Crown of Lies

I smarted with shame. “It’s not like that. He wasn’t just any boy. He was—”

When I didn’t continue, he sighed sadly. “He was what? A friend? A soul-mate? A teenage crush?” He pinched his nose. “Elle, I will never stand in the way of you finding love. I want you to find love. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish your mother was still alive to teach you how valuable love can be, but I won’t permit you to throw away everything you have with a stupid infatuation over a criminal who doesn’t deserve you.”

“Dad...don’t—”

His eyes dropped to my throat. Pain arrowed through him, followed by rage. “Where is your necklace?”

I jolted.

“Tell me, Elle. The sapphire star I bought you. The one I spent hours deliberating over. The one I bought because the blue matched your eyes and the star symbolized how much you mean to me?” His fists shook. “Where is it?”

I looked at the beige carpet. “I lost it.”

The lie turned to paste on my tongue, but it was better than the truth. Better for him to blame me than to think of his gift in the possession of heartless thieves who meant me harm.

“For God’s sake, Noelle.” He shook his head, tiredness etching his eyes. “Not only were you irresponsible with yourself but with your gift, too. If you planned on using tonight as a demonstration that you were capable of spending some time alone away from the company, consider it a failure.” His voice deepened with authority. “Until you can prove you are still the considerate daughter I raised, I don’t want you leaving this house without David, do you hear me?”

My tears turned to anger. Heat smoked through me to argue back. To tell him just how suffocated I felt, how lonely, how lost. But I’d already hurt him tonight, and now, he’d hurt me.

We were even.

I smiled tight, hiding everything. We both had more to say but wouldn’t verbalize. He was disappointed in me. I was frustrated by him.

It was best to go to bed before we uttered things we couldn’t take back.

“Goodnight, Dad.” I moved around him and left the living room. “I’m sorry about the necklace.”

As I climbed the sweeping staircase to my room on the third floor, my mind returned to the man who tasted like chocolate and had hands that could touch so sweetly but also cause such violence.

I would never forget him.

And tomorrow, I would do what I could to help him.

Because he’d helped me, and in some crazy way, he’d claimed my young, naïve heart.

I would get him free.

No matter how impossible that task would be.

Chapter Eleven

THREE YEARS LATER

“DON’T FORGET, YOU have that dinner meeting with your father, Mr. Robson, and his son tonight at the Weeping Willow.” Fleur smiled, hoisting another armful of contracts and financial portfolios.

I removed my reading glasses and took the folders from her. The heavy thud as I placed them on my desk ricocheted through me. “Yes, I remember.”

And I want nothing to do with it.

For the past year, my father had used every business meeting with his right-hand man, Steve Robson, to try to set me up with his son. He thought I couldn’t see through his tricks, but the way he kept finding excuses for us to be around each other wasn’t subtle.

“Anything else, Ms. Charlston?”

“No, thank you. Please don’t put any calls through. I have too much work to finish.”

“Of course.” Turning in her pretty purple dress, Fleur left my office. Her wardrobe was smart but flirty, reminding me that outside the thick glass windows existed sun and heat and summer.

I hadn’t been away from an air-conditioned building for more than a few minutes at a time for months. If I wasn’t being driven from office to office, I was in store warehouses or shop-fronts or doing my best to catch up on sleep, that for some reason, had become elusive for the past three years.

Ever since my one night of freedom, sleep had evaded me. Dreams never came. Nightmares visited often. The damn guilt because I wasn’t able to help him eroded me day by day.

You said you wouldn’t think about him anymore.

I said that every morning.

And by every lunchtime, I failed.

The best I’d been able to do was realize how stupidly idealistic I’d been. My dad, bless his heart, had helped show me that it wasn’t Nameless who I thought I’d fallen in love with that night but the idea of love.

No one could fall for a stranger in a few hours. Especially a girl who’d been attacked and molested and then corralled into breaking and entering a national treasure. My nerves and adrenaline would’ve heightened every experience, making it so much more than what it was.

I’d read into things. I’d imagined the heat behind the kisses and painted a perfect romance, when really, all there’d been was a dirty boy and a baseball field.

That’s all.

I recognized myself for what I was.

I was young, fanciful, and Dad was entirely right that work took precedent over a silly infatuation.

He was nothing to me.

Just a man from my past who took my first kiss.

Got it, stupid heart?

I sank heavily into my chair. My elbows stabbed into the desk as I rested my head in my hands. Even now, with all my pep talks and conclusions, I still felt guilty for not doing more.

That’s why I think about him.

Not because I still believed we were meant to be, or the craziness between us was serendipitous, but because I’d failed and left him alone in a prison that no doubt took whatever good was left in him and spat him out cold, cynical, and cruel.