Mile High (Up in the Air #2)(71)

I was supposed to be the innocent one here, but I simply couldn’t trust James in the way he seemed to trust me. The very idea was impossible to me. I didn’t even trust my own feelings. Every emotion he made me feel was met with my reluctance, and my skepticism, and my doubt. I felt like half of a person, the part that could trust other people somehow missing from my soul.

“Of course. This way,” he said, his voice just as quiet as mine had been, leading my by a hand gripped just above my elbow.

I felt an urge to reassure him, or even to apologize, for what, I wasn’t quite sure. In the end, I was silent.

He led me to the restrooms, pointing down the hallway as we parted. “I’ll be waiting in the antechamber to the dining hall.” He walked away.

Even the restroom was daunting, huge with cream and white marble along the floor, and thick columns that seemed out of place in a bathroom.

The stalls were made of glass that frosted over from transparent to opaque as you clicked the lock into lace. I’d seen the trick before in a few hotspot Vegas clubs, but I was still vaguely impressed with the effect.

I just stood there for the longest time, door closed, taking deep, painful breaths. I tried to place what was affecting me so. I felt myself falling, once again, so deeply under James’s intoxicating spell, but some part of me just couldn’t trust him.

But was it him? Or was it me? Was I so superficial that, just because he was so impossibly beautiful, I didn’t believe he could ever really fall for me the way I’d so easily fallen for him?

He had an angel’s face, but his eyes were so hypnotically tarnished, a mirror of my own pain in their depths. I had never been superficial, and I knew that his looks hadn’t been what made me fall for him. It was the soul underneath all of that beautiful packaging. I had seen that he was more, so why wouldn’t I let myself trust that? Why had that seductively beautiful submissive, so much closer to his physical equal than myself, shaken my faith in him with just a brief encounter? Was I insecure, or just realistic? I berated myself, again and again, for being foolish. If he had wanted to be with Jolene, he wouldn’t be with me…

Finally, when I felt I had given myself a good enough pep talk, I let myself out of the stall. I nodded politely to the bathroom attendant as I washed my hands.

I was checking my makeup carefully in the mirror when two figures breezed through the door. I stiffened when I saw who they were.

Jules practically beamed when she spotted me. Jolene’s look was even more confusing. It was feral and almost…smoldering.

They moved to flank me, moving together as though they had planned it. I towered over both of them, but they still managed to make me feel overwhelmed.

“Bianca,” Jules murmured, running a hand over my hair affectionately.

I stiffened until I felt a little brittle. Her smile grew wider, and perversely, warmer. “How are you, love? Is James sweeping you off of your feet? He’s very good at that, you know. No one so beautiful was ever so charming as our James. Wouldn’t you agree, Jolene?”

Jolene was studying me in the mirror, barely blinking as her stunning eyes drank me in. “He’s irresistible and completely relentless when he wants a new woman. In the beginning, he pursued me with such passion and fire that I still dream about it sometimes. I’ve never felt as beautiful or desirable as I did when I was with our James. It was the most exhilarating year of my life.”

My breath caught, my heart pounding in my chest nearly loud enough to drown out the last of her words.

A year? My head began to spin.

“Tell her everything, Jolene,” Jules prompted the other woman. It was an order, really.

“I was under contract with Mr. Cavendish for a year and two months. I belonged to him for that time, exclusively unless he said otherwise, to do with as he wished, completely at his disposal. I was in my own personal heaven.”

Under contract? I tried to take it all in. I had known a little about the contract she spoke of, though he had never tried to do the same to me. Perhaps because he had been afraid to scare me off, perhaps not.

But a year and two months? He had claimed never to have had a girlfriend before, but this sounded far more serious than having a girlfriend…

“How long ago was this?” I asked Jolene, keeping my face very carefully blank, my tone very empty.

She ran her tongue over her teeth, and the gesture struck me hard, as though she had learned it from being so familiar with James. She must know him so much better than I do, I thought. “Three years ago.”

I was somewhat mollified. I arched a brow at our reflections. “A bit long ago for you to still be so hung up on him, don’t you think?” I asked her. I didn’t mind at all if I came off as a bitch with these two women. The last time I had encountered Jules, her words had crushed me, and I had fled like a wounded animal. I wanted her to know, this time, that I was not such an easy mark.

Jolene’s eyes were earnest, as though she felt not even a hint of my malice. “Three years ago was the end of our written contract, but far from the end of us. He still calls me often, between whatever fresh conquests he’s obsessed with. Just six weeks ago he flew me out to Vegas on his private jet to spend a night with him.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

That one hit it’s mark squarely, and I felt myself trembling. I did some absent math in my disconnected brain. He had admitted to being with a woman only one day before he had met me. The dates added up for her claim. At least he hadn’t called her while we were on a break…