The Schemer (Harbor City 3)

Panic flared in his chest. “I’m sorry. I didn’t put that well,” he said, his words coming out in the same frantic speed as his heartbeat. “But this is the only way to make everyone see past where I’ve come from and to where I’m going. I have to make this deal.”

She looked him dead in the eye. “You know, no one judges you for your working-class roots as harshly as you do yourself.”

Heat blasted through his body. How many times had he heard the taunts at school, the whispers in the boardrooms? But when was the last time that happened? a small voice inside him asked. He pushed the doubt aside. Throughout his life there’d been one thing motivating him and moving him forward—proving everyone wrong. He wouldn’t let go of that now. He couldn’t. Without that fire, who was he?

Everly continued, pressing against that wound of his that never seemed to heal. “Your parents may have started you on that self-loathing route—and God wouldn’t I love to tell them to go fuck themselves for doing that to a child—but you’re continuing to march down it of your own volition. At some point in time you have to take responsibility for the path you’ve chosen. You can’t blame all of it on where you’ve come from.”

“That’s bullshit. You don’t know anything about me. And for someone who talks the talk, how much are you really walking the walk? Care to share more about your daddy issues with the class?” he asked, his snarly voice loud enough to make the waiter passing by on his way back to the kitchen flinch. Dammit. Cool it down, Jacobson. Causing another scene is not going to help anything. Heart still racing but his voice lower, he continued. “Everly, I—”

“Don’t bother,” she interrupted as she pushed past him. “Whatever you’re gonna say next doesn’t matter anyhow. We’re done here. Only until it’s not fun anymore, remember our agreement? Well, this isn’t my definition of fun.”

Stunned, he didn’t have a response beyond saying her name as she walked out of his life. Once again, she’d done the unexpected. This turn of events, though, was a steel knife through the chest. He wanted to scream, to rant, to rave, but he couldn’t. The lessons he’d learned came rushing to the forefront—never let anyone see your emotions because it gave them too much power. So while the caveman inside him screamed at him to fight, he did the opposite. He swallowed the razor blades and stayed frozen to his spot. Her footsteps hesitated for the briefest of moments, but when he made no move, she went on without him while he listened to the distinctive click-clack of her heels as she marched across the marble floor.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Tyler spent the next four days almost exclusively at his office. That meant his back ached from sleeping on the couch, he was out of fresh clothes kept in his executive bathroom, and he hadn’t shaved in days. He’d reached out to every member of the Ferranti Hotel group’s board who was in Harbor City and did his best to smooth things over. It hadn’t worked. Oh, they hadn’t said that outright, and his pitch meeting was still scheduled in three weeks, but he knew a polite brush-off when he experienced one. He smelled like shit. He looked like shit. He felt like shit. So it was pretty much the trifecta of shit in his life.

So why was he sitting at his desk scrolling through old text messages from Everly? Because that was as close to fun as his life got anymore. God, he was fucking pathetic. Just as he was about to put the phone down and continue the exercise in futility known as putting together a hotel expansion presentation that wasn’t going to go anywhere, it vibrated in his hand.

EVERLY: No need to hide out any longer. I left my keys with the super.

What the fuck? Where in the hell was she going? Hiding out? He’d been working his ass off. There was a difference. Anyway, why would he hide? She was the one who’d told him to fuck off. He stood up so quickly that he sent his desk chair flying back behind him and it thunked against his credenza.

“That can’t have been good news,” a familiar deep voice said.

Sawyer Carlyle stood in his open office doorway, holding a white paper bag. It had been a rough few years between them. At first, there’d been only a cold silence with Tyler plotting to make the other man’s life as difficult as possible. However, his heart was never really in it and cracks in the ice had started to form when Sawyer fell for his now-wife, Clover. Something about seeing the other man so completely at a loss about what was going on in his life thanks to the whirlwind that was Clover had brought the two of them back together. By the time Hudson Carlyle had made a public declaration for Tyler’s friend Frankie Hartigan’s little sister, Felicia, he and Sawyer had started to rebuild their friendship. Now? They weren’t in each other’s pockets, as Mrs. Hartigan had said repeatedly when he and Frankie were growing up, but they were friends again and it felt good—just not right now, when it felt like an iron hand was squeezing his lungs shut.

“She’s leaving,” Tyler said, his attention dropping again to the phone screen.

“Who’s leaving?”

“Everly.” He grabbed his chair and flopped back into it.

“The gallery owner?” Sawyer asked, walking over to the pair of chairs in front of Tyler’s desk and sitting down, setting the bag on the floor between them. “Yeah, Hudson said she was opening up a new place on Aucoin Avenue.”

What the fuck? Why was he just hearing this now? “She can’t.”

Sawyer snorted. “Oh yeah, why’s that?”

“Because she signed a lease with me.” That sounded lame even to him.

“One that according to Hudson you let go to a month-to-month without any notice requirements.” Sawyer shook his head. “Rookie mistake, Jacobson.”

No shit. And one he couldn’t fix at the moment—if ever. God, this fucking sucked. And to top it off, the happily-in-love jerk in front of him just sat there grinning like a man about to enjoy ice cream and beer for breakfast. The rat bastard. If they really weren’t friends again, Tyler would be showing his smug ass the door.

“How do you know this?” After all, that kind of intel was usually his bread and butter.

“Because my little brother is all sorts of pissed at you because of Everly, and he felt like yammering while I was working out this morning,” Sawyer said. “So tell me, what in the hell did you do to her?”

Act like an asshole. “Nothing.”

Sawyer lifted an eyebrow. “Really?”

“She did it to m-me,” he sputtered, remembering the ice in her eyes when she told him it wasn’t fun anymore, so different from the fiery avenging-angel look she’d had going while handing Irena her ass—if it hadn’t been for the fact that Everly had fallen right into the other woman’s trap, it would have been a sight to behold. Instead it had been like watching everything he’d worked for implode. “She caused a huge scene at the gala and more than likely sank the Ferranti Hotel group deal, and then she told me that she didn’t want to see me anymore.”

“So she broke up with you,” Sawyer said, distilling Tyler’s hell into six one-syllable words.

“We weren’t going out.” He shoved his phone away so it was half-hidden under a stack of papers. “It was just fun.”