It was just… Elaine was different from anything I’d had before. We had something worth holding onto, worth trying to keep.
But I couldn’t force her to see it. All I could do was let her go and wait. See if she realized it and called me. Dammit. Blinking, I cleared my throat, and stood, shaking it off and quickly going to the bathroom to hit the shower.
Cleaned and dressed, I roughly threw all my shit in my suitcase. Derek and I had different flights back to Princeton. His departed later than mine, so I didn’t have to see him before I left the resort. I called to let him know I was heading out, but I got voicemail.
“It’s me.” The change in my voice was apparent, defeated. “Heading out. See you back at the office.”
Back to reality.
I tried to stoke that confidence—she would come around. But how could I know that? We’d only been together a few days. Picking up my suitcase, I walked out of the room, and the dry, twisting ache of what I was leaving behind went with me.
Chapter 11 – Whatever it Takes
Instead of going in, I left a message that I was sick. Partly because the last thing I felt like doing was dealing with Star, but mostly because I couldn’t get out of bed. Lying on my side, I couldn’t stop thinking about Elaine.
I tried to reason with myself. It didn’t make sense for me to be so torn up inside. I’d had other women. Hell, I’d loved one woman enough to ask her to marry me. But I’d never felt consumed by the mere thought of touching someone before. Everything in me was drawn to Elaine. She said she wanted to be the only one I thought about, and she’d gotten her wish. And it fucking hurt like hell.
Rolling onto my side, I kicked my ass out of bed. I wasn’t doing this. Yes, she was gorgeous and sexy and amazing. And she ended it. She didn’t want a long-distance relationship, and whatever had happened between us wasn’t enough to change that. It didn’t make sense, but I had to deal with it. If she never came back, I would work through the pain twisting a hole in the center of my gut and get over it.
Food tasted like cardboard. I tried unpacking, but the second shirt I pulled out that smelled like Cactus Flower perfume almost had me throwing things. If I tried to sleep, all I saw were her eyes, her body, her smile. Walking around my apartment, I knew I couldn’t spend the day here like this. Sick or not, I got dressed and went to work. Anything was better than being here alone thinking about her.
* * *
I walked through the glass doors that read Alexander-Knight, LLC, and for a moment surprise pushed out all my other emotions. Nikki was there behind the front desk.
“You’re back?” I said. “But what about…”
A big smile covered her face, and she hopped up, circling the desk to hug me. As always, she wore a tight wrap-dress showing off her sex-kitten figure. I think the dress was peach-colored, but her appearance didn’t interest me as much today. She pressed her body against mine in a hug, and I bent my elbows to return her embrace. Still I was confused. Where was Star?
“How are you, handsome?” She stepped back, evaluating my expression. “Hmm… not so good either. Derek’s acting like his favorite pet got run over. He’s been in his office with the door closed all morning.”
“I don’t think he has any pets,” I said absently.
Nikki breathed a short laugh. “What happened to my guys in the two weeks I was gone? Did you miss me that much?”
My hand automatically went to my stomach, covering the spot where the pain was most intense. “Jet-lag. You know how it is traveling across country.”
“Actually, I don’t, but I do know what jet-lag looks like, and it ain’t this.”
Discussing my heartache with Nikki or anyone else was not about to happen. “Well, I’m glad you’re back.” I forced a smile and headed to my office.
Flipping through my case, I pulled out the cards and information from the clients I’d met and tried to care about them. Derek gave me a portfolio describing the different levels of service we offered, from Level One, which was strictly enforcement—an online network got hacked, we tracked down the hackers—all the way up to designing the network and integrating it into our system for round the clock monitoring and troubleshooting.
He’d also returned from Dallas with that huge corporate-phishing ring we were supposed to track down. All of it combined to being more than enough work to bury myself in for as long as it took to stop feeling it. To stop needing her.
I went to the server and pulled up our standard business letter for new clients and started typing up the first proposal.
* * *
Calm put in an appearance around two o’clock. I’d worked solid through lunch, sent out the welcome packages to my new clients then spent several hours analyzing the email accounts from the phishing ring. A pattern was forming, but whether it matched the same scam being used across servers was as yet unclear. My mind was effectively numbed by the repetition of tracking URLs and looking up owners in the whois database, and I needed to walk around.
I went down the hall toward Derek’s office. As far as I knew, his door had been closed all day, but I knocked. He’d been distracted the whole time we were in Scottsdale, so I wasn’t bothered by his strange behavior now. What did bother me was that since we’d returned,
he seemed sadly distracted instead of happily.
“How’s it going,” he said, focused on his computer.
“It’s coming together. I’m starting to see a pattern.”