hers. “There’s something you need to know first. Those headlines about my twenty-first birthday. They’re true.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I rasped.
She pulled back. “It’s important to me that you know the truth first.”
“And it’s important to me that I sign this without knowing the truth. You’re stepping all over my grand gesture here.”
“How can you have a sense of humor at a time like this?”
“It’s part of my considerable charm,” I said, scrawling my signature across the first page.
“Dammit, Derek,” she sighed. “You can’t perform a grand gesture when you don’t know everything. This might make you change your mind.”
A part of her expected it to.
I kept signing. “Tell me your secret,” I said.
“Lita wanted to go out for my twenty-first. She didn’t like that I was planning to stay in. ‘You deserve to have a little fun, Lady Stanton.’”
I winced, recognizing the button pushed.
“‘He’s cute,’ she told me. ‘Go be a normal human being. Get drunk. Have a one-night stand with a stranger.’ I was young. Drunk. And entirely too easily influenced by my friend.” Emily said the word bitterly.
“I didn’t do that sort of thing. And for good reason. But that night, I felt more like being a Lita Smith than an Emily Stanton. And for good reason. I was getting into his car when a female bartender had hauled me back out of it. ‘Trust me, sweetie, you won’t like yourself when you wake up in the morning.’”
She scrubbed her palms over her knees.
“The bartender tried to talk him into taking a cab home. There was a struggle for keys, but in the end, he drove off. I found Lita inside. She’d seemed almost angry that I hadn’t gone with him. ‘You’re just too good for your own good,’ she’d complained. I felt like I’d let her down, so I bought her another round. That’s how I usually made things up to Lita. I bought her things. She liked presents. And I liked having a friend.”
My heart broke a little more for the lonely girl in the lab coat.
“By the time I was home throwing up while Lita watched, I couldn’t even remember what he looked like. To my mother’s horror, a few pictures had ended up in gossip rags. The worst of which showed me dancing on a bar at a drag club in South Beach. But the bigger scandal never became public knowledge. Until now,” she said, leveling me with her gaze.
“I didn’t find out until days later that the guy I didn’t go home with died. He’d driven through a DUI checkpoint, led police on a chase, and lost control of his car. He crashed into a concrete embankment and died on impact.”
“Jesus, Emily. You could have been with him,” I breathed.
“That’s what Lita said. Only now, with hindsight, I know she said it wistfully. She showed me the article. I didn’t even recognize his name at first. She knew him. And I think she arranged for us to meet. Maybe she was playing this game even back then.”
Lita had been. I was sure of it. I hated her. I hated her hatred and jealousy and greed. I hated that she’d hurt the woman I loved.
“But she never told anyone. She kept that secret. I thought it meant that I could trust her.”
“Instead, it meant she was waiting for the right time to use it,” I guessed. “You’re not responsible, you know. For what happened to him.”
“I know now. Maybe for the first time,” Emily whispered. “So now you know.”
“Do you see me running for the door?”
“You’re too hungover to run.”
She slid closer until our legs brushed. I had to fist my hands at my side to not touch her. Setting her coffee down, she took the pen from me and repeated the signature process. She had shadows under her eyes. Given that it was five in the morning, I assumed she hadn’t slept at all.
But there was an energy crackling off her, and I needed to reach out and touch it. Touch her.
Desire lanced through me like a lightning bolt. She was what I wanted, and I just needed to know the game we were playing so I could devise a way to win.
“Excellent,” she said primly. “Now, on to the next one.”
Another contract? Was it a restraining order? A buyout offer? A prenup?
Everything I needed to know about our future would be coldly sketched out in legalese.
She handed me the papers and then rubbed her palms on her knees again.
I