The Touch of Magic Series, page 117
Some kind of calm stole over her.
Sloan breathed a few deep sighs and brushed away a few tears. Really, it was her own fault. She had gone downstairs looking for company and wound up with too much liquor in her. She wasn’t the first woman to have done something that she didn’t remember, but knew enough to regret.
Sloan clenched her teeth, and double-checked everything. She would not add to this day by publicly humiliating herself by showing up without pants, or having her shirt buttoned wrong, due to her own distraction. Her contracts looked to be in order, but she wouldn’t have sworn by it as everything she saw was a little bit blurry. Twice, she made sure that her shoes matched and her clothing was on the right body parts.
The rattles got to her. Things felt loose in her soul and she didn’t know how to put them back or even where they belonged. She reminded herself to breathe, and wished to God that she could force herself to be calm. Or at the very least fake it well.
A veil!
As she finished the spell, her stomach turned, so she fed it the granola bar that she had stashed in her luggage. It was like dry, crumbly cardboard, and the flavor suited the morning.
Finally, when the big red numbers of the hotel alarm pointed out that there wasn’t any way to put it off any longer, she left the room. Her thoughts churned and swirled as she clutched her papers and headed toward the elevator.
In the hallway, Vanessa waved hello, and Sloan waved back forcing a curt smile.
Sheila came up a little closer. “Are you all right?”
“Mmm-hmm.” She nodded as the sound came out through clenched teeth and Sloan was smart enough to know she wasn’t fooling anyone. Luckily, no one pushed the issue.
Behind her a door clicked and she jumped, turning to face him. But it wasn’t Max. It was Wil emerging from Max’s room. He gave her the once over, and she knew. She knew that he knew. Surely, he heard a different version of the story than hers, but she forced a smile anyway and tried not to die there in the hallway.
Half the team appeared to have already left, so Sloan walked along behind everyone else. Their usual chatter was a mad noise that rushed inside her skull until the silver doors opened on the conference room floor and they quieted. The quiet was more to her liking. Still, she had to perform, and try to look normal. She hoped her veil spell held.
If he’d shown up, then maybe she would have been able to assess the situation. But Max was nowhere to be seen. Sloan waited on pins and needles for his appearance. A few moments into the meeting, Wil apologized to everyone at the meeting, stating that Max would join them later.
That bastard! The thought flew through her brain. She had forced herself here, and was trying at least to act normal, and he had the cajones to not show? Again, she fought off the queasiness she felt growing deep inside her.
Zoning out during the presentation was easy. Sloan breathed deeply and simply let her thoughts take over. She was most angry that he didn’t show up. It wasn’t fair that he got to take time out from his schedule. She was the violated party, she should have been the one to skip out. Beyond that she was simply disappointed.
The man she’d held up as ideal simply wasn’t. Her fantasy of Max was long lost. He didn’t exist, and maybe not only was it not Max, maybe her dream man didn’t exist at all. That was as hard to swallow as the night she didn’t remember. Everyone loved Max and, of course, so had she. But he wasn’t what they all thought he was. Not only had he cheated on his girlfriend, he had taken advantage of a drunk girl.
He seemed genuinely surprised. The thought invaded her brain, but she squashed it with a reminder that she had almost believed Joe’s story about being caught with her cousin. Almost. She’d vowed she wouldn’t be that stupid again.
Her deepest disappointment lay in herself. That one hurt the worst. That she had gotten that drunk and gone off and done what she did. She shouldn’t have trusted Max. Clearly, her “better judgment” was just as bad as it had ever been. She was great with real estate, and jobs, and general common sense, but when it came to men, Sloan clearly could not be trusted.
The image of Max softly letting himself into the room appeared just in the corner of her eye. But she would have recognized his walk, the color of his hair, the shape of him, anywhere. Her head jerked up and for a moment she looked over and met his eyes square from across the room.
He looked haggard. Drawn. Out of sorts. His shirt was wrinkled and she didn’t think she’d ever seen that before. Then she berated herself for thinking that maybe he was upset, too. He didn’t deserve her good graces. Sloan lowered her eyes back to the table top and kept them there for the rest of the meeting.
CHAPTER 8
For a week Sloan forced herself to get out of bed each morning. Each day she made a point of not wearing the outfit she’d draped over her chair from the night before when she took it off. Normally neat, she now had five suits piled up, gathering dust and wrinkles.
Stacks of folders littered her desk, her usual neatness gone like her good mood. Everyone had commented how she was withdrawn, quiet, not her old self. Sloan didn’t respond to them or to much of anyone. She hadn’t even brought herself to call Lisette and tell her friend about the horrible mistake she had made.
Lisette would be the easiest to tell. Her best friend from back home could be told via message or text or even online. Sloan wouldn’t have to face her, but she still couldn’t do it. She knew she should. She needed advice. She’d hit a new low of stupid, getting that drunk and sleeping with a man. She’d been so drunk she didn’t even remember it, and that was not like her. Worse, she wasn’t even really with him, she was just his side piece.
Her sister Rae had unknowingly been the other woman once, and she’d been mad as hell when she found out. But Sloan…Sloan was only mad at herself. She couldn’t even remember if she’d been deceived. She was never drinking again.
