I had never intended to make her part of this, though. She had to believe that.
“Did you let him fuck you already?” Gerrard asked Abby, as though that was any of his business. “Because if you have, you’ve got, oh, maybe two weeks of his attention left before he starts looking for someone else.” He ran his eyes over Abby’s body again. “Maybe just one week,” he said cruelly.
Abby looked like she wanted to cry, and that was it for me. I hoped she couldn’t possibly think that I was only interested in her because of the stories the press would write about us. But more than that, I hoped she didn’t believe she was as unattractive as Gerrard seemed intent on making her feel she was. I pulled back my fist and decked Gerrard as hard as I could.
He came right back at me, fists flying, but I had the advantage of height on him, and I was blinded by anger. Distantly, I could hear Abby yelling at me to stop, but I just couldn’t let Gerrard get away with this. He had already spent so many years fucking up my life, making it so that I never had any sort of break from the paparazzi, and even though I had fired him, he was still trying to meddle in my life. He acted like I was the one who wanted the paparazzi following me all the time, when I knew that he was the one who had set it up so that they were always there around me.
I slammed my fists into him again and again, taking a couple shots in return but giving back better than what he could dish out. I only relented when I was pulled off Gerrard by none other than Austin.
The bouncers finally stepped in, grabbing Gerrard and hauling him out of there. But Gerrard was intent on making a scene, screaming back over his shoulder about how he was going to take me for all that I was worth and how someday I would regret the day I had fired him.
I sagged in Austin’s grip. The night had been going so well, but I felt like I could barely even look over at Abby. I needed to apologize to her, though. I needed to be sure that she understood that what Gerrard had said to her was all lies—that she wasn’t just some media ploy for the sake of the company.
I turned toward her, opening my mouth, but before I could say anything, she had backed up a couple of steps. “I need to go,” she said to me.
“Abby, wait,” I said, feeling a sort of hopelessness well up inside of me.
But she didn’t wait. Instead, she hurried out of the bar without a backward glance. I felt coldness seep through my whole body.
Chapter 26
Abby
I DIDN’T WANT TO LOOK at the news on Saturday morning, the night after the fight at the bar, but I knew that I had to. I had seen the flashbulbs going off, and I had to know what they were saying about me. Especially since I was no longer sure I would be going back to work for McGregor Enterprises.
Things had been going so well—that was the part that really killed me. I had hit it off with Austin, and I had honestly thought that maybe, just maybe, Daniel liked me as much as I liked him. I’d been so sure that he was one of the good guys.
I had danced with Daniel, and I never danced with anyone. But it had been fun and silly, and I could tell that Daniel really wanted me. It wasn’t just his hands all over my body but the look in his eyes. Lustful, sure. There had been something else there, though. Like he couldn’t believe how lucky he was. Like he felt as though he had won the lottery by getting to dance with me.
But Gerrard had called all of that into question. Now, I had to wonder whether Daniel had ever been interested in me at all or if it was all just part of his act for the paparazzi.
Silly me, but I had thought that he hated having the paparazzi around all the time. I remembered what he had said about using them, though, and I suddenly realized that if he didn’t tolerate their presence around his building, if he didn’t play up to the cameras, then they would never have had a single story on him. He was a billionaire. He could have easily gotten rid of a few pesky paparazzi, I was sure.
It all seemed so coincidental now, when I thought back on it. Seriously, why had I believed him when he said that the reason I had been accosted that day on my way into the building was because the security team for the building was short-staffed? That didn’t make any sense.
And then Dan
iel had just happened to be there, ready to swoop in and save me. Ready to make sure that the media got a decent photo of the two of us together.
It made me sick just thinking about it. He had orchestrated the whole thing, and I had gone along with it all because, what, he had been nice to me a couple of times? That was sickening.
The media stories about the fight were just as disheartening. They portrayed me as Daniel’s flavor of the week, his latest piece of eye candy. And they portrayed him as a dashing knight out of some fairy tale, swooping in to fight when my honor was called into question. Of course, they all knew who Gerrard was, and that was what made it all the worse. Daniel had been fighting his former employee for the sake of the leggy blonde he had hired in the man’s stead.
And here I was, caught up in the middle of it. No self-respecting business would ever hire me after this. I should never have been seen out at a bar with my boss, let alone been seen with him fighting over me.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I knew I couldn’t spend the whole weekend wallowing on my own, but I also knew just how much it was going to hurt to admit to Leanne and Matt that I’d been wrong. Still, Leanne was my best friend, and if anyone was going to console me through this, or better yet have any advice for me, it was her.
I headed over to her house, pausing for just a moment to collect myself before I knocked on the door.
“Hey!” Leanne said brightly when she saw who it was. She pushed some hair back off her face. “I was just doing some cleaning because Matt took the kids off to the park, so you are a godsend. You know how much. I hate cleaning.”
I laughed hollowly as she let me in, and Leanne peered at me. “Uh-oh,” she said, shaking her head. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She led the way into the kitchen while I trailed after her. The next thing I knew, she was setting tea and cookies in front of me. I smiled weakly at her, and she laughed. “Sorry, I don’t know what to do to comfort people anymore. I give the kids juice, but that seemed a little weird for you.”
“So you decided to go full Mary Poppins on me?” I teased, wishing I could feel amusement inside of me. Instead, I just felt curiously numb. It felt as though I had been through all the different emotions that a person could feel since the previous night. Horror at the careless way that Daniel had beaten up his former advisor, pain at the way that he had so carelessly been using me, loss at the thought of what might have been between us, confusion at how things had gone so wrong.
How could I ever have thought that Daniel was someone else, someone good, someone I should be with? And how could I ever have doubted what Leanne and Matt had tried to tell me?