The Pretend Girlfriend (17 page)

"I'm not insinuating anything. I'm merely stating facts," Sylvia said.

"This interview is over. Come on, Gwen; we're leaving. Sylvia, if I see one word of this in print, if it comes out on some talk show or news piece, your editor can expect a libel suit," Aiden said. He helped Gwen to her feet.

"It's only libel if it's not true, Mr. Manning," Sylvia said.

A few of the people at the other tables must have overheard, at least in part. Little mutters chased them out of the conference room. Mutters and stares.

Rather than leading her back out through that gauntlet of camera flashes and curious reporters, Aiden took her out through a side entrance and had the Limo meet them there. He opened the door for her and then climbed in beside her.

"I'm sorry about that," Aiden said. He slammed his fist into the door. "I can't believe he did that!"

"How did she know about that stuff? About my rent?" Gwen said.

"Henry, of course. He did say he'd find out everything about you. He probably just passed some of it onto Sylvia. I just didn't think he'd be so brazen, is all. I thought it was just going to be an interview trying to trip us up on some detail of the relationship..."

"Can you take me home, please?" Gwen said.

Aiden told the driver to get them back to her building as quickly as possible.

They stayed quiet for a while, the two of them listening to the muffled rush of the road beneath the tires.

Gwen hugged herself, chewing on her bottom lip. That had really shaken her, she realized. Much more than she thought it would. She figured that she'd managed to convince herself that maybe Henry wasn't as bad as he seemed, that maybe he'd go easy, considering that Aiden was his son.

What else did he have planned?

She began doubting herself, her motivations and feelings. That vehemence she'd felt earlier, trying to convince both herself and Aiden that they could get through this interview and that she could then get on to getting him to admit that he did really like her.

That just didn't ring true, not at that moment at least. What if Beatrice was wrong? Gwen had seen just in the last hour or so how Aiden could change the way he acted to best suit the situation. Maybe he'd been looking at her when they were at Starbucks just for Beatrice's benefit. Maybe all Beatrice had seen was exactly what he'd wanted her to see.

I am in so far over my head
, she thought. Henry Manning was clearly a master manipulator. And Aiden himself had admitted that Henry taught him at least some of his methods.

She felt caught up in so many lies that she could no longer discern them from the truth, and that frightened her. Looking down, she saw that lovely shimmering dress she wore. Even that was a lie! It didn't belong to her. She wondered how many months of rent it might have cost. And Aiden had given it to her to make her look a certain way, to make people perceive her how he wanted them to.

Was all this really worth a maybe? The maybe in question going along the lines of: Maybe Aiden really does like me the way I like him.

The car stopped, and she saw the front entrance of her building all lit up inside. She couldn't remember the trip, aside from the blur of the dotted line on the road.

Aiden opened her door for her, and when she put one foot on the ground her heel panged. "I hate these stupid shoes!"

Managing to leave several runs in her pantyhose in the process, Gwen pulled the heels off. They dangled from her finger for a moment before she threw them back in the car. She never wanted to see them again.

The sidewalk felt cool against the soles of her feet. Aiden started following her towards the door. "I think we should talk about this," he said.

She spun around and put her hand on his chest, stopping him. With her heels off, she couldn't help noting how tall he was, and that, like just about everything else, bugged her.

"No. We're done talking. I am going up to my apartment to try and forget about tonight. And you aren't going to bother me, contract or no. That means no texts, no calls, and especially no more deliveries! If anything, and I mean anything, happens before noon tomorrow I am done with this, and I don't care about the consequences. Money can't fix everything, you know." She'd been jabbing him in the chest with her finger at just about every syllable. Her finger hurt. Was he wearing a metal plate under his shirt or something?

"Sleep well," Aiden said, seeing how irritated she was.

She hated that about him. Any other guy might argue. But any other guy couldn't size up the situation and see there was no winning with her in a mood like that.

