“Hey.” She tried to keep her voice low.
“Hey yourself.” Marcy’s voice bounced off the walls of the posh bathroom.
“Shhh.” She huddled over the phone trying to block the noise with her body.
“I take, by the volume of your voice, you’re not alone.”
“Falon is sleeping in the other room.” She blushed while glaring at her friend through the phone. “What do you need at seven in the morning, Marcy?”
“Oh, just enjoying a nice cup of coffee and a beautiful sunrise.”
“Seriously, cut the crap, Marcy.”
She heard her friend sigh into her phone. “Okay, I was just wondering if the mission was accomplished. Did you bring that man to his knees, begging you to put him out of his misery? Did you finally get the Big Bad Wolfe back for the way he treated you all those years ago?”
She was about to answer when she heard the soft sound of fabric rustling. Afraid to look toward the half-open door she already knew the worst had happened. Swallowing hard, she forced herself to meet Falon’s arctic glare. From just the look, she knew he had heard every incriminating comment Marcy made.
“What? Wolfe got your tongue?” Marcy’s joke fell flat.
“I’ve got to go.” Sarah’s voice sounded hollow as she ended the call, her eyes never leaving the cold accusation aimed her way.
“Falon, I can—”
“It was all a game, then?” His harsh question made her wince. “What was it, Sarah? Did I turn you down for a date in college? Did you spend hours in your little box of a dorm room pining after a man you could never have?”
“No, Falon. I—”
“Enough.” The command rippled across her skin and she knew whatever tenacious relationship they forged the night before was over. “I don’t want to hear your excuses. Just know this, Sarah. I came here to do a job, and that job comes first. Doing you? That was just icing on the cake. I never intended to keep you. This was just a temporary thing, a way to burn off steam built up by dealing with idiots who can’t control their own finances.”
With that parting shot, he left her shivering in the middle of a hotel bathroom feeling cheaper than she ever had in her life. He was right to be angry with her. This whole thing started with her wanting to prove to the both of them she was a woman worth wanting. She hadn’t planned on their emotions coming into play or breaking a man she thought infallible.
Quietly she gathered her clothes, putting them on as quickly as possible. She knew attempting to talk to him now would be useless. She could only hope time would make him more receptive to what she had to say.
***
Falon heard the door quietly click shut and threw his fist into the wall. The pain radiating up his arm barely registered over the tight ache in his chest. When he was pulled from sleep by the hushed sounds of Sarah’s voice from the bathroom, a few erotic thoughts pulled him from the mattress.
He was fully prepared to make his dirtier fantasies come true while covering her body in soapy water when he heard another voice coming from the steam-clouded room. Not wanting to eavesdrop but unable to walk away once he heard his name mentioned, Falon stood in shock just inside the half-opened door. What he heard pulled him down from the high realizing he wanted to be with Sarah had given him. Hearing she had just played him for some petty college-age revenge burned a hole in his now vulnerable heart.
It hadn’t been real. Not of what she said or did was been because she felt anything other than an obvious deep-seated anger directed at him. Falon reacted the only way he knew how. He cut her deeper than the wound she had delivered to him. As the words left his mouth, a part of him wanted to frantically draw them back and beg her to forgive him. As he watched her crumple under his verbal barrage, the satisfaction he usually felt when besting a foe was absent.
Lying in the cooling bed that still smelled of Sarah and their lovemaking, he pushed his tenderness for her behind the cold wall of his resolve. She had used him, lied to him, she didn’t deserve his sympathy. He squeezed his eyes shut trying to dispel the image of her standing in the bathroom, dripping water onto the cold tiles, looking at him like he was crushing her world.
Swearing, Falon sat on the edge of the mattress. It didn’t matter what she looked like in those moments when he lied and said she didn’t matter, that she was only icing on the cake. It was all a game to her anyway. None of it was real. The why did it feel like he was throwing away something so rare he may never find it again? Because, he let his stupid heart go and fall in love with the woman. He should have listened to his brain, but every time Sarah was near his heart spoke so much louder. It took letting her take control, trusting her to not let him fall to see how loud that voice was. And where did it leave him? Abso-fucking-lutely nowhere.
He ignored his conscience as it reared its head, reminding him he had set out to use her as his own private plaything. But that was before. Before she worked her way under his skin and stole a part of him he would never get back. So maybe it was partly his hurt pride that made him jump to conclusions about the conversation he overheard but it didn’t change what Sarah had done. He could deal with a lot of shit from people but someone deliberately working their way beyond his walls to bring him down from the inside was unforgivable.
He never should have let her get close. He should have kept her at the cold distance he kept every other woman, but there was something about her that had spoken to him. He wanted her to know him, his past. His deepest secrets, he wanted her to understand the man he had become. She was right when she said he had changed from the man she watched from afar nine years ago. For the first time, he wanted someone to understand the true motivation for those changes.
Scrubbing a hand over his face, he glanced at the red glow of the clock. If he wasn’t going to sleep, he might as well get some work done. The sooner he could finish this job he never should have taken the sooner he could get out of Chicago. God, he should have never come back here.
Chapter Twelve
“What are you doing Sarah?”
“Uh-working. I thought that would be pretty obvious,” she answered without looking up from her computer monitor.
“That’s not what I meant.” Marcy moved further into the room. “So you’re just going to ignore it then?”
“Ignore what?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that Falon Wolfe walked out of here with Ginny Green attached to his arm like the blood sucking parasite she is.”
Sarah had forgotten Ginny was stopping by the agency that morning to meet with Marcy. They were to go over the new strategies Falon had devised, to reassure Ginny she didn’t need to hunt for new representation. The blond got one look and Falon and had been all over him. She tittered and teased her way into convincing him to join her for lunch. Sarah watched them slink out of the building, the ache in her chest growing with each step Falon took away from her.
“She’s your client, Marcy.” She moved her mouse around a bit, clicking on an empty space on the desktop. She wasn’t really working on anything. She was hiding. Hiding from the fact that Falon had broken a hole open in her chest she could still feel bleeding and from the fact that he didn’t seem to care.
When she walked into the office this morning, he was already there. She stood frozen a few feet from the glass that separated him, watching him work. He looked slightly rumpled and it gave her hope that he had spent the night regretting the way they left things. He must have sensed her eyes on him because he moved his gaze from his work to her. The frigid indifference there killed what little hope she had he regretted his words.