My heart hit a stop button and hung love-struck in my chest.
Noelle Charlston.
The girl from the alley.
The name seared into my mind thanks to her identification card with the logo of Belle Elle—the largest retail chain in the US.
She thought I hadn’t noticed. That I didn’t believe her when she said she was an office worker at the one place I could never enter without a security guard throwing me out. My wardrobe told them all they needed to know and the fact that the last time I snuck inside I’d taken a nap in the houseware department didn’t help my case.
I found it sexy that Elle worked there. I had fantasies of her working hard, renting a tiny studio, making something of her life while I looked up from squalor below.
I respected her for her tenacity to better herself. I was attracted to her for her lack of confidence or willingness to talk about her life when minimum wage made her so much richer than I was.
I’d become infatuated with her from the start. It turned to an obsessive need to know her the longer we walked back to her home. And when she mentioned it was her birthday, and she wasn’t even out of her teens yet, I had the disgusting desire to be the first to welcome her to adulthood.
I’d taken her to the park to see how far her limits would go. A sheltered little girl out for a thrill. But then she’d agreed to follow me.
To break into the park with me.
To trust me.
Then she fucking kissed me. And I no longer wanted to test her but steal her to be mine forever. I’d lived in pure happiness for an hour out of so many years of loneliness.
That was before the night ended, and I never saw her again.
Until now.
She sat in an overstuffed armchair with a gray cat on her lap, stroking it with languid pets while her shoulders remained tense. Her long blonde hair that I remembered filled with leaves and grass clippings from rolling around on the baseball field, draped over the back of the chair while her eyes locked on the three males in front of her.
Two older, one around her age.
Their lips moved, faces speaking with animation that I couldn’t hear.
The closed windows were air tight; the occasional whir of traffic and murmur of dog walkers meant I couldn’t distinguish any other noise but the city buzz.
The sapphire burned my hand, demanding I knock on the door and give it back. To say ‘hi, do you remember me?’ To kiss her if she’d forgotten and remind her if she hadn’t.
I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt about why she hadn’t come looking for me. Why I’d thought about her for nine long months, but she’d moved on and dismissed me.
But the longer I stood in the manicured bushes hiding me from the street and spied on her life, the more I understood why.
I thought we’d had a connection that night.
I thought she’d fallen down the same slippery slope that defied logic or reason as I had.
Turned out, it might’ve just been one-sided. Because there she was, smiling at the boy opposite with his sandy blond hair and a smirk that said he wanted to fuck her and she’d probably let him.
She wasn’t surviving in a crappy apartment with annoying roommates and eating budget groceries to make ends meet. She wasn’t dressed in cheap clothes and costume jewelry so common to girls her age.
Nope.
There she sat, leading a pampered life in a spoiled little world.
She was the daughter of a rich man.
She had a pampered kitten in a spoiled big house.
She was probably allergic to work and had servants for everything.
To prove my case, a woman in an apron trundled into the living room with a tray of baked goods and a teapot. Elle smiled at her but didn’t get up to help pass out the sweets. She waited like the men until the woman had placed cupcakes onto glass dishes, accepting the food cordially but with the airs and graces of someone used to having things given to her.
This wasn’t a recent climb up the monetary ladder. She wasn’t poor and now suddenly rich.
She’d been born into wealth, and it dripped off her.
Why didn’t I see it that night? Taste it? Smell it?
Fuck, I was so stupid.
For so long, I thought she was an employee. That she knew the value of hard work in a different capacity to me but still understood the cost of survival in a big city.
I gave her excuses about why she couldn’t find or visit me in prison even if she didn’t issue a statement saying I was innocent.
To her, I would’ve been an adventure, nothing more.
To me, she was untouchable, something I could never have.
Standing outside her castle, wrapped in the shadows I’d befriended, I gave up on my stupid fantasies. She was nothing more than an overindulged brat who ran away from her doting father to be something she wasn’t for a night.
She wasn’t who I thought she was.
She’d let me believe in a fairy-tale.
I had no time for brats.
The visions of returning her necklace faded.
She didn’t need it.
She probably had thousands of replacements.
I wouldn’t be lying to Stewie tonight.
He could have it back.
He was the rightful owner now, not her.
With a stupid heart that’d finally learned its lesson, I turned and walked away.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Elle
TWO WEEKS PASSED.
An insanely long two weeks where I went to work but didn’t manage to do even the simplest of tasks.
I constantly hounded Larry for updates on visiting hours for Penn and promised him unlimited funds to gather whatever information he needed to submit for Penn’s case.
Dad kept popping in to check on me, but for his benefit, I kept my stress hidden.
He didn’t need to know I hadn’t slept properly since the night Greg took me. He didn’t need to understand I couldn’t carry a normal thought without almost bursting into tears thinking about Penn locked up while I carried on my life as if nothing had happened.
I couldn’t shift the guilt.
The awful compounding guilt that history had repeated itself, and instead of banging down police doors and ramming a bulldozer into the prison for a jailbreak, I was twiddling my thumbs bound by bureaucracy and tied up with paper pushing.
Even Fleur hadn’t been able to get me out of my depressive funk.
Thanks to her heart of gold, she picked up my slack and kept Belle Elle running. She told me what to sign and when. She helped prepare my notes for business meetings and ensured my wardrobe screamed CEO when really all I wanted to do was cry in the corner with Sage.
Enough with the pity.
You told Greg what would happen if he goes after Penn.
Hopefully, in another few weeks when he went to trial or Penn went to trial or whatever was supposed to happen next, Penn would walk free, and Greg would pay for what he’d done.
The last I’d heard, he’d been transferred from the hospital to some penitentiary system and processed. No mention of bail or whiff of him being released.
Would Penn and Greg see each other inside, or would they be kept apart, knowing the history and the reason for Penn’s incarceration?