“Donate it to charity I guess. Someone must be able to make use of a five-thousand-dollar suit stained with cocktail sauce.” I wondered how long it would be before Brooke’s dipshit catering manager came calling for the cleaning bill for the rest of them. “Anything else?”
“A guy named Martin called and said he needs to talk to you about damages you agreed to pay for an event he catered.”
Bingo. I could predict this shit like clockwork. “Let me guess—several light-colored suits need to be replaced because the stains are permanent.”
“He mentioned seven or eight suits, yes. It was hard to follow his explanation to be honest. Something about the enzyme in the horseradish, blah, blah, blah,” Victoria said with a shrug.
“I don’t want to talk to that asshole. Just tell him to collect the claims with the receipts and send them over, and I’ll see they are paid.”
“I’ll tell him.” She walked out of my office with the dry-cleaning plastic covering my favorite-but-now-ruined suit fluttering behind her.
If all those suits combined came in at a dime under fifty grand, I’d be surprised. Yeah, well, a promise was a promise, and my word was good. I’d said I’d cover damages, and eight ruined designer suits certainly constituted as damages. Fucking waste of good money. It wasn’t the damages being out of my pocket that bothered me really, it was the cause of the whole thing—an arrogant prick taking advantage of a nice girl just because she was pretty and he’d decided he wanted to fuck her.
That was how it went down. I was there. I saw everything happen almost as if it were in slow motion. If Brooke had just taken Aldrich’s abuse, as he assumed she would, then no flying shrimp, no ruined suits, no damages—just another example of SOP in the after-hours corporate world. The number of hits she’d received that night alone were proved in the business cards she’d tossed at the feet of her shithead boss. That must be a horrible thing to have to put up with while you’re trying to do your job. She shouldn’t be in that situation at all. I wished I’d never gone to that fucking reception in the first place.
And I wouldn’t know her name was Brooke, or that she lived on the island with her grandmother, or that she needed a second job because she didn’t make enough money at Harris & Goode as an interior designer to pay the bills. Oh, I’d had plenty of time to think about Brooke over the last few weeks. The things she’d said to me on the phone. How much she resented the people who had fired her grandmother. The regret in her apology when she realized she’d said too much to the wrong person. And maybe even the same disappointment I’d felt when we both realized our little attraction—or whatever the fuck it was—wouldn’t be going anywhere because we came from different sides of the tracks.
I’d gone to the Starbucks twice, hoping I might bump into her accidently.
No sign of her.
I’d come close to calling just so I could hear her voice again, but what would I say? “Your voice is so sexy I get hard like a teenage boy when you speak. Wanna go out with me?” She already suspected me for a stalker, and it would barely put me above Aldrich if you really got down to the brass tacks of what I wanted from her. And what in the mother fuck was that exactly?
I don’t think I’d yet figured out what I wanted from Brooke. Sex? To be her boyfriend? Something even more than that? I’d only cared about the sex in the past. Oh, I’d love to take my time with her in bed, and I’m sure it would be spectacular, but for the first time since I could remember, sex was not my main motivation. Why the fuck was that? What made Brooke unique in that way? Why was Brooke so tantalizing to me I couldn’t get her out of my head?
I remembered something else, too, and I suspected it was a biggie. What she’d said to Aldrich right after she broke his nose. “You put your hands on me. Nobody does that and gets away with it anymore.”
It made me crazy that Brooke had been hurt badly by some guy in the past. Who the fuck would touch her with anything other than respect? Adoration? The fuckwit certainly hadn’t deserved her. Did I? Was it important to me that I deserve her? I’d never had to entertain that thought before and it confused me. I didn’t really have a handle on what I was doing in regards to Brooke . . . at all.
Taking time I really didn’t have, I considered my options.
And then I called my brother Lucas.
“Caleb, long time, no talk. To what do I owe—”
“Lucas, who is the girl named Brooke with an English accent living on the island with her grandmother?”
“Umm . . . bro, don’t you remember Ellen Casterley, the housekeeper at Blackwater? She worked there for our whole life.”
“Ellen Casterley, our sweet British housekeeper, is her grandmother?” I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.
“Yeees. Brooke came to live with Mrs. Casterley after her parents were killed in London. Brooke was like fifteen at the time, and it was kind of big news on the island. I remember everybody talking about it—why don’t you know this?”