“It’ll just take a minute if I deal with him too,” says Caleb between his teeth.
“Please.” My voice is quiet, but my fingers press into his skin. Jeremy’s incapable of backing down from a fight, and if he’s given a reason to feel jealous, he’ll only want the fight that much more.
Caleb’s jaw shifts with the desire to argue, but he finally gives me a tiny nod and I follow Jeremy to the other side of the bar.
He doesn’t appear to be here with anyone, as if he came here solely to talk to me. Which begs the question: how did he know I’d be here at all? Of the three times I’ve gone out, Jeremy’s known about all of them. I assumed I’d been seen by a mutual acquaintance…but three times is a little too coincidental.
“Who’s watching the kids?” he demands.
I don’t owe him an explanation when he’s barely seen the kids since we split, but answering is the fastest way to get him out of here. “Molly.”
His eyes narrow. “I don’t want my kids with your idiotic friend.”
If I ever needed proof that what he says to me isn’t based in reality, it’s this. You can call Molly many things, but idiotic isn’t one of them. It’s just another of those tiny little poison darts he shoots, hoping one of them will sink far enough to sting, and I’m done allowing him to dictate anything I feel, good or bad. “She’s got a PhD and is smarter than the two of us put together.”
But Jeremy’s already moved on. He glares in Caleb’s direction. “Is fucking your married boss really the best you can do? Are you that desperate to prove you’ve still got something anyone wants?”
How the hell does he know Caleb is my boss? And that he’s married?
“This is insane,” I say, pushing away from the wall. “I’m done listening to you.”
I find myself jerked so hard toward him that I stumble. The pain begins in my shoulder and shoots down my arm while threats spill from his mouth, and I barely have time to react before Caleb is there, pulling me behind him and punching Jeremy in the face so hard that he falls to the floor. “You’d better keep your fucking hands off her from now on.”
Beck and Harrison jump in the fray, Beck blocking Jeremy from continuing the fight while Harrison turns toward us and groans at the sight of Caleb’s arm around me, holding me close to his chest. “Well, if he didn’t know you two were together before, he sure knows it now.”
Beck wraps a hand around the back of Jeremy’s neck, forcing him toward the door. “You just assaulted a female in my bar,” he says. “Consider yourself permanently banned.”
“You’re lucky your friends jumped in,” Jeremy says to Caleb as he walks out, rubbing his jaw.
“Let’s see if you’re so brave outside, asshole,” Caleb replies. “I guarantee you’ll regret it when you’re searching the parking lot for your teeth.”
Harrison pushes a hand through his hair. “No one’s fighting in the parking lot. And you and I need to talk. This changes things at the office.”
God. Could dating an employee have repercussions for the company, or the merger? Probably.
Caleb’s lips press to the top of my head. “Can’t it wait?”
“No, Caleb. We need to get ahead of it, in case he presses charges. Which is why you shouldn’t have fucking hit him in the first place. What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that he just wrenched my girlfriend’s arm and I was sick of his shit, and you’d have done the same goddamn thing in my shoes.”
Harrison’s shoulders sag. “Perhaps, but we still need to strategize. Now.”
“It’s okay,” I say, stepping away, holding up my phone. “I want to check on the twins anyway.”
“Use my office,” Beck says. “It’s quieter in there.”
I open the office door, wandering toward the desks in the corner while I wait for Molly to pick up.
“Hey,” I say when she answers, “how are my babies?”
“Your kids are fine and asleep, though they knew less about applied physics than I anticipated. How’s it going? Have you shown him the lingerie?”
“I doubt I’ll be showing him anything. Caleb just punched Jeremy, among several other developments. I assume Jeremy won’t try to come by the house tonight and we’ll head home soon, but don’t let him in, okay?”
“As if,” she scoffs. “I didn’t want to let him into your house when you still lived with him. But—ah—it’s so romantic. I wish Michael would punch someone for me. I mean, before your wedding, when it will definitely happen.”
I rub my eyes. “No, not romantic. Potentially problematic. And I also learned that Caleb’s ex was apparently the world’s sexiest human—like Marilyn Monroe, but not dead—so I may have lost the confidence to show him the lingerie.”
“If you really want Caleb to prove he cares, have you considered faking your own kidnapping?”
I laugh and let her go just as Beck walks in. He’s frowning, worried, but I’m not the object of his concern—it’s the photo hanging on the wall just a few feet away, a photo I hadn’t even noticed before, one he clearly just remembered was here and didn’t want me to see.
In it, Caleb’s sitting on a barstool, with Beck standing there waving a dollar bill. And between them, sitting on the bar itself, is a woman who must be Kate.
She has red hair falling nearly to her waist, almond-shaped eyes and a coy smile. Her dress is shirt-length and barely that, showcasing endless legs crossed seductively. She’s beautiful, but it’s not her beauty I find distressing—it’s something else. Some indescribable quality I don’t possess—sexuality and confidence. In any movie, she’d be cast as the seductive bad girl, the one no man can resist, which is pretty much what Audrey has already told me about her. It’s basically what Caleb said too.
“I guess that’s Kate,” I whisper.
“Don’t try to convince yourself that it was some great love story between the two of them,” he says, still staring at the photo. “Kate tends to get exactly what she wants, and she wanted him. End of story. They had nothing in common.”
“They must have had something in common.”
“They had one thing in common,” he says, his voice gravelly, laced with anger, “and without that one thing, they wouldn’t have lasted an hour.”
I’m sure he thinks he’s reassured me, but in reality, he’s done the opposite. As I follow him back to the bar, I’m once again fighting the mounting sense that I just can’t match up to her.
“You ready?” Caleb asks.
I nod and say goodnight to his friends before we head outside together, his hand on my back the whole way as if Jeremy might be lurking around a corner.
“Ride home with me,” he says. “No point in trying to hide it all now anyway.”
He opens the door of his truck and I climb in, fighting the desire to burst into tears. He grabs my hand after he starts the engine, but his face is strained.
“Are you really okay?”
That concern in his eyes undoes me. I want this so much, want him so much, and it’s starting to feel like it’s never going to work out. He didn’t promise me the fairy tale and between his ex and mine and the fact that he’s still planning to move...it’s hard to see how we’ll wind up with one.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I can’t believe I got you in a fight tonight.”
“You didn’t get me in a fight. I wanted that fight. I wanted it more than I’ve ever wanted a fight in my entire life, and I still want it. Are you sure he didn’t hurt you?”
“I’m sure.”
He cradles my jaw in his hands and kisses me. When he starts to lean away, I grab his collar and pull him to me. His mouth on mine feels like relief, like a cure, but he backs away again, leaning his head against the seat. “Lucie, keep kissing me like that and I’m not gonna be able to stop.”
“I don’t want you to stop,” I tell him. The bar is only thirty feet away, but it’s too dark for anyone to see inside his truck. I climb over him. The steering wheel is at my back and my left knee is propped awkwardly on the center console and I couldn’t care less. I unzip his jeans, and he lifts his hips just enough for me to shove them and his boxers down. He reaches between my legs and stills.