Nefarious, page 28
She’d been right about him then. He’d only won her back through cruel manipulation.
“How did you know where I am?” If Rosamund hadn’t talked, was someone tailing him again?
“Oh, please.” She rolled her eyes “You told me you’d be here. You weren’t very subtle about your plans. I’ve actually been here for a week asking around. Nobody’s heard of Dane Russ, but someone pointed you out, thinking I had your name wrong.”
“Well, here, I’m Dan.”
She snorted. “It’s not that different.”
“It’s enough.”
“So?” She gave him a once-over, probably taking in his disheveled appearance and judging. “You look well. Is Key West everything you’d hoped it would be?”
“It’s quiet. But I forgot that old saying: Everywhere you go, there you are. Being alone with myself is its own kind of hell.”
“Are you okay?” Her brows drew together. “I’ve been worried sick. You literally dropped off the grid. I figured if you weren’t here, you were dead. I was determined you’d be here.”
“I’ve been here. Trying to figure out how to undo myself.” He narrowed his eyes, searching for a better way to explain it. “I haven’t been a good person. I don’t know if that’s permanent or malleable. I keep looking for ways to just buy salvation.”
She sat back and studied him as though she could be the one to decide the fate of his afterlife. “Why didn’t you even say goodbye? You could have at least sent word where you’d gone. Were you planning to make me spend my life without some kind of explanation?”
“I was doing you a mercy, Noelle. I worried you’d follow me.”
Her mouth twisted into a frown, and he noticed how tired she looked, the sallow under her eyes, the overall disappointment he’d spinelessly tried to avoid facing.
She heaved out a ragged sigh. “I’m sorry. I know you probably don’t want to see me, but I wanted to talk to you. At least once more. I couldn’t just let you disappear from my life without another word.”
“I needed to disappear, to take a break from everything. I came here hoping to find myself.”
“You didn’t need to do that alone.”
“I’m not alone.”
“Oh.” She blinked like understanding suddenly dawned. “Of course. I should have thought . . .” She started to stand, to leave, hands shaking as she reached for the strap of her purse.
Belatedly, he heard how she’d misconstrued his words. He could say nothing, and she’d go. That would be the best thing for her. She’d move on and never look back at the good-for-nothing who’d wrecked her life. But if by his omission, she believed he’d taken solace in the arms of any other woman, he’d end up hurting her in a new and different way.
“Wait!” He threw his arm out. "I just meant I’d made friends here. I’ve never had friends before. It’s nice.”
She sat back down, but her tanned skin had drained of all color but the splotch of red near her jaw. Her chest rose and fell like she’d had the fright of her life, and he hated himself for how he continued to lure her into his woe-begotten life. His heart clenched for reanimating an emotion he should have left well enough alone.
“I’m sorry for reeling you back in, Noelle.” Her mouth curled down, lips trembling, and he squeezed his fists to resist the urge to reach across and take her hands. “You were safely free of me, but I couldn’t stand to be rebuffed, so I made it my mission to seduce you.”
“Was that all it was to you? Did you lie to me?”
Ah. Dagger straight to the heart. Maybe he’d get to do penance one victim at a time.
He could lie to her now, but he’d made himself a promise to leave the machinations to his former life. It would be a slippery slope to his old self if he started playing deceitful games in some vain ploy to gain Noelle’s forgiveness.
He laid his hands on the table and leaned forward to gaze in her pretty eyes as he confessed. “I lied to a great many people.”
She scowled. “Did you lie to me specifically when you told me you loved me?”
Perhaps some truths were too toxic to be spoken aloud. “Does it matter? Why would you want that from someone like me?”
“It matters. You matter.”
However she’d come up with that false notion, he needed to disabuse her of it before she convinced herself he was worth saving.
He looked out at the endless sky as if the words he sought dwelled in the clouds. There was a sense of boundless freedom in the knowledge that this sky stretched out over infinite ocean. He could board a ship and lose himself to adventure like the pirates of old. But he’d lived a kind of pirate life already. What he wanted was to set down roots, become part of a community, add value. He was tired of sucking the life out of everything and everyone around him.
“Noelle, thanks for coming here, but I’m the anti-hero in your story. What you saw in me was a mirage.”
“Do I look like a saint to you?”
“Yes.”
She laughed quietly, then tilted her head with a little shake. “You do think highly of yourself, don’t you?”
“Not really.”
“You’re not just flawed like the rest of us, you’re an arch-villain. You’re not just searching for answers, you’re lost, damned, irredeemable.”
“Are you here to bring me religion, Noelle? Absolve me of my sins?”
“I’m here to tell you that the fact you know you have flaws is in itself evidence you’re not as contemptible as some. You’re not nearly as corrupt as you think you are. Do you think Val will accept any blame in this?”
That was a laugh. “No. She’ll go down swinging.”
“She did. Or so I heard. She’s trying to bring a countersuit against the company, against me.”