She sat at her desk and stared at the screen. Though she was leaving early and taking long lunches, all her work was done. Not that anyone would be able to tell. She stayed at her desk, finding new work rather than facing the world or fessing up to her mistakes.
Sighing her way through another contract crossed out and written over—poorly—by an exec, she ticked minutes away, waiting for the moment she could leave. She’d work at home if she needed too. But instead of seeing the contract she saw the pattern in the words.
This was one of Max’s. Over the months, she had come to recognize his scrawl. She still believed it to be sexy. The writing itself spoke to her. But it no longer represented a fantasy, now it mocked her for yet another bad choice, this one far worse than any of the others.
Her head and her gaze snapped up as Max appeared in her doorway. Her breath caught. And for a brief moment she truly believed that he was a figment, conjured by her thoughts. He didn’t say anything, just stood with his hands loose at his sides, his suit impeccable, and his face blank. He blocked her only way out. It was all she could do to keep from shrinking away from him. Over and over her mind spoke, Don’t let him see that you’re still upset.
Finally, she found her voice. “What do you want?”
His eyes searched hers and, she hoped, found nothing. “Can I close the door?”
With a conscious thought she tried to ease the tension that was growing along her jaw. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
She didn’t trust him and the truth was, she didn’t trust herself. Her stupid heart was still attracted to him, even though her brain knew he was twenty kinds of wrong.
Max nodded and came in a little closer, looking like he was acquiescing. But she didn’t let the lie of his loose posture fool her. She tried to calculate a way around the desk and past him through the clearance he had left at the doorway. His words penetrated her escape route plans. “It’s about Chicago. I thought you might rather keep it private.”
Did he do something to me?
It hit her like a ton of bricks. She’d gotten drunk and done something monumentally stupid. On a work trip, too. But had she? She’d drunk one and half margaritas. For the first time, it occurred to her that shouldn’t have erased her whole night.
Her body went still with the shock and she tried not to let him see. Had Max done something to her? Would he be here now if he had? Taking a deep breath, she thought, of course she wanted to keep it private, but she wasn’t about to close the door or let him have any other power over her ever again. “Maybe you would rather keep it private.”
With a bone deep sigh, Max dropped his large frame into the seat in front of her desk. He appeared to know that she was extremely uncomfortable, but he didn’t seem to care. His head was resting, face down, in his hands, but his words and almost convincing despair carried up to her.
“Listen, I’ll bet everyone around here is somewhat aware of what happened. And I also think that everyone thinks I’m some sort of scum. So at this point I really have nothing to hide.” It was only then that he lifted his head from his hands.
Sloan’s teeth ground. Down at her sides where he couldn’t see them, her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. She held back the spell she wanted to chant. First, because chanting and casting spells at work was a no-no. It wasn’t in HR rules specifically, but she didn’t cast in front of people who didn’t already know. Second, she didn’t cast it because it was a curse and Sloan didn’t curse people. She still knew the curse spells though!
Was he here to make pretty excuses? It sure didn’t sound like he was drumming up an apology. But she kept her mouth shut.
After a moment he spoke again. “I had your margarita glass analyzed.”
“What?” The word fell out of her mouth before she even registered anything other than that he hadn’t apologized. Or even come close. She waited, staring at him, having no idea what was coming next.
At last he looked up at her, and she was insanely disappointed by how trite he looked. She was such a sucker, and look where it had gotten her.
“That morning, I saw that you’d left your glass on the bedside table. So I called a friend and she suggested a laboratory there in Chicago that does freelance work. I had them analyze the glass and the contents.”
“What?”
“You simply weren’t that drunk. You behaved normally enough—”
“Close the door,” she interrupted him. The command was low and tight and didn’t sound like her. It made her even more angry that he knew more about her behavior that night than she did. She still couldn’t remember anything past entering his hotel room door.
Rising, he walked the few steps to close them in her office. For once, she was grateful for the glass windows allowing everyone to see in, to see that—despite the closed door—nothing was going on between them. In that short space of movement, she could see that his shoulders weren’t squared up the way they used to be. He slouched a little. Max Summerland looked defeated.
Hands jammed in pockets, he turned back to her. “You didn’t act very drunk at all. Not after the first half-hour anyway—”
Sloan spotted Sheila coming down the hall and that was the only thing that kept her butt in her chair. “And do you mind refreshing me on what exactly it was that I did that first half-hour?”
He was taken aback. It was the first time he made solid eye contact with her. He was genuinely startled. But he answered quickly, with a certainty she hadn’t expected. “We talked.”
Still, his words tickled at the back of her brain. She was missing something. There was something he hadn’t said. Her heart rolled in her chest. She’d never been normal. She didn’t like knowing that someone was lying to her, worse was like now, when she suspected it, but didn’t know. Rae would know. She would be able to sit here and get some feeling in her brain that would tell her. Sloan needed a pendulum for those kinds of questions, and she couldn’t well tell him to wait a minute while she pulled some witchcraft out of her bag and tested him.
