with you, Kyra,”
“Don’t use that word. It’s not love. What you did was trick me.”
She’s got it all wrong. If there is a major falsehood, it is this. “I changed my mind. I knew I couldn’t go through with it.”
Rage stomps through her eyes as she pieces it all together; all the bits that once didn’t make any sense. “All this time you were making suggestions and criticizing our food event on the night of the fight, and you made me think I was stupid when I told you about my idea for the small business units. And your gripes and moans about the buckets and the leaky roof.”
“I saved your life.”
She blinks and mimics a damsel in distress. “Oh, yes, you saved me.” Her hands fly to her chest in a theatrical manner.
“I know that what I did was wrong, Kyra. To think that I could infiltrate your company and somehow persuade you to move.”
“It was morally wrong and completely stupid. ‘The’ Brandon Hawks—not Brad Hartley the traveler who worked on community projects—but a billionaire’s son infiltrating Redhill.” She scoffs in disgust.
Guilt grips my insides with its pincers and squeezes hard. “I was hiding from who I used to be. I wanted the old me gone. I reinvented myself. With a billionaire for a father, it’s easy enough to do. So, you see, nobody knew me. Though that might change now with that fucking photographer Jessica hired.” I shake my head in disgust. She has left no stone unturned. Her scheming, manipulative mind had it all planned out.
“You used me.” She steps forward and stabs me in the chest with a bony finger. “You used me.”
I blink, because my vocal chords fail. Her face twists as sure as if I’ve skewered her with a screwdriver, the pain of my words cutting her deeply. I want to put my arms around her and tell her that I’m sorry. I want to tell her that I made a mistake, that I could see that the work she did was good, and needed, and only a corporate machine would run over her dreams and raze them to the ground. But I have never seen so much anger in her before and I’m scared that any move on my part will make things worse. “Kyra, listen to me—”
“No! I’ve listened enough. I want you to get out of my life and never come back. You used me for your own selfish gain. For your greed. You stand for everything I despise.”
“I’m a changed man.”
“You’re the same old snake to me.” Her body sags with the weight of my deception. A moment passes, she looks away, wrapped in her own personal pain. “Was any of it real?”
I reach out, wanting to touch her face to comfort her, to show her that this is me now. What I feel for her hasn’t changed, and yes, it was real. These last few weeks, ever since Eli’s fight, they have all been real.
But she moves away, a shiver of revulsion making her shoulders jolt. I step towards her. “The way I feel about you now is real. I’m crazy about you, Kyra. I might not have fallen in love with you right from the start but the more time I spent with you, the more I grew in awe of you. At the start I was too busy pushing back on your ideas because they reminded me of who I was and where I had come from, and I hated that. I’ve spent twenty years trying to forget that unwanted child and to make my world be one in which I will never be poor, or hungry, or unwanted and forgotten, but you started to show me the world through your eyes, Kyra. You made me start to care.”
“Don’t ...”
“It’s true. I was wrong. I did a shitty thing. I lied and wheedled my way into Redhill for all the wrong reasons, but once there, working with you, going to those food nights, seeing the good work you do, the lives you transform, it made me see how wrong I was.”
“When did you have this epiphany?” she bites out. “A few hours ago, when Jessica had the balls to reveal to the rest of the world who you really are?”
“I was going to tell you.”
“When? In the helicopter? In the vat of grape juice? On the massage table? When? When did the lying ever stop?”
“What I did was so wrong, and so deceitful. It wasn’t easy to