Dane hadn’t followed the news. He’d buried himself in innocuous games and willed himself to stay alive another day. That was the best he could manage. “So you’re saying there’s relative evil?”
“You’re not evil, Dane. You’re a bit of a scoundrel, but I know you. I’ve seen your true nature, and you’re not a total miscreant. Without a corrupting influence, you even focus your talents on good works.”
“You can’t place my decisions on Val. We’re two separate people. We each carry our own blame.”
“And unlike her, you’re kind. You help people.”
“For every act of kindness you could uncover, I’ve done something worse. And you should know I faked all that charity Morty Becker documented for you.”
“I’m not talking about that. You forget I worked next to you at R&M. You had so much passion for developing new technologies, and not for your own gain. It was one of the things that I loved about you even then—all that dorky enthusiasm. You were so enamored with simplifying trading so average people could understand it. You had all the wonder of a child discovering the world. I’m going to guess since you’ve been here, you haven’t spent your days lying on the beach. Tell me what you’re working on?”
He smiled. She’d made him sound like a half-decent man. He brushed his eyelid with the back of his hand. He’d never seen himself the way she’d just described him. Had she?
So he laid out the idea that had him excited for the first time in years. “It’s kind of a role-playing adventure, but simple. I’ve noticed some of the most popular games are almost retro in their feel. I’d want it to be open-sourced so anybody could contribute and change it. I’ve been lining up local artists and coders to start work on a prototype.”
“You’ve only been here a few weeks. You’re already giving work to the locals?”
“I mean, yeah?” He scratched the back of his neck, feeling an odd sense of pride and humility all at once. “I’ve mostly been buried in game theory. It’s likely I’ll burn all my time and money on a total flop, but I have a lot of both. At least I’m spreading it around.”
“And that makes you feel good? Giving other people honest work? Helping the economy?”
“It’s the least I can do, Noelle. But it doesn’t erase years of leeching off people like an emotional vampire.”
“Before I came looking for you, do you know what I did?”
“Had your memory wiped?”
“Funny, but quite the contrary. After I got that bizarre email from you that Saturday, when I couldn’t reach you, I wandered around, lost, trying to understand what had happened. I ended up at Kitty Monroe’s, and we talked about you. You know, before—when you were pretending you wanted to date me—I’d reached out to some of the board at R&M to ask them to send me dirt about you. It was Geraldo’s idea.”
Dane’s blood went cold at the memory of her emails. “Noelle—”
“I know. I shouldn’t have snooped, but see? We’ve all got dirt on our hands.”
He could have laughed at her trying to come down to his level, as if to prove that every sin could be overlooked if everyone was a little bad. “Noelle, I already know about all that. I fucking read your emails.”
She froze and blinked. “Oh, right. The guy in IT mentioned that. Anyway . . .” Her hand swanned as if waving away a pillar of smoke, like she could dismiss an ethical breach with a flourish. “When I went to see her, the way she spoke of you was nothing like the things she’d written.”
“Of course not. I’d coerced Kitty and every single one of those people to put in a good word for me, Noelle. It was all lies.”
“Really?” She didn’t look scandalized. In fact her grimace made her look underwhelmed. “It’s funny. When Kitty first wrote me, I didn’t question her account because it rang so true. It fit the image you cultivated. The bad boy with the heart of gold. Sound right?”
“Half right.”
“Well, Kitty did have some grievances to air she’d apparently been holding onto.”
Dane gritted his teeth, wondering when this slow death by Festivus would end.
“She said you always thought you were smarter than everybody in the room and more than likely had broken multiple laws before draining the company of capital on a severance package you shouldn’t have taken.”
“Wow. And this is how you planned to convince me I’m just a saint in wolf’s clothing?” All this reminiscing over Dane’s treachery was beginning to tire him out. He’d been flagellating himself just fine on his own. He started to stand. “I think I’ve heard enough.”
“No. You haven’t quite.” Her smile melted. “I asked her if there was anything truly good she could recall, and she told me about the things you did for people that nobody ever talked about. Is it true you paid off the loan on some food truck outside R&M headquarters?”
Had he? “I don’t remember that.”
“Kitty said the guys who owned it swore it was true. They said, you’d struck up a conversation with them every time you’d stopped for their chicken shawarma.”
“Oh, the chicken shawarma. My guilty pleasure. Seven bucks for street meat heaven.” Maybe he could pay for those guys to move to Key West.
“Well, one day they apparently told you they were closing up because they’d missed a few payments on their truck. When they got home that night, the bank told them the loan had been paid in full.”
“So how do they figure it was me?”
“The bank told them.”
“Oh.” He’d probably had his accountant do it. “I have no recollection of this.”
“Because you’re naturally charitable, Dane.”
He snorted. “Hardly. If I paid off that truck, it was pure selfishness. If I don’t remember it, it’s because money isn’t charity to me. That would have been a financial investment into my own happiness. I wasn’t buying that truck for them; I was buying it for me.”
“Okay. Then tell me about Rosamund?”
