CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MIA
I thought life would be easier once I was an adult. Like many children in unhappy homes, I’d spent hours locked in my room - hours dreaming about what the world would be like when I was finally allowed to experience it. In my teen mind, I’d believed every problem I had was a direct result of my father’s anger and criticism, that once I left for college, I’d discover a simpler world, one I could control myself so that I was never be caught off guard by unwelcome surprises.
Dreams had always danced in my head of having a tight-knit group of friends I could rely on. Even as a teen, I couldn’t stand being touched, but I’d thought that, maybe, I would find a man who affected me enough that I could stomach the feel of his skin against mine. I imagined the possibility of marriage and children, of a career that satisfied me and sent me home each day feeling accomplished.
What I’d found since leaving college is that adulting was much harder than I imagined it would be. There are no magic cure-all’s that would correct the mistakes. There were no guarantees and no happy endings unless you fought tooth and nail to achieve them. Unlike the fairy tales and chick flicks that always promised a miracle that would turn around a difficult life and make it beautiful, I was learning that our consequences are what we make of them. From beginning to end, we’re responsible for what our lives become and there’s no magic formula that would make it any easier.
I was an adult. I had nobody I could rely on. And I was stuck with the consequences of my bad choices, regardless of whether they kept me up at night, restlessly changing positions until gaining only a few minutes of sleep before the sun lit my window the next morning.
Sitting up in bed with my alarm blaring out some annoying radio station, I scrubbed my hands across my face before slapping my palm over the snooze button. My usual routine would have been to lie back down and claim another five minutes of sleep, but my anxiety came roaring back like a deadly backdraft, my consciousness providing oxygen to its fire.
Peeling my eyes open, I stared out at the sky becoming pink with the morning sun. Fog obscured the streets, the streetlights still blazing but unable to touch the ground with their light. It was six in the morning, giving me plenty of time to make some coffee, drink it while getting ready, and cart myself in to work to get fired.
Toying with the idea of calling in sick, I thought better of it. Thankfully, the headache currently pounding against my skull was tolerable. Enough to remind me I’d had wine the night before, but not enough to debilitate me, it would be gone by the time I finished my shower.
Unfortunately, the headache was the least of my problems.
The night I’d spent with Donovan came rushing back to me, and I would no doubt discover exactly what my foolish mistake cost me as soon as I stepped foot inside the office. But like a bandage, it was better to rip it off and get it over with. Hiding in my bed all day would only lengthen the time it took for me to learn my fate.
Checking my phone, I was happy to find that my stalker hadn’t messaged me again. But even with the small reprieve, I knew he would return, and that was just one more issue I had to deal with. While tossing and turning all night, I decided going to the police might be my only option. But in order to give them every means of discovering who was following me and making it stop, I needed access to Dark Realities, needed some proof that I wasn’t an insane woman making up ridiculous fantasies in my head. I could show them the emails, could show them the texts and even the deposit, but without the website, they wouldn’t have a starting point to begin their search.
Perhaps Donovan would know how a website could disappear leaving no trace that it had ever existed. Although the likelihood that he would tell me anything besides ordering me out of his office was slim to none. It wasn’t like he was the only person who knew about computers. Jackson and Trevor were also educated in that department. If I wasn’t fired, I could always ask one of them.
Damn it, I was stalling. Forcing myself to my feet, I padded into my shower to let the water chase away what remained of my headache. It was a dull thud by the time I dried off, wrapped myself in my ratty, blue flannel robe and padded barefoot into the kitchen.
Drinking my coffee while doing what I could to hide puffy eyes and the dark circles that ran beneath them, I gave up after six layers of concealer and got dressed. Letting myself out the door was like unlocking Fort Knox but I was careful to lock every deadbolt back in place to make sure nobody was waiting for me when I got home.
After making it downstairs and crossing the small lobby, I paused at the doors, worked up the nerve to push them open and then hauled ass to the car. It wasn’t easy running in heels, but I was getting better at it every day.