And some part of her recognized that she really was upset beyond proportion with the situation. But she couldn't help it. It was all the stress of this whole thing coming out. She'd been bottling it up; it had to come out somehow.

"Nobody talks like that," she said, watching Aiden started back to the limo. He didn't respond. How could he be so cool and collected? She needed to get some sort of reaction out of him.

"You're just like your father, you know that?"

That did it. Aiden jerked to a stop, his shoulders hunching up. Gwen felt the thrill of triumph, followed quickly by wave of nausea. Even in her irrationally angry state, she recognized that was stepping over the line. That same irrational anger kept her from apologizing right away, and instead she just fumed, watching him get back into the car and drive away.

Up in her bedroom, she tore the dress taking it off. The zipper got caught about halfway down and in her frustration she just tore it off by main force. This left a jagged rent in the shimmering material beside the zipper where it gave way.

Again, she felt a pang of guilt and nausea. Aiden had told her she looked good in that dress.

She threw it into the corner along with the rest of the laundry she still needed to get done.

From there, it was straight to bed to try and forget about the way Aiden had flinched like she'd hit him when she compared him to his father.

It felt like she'd just closed her eyes and started to doze when her cell started ringing and buzzing.

H
er first thought was Aiden disregarding her threat to try and talk to her.

She rolled over to look at the clock. It was five in the morning! She couldn't remember going to sleep. Some weak morning light made the shadows around the window fuzzy.

Gwen sat up, rubbing at her eyes. An awful taste coated her tongue, and it felt like someone was trying to push her right eyeball out from behind with a sharp knife.

She stood up, thinking that no one should be awake this early unless they were farmers or being subjected to torture.

Grabbing her cell, she thumbed the button on the touch screen to answer. At the moment, her guilt over hurting Aiden outweighed her anger at what happened last night, and she just wanted to apologize. Actually, it was kind of sweet of him to get in touch with her. She imagined him up all night, worried about leaving her in that state...

"Hey, Aiden, look, I just wanted to say," she started.

"Miss Browning?" a woman's voice interrupted.

"Who is this?" Gwen said, taking her phone away from her ear to check the call display. It just said Private Number.

"Is this Gwen Browning?" the woman asked.

"Yes. Who is this?" Gwen repeated.

"I'm calling on behalf of Henry Manning. He would like to see you at his office straight away."

"You're kidding," Gwen said. She sat on her bed and rubbed at her eye, trying to get rid of that sharp pain.

"There is a car waiting for you downstairs."

"Listen, I don't care..."

But the woman hung up on her. Gwen bit back a few choice words. Her first thought was to just go back to sleep. But when her head hit the pillow, she couldn't stop thinking about that awful interview, and how Henry Manning was behind the whole thing.

It felt good to be angry with him. Justified, even. So Gwen rolled out of bed again and got ready, intending on going to see the high and mighty Henry Manning just to tell him where he could shove all of this nonsense.

Sure enough, when she got downstairs a glossy black Town Car waited for her. The driver didn't say anything when she climbed into the back seat, instead just throwing the car into gear and starting towards Manhattan.

At this early hour, the city was quiet. A few yellow cabs roamed the streets like scavenging seagulls, looking for whatever scant morsels they could find.

The early morning sun glinted off the river as they passed over the bridge, making it look like the water burned.

The Town Car took her well into the business core. The skyscrapers loomed high overhead like foreboding titans and the formerly intense fire of Gwen's anger cooled in their shade.

She began to think that maybe it would be a good idea to call Aiden. That coming to face Henry by herself wasn't the best decision.

But then the car stopped at the curb in front of a high-rise that seemed made of glass. The topmost section of the building looked bathed in fire as the morning sun came over the horizon. A security guard opened her door. He wore some kind of black army vest over a blue shirt, and kept his hair cropped short like a soldier.

"Miss Browning, please come with me," he said. It was less a request than a direct order couched in the guise of a request.

