“Amy?”
He closes his eyes. “Right. She’s not happy, but she’ll get over it. I just wanted to apologize for the way she acted today.” When his eyes open again, he frowns. “Did something happen between you two?”
I stiffen. “I just rub her the wrong way, I guess.”
“I get that you’ve made some mistakes, but . . . she’s irrational when it comes to you.”
Mistakes. Of course I’ve made some, maybe more than my share, but I hate feeling like those mistakes define me with Kace. Especially when he doesn’t even know the worst of it.
He pulls a face. “I’ve never understood why she dislikes you so much.”
I grunt. “Dislike is such a nice word. Amy hates me.”
“Why?”
The image of her pressed against the elevator wall with my boss’s hand up her skirt flashes in my mind. But I shrug. “Vinegar and oil?”
He shakes his head. “I know you made a bad impression on her when you had an affair with Clint, but—”
I shove myself back and hop off his lap. “What?”
He flinches. “Shit. I probably wasn’t supposed to know that.”
“She told you that?”
Slowly, he pushes up off the couch. “I’m sorry. It’s not my business, but she’d vent at the end of the day and—”
“Kace.” I take his hands and look into his eyes. “I did not have an affair with that man.”
He shrugs. “Okay, then Amy misunderstood. I don’t want to get in the middle of that.”
“I left Allegiance because Clint wouldn’t stop coming on to me. He was an entitled creep, and he thought that because he signed my paycheck, I shouldn’t object when he put his hand up my skirt in the break room. I didn’t feel safe after that, so I left.”
“Did you report it to HR? That’s not okay, Stella. There are laws—”
“There are laws that allow women to fight against this shit only when we can afford a drawn-out court battle that’ll flash the worst pieces of our past in front of the world.” I shake my head. I couldn’t risk that, and I made my peace with my decision long ago. While I’d like Kace to understand, I have no regrets. But the idea that Amy told Kace I had that affair? That she painted me as the one guilty of her transgressions? “There were employees who had affairs with him. Employees who played the quid pro quo game, reluctantly or happily—it wasn’t my place to judge their decisions.”
“Then she mistook someone else for you.”
Or maybe she wanted to discredit me. “What else did Amy tell you about me?”
“I don’t want to do this, Stella. I don’t know why she thought that, but I need you to understand I have to have a good relationship with my wife.”
Ex-wife. Say she’s your ex-wife. The words are on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow them back.
“It matters to me that there’s not anger and resentment between us. Don’t make me get in the middle of this.”
“She lied about me, Kace.”
“Maybe she saw or heard something and misinterpreted it.”
Like I “misinterpreted” Clint’s hand up her skirt at that conference? “Like what?”
“You spending lunch hours in his office. You two leaving together.” He turns his palms up. “Does it matter?”
“Yes!” My eyes burn. Fuck. It’s one thing to make me carry around this secret, one thing to blackmail me with my own mistakes so I wouldn’t share it with Kace, but to know she was planting lies about me at the same time? I could scream. “I never took lunch in his office, never left with him.” But she did. She really did. “The only time that man ever touched me was the day I quit. If she’d walked into the break room when he put his hand up my skirt, she would’ve seen me jerk away and tell him not to touch me again. If she overheard us talking alone in his office that afternoon, she would’ve heard him offer me a promotion and fat raise for, and I quote, ‘just a little time on my knees.’” My face is so hot and my eyes are burning, but fuck it, I’m not going to cry about that asshole.
“Stella . . .” He shakes his head, but fury lights his eyes, just like it did that night I was out with Jared. “Fuck.” He drags a hand through his hair. “Now I wish he still worked there so I could go give him a piece of my mind.”
“I took care of it in the only way I could, Kace. I got the fuck out of there.”
He studies me for a long, quiet moment. “I’m sorry I believed everything Amy said to me.”
The front door groans as it opens. “Stella?” Dean calls. “Is that Kace’s truck out front?”
Kace’s eyes go wide, and he stands. “It is,” he says as Dean enters the room.