Gilt_ By Invitation Only - Geneva Lee Page 0,58
Jonas and Hugo, and I knew Monroe would be able to tell me who you were.”
“You wanted to know who I was?” I ask, softening too much.
“I wanted to run after you but I stopped myself.”
“Why?” I demand. The question covers so many unanswered things from that night.
“I’d been drinking for hours. I passed out with my head on the bar. It wasn’t a proud moment for me.”
“And then you found your dad.” My stomach beings to churn as I relive the night with him. I don’t like experiencing it through his eyes.
“Yes, and I didn’t think. I tried to stop the bleeding and checked his pulse. Then I realized it was too late. Monroe found me like that: covered in his blood and drunk off my ass. She called the cops. All I can remember is her screaming ‘what did you do?’ over and over again. She couldn’t hear a word I was saying. She still can’t.
“So, when the police brought you in, I told them about the girl,” he repeats himself. “I let them draw their own conclusions. You were my alibi.”
“But I was also your primary suspect,” I guess. Betrayal rips my heart in half, and my hand flies to my mouth to hold back a sob, but Jameson won’t let me scramble away from him. He grabs me by the hips and holds me on his lap. “The day in the cemetery when I found you, you didn’t trust me. You suspected I might have killed him. Am I right?”
I force myself to nod.
“But you didn’t want that to be the case,” he continues.
I nod again.
“That’s exactly how I felt the whole time,” he says. “I needed to find out if I could trust you. I needed to find out who you were. As soon as Monroe told me you were a Southerly, it was a strike against you.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” I spit at him.
“Calm down, Duchess,” he urges me, but I dodge his hand when he tries to stroke my cheek. “I stood there and listened to you talking to your sister in the graveyard, and I knew then that you could never hurt anyone.
“But you had to be sure, I guess.”
“It sounds like you’re familiar with the stakes.”
“I am,” I admit slowly. I want to be angry at him for suspecting me. This whole time he had been putting me to the test, but hadn’t I been doing the same to him? It was a classic case of two wrongs don’t make a right. Now we’d found ourselves at a crossroads.
“I had to know for sure, so I sought you out.”
“You stalked me,” I correct him.
“Fine, I stalked you, Duchess. You’re incredibly stalk-able.”
I choose to take that as a compliment.
“Then at some point it stopped being about looking for answers and it just became about spending time with you,” he confesses.
As hard as I try to hold on to my anger I feel it slipping slowly away from me. It leaks from my blood until I feel nothing but exhaustion. Jameson waits, his eyebrows furrowed, as I stay stay silent.
“I get it,” I say finally.
“Because you were doing the same to me?” he asks.
“Maybe,” I hedge. What’s the fun in showing all my cards at once? Except I know he’s already seen them. He’s seen right through me. I won’t be getting any tricks past him. The good news is, he won’t be getting any past me either.
“So where do we go from here?”
“I don’t care,” he murmurs. This time I let him take my hand. “As long as we go there together.”
“I don’t think they make co-ed prison cells,” I say flatly.
“Touché, Duchess.”
“Please tell me you have a really, really good lawyer.” We can’t keep avoiding this, or avoiding the practical discussions that need to happen. “Speaking of which, do I need a really, really good lawyer?”
“Believe me, Detective Mackey is not interested in you,” he says. “She had a few words with me for dragging you into this. I think she’s convinced I paid you to say we were together that night.”
Despite the conflicting emotions swirling inside of me I take offense at this. Maneuvering myself in the seat, I straddle him and wrap my arms behind his neck. “Did she honestly suggest my boyfriend needs to pay someone off to spend the night with him?”
He smirks, allowing a glimpse of the arrogant boy I’d met that night in his father’s study. His hands circle my waist and press flat against the