“Good, because she’s going to know everything you know about Tower VC. Probably more.”
“Fine with me.” Alex shrugged and pushed his empty glass toward the bartender, motioning for a refill. “You know I’m not the paperwork guy. I can already tell she has me beat on smarts. It doesn’t take much, to be honest.”
That was a lie. Not the paperwork part—Alex was allergic to paperwork. But he had a brain. He just didn’t use it, preferring to hide behind the prison record and the tattoos. You’d think Alex would be out of place in Dallas, but he wasn’t. He would have been out of place in New York or L.A. Strangely enough, the cowboys and ranchers liked Alex quite a bit. Alex was tough, and Texans appreciated tough people.
Most people only saw the ex-con, dark and possibly dangerous, but I’d known Alex a long time. I knew the damage that drove him, the scars he had that wouldn’t heal.
“Do you ever hear from Kat?” I asked him.
Alex pulled his fresh drink across the bar toward him. It was a whiskey, neat. He’d definitely spent too much time in Texas. “No,” he said, his tattoos flexing as he raised the drink and sipped it. “We’re divorced, remember?”
Kat had been Alex’s high school sweetheart. Back in those days, he was a rough teenager with a shitty home life, and Kat was the best thing in his life. They adored each other. She’d even stuck by him through his eighteen months in prison, waiting for him when he got out. They got married at twenty-one.
Then it all went to shit. None of us knew exactly what happened—Alex wasn’t talking. But Kat moved out and Alex got hard. Really hard. He got in more trouble. He lived alone in a big house in Texas, and he did oil and ranching deals with very hard men for Tower VC. He didn’t wear suits, he didn’t take orders from anyone, he didn’t date. And he didn’t talk about Kat. Ever.
Alex took another sip of his whiskey and looked at me. “So what do you think Noah dragged us all across the country for? This deal he has in the works?”
“I have no idea,” I said. I watched Noah sit down next to Samantha, say something to make her laugh. Had I ever made her laugh?
If he kept doing that, I was going to kick his ass all the way back to L.A.
Alex watched where my gaze was fixed. “He’s such an asshole,” he said.
I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about.
Alex finished his whiskey. “He’s an asshole, yet I wish I was more like him. Don’t you?”
Fifteen
Samantha
* * *
When I rolled over in bed the next morning, the first thing I felt was pain. I put a hand on my forehead. It wasn’t a hangover—I’d had exactly one glass of wine at the bar yesterday afternoon while talking to the Tower VC partners. Then I’d come back to my room and ordered room service—no alcohol—while I caught up on work before going to bed.
Yet as I pushed myself up from the pillows, a second bolt of pain throbbed through my head, pulsing behind my eyeball. I groaned. I sometimes got migraines, but it had been months since my last one. I didn’t need to get one now.
I rifled through my suitcase and took some ibuprofen. I shuffled to the bathroom and washed my face, hoping this wasn’t actually happening. In the mirror, my eyes looked exhausted and bloodshot, and my skin looked gray. I groaned out loud, miserable in my beautiful luxury hotel room.
I checked the time. It was 8:30. I was due at the Tower VC Chicago office at nine, and I wasn’t even showered or dressed. How had I slept so late? I had a vague memory of waking up earlier, then falling asleep again. Or had I imagined it? The pain descending on my skull was so intense I had a hard time thinking.
I walked back to the bedroom, looking through my suitcase for a full minute before I remembered I had hung my work clothes up in the closet. I was standing in front of the closet, thinking in panic about a shower, when there was a knock at my hotel room door.
“Samantha? It’s me.”
Aidan. Coming to pick me up and take me to the Tower VC office for the meeting—the very important meeting—with all the partners. The meeting I was supposed to be at so I could impress all of them with my capable professionalism, and I was standing in my sleep shirt, bewildered and in pain. A moan of excruciating panic left my throat.
“Samantha?” He sounded alarmed now. He must have heard me. Was my moan that loud?
“I’m coming,” I managed. The words were weak in my throat, but I got them out. I walked unsteadily to the door and opened it.
Aidan stood there, beautiful in his usual black suit and tie. His eyes went wide as he took me in.
That was when I realized two things: I was in a pair of panties and a tee and nothing else, and I was about to throw up.
“Um,” I said.
He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “You’re sick,” he said, putting a hand on my elbow to steady me. He put his other hand on my forehead, testing for fever. “Is it the flu?”