STEP BY STEP (10 page)

“So you were just fucking your way to the
top this whole time?” I asked her, my eye honing in on her bare ring finger.
“Where’s your ring? Does your husband know what kind of woman you are?”

Sapphire looked torn. “When you and I
started…hooking up…I was separated. We sort of got back together in the
interim, I guess. I owe it to my daughter to try to make it work with her
father.”

“And when were you going to tell me
this?” I asked, fighting the strain in my voice. “Huh? When
?!
”

She held her eyes on the ground, unable
to meet my angry glare.

“Did this mean anything to you? Us?” I
asked, spitting mad. “Or was it all one, big lie?”

Her big, chocolate eyes slowly
raised
to meet mine and her lips curled into a half smile.
“I don’t know what it was exactly. I just know it was fun, and I didn’t want it
to end. I never meant for it to go this far…”

I placed my hands on my hips and hung my
head. “I was going to propose to you tonight.”

I couldn’t look at her. I spun around and
headed back towards my apartment uptown. A million thoughts rushed through my
mind. All I knew was that I never wanted to see her again, and I never wanted
to feel like that again.

MIRABELLE

“Morning,” I said as I rapped on
Preston’s door. “I brought you something.”

I handed him a steaming mug of black
coffee and watched as he took it from my hands and sat it aside, almost out of
arm’s reach.

“You okay today?” I asked, studying his
face. His expression was nearly twisted into some sort of angry smirk.

“Do you need something right now?” he
asked, turning to me and then looking towards the door behind me.

Speechless, I shook my head and walked
out, shutting the door behind me. I headed towards my office, trying to rack my
brain as to what could possibly be his problem. I’d always heard guys could run
hot and cold, but this was ridiculous.

I sat my bag down on my desk, almost
missing a tiny envelope with a jewelry store logo on it sitting right next to
my keyboard. I gently pulled the seams apart on the envelope and poured the
contents into my hand.

My grandmother’s pendant.

The chain was shiny and new, and it felt
slightly thicker, sturdier. He must have found it that night after dinner and
had the chain replaced. I unhooked the clasp and secured it back around my neck
where it belonged, gripping the tiny stone between my fingers. That necklace
meant the world to me, just like my late grandmother.

The sound of Preston’s door opening
forced me to look up and out my doorway. His footsteps traveled the short
distance between our offices only he didn’t stop. He kept walking.

“Preston!” I shouted out towards the
hall.

Seconds later he appeared in my doorway,
face expressionless. I motioned for him to come in and shut the door.

“Yes?” he said as he closed the door and stepped
towards me, his hands clasped and eyebrows raised. This was not the same man
who just last week couldn’t keep his hands off me.

“Oh,” I said, my cheeks reddening. “Is
everything okay between us? Or are you having second…”

I couldn’t bring myself to finish the
sentence. The fact that I’d had sex with my boss and former stepbrother went
against every morale fiber of my being. Saying it out loud only made me feel
worse about it, especially now that it appeared to have been a glaring mistake.
He was such an asshole. He hadn’t changed at all.

He rolled his eyes. “What do you need, Mirabelle?
I’ve got somewhere I need to be.”

My fingers twisted around the diamond
pendant that hung from my neck. “I just wanted to say thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said as he turned to
leave, his hand gripping the doorknob in haste.

“Wait,” I called after him. I walked
around my desk and stepped closer to him. “What’s going on with you today?”

“Come clean,
Miri
,”
he said through gritted teeth and with averted eyes.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Come clean,” he repeated.

“Yeah, I heard you the first time,” I
snapped. “Now what are you talking about?”

“There’s something you haven’t told me,”
he said. “Something very significant.”

I racked my brain. Nothing came to mind.
I was a pretty simple girl
;
a straight A college
student with a penchant for avoiding needless drama. I had no skeletons in my
closet. Not a single one.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,”
I said with my head held high. “You’re being weird right now. I don’t like it.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like being lied to,”
he said, facing the other direction. His hand gripped the doorknob and began to
turn it to the right.

I palmed the door and held it shut. “I
don’t play games,
Preston
. You’ve been
inside me, at least give me the privilege being able to have a decent
conversation with you. I don’t have time to try to read between your blurred
lines.”

He turned back to face me, obviously
surprised at the heat and intensity of the words leaving my mouth.

“I’m a damn fine intern,” I said with my
hands on my hips. “You’re paying me pennies compared to what I’m worth and you
know that. And on top of that, I let you inside me. Not just in my body, but in
my heart as well.”

He stared at my lips as I spewed my
venom.

“Look me in the eyes, Preston,” I
commanded. “You give me this job. You give me this office. You kiss me. You
take me out to dinner. You make love to me. You fix my diamond pendant. And now
that your ex-girlfriend is back in the picture, suddenly I’m chopped liver?”

“No,” he said, his eyes locked into mine
and filled with angst and confusion. “It’s not about her. It’s not about her at
all. It’s about the fact that you lied to me.”

