Levi ground his back teeth. “If it is him, he made a huge fucking mistake by letting me know he was alive. Because I’ll make it my personal mission to ensure he doesn’t stay alive for long.”
Scanning the many contents of her fridge, Piper hummed to herself. She liked to cook. It relaxed her. But as ideas for various meals sprang to her mind, none gripped her. She was in one of those weird moods where she was hungry but didn’t feel like eating any of the meals she usually favored. Ugh.
She closed the refrigerator and began browsing through her cupboards, hoping inspiration would strike her. That turned out to be a pointless hope.
A knock came at the front door.
Piper felt her brows flit together. It would be fair to say she wasn’t the most social of beings, so there weren’t a lot of people who’d generally stop by.
Suspecting it might be Levi, she puffed out a long breath as she strode down the hallway, totally ignoring the fluttering in her stomach. She glanced through the door’s peephole. Her face hardened. Not Levi. Not anyone she’d want to see.
Piper pulled open the door. “This seemed like a good idea to you? Honestly?” Did he want her to throw another hellfire orb at him? Because she wouldn’t be opposed to that.
Kelvin flapped his arms. “I didn’t know what else to do. You wouldn’t take my calls. You wouldn’t reply to my texts. I don’t know if you’ve even listened to any of my voicemails. At least hear me out, Piper.”
She itched to slam the door in his face, but that would be awarding him the sort of emotional reaction he simply wasn’t worthy of. Plus, indifference would piss him off far more anyway. So she gave a bored shrug and said, “Fine. Say what you want to say and then go.”
The corners of his eyes tightened at her dismissive tone. “We’re really going to do this? Throw away our friendship?”
“Well you shit all over it, so …”
He cringed. “What I did was in poor taste, for sure. Okay, that’s an understatement. But I didn’t purposely set out to have sex with Trinity on your chair. The moment was intense, there was a lot of stumbling and turning, and then suddenly she was sitting on your chair.”
Folding her arms, Piper propped her hip against the doorjamb. “And you didn’t ask her to move?”
His mouth opened and closed. “I was caught up in the moment.”
“Ah, I see.” She skimmed her finger along the underside of her chin. “Tell me, Kelvin. If you’d walked into the studio and found me lying on your chair while a guy drilled his dick into me, how would you have felt?”
He grimaced. “Disrespected. Pissed. Hurt that you’d even think to do that.” He heaved a sigh. “I’m sorry, Piper. Really. I’m not gonna ask you to forgive me any time soon—I know I don’t deserve to be let off with it so easily. But at least come back to work.”
“I’m no longer one of your employees. I quit, remember?”
His face softened slightly. “You didn’t really mean that.” He looked amused that she’d believe he’d think differently. “You only said it because you were angry.”
“Oh, I was angry. I was also completely serious.”
He studied her for a long moment, and then his cheeks began to redden. “Piper, you can’t leave the studio.”
“Sure I can. Already did.”
“You have clients! You’re fully booked for the next few months!”
“Someone else can take them on. Including you.”
He shook his head, a beseeching look on his face. “Piper, don’t do this.”
“It’s done.”
Noting movement in her peripheral vision, she glanced to her left … and her stomach hardened as she noticed Sefton and his brother, Jasper, striding down the sidewalk. Knowing her history with them, Kelvin quieted and watched the two males closely.
As the brothers passed her house, Sefton made a point of not looking at her. Jasper, however, tossed her a vicious snarl. A snarl she’d seen the day he yelled in her face and raised his fist to her after storming into her previous place of work. It was Kelvin who jumped between them, shoved Jasper away from her, and then slammed his fist into Jasper’s nose. See, Kelvin wasn’t a complete asshole, but he was a man she no longer trusted.
Once the siblings were a fair distance away, he turned back to her. “Has Sefton given you any problems?”
She shook her head. “And no, Jasper hasn’t confronted me again, before you ask.”
“Well the last one earned him a broken nose, so maybe that’s why. You know you can call on me if he gives you any more problems.”
“And we both know I won’t.”
He sighed. “We agreed that if our relationship didn’t work out we wouldn’t let it come between us.”
“And we didn’t. But look at the shit you pulled afterward. Within days, you were fucking someone else. A woman who’s a twat to me, no less. And you did it under my nose. Like … I could actually hear you two going at it most of the time.”