“I’m not sure I want you sitting,” Katie said. “It might get in the way of all the groveling you’re going to have to do.”
“Who’s groveling?” he said. “You’re here. I accomplished everything I needed to with my previous groveling.”
“Sean and I decided we needed a vacation, and someone told us Buffalo is lovely in February. Though, honestly, Sean?” She glanced at him. “We should probably shoot that guy. But either way, we’re not here for you, Pratt. Not until you say you’re sorry.”
Judah smiled to cover his unease. He’d known she would press him. He’d invited her, begged her to come because he needed to be pressed. But he still wasn’t positive he could tell her.
“I don’t do apologies. I told you that already.”
“And I told you you’d better learn. You’re too old to be so inflexible.”
“I’m twenty-nine.”
“You’ve been twenty-nine for years. Do they give you some kind of aging plan when you get into the music business? ‘You’ll be twenty-nine until you’re thirty-seven, and then you’ll let your hair go gray and skip straight to Silver Fox’?”
Judah smoothed a palm over his temple, where the silver would be if his stylist didn’t cover it up. He was hardly ancient, but the last few years, he’d started to feel like he might as well be a hundred. He shot a look at Sean. “I thought you guys were supposed to be professionals.”
Sean shrugged.
Judah sighed and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Fine.” He cast his eyes at the ceiling. “Sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Katie asked.
He shot her a look with poison darts in it, but she didn’t even blink.
“It’s not a real apology unless you take responsibility for what you did,” she explained.
“Sorry for …”
He faltered. It was no joke—he didn’t have a clue how to apologize. Nobody ever expected him to.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what an asshole he’d been. In his running mental tally of his sins, trying to throw a leg over Katie ranked pretty high for the month of February, and he’d planned to do worse.
When she’d walked into his apartment in Chicago, he’d known instantly that she was the person he needed. For what, he had no idea. It didn’t work that way.
He’d thought about it and figured Katie could be his girlfriend. Travel around with him, make him look straight. If he kept her with him every night, fucked her when he had to or drank until he blacked out, he wouldn’t lie awake thinking about the messages.
Thinking about Ben.
It wasn’t a genius plan, but it had been the best he could come up with once the feeling grabbed hold of him. Sometimes he wished the fucking feelings came with an instruction manual. He wasn’t psychic, though his grandmother had been fond of saying he could be if he tried.
Trying had never been Judah’s forte. If it didn’t come easily, he didn’t normally bother.
But the problem with that attitude was that it didn’t help much at times like this. The tricky thing about giving up control to other people—the conundrum of having handed his entire life over to Paul all those years ago—was that whenever he tried to take it back, he just fucked everything up. As if he had an adult body and all these wrinkles, graying hair, and an increasingly iffy back, but his ability to function like everybody else had been arrested at nineteen.
He’d fumbled through that encounter with Katie like a dumbass teenager.
Maybe it would have been okay if he’d been able to concentrate when he kissed her. Lately, he had trouble concentrating on much of anything. Even drunk, alone in a hotel room with a beautiful woman, the messages kept playing back through his head.
Someone knew what he’d done and was going to expose him. And the list of possible someones was awfully goddamn short.
He’d spent three months frozen in place, trying to work up the nuts to do something about it. He and Paul agreed that they couldn’t turn the messages over to the Palmerston Security guys, not if they wanted to keep them quiet.
Paul said not to sweat it, but Paul had been smoking way too much lately. He’d dropped some weight, and he looked like hell. He was sweating it, and he didn’t even know everything. Judah had stopped showing him the messages after the first couple.
He could handle this, but he needed Katie to help him. Which meant he needed to come up with some appropriately
apologetic words.