Between Commitment and Betrayal (Hardy Billionaire Brothers, #1)(53)

“I should have knocked.”

“No.” She shouldn’t make excuses for others by blaming herself. “This isn’t your fault.”

“Well, if I had knocked and waited—”

I didn’t wait for the rest of her reasoning. I sped ahead and whipped my car into park on the side of the road to get out and stand in front of her.

She stopped abruptly, breathing harder than normal, small beads of sweat running down her high cheekbones, glistening in the sunlight while her hair went wild around her in the breezy morning air.

She stared up at me with those sapphire eyes, and in them, I saw pain rather than anger, sadness rather than irritation. My hand instinctively went to her neck, pulling her closer to me. I felt her heat, rubbed my thumb over her jaw, hoped to soothe something in her. “You don’t knock to come into your own home, and you don’t wait for your husband to finish a conversation with another woman.”

“Declan,” she breathed out. Looking up at the sky, her eyes brimmed with unshed tears. “I’m just an employee now. Carl is gone and Melinda and Anastasia find me to be a nuisance, even if, at one point in my life, I wanted to be so much more to them.”

“You’re not just my fucking employee.” I wanted to snatch back those words forever. “Look, I’m going to meet with Anastasia and Piper. I’ll tell them—"

She chewed her cheek and searched my face, blinking rapidly. Her long lashes caught any of her tears before she stepped back, out of my reach. “You’re meeting with Piper?”

I narrowed my eyes at how she straightened, how she pulled at her duffel in front of her, utilizing it for some sort of stability to hold on to. “She’s PR for us, and we will need that and good story when the time comes.”

Her head tilted, “Has she always been your PR?”

A sliver of hope ran through my veins that she cared, that she was just a little bit jealous. “Piper has always been around because of Anastasia and Carl. She’s Anastasia’s best friend. If you want to come to meet with her when we discuss—”

“Absolutely not.” She cut me off. “I’m not looking to invade your professional or private life at all.”

The fuck? I was looking to invade every part of her and her life. Quite literally.

“Please inform me of what she thinks the spin needs to be. If the story is that I’m to be made the employee who’s on her way out soon, fine. I just need a heads-up.” She cleared her throat. “Also, I’m hoping to work extra hours to pay you for my half of her PR salary.”

“You’re not paying me for shit, Everly. And I’m not going to throw you under the damn bus for some bullshit PR story. Are you serious right now?”

“You have status in this community, and I don’t want to ruin it. And we should have been this way from the very beginning. I knew this was how it was going to be. I just got lost in …” She waved away our relationship and started to walk around me. “You do what you have to do.”

My arm shot out and grabbed her elbow. “What I might have to do is throw you in my car, Drop. You’re treating me like I can’t be trusted, like we’ve shared nothing.” The thought had me pausing even as my heart picked up speed. It’s how I knew I cared for her way more than I should. “You’re treating me like I’m nothing to you.”

She glared up at me and ripped her arm out of my hold. “We are nothing to each other but a signature, Mr. Hardy. We made a legal commitment, that’s it. Let’s stick to it and get through this.”

“Just a signature?” I’d contained my frustration in worse circumstances, but Everly pressed all the right buttons, and it was the exact wrong time to push me over the edge. “Drop, I can’t fucking sleep without thinking about you down in the guesthouse, can’t go to work without my eyes drifting to where you’re helping a client, and let’s be clear, I still taste your pussy when I think about it, still feel your tongue on my cock when I imagine it. You may think you can go backwards and forget my first name, but remember you knew it when you moaned right before I made you come.”

Her eyes widened. Then she took a step back, then another, then another toward the gym, away from me, away from the idea of us. “Well, I’ve forgotten it, Mr. Hardy. I’m an employee, that’s all. You said it yourself.” With that, she spun and started jogging again.

I should have sped off and left her there with how fucking enraged I was. Instead, I inched the Bugatti alongside her the rest of the way to work.

She turned to glare over her shoulder once. “You seriously can’t still be following me?”

“I might be mad, but I’m not ever going to have my wife jog on her own with the shit you told me the other day about sexual assaults.”

“This is a completely safe neighborhood!” she pointed out.

“Even safer given my driving behind you,” I deadpanned.

“You’re causing a scene.” She pointed to the cars behind me.

“Get in then.”

Everly was cool, calm, and collected most of the time, but I had to smile when she narrowed her eyes and said, “No.”

Cool, calm, collected, and stubborn. She’d made her decision, and she was sticking to it.

And I had my temper and my acting without thinking. So I yanked the wheel, steered the car to the side of the road—again—and got out. “Drop, remember when I told you I make the rules and you listen? That it’s better that way?”