At seven fifty-five, I strolled into the small reception area of Stone Industries, my eyes instantly seeking out the tablet Donovan left on the desk. What I found instead was a tall man with broad shoulders, brown hair, and a scowl written across his lips that was the perfect complement to the line of anger running between his eyes.
“Morning, Mia.”
Noticing Jackson left the word good out of that greeting, I wasn’t too optimistic I still had a job.
“Good morning.”
His eyes darted to the clock on the wall. “Listen, you have five minutes before you have to start, so we should talk.”
Damn it. “I’m fired, aren’t I?”
Tilting his head slightly to the left, and strangely resembling a confused, shaggy dog, he narrowed his eyes on me and asked, “Why would you be fired?”
Before I could answer, he disappeared behind the half wall, the door between the lobby and back room opening and closing. His hand wrapped around my bicep, the sudden hold forcing to cringe and shut down as he dragged me out into the building hallway. I was practically in tears by the time he stopped moving me away from the main office door, my body weakly attempting to jerk away from his grip. It wasn’t until we were far enough for him to be happy that he let me go and looked back at me. The shock in his expression was clear as day.
“Are you crying? I told you that you’re not fired.”
The tears hadn’t escaped my eyes, but they were definitely welling, the burning saltiness of them stinging my bottom lids. Wiping them away with the back of my hand, I lied. “I’m just tired and it’s cold out. That tends to make my eyes water.”
After a quick search of my expression, Jackson shook his head slightly and reached as if to grab me again. I flinched away, tucking my arms closer to my body. “Please don’t touch me.”
“You’re mad, aren’t you? Are you quitting? Please tell me you’re not quitting. Donovan feels bad enough...”
“For what?”
This conversation was becoming extremely confusing and if one of us didn’t just spit out what we were thinking, we’d end up standing here all day dancing around the point.
“For kissing you last night.”
Kissing me? Quickly scanning through my memory, I distinctly remembered being the one to kiss him. If anything Donovan had been the one to shut down, to walk away, to take me home without so much as a word spoken about what happened. “He didn’t kiss me. I kissed him.”
Jackson’s expression tightened, an objection obviously caught in his throat that he decided not to argue. “It doesn’t matter who kissed who. What matters is there should be no kissing at all. None. Not even a peck on the cheek. Donovan can’t handle it.”
My eyes rounded, the urgency in Jackson’s voice snapping me to attention, even if the confusion addled my thoughts. “What do you mean he can’t-“
Reaching out, Jackson covered my mouth to silence me and looked over my head toward the office door. My body shook as soon as his skin met mine, my feet stepping back as quickly as they could carry me. Over the years, I’d gotten better at handling touch, but the breakdown last night had left me in a strange place, trapping me in the past and making it impossible to tolerate even the bare hint of another person’s body against mine.
“Sorry,” he apologized. “You were speaking loud and I don’t want Donovan to know we’re having this conversation.” Sighing, Jackson ran a hand through his hair, the frustrated movement making it clear he was vacillating between anger, concern and indecision. “I can’t tell you the details, but I can tell you to stay as far away from Donovan as possible. There’s something you don’t know about him, something I won’t tell you because it’s not my story to tell. But I will warn you. For both of your sakes, I’m putting my foot down on this. If you want to keep your job, you need to stay as far away from him as possible. Do you understand me?”
In the time it took him to deliver his warning, Jackson had gone from concerned friend to angry and slightly threatening. There was a certain grit to his whispered voice, the curt sound of his words making me want to step back farther until I had a running start should he attempt to grab me again.
Blinking in his direction, I didn’t know what to say. He was making it sound like Donovan would explode if a woman went near him. “I’ll stay away.”