“I didn’t lie to you!” I said, barely
recognizing the angry shriek that escaped my mouth. I rarely raised my voice,
but I wasn’t going to stand there and let him accuse me of lying.

“I know what I saw,” he said in a low
hush. Before I had a chance to say anything else, he was gone.

PRESTON

About
one year ago…

“Preston,” Mr.
Halston
said as he entered my office door unannounced. Being equal business partners never
stopped him from acting like my boss and barging into my space. Perhaps it was
because I was hardly thirty and he was twice my age. “I have someone I’d like
you to meet.”

As Mr.
Halston
moved from the doorway, behind him stood the most beautiful thing I’d ever laid
eyes on. A tall, fair-skinned beauty with cropped blonde hair and the biggest
eyes I’d ever seen stood with one hand resting on her perfectly proportioned
hip. Her red lips, full and soft, parted into a sweet smile as she walked
towards me and extended her right hand.

“Sapphire Hart,” she said. “Nice to meet
you.”

“Sapphire’s our new associate VP of
Client Relations,”
Halston
said. “The young lady I
told you about. She’s the one I offered the job to last month while you were on
that ski trip in the Swiss Alps, but she had to finish out her old contract at
Reed, Ferryman, and Henderson.”

“RFH,” I said as I shook her hand. “Very
impressive. What made you want to come here?”

“Mr.
Halston
convinced me,” she said as she gave him a friendly, knowing wink. “There are
more opportunities for advancement here. And growth. RFH was a little stale for
my style. I wanted something a little more exciting. A little more
progressive.”

“I see,” I said, trying to hide the fact
that I found her impossibly gorgeous. My eyes kept traveling the length of her
body as if they had a mind all their own.

“I hear you have a vision for
Halston
and
Woodfield
,” she said.
“I’m here to help you make that vision a reality.”

Sapphire oozed confidence like nobody’s
business. With her head held high and her shoulders back, she was a woman who
wasn’t afraid to try to take over the world. She was exactly what I needed. She
was exactly what I wanted…

“I look forward to working with you,” I
said.

As Mr.
Halston
lead her out of my office, his hand on the middle of her lower back, she turned
to look at me one last time, flashing a sexy smile in the process.

The second she left, I loosened my tie.
My mouth was dry and suddenly the room was hot. The growing bulge in my pants
told me what I already knew, and no woman had ever given me that powerful of a
physical reaction before.

Sapphire was a real spitfire. An
intelligent beauty that packed a 1-2 punch, she was the stuff that
dream
girls were made of. Group meetings turned into
individual meetings, and eventually joint projects with the two of us at the
helm took up most of our days. Working lunches turned into casual drinks which
turned into date night dinners and the occasional hotel room.

We wanted the same things from life, and
we were prepared to chase our dreams together. The attraction was evident the
moment we first made eye contact, and the chemistry as undeniably intense. She
was the only woman powerful enough to put me in my place, and God knows I
needed that.

Month went by, and my feelings towards Sapphire
only snowballed into something that was bigger than I knew what to do with, and
one lazy Sunday afternoon I’d found myself wandering into a jewelry shop on 5
^th
avenue. I walked out with a flawless, five-carat, cushion cut diamond
solitaire, and I spent months trying to come up with the perfect proposal.

That night, at the restaurant, everything
changed. Life as I knew it was over. I’d never given so much of myself to
anyone before, and in a matter of seconds, I realized that those feelings
weren’t reciprocal.

The way she’d wink at me from across the
table in meetings. The way she’d bring me my coffee every morning, just the way
I liked it with two sugars and the tiniest bit of vanilla cream. The way she’d
stare into my eyes when we made love, and all those nights spent curled up in
each other’s arms, daydreaming about our ambitions and life goals. It was all
for nothing. It all went to shit the second she admitted she’d lied.

Not only was our relationship one, big,
giant lie. So was she.
Married mom from Jersey.
Fucking lying bitch.

As I sat alone in my apartment Christmas
day, in front of the tree Sapphire had insisted on decorating together in my
place, I drowned my sorrows in a few too many glasses of warm brandy and passed
out on the sofa in a puddle of my own vomit.

It wasn’t my finest moment, but by the
time I’d come to, I made a vow to myself never to waste another second with a
liar. No second chances. No exceptions. I would’ve sworn off women completely
if I wasn’t such a hot-blooded, American man. As long as I always wore the
pants and called the shots, I wouldn’t get hurt again.

MIRABELLE

“Mirabelle,” Preston said as he called my
desk phone. “Come in here.”

I’d emailed him my updated proposal for
the Johnston account earlier that week. They’d come back and said they liked
it, but they weren’t quite sold and wanted to mull it over some more. Preston
then insisted that I make it better. I’d racked my brain all week, stayed up
late, come in early, and poured all of my blood, sweat, and tears into that
marketing plan.