“What?”
“If money’s so easy, why did you personally take the time to keep her company? Bring her food? Check up on her and make sure she was secure?”
Dane swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Morty Becker isn’t as terrible an investigator as you thought he was. You do realize he worked for me, not you.”
“Leave Rose out of this.” He snatched the letter he’d been writing and stood. “It’s been fun catching up. Maybe I’ll run into you again sometime. Where are you staying?”
She pushed her chair back. “I thought I might stay with you.”
Vertigo caused the ground to tilt, and he grasped the table for support. “You can’t, Noelle.”
She came around the table and laid a hand on his shoulder, steadying him. “Why not? I’m here.”
“You shouldn’t be.”
“Because you don’t want me?” She asked it like she knew the answer already, but he wouldn’t make it that easy for her.
“I’m not fit for anyone. I need time.”
“You’ve had time. Tell me you don’t want me, Dane. Tell me the truth.”
The truth. Why had he made that vow? He evaded with a different truth. “I’m a broken man, Noelle. I’m not the man you thought I was.”
“I know who you are, Dane. Tell me you don’t want me, say you never loved me, and I’ll leave here.”
He could do it. With his eyes closed, he could tell her it was all a game, a joke at her expense. He could break her heart with finality and keep her out of his dangerous clutches.
“Look at me, Dane.”
He lifted his eyes. Hers were blue pools of disaster for him. He couldn’t look away. Those were the eyes he’d seen in a New York City hotel room he’d named Paradise. But once you leave Shangri-La, you don’t get to go back. Once you break a woman’s heart, it will never be whole.
His breath rose and fell like the moon pulling the tide, and he couldn’t form the lie that would save her from him. “I can’t.”
Noelle laid a hand on his cheek. “Don’t you know that I love you, too?”
He waited a beat for her to qualify it. “I love you, but . . .” But he needed to atone for his sins. But they were never meant to be.
It never came.
“Noelle, what we had was . . .” God, what word could encapsulate the everything of those few days when he’d had her body, mind, and soul. When she’d looked at him like he was the person he’d pretended to be. “It was serendipitous.”
She laughed. “Hardly.”
“It wasn’t for you?”
“Serendipity is an accident of circumstances, Dane. Do you really want to tell me you’ve ever just fallen into anything that remarkable by happenstance?”
“What would you call it, then?”
“Preordained.”
“Doomed.”
“Blessed.”
How could she keep seeing him that way after everything else. He shuttered his eyes and sought a way to escape her relentless pursuit of his beleaguered soul. Before he found the strength to bolt, she pulled him into a hug that felt like true acceptance, and he wanted what she was offering, desperately needed it like rope to a drowning man.
But he pushed her back. “You don’t get it, Noelle. I cheated. I lied. I hurt people.” His voice rasped liked sandpaper. “I’m the bad guy in this story. I don’t get a happy ever after.”
She sniffed as though offended. “Well, now you’re being a little bit selfish.”
“What?”
“Are you going to send me away? Break my heart? Make your sacrifice mine as well?”
His fingers raked through his hair. “You deserve better. You’ll find someone who’ll earn your love.”
“Excuse me? I’m not a cookie or a gold star someone wins for checking off a series of good deeds. If you’re working to earn anybody’s love, it should be your own. I don’t need you to self-immolate for me.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It might take me my entire life to rediscover the person I once was.”
“Dane, hear me when I tell you that I’ll gladly help you do that work, but for you. I love you the way you are.”
He swallowed back the painful tightening in his throat. Nobody had ever said that to him. Nobody but Rosamund. He whispered his last plea. “You’re making a mistake. You should go home.”
“Unless you can tell me you don’t want me here, this is my home.”
The last bit of glass sheltering his heart cracked, and he clutched his chest as though he could actually die from happiness. “Will you promise to leave me when I don’t measure up?”
“No, Dane. I’m not going to abandon you whenever you show yourself to be human. I might call you on your bullshit, but I promise to stick by you until you find a way to believe you already do measure up.”
His knees buckled from the relief of this woman strong enough to hold him up while his fight gave out.
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward him. “Yes, I want you. I’ve never stopped wanting you. Damn you. You shouldn’t want this.”
She wrenched her arm free and lifted a finger to his temple, tracing a line into his hair. “There has never been a man on this earth I’ve wanted more.”
The dam on his resistance broke, and he wrapped a hand behind her head so he could reel her in and kiss her, kiss her like she deserved, with reverence. Noelle’s entire body softened as he drew her closer, lined their bodies as one.
The catcalls of passersby broke the spell, and he pulled back, wiping tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. He breathed out, “I love you so much.” With the awareness that they had an audience, he admitted defeat. “I do believe we should continue this at my bungalow.”
He couldn’t believe he’d be able to share his new paradise with the woman he loved.
“You know, we might want to make a detour to this shop I discovered over that way.” She waggled her eyebrows, and Dane suspected he knew the store she meant.