Gwen followed him. He led her to a bank of elevators inside a massive lobby. Gwen imagined that it was usually full of people, but at the early hour they were the only ones aside from another guard sitting behind the desk in the center of the room. Their footfalls echoed, and the air conditioner was set a couple degrees cooler than Gwen found comfortable.

She followed the guard into the elevator. He prodded the button for the top floor. From there, he escorted her into a large reception room. Enormous art prints from various Italian Renaissance masters took up the walls, and overstuffed leather sofas surrounded several modern, irregularly shaped coffee tables.

A pretty woman somewhere in her thirties, her hair up in a bun, waited at the desk. "Gwen Browning?" she said. It was the woman from the phone call. The one who'd hung up on her.

But Gwen felt much too cowed to confront her about it. The opulence of the place just overwhelmed her. And she didn't think those paintings were prints. The one behind the receptionist looked like the real thing. She could see the little ridges in the paint from where she stood.

"Yes," Gwen answered. She felt so small and insignificant. But that was probably the point, she realized. Everything Henry Manning did was to manipulate things to his advantage.

"Mr. Manning will see you now. Please go straight inside." Another one of those orders pretending to be a request.

Gwen screwed up her courage and walked towards the doors. Before she could grab the handle, they swung in of their own accord, the motors nearly silent.

Henry Manning's office looked surprisingly small, until the ceiling (or lack thereof) caught her attention. Glancing upward, her breath caught. There was a ceiling, all right. It was just about thirty feet up, and all glass.

"Gwen, thank you for coming. Take a seat, won't you?" Henry said.

He waved at a plush chair at his desk.

"No thanks," Gwen said, her triumph at this small defiance far too much.

He also offered her his hand, and she almost took it before remembering that particular trick. The one Aiden had used on her own father. He smiled at her refusal.

"Right to business then, I take it?"

"I don't have any business with you. You need to understand something," she started, trying to breathe some heat back into the dying embers of her anger.

"No, that's right. You're only business is with my son. But you see, his business is, quite literally, my business." He spread his arms apart, indicating Carbide Solutions, "And if he hopes to truly inherit it from me someday, he has to stop these little games. Like the one he's playing with you."

"We're not-" Gwen started.

"Just stop that. We both know the truth. Do you really think he could get a contract like that done up without me finding out about it? My son has real potential. He also just has it in his head that he needs to fix the company's image. And he's trying to do that with all this pointless charity, and with you. Yes, you. You're a part of that image he wants to project. Nothing more."

Why did some people have to do that?
Gwen wondered. They interrupt others, cutting people off mid-sentence as though their thoughts and opinions were the most important things in the world, like it was a privilege to hear them go on and on about whatever.

It was a wonder that Aiden even made it to adulthood, overshadowed by a man like Henry.

"You don't know your son at all," she said, crossing her arms. Her feet started to hurt from just standing there, still sore from their cute-shoes torture from the previous night. She wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of seeing that, though.

But that just earned her a small, tight smile.

"I know him better than he knows himself. And certainly better than you do. So that's why I am going to make this easy for both of you."

Henry put his fingertips on a leather bound clipboard on his desk and slid it across, closer to her. "Inside, you'll find another contract. It nullifies the current one you have with my son. There is also a... severance package I think you'll find more than generous. Just sign it, and all this goes away."

Gwen didn't know what to say.

Henry did, apparently. "He doesn't love you. And he certainly doesn't like you. You're just a tool to him. When he wears you out, he'll just toss you aside anyway. You are no good for him, so stop fooling yourself. You'll be doing yourself, Aiden, and this company a favor by cutting this little act short here and now."

Gwen approached the desk. She opened the clipboard. Sure enough, there was a new contract in there. Just like with the one Aiden gave her, this one started with a non-disclosure agreement.

Henry Manning reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and took out an expensive pen. He removed the cap and slid it across the desk, leaving it beside the clipboard.