“I do not storm.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’ve seen you storm.”
“He makes me want to throw things.”
“Not the ring.” Vanessa picked up Ellie’s hand and gave the ring a closer inspection. “You’re keeping that if the knucklehead doesn’t get his act together. I mean, come on.”
“The problem is I want to keep it all—his friends, his house, his brother.” The words ripped out of Ellie. It hurt to admit all of that.
“Oh, man. You have it bad.”
Ellie was starting to realize that. “No kidding.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The DC Insider: They’re engaged! You know who they are and what we’re talking about. We’re hoping for a September wedding. You?
“He didn’t actually steal the money.” Derrick said the comment more to himself than to any one person. He’d forgotten Jackson was sitting in the chair across from him, one leg crossed over the other, so he did have a captive audience.
He looked up. “Excuse me?”
Derrick wasn’t sure how to explain how he’d come to that conclusion, but he tried, anyway. It was more of a feeling than any one specific grounded in fact. Still, he thought he’d stumbled over the right answer. “It was this thing Noah said. He talked about being my mentee.”
From the beginning Derrick had assumed the situation with Noah was about money. That fact fit with what he knew about Ellie’s precarious finances and now with what he knew about her unstable upbringing and the limited resources and attention given to Noah.
Noah hadn’t been searching for easy money. He hadn’t even tried to take the amount he’d managed to gather out of the account he’d created, which would have been easy. He’d moved the money the same way he’d moved around everything else in the company’s system. Without one person noticing. And Derrick hired smart people. They knew what they were doing but their brains were no match for Noah’s. He’d acted almost as if he were bored and looking for a better way to categorize things.
Derrick’s tech people were still trying to figure out how the kid’s mind worked so they could mimic it.
“You know you’ve been sitting for three hours without moving.”
“So?”
“You worked late last night.” Jackson nodded in the direction of Derrick’s cell. “You haven’t been texting with Ellie today like you usually do.”
Derrick had no idea what that had to do with the information Jackson mentioned, except to question why he spent so much time tracking Derrick’s movements. “I’m working.”
“Are you sure you’re not pouting?” Jackson dropped the file he was looking at on his lap. Closed the cover and focused on Derrick instead.
“Does that seem like something I’d do?”
Jackson snorted. “Not before Ellie.”
Derrick didn’t know how he felt about that answer, either. He knew she’d turned his life upside down. He’d lost control of his office and his home but he’d hoped no one else had picked up on that.
While they were spinning around topics without finding answers, he figured he might as well add one more fact. “We’re engaged, by the way.”
Jackson’s foot fell to the floor. “What?”
Derrick returned to looking at the printouts in front of him. “I need you to send out that press release and leak the info to the Insider.”
That was the game, after all. A fake engagement to clean up his reputation and defuse Noah. The idea had once made sense but Derrick had grown to hate the words. Now he wanted a shot at making it real.
“Back up.” Jackson knocked his fist against the desktop. “When did this big event happen?”
“Yesterday.” A day that now ranked as one of the most confusing days of Derrick’s life.
He’d thought he was doing the right thing when he’d taken out the box. Settling the unsettled between them. Giving Noah another reason to calm down. Feeding the PR machine. But he’d forgotten that Ellie didn’t always do and say what he expected. She worked in this other world that he didn’t get.
Bottom line, he’d hurt her and she didn’t seem ready to let him fix the damage. That might have been good since he had no idea how to fix it.
“And we aren’t celebrating the big event?” Jackson asked.
There would be a party. That was the point. A public coming-out of sorts. But he had one problem with arranging it right now… “She hasn’t talked to me since.”
Jackson laughed. “That sounds like a good start to a marriage.”
“A fake marriage.” For some reason everyone kept forgetting that part. Sure, the ring was real. It seemed like a dick move to get her a fake one of those. Besides, he liked the idea of her wearing his ring. Of seeing it on her finger.