Nodding his head once, he calmed down and said, “Good. That’s good.” His expression softened, breath blowing over his lips as he forced his hand through his hair again. Struggling with something, Jackson fought to be careful in what he said. He lowered his voice to a bare whisper before admitting, “Donovan has issues, okay? He’s not dangerous or anything, he’s just not all there in his head. His tastes are...not normal. Okay? They’re not...” Struggling may have been too soft a word. With every cut off sentence, he showed me he had a lot more to say, but was about to cut his own tongue off to keep from saying it. “Especially when it comes to this. I don’t want to see either of you hurt. The last woman he was interested in...”
Jackson’s voice trailed off, indecision flooding his eyes as he glanced over me again toward the office door. Stepping closer to me, he was sure to keep his hands to himself after seeing my earlier reaction. “His last relationship ended extremely badly. Just know that. It messed him up, Mia, and I don’t need more problems with Donovan. Without him, there is no firm, and without the firm, thousands of people will be without jobs. This affects more than just the two of you, so just stay away from him.”
His emphasis on those last words conveyed another unspoken threat. While intrigued by his insistence that there was something about Donovan I didn’t know - and maybe didn’t want to know - I wasn’t concerned about doing anything that would force Jackson to act on that threat. Donovan was off limits. I was fine with that. Logically, at least. Emotionally, my heart came alive any time the man was around and I couldn’t figure out why. It also deflated at the thought of keeping my distance.
It seemed like every factor in my life right now was mired in shadow and secrecy. The game. Donovan. Everything.
“I’ll stay away,” I promised, even if that promise made me want to crawl back into my bed and cry for a week straight.
Not knowing what it was about Donovan that brought me to life any time he was near, I tried to make sense of everything I knew about him. He was a bastard when you first met him. So cold and distant that you wanted to move away as far as possible just to prevent frostbite. He didn’t exactly warm up when you got to know him better, he just eased the sharp edges a touch with his jokes. Maybe if I hadn’t been so scared of everything, I would have laughed at those jokes when he first started making them, would have seen the dark humor for what it was.
Instead, I’d feared him, only to learn that there was warmth to be found in his personality, you just had to understand that, by constantly prodding, Donovan was actually taking an interest enough to try to help. Or, there was always the possibility that I saw too much in his efforts to make me stick up for myself. I didn’t know. And with Jackson’s new warning added to the pile of information I had on Donovan Stone, I was sinking even deeper into a pit of confusion.
“Can I go to work now?” I asked. It was clear Jackson didn’t want Donovan to know we were having this discussion, which meant that when I walked back in there, I would be officially late and have to suffer Donovan’s comments as a result of it.
“Yeah. Go ahead. Sorry, Mia. I just need to look out for the firm. And for Donovan.”
I nodded my head looking for anything I could say to ease some of the tension between us. “No problem. And thanks for the warning.”
We both walked toward the office door, and to fill the silence, I asked, “How’d your installation job go? Is that why you were out of town last night?”
Jackson opened the door and gave me a strange look. “Out of town? I was home last night. Who told you I was out of town?”
Apparently being off limits wasn’t the only thing I should know about Donovan - he was a liar as well. “Nobody, I just assumed since you’d been out of the office.”
Shrugging it off, Jackson and I both went to work. While I filed, he went through boxes of spare parts, making as much racket as a bull in a china shop would accomplish. But I didn’t mind the noisy company. While working on several different piles of paperwork in an attempt to compile them into a filing system that made sense, I wondered about why Donovan had lied to me, and also wondered if Jackson’s presence in the office today was his attempt to place distance between Donovan and me. By noon, Donovan hadn’t emerged from his office. He hadn’t messaged me on the tablet either.
“I’m heading out to grab lunch. Did you want anything?”
I startled at Jackson’s voice, only because he hadn’t spoken a word to me that morning since our little chat in the hall. Spinning my chair to look at him, I smiled and shook my head. “I’m not really all that hungry. Plus I want to be here while you’re gone. Trevor makes his deliveries today and I’d rather one of us stay behind so Donovan doesn’t have to deal with it.”
