. It felt good and terrible at the same time, to let go of the façade that had passed for the real me all of these years, to let someone else see me, even when I felt gross and hateful. 

Sam sat at my side. He didn’t touch me, even though it felt as though maybe he wanted to, but the warmth of his presence, of the idea that maybe he was my friend even if we were fighting right now, dug my fingers into that scrap of hope. That even if things weren’t different today, it didn’t mean they couldn’t be. With my roiling emotions drained, my intellect snapped into use again, and an idea took root in the back of my mind.

Not a way to make Sam consider a future with me again, because I didn’t think that would be possible. Relationships were all about trust—that was the reason I’d never had a real one of any kind. No one could trust me, and I couldn’t trust them. 

But I could still find a way to make things right. I could do what I’d decided to do between Belgrade and Santorini—get Sam his money back. Get him out of this sticky situation without compromising his career. Figure out how to get out from under my dad’s thumb. 

Get my life on track, so that the next time I felt the way I felt when Sam stared into my eyes, I’d be able to believe in the possibilities of love, of a future.

Just thinking of caring about anyone else the way I did about Sam made my heart rebel. Right now, it felt as though that would never happen. But Sam and I would never happen, either, and the time had come to do the only thing I could. One last gesture to what might have been before moving on with my life. 

Clinging to any part of my past wouldn’t be healthy. After today, that included Sam.

I took a deep breath and got up, then walked over to the bars and shouted for the guard. Sam’s eyes burned a hole between my shoulder blades. I smiled when I felt them slide down to my ass, resisting the urge to wiggle as the handsome British accent stopped, eyebrows raised.

“I’d like to talk to whoever is in charge. It’s important.”

Chapter 19

Sam

I wanted to be surprised at the way things turned out but I believed in being honest with myself. As hard as I’d tried to ignore my gut feelings when it came to Blair, as close as I’d come to convincing myself everything was simple, there had been more than one red flag—none of them bigger than the fear inside her I couldn’t place, couldn’t assuage. 

Turned out my gut was right. That fear in her was born of the idea that I might find out what she was up to before she managed to wrangle whatever account information she needed, not any worry that stemmed from her childhood or her inability to form attachments. 

It hurt my pride and my heart, which had been dangerously close to being in her palm when everything went to shit. There was no denying the chemistry between us. I knew in my soul she hadn’t faked that—
couldn’t
have faked that. The way we connected in bed, in conversation, in silence, was real. There
was
something between us, something I’d never felt before and worried I would never feel again, but it didn’t mean shit now. 

Blair had been gone long enough for me to start to worry about the Cayman cops mistreating her, which made me angry and contemplative at the same time. It seemed that finding out she’d been trying to make me look like a fool wasn’t enough to dislodge the emotional attachment we’d formed. It had almost killed me not to hold her while she’d cried as though her soul had ripped in two. The desire to make her feel better about treating me like every other moron she’d ever met confused me. 

It was the friendship. The one that had grown around us in the days before we’d gone to bed together, solid and formed before we’d noticed what had happened. One that meant I worried about her and wanted the best for her, no matter what that meant for me.

The good-looking cop returned, turning the key in the lock and holding open the metal cell door. “Let’s go, lover boy.”

“Where are we going?” I wanted to be more suspicious, or possibly more of a dick, but the events of the last several hours had exhausted me, body and soul.

“Cap wants to talk to you before you go.”

Go?
“Where am I going?”

“Wherever you want, as long as you have the cash to get there. Come on.”

“Wait, are you saying you guys aren’t pressing charges? And I don’t have to do anything?”

He didn’t respond, motioning again for me to come along. When I paused next to him, free from handcuffs or even a strong grip, he smiled. “Cap’s got the details, but yes. You’re free to go, after a brief chat.”

I didn’t know what to say to that—not to mention the worry that saying anything at all might jinx my good luck—so I followed him down the hall to the conference room in silence. There was an older, portly man inside with Blair, whose wrists
were
locked in handcuffs as he helped her up and out the door.

Our eyes met as she squeezed past me into the hall. The look on her face, her eyes filled with sorrow and guilt, made it hard to swallow. To breathe. But the solid strength running underneath her pain had been one of the things that intrigued me from the beginning. Blair would survive. 

The British guard took her and left me alone in the doorway to the conference room. The older man, whose badge identified him as the police captain, escorted me to the table after shutting the door behind us. 

“Have a seat, Mr. Bradford.”

I did as I was told, trying not to fidget. “Sir, I—”

“No. I don’t want you to say anything just yet. I’m going to tell you what’s going on and why you’re being detained, then you can agree or disagree with the statement that has been provided by Miss Paddington. Is that clear?”

I nodded even though it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. In the movies when the police brought in two suspects, they interviewed them separately to see if their stories matched up. 

“There was an alert placed on your passport, and Miss Paddington’s, due to a break-in that happened at the Belgrade home of one of our residents. It has also been discovered since you have been in custody that a sailboat was stolen from the yacht club in Jamaica, a boat that is now anchored in our North Sound.”

“Okay . . .”

“We’ve spoken to Miss Paddington about both of these incidents, given her connection to the Cayman resident who initiated the complaint.”

“She’s his daughter.”

“Please keep your mouth shut, young man. I’d hate to see that Spaniard win another Aussie Open.” He winked, taking me by surprise. “Miss Paddington has admitted to being in the Belgrade house and to stealing the sailboat, but insists that she told you that both belonged to her father and she had legal access to the property. She will remain here until her father decides whether or not to press charges—or the owners of the
Wiggler
can be located—but you are free to go. There is a ticket to Melbourne waiting for you at the airport in George Town.”

Blair was taking the fall. She was taking the blame for everything and putting me back where all of this started, but her father had insisted nothing but access to my accounts would spring me from prison. She had thwarted him, gone against his wishes to manipulate the police, and I knew I should take advantage of her kindness and run back to my life before things got worse.