She stared right at him. “I thought you said we...” She couldn’t even bring herself to finish the sentence.
“That was later.” Suddenly the floor had become interesting to him again. “Several hours later.”
While she attempted to herd her thoughts together, and tried desperately to remember anything, Max gathered himself. At least, most of his old self. “Anyway, I called an old friend who’s a doctor now, and she thought I might be right. That you might have been drugged.”
Drugged!?
“No.” The word rolled out of her, dragging nausea behind it.
Suddenly he was the old Max. He didn’t notice that she couldn’t really breathe. His posture changed, he leaned forward almost towering over her as he argued his case. The man could sell ice to penguins. “Think about it. You don’t remember anything, right?”
She shook her head, thinking that he would try to lead her astray, to convince her to conclude that he had done something other than what he had.
“And you didn’t act that drunk. I would never have...”
Instead her mind tried desperately to wrap itself around the possibility he presented. With it came a new wave of horror. She had been trying to suppress her feelings of stupidity for about a week. But if she had gotten drunk and been so stupid, then at least it was her own fault. It would be something she could avoid in the future. She already wouldn’t ever drink again. But if she had been drugged…
Her initial feeling of violation hit her all over again, but much stronger this time. Sloan dove around him, trying to get out the door. Trying to get to the bathroom where she could throw up what she hadn’t eaten at lunch.
As she moved by him, he grabbed her arm. He was simply too strong, there was no way to get past him, and she couldn’t speak with her throat and stomach working in reverse. She was cornered, and she was going to lose it. Dropping to her knees, Sloan dry-heaved into the wastebasket. Tears found their way out of her eyes. Her breath rushed in and out of her, while she hugged the edges of the trashcan, squeezing her eyes tight. She was going to cry and she did not want to cry.
After a minute, and a long, deep breath, she realized that Max was kneeling beside her, holding her hair, asking if she was all right.
She slapped at his hands, frantic to make him let go, before she got it together and nodded as she backed away. “I’m sorry.”
Sternly, he shook his head at her. “Don’t be sorry. It’s a lot to take. Even for me, and I can only imagine how you must feel.”
With a few blinks of her wet eyes, and a sip of the water he had picked up off her desk and held out to her, Sloan slowly pulled herself together. Just before she was going to speak, Max started again. “The analysis on the liquid in the glass was consistent with GHB. It’s a common date rape drug.”
Her stomach heaved again, but she managed to curtail it this time. “So there were drugs in it?”
“Not really.” He shook his head, clearly frustrated. “That’s why GHB is so widely used. It breaks down, you can’t really detect it—”
“But you said—”
“That the liquid had chemicals in it consistent with GHB. There was no way to know that the drug had actually been there at one time. It doesn’t prove anything, but it very strongly suggests. There’s no other understandable reason for those chemicals to have been in your glass. Alyssa, my doctor friend, told me it likely won’t hold up in court.”
His fingers slid through his hair. Sloan sank into her chair again, sitting for fear that her legs might give out. But Max paced and started talking rapid-fire again. “There were three sets of fingerprints on the glass. Yours and two others.”
Her body couldn’t take all these shocks. All these pendulum mood swings, from fear to revulsion to anger and back again. “Where did you get my fingerprints?”
Max startled at her question. “From the water glass you had later. My friend told me to keep it and send it.”
She didn’t remember any water glass, but that didn’t mean anything. She felt her eyebrows lift. “You stole a piece of glassware from a hotel?”
“Two pieces.” He looked angry about the whole thing and she wondered why he was upset. She was the one who’d been drugged. She was the one who didn’t remember. He spoke again. “What else could I do? You hate me and I didn’t do anything.”
CHAPTER 9
Again, Sloan wished she had Rae’s powers right now instead of her own. She’d grill her sister when she got home tonight. Still, Max went on.
“I’m desperate to make you not hate me. I understand you may never like me, but I want you know I didn’t do this.”
She’d slept with him. That much had been obvious from the moment she woke up that day and he hadn’t denied it. So he’d done something, even if it was just talking her out of her undies.
“One of the sets of prints were yours. There were two others, but not mine.” This time when he looked at her, she could tell he was waiting for a reaction.
But she couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, when she got tired of him watching her that way, she shrugged. “What does it mean?”
“It means that I didn’t touch your glass. Really, Sloan, I’d never do what you think I did.”
Her heart ached. Her head hurt. Her ears rang. But Max didn’t give up. “Think of everyone who was already there by the time I got to the bar. I have a suspicion, but I don’t want to sway you. So who touched your glass? Who would?”
“I don’t know.” She felt like someone had unscrewed some valve and all her energy had drained out. She wanted Max to go away so she could just curl up under her desk and try to figure out what the hell had happened in Chicago. She’d been supposed to meet her dream man. Instead of being thrilled with a new love on the horizon, she simply wanted to sleep away at least the rest of the week.
“Think, Sloan!”
She shot him a dirty look, and he sank into the chair, clearly feeling chastised. Instead of making her feel better, it made her feel rude. The same thought passed through her head that had passed a thousand times this past week. If he’s guilty, he’s sure putting on a great show.