Nodding, he left without another word. He didn’t have to say it, but I knew he’d be back as soon as possible to continue playing third wheel.
A half hour went by before the main door opened and the sound of shuffling boots could be heard in the lobby. I peeked around the wall to see Trevor staring back at me, a stack of boxes in a handcart at his side.
“Hey, Mia. Would you mind opening the door to the back for me? These boxes are heavy so I can’t leave them on the desk.”
Holding up a finger to tell him to give me a second, I stood from my seat and crossed the room to open the door. He made quick work of putting the boxes back near the other supplies before turning to hand me the clipboard with the delivery form to sign. Taking the form from him, I almost jumped out of my skin when his finger swept out to touch mine. His eyes pinned me in place as soon as I reacted, a question written into the line of his brow. “You okay? You seem jumpy today.”
His eyes darted to Donovan’s door and back to me, his voice lowering so that only I could hear it. “Has he done something to you?”
My brows pulled together, my thoughts racing over why everybody believed Donovan was some kind of threat. The shiver that ran up my spine reminded me of another threat - the true threat that had me watching over my shoulder and doing the fifty meter dash between work, home and my car.
“No. Of course not. Why would you think that?”
He darted another glance at Donovan’s door before shaking his head. “No reason. Donovan just rubs me the wrong way sometimes and he’s never been able to keep an assistant for long. I like you, Mia, so I really hope you stay. But if you do leave for any reason, you can always come work for me.”
Sadly, the offer made me feel a lot better. It was good to know I had somewhere I could go in case Donovan decided I couldn’t work for him any longer.
“I should go,” Trevor said, his eyes looking me over before he pushed the handcart toward the front lobby. Before he could make it through the door, I called out to him. I still needed to know if there was a way to find Dark Realities so I could go to the police, and Trevor seemed like the safest person to give me that information at the moment.
“Hey, Trevor. I have an odd computer question to ask you, if you have a minute?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
Shifting my weight between my feet nervously, I considered how to phrase the question without giving too much away about the reason I needed an answer. “If you were using a website regularly and then one day it just disappeared, would that mean it’s gone for good? Or is there a way to hide it from one person?”
Forehead wrinkling, he stared at me for a few seconds before answering, “No. Not really. Unless they moved the entire site and scrubbed the search results from the main search engines and somehow told everyone else where the site could be found, but not that one person. But that would take a lot of effort, and some hacking skills. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering,” I stammered, jumping in place again when Donovan’s door opened behind me.
Trevor looked past me to the man I knew stood at my back, his eyes narrowing as his lips pulled into a tight grin, and inclined his head in Donovan’s direction. “Donovan,” he practically growled, his fingers tightening over the handle of the handcart so hard that his knuckles turned white.
Only silence behind me, but that was typical with Donovan.
Trevor flashed me a smile and told me he’d be back in a day or two with another delivery before walking out of the office and leaving Donovan and me alone. A hand touched my back softly, but instead of the crawling sensation I had with both Trevor and Jackson that morning, warmth bloomed across my skin. I hated that warmth. Even more, I hated that Donovan had just confirmed it was him, specifically, that could touch me, even when I was feeling miserable and out of place.
Turning, I caught his eyes with my own, saw something behind them that was part apology, part anger. Always a mix of opposites, Donovan was the most frustrating enigma I’d ever known.
Tilting his head toward the office door, he silently invited me to follow him. After waiting for me to walk through, he closed the door so that we could talk alone. Jackson wouldn’t like this private meeting when he returned, but I couldn’t exactly tell my boss that I wasn’t allowed to be alone with him.
Taking a seat behind his desk, Donovan didn’t bother with the tablets for this discussion. His expression shadowed, he looked me dead in the eye when he signed, I think we need to clear the air before any problems happen between us. I’d like to set some rules.
My heart fell into my stomach at the word.
If there was anything I was sick of at the moment, it was rules.