She stared at the keypad then back at me. “Why are you giving me the code?”
“If that guy or anyone else you don’t want to see shows up, you come back here, and you plug in 0522.”
“I’m trying to have a nervous breakdown, and you want me to memorize numbers.”
“Enter the code, Naomi.”
She did as she was told while muttering about what pains in the ass all men were. She wasn’t wrong.
“Good girl. See the green light?”
She nodded.
“Open the door.”
“Knox, I should get back out there. People are going to be talking. I’ve got six tables,” she said, her hand hovering over the handle.
“You should open the damn door and take a breath.”
Those gorgeous fucking hazel eyes of hers widened, and I felt the world slow to a stop. When she did that, when she looked at me with hope, trust, and just a little bit of lust, it did things to me. Things I didn’t want to dissect because it felt good, and I didn’t want to waste time wondering how it was going to go bad.
“Okay,” she said finally, pushing the door open.
I hustled her across the threshold and closed the door behind us.
“Wow. The Fortress of Solitude,” she said with reverence.
“It’s my office,” I said dryly.
“It’s your safe space. Your lair. No one but Waylon is allowed in here. And you just gave me the code.”
“Don’t make me regret it,” I said, moving in to back her against the door, fighting against the need to grab her and hold her tight.
“I’ll try not to,” she promised on a breathy sigh.
“What happened out there was a shit show,” I began, putting my hands on either side of her head.
She winced. “I know. I’m so sorry. I had no idea he was coming. I haven’t talked to him since the rehearsal dinner. I tried to get him away from the crowd and handle it privately, but—”
“Baby, a man ever gets you in that position again, I want you to knee him in the balls as hard as you can, and when he doubles over, you knee him in the fucking face. Then you run like hell. I don’t give a shit about causing scenes. I give a shit that I walked into my bar and found a man with his hands on my girl.”
Her lower lip trembled, and I wanted to hunt down Warner Whatever the Fuck His Name Was and put his head through a plate glass window.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Baby, I don’t want you to be sorry. I don’t want you to be scared. I want you to be as pissed off as I am that some asshole thought he could put his hands on you. I want you to know your worth so no one in their right mind ever thinks they can treat you like that. You get me?”
She nodded tentatively.
“Good. Think it’s time you tell me the whole story, Daze.”
“We don’t really need to talk—”
“You’re not getting out of this room until you tell me everything. And I mean every fucking thing.”
“But we’re not really togeth—”
I pinched her lips closed. “Uh-uh, Naomi. It doesn’t matter what the fucking label says, I care about you, and if you don’t start talkin’, I can’t do what I need to do to make sure it never happens again.”
She was still for a long beat.
“If I tell you, will you let me go back to work?” she asked through my fingers.
“Yes. I’ll let you go back to work.”
“If I tell you, will you promise not to hunt Warner down?”
I was not going to like this one bit and I knew it.
“Yes,” I lied.
“Fine.”
I took my hand away, and she ducked under my arm to stand in the middle of the room between my desk and the couch.
“It’s my fault,” she began.
“Bullshit.”
She whirled around and fixed me with a look. “I’m not telling you anything if you’re going to interject like one of those old man Muppets in the balcony. We’ll both just die of starvation in here, and eventually someone will smell our decaying bodies and break down the door.”
I leaned against the front of my desk and stretched my legs out. “Fine. Continue with your asinine assessment.”
“Excellent alliteration,” she said.
“Talk, Daze.”
She blew out a breath. “Fine. Okay. We were together for a while.”
“History. You’ve got it. You moved on, and he hasn’t.”
She nodded.
“We’d been together long enough that I had my eye on the next step.” She glanced at me. “I don’t know if you know this about me, but I really like checking things off my list.”
“No shit.”
“Anyway, on paper we were compatible. It made sense. We made sense. And it wasn’t like he was making plans for next year’s vacations. But he wasn’t moving as quickly as I thought he should.”
“You told him to shit or get off the pot,” I guessed.
“Much more eloquently, of course. I told him I saw a future for us. I was working for his family’s company, we’d been dating for three years. It just made sense. I told him if he didn’t want to be with me, he needed to cut me loose. When he slid a jeweler’s box over the table at his favorite Italian place a few weeks later, part of me was so relieved.”
“The other part?”
“I think I knew it was a mistake right there.”
I shook my head and crossed my arms. “Baby, you knew it was a mistake long before then.”
“Well, you know what they say about hindsight.”
“It makes you feel like an idiot?”
Her lips quirked. “Something like that. You don’t really want to hear all this.”
“Finish it,” I growled. “I spilled my guts to you the night Nash was shot. This’ll even us out.”
She sighed, and I knew I’d won.
“So we started planning the wedding. And by we, I mean his mother and me because he was busy with work and didn’t want to deal with the details. Things were happening with the company. He was under a lot of stress. He started drinking more. Snapping at me for little things. I tried to be better, do more, expect less.”
My hands itched to close around that fuckface’s throat.
“About a month before the wedding, we were out to dinner with another couple, and he had too much to drink. I was driving us home, and he accused me of flirting with the other guy. I laughed. It was so absurd. He didn’t think it was funny. He…”
She paused and winced.
“Say it,” I said gruffly.
“H-he grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head back. I was so surprised I swerved and almost hit a parked car.”
It took everything I had not to jump up from the desk and run into the parking lot to kick this fucking guy’s ass.
“He said he didn’t mean it,” she continued as if her words hadn’t just set off a ticking time bomb inside me. “He apologized profusely. He sent me flowers every day for a week. ‘It was the stress,’ he’d said. He was trying for a promotion to set us up for our future.”
I was choking on suppressed rage and wasn’t sure how long I could pretend to be calm.
“We were so close to the wedding day, and he really did seem like he was sorry. I was stupid enough, eager enough to move on to the next step that I’d believed him. Things were fine. Better than fine. Until the night of the rehearsal.”
My fingers dug into my biceps.
She was pacing now in front of me. “He showed up to the rehearsal smelling like a distillery and he had several more drinks during dinner. I overheard his mother making snide comments about how she wished she could have invited more people but that she couldn’t because my parents couldn’t afford it.”
Fuckface’s mom sounded like she needed her own kind of ass-kicking.
“I was so mad I confronted him when we left the restaurant.” She shuddered, and I was afraid I was going to grind my fillings into dust. “Thank God we were alone in the parking lot. My parents had already gone home. Stef and the rest of the wedding party were still inside.
“He was so angry. Just like a switch had flipped. I never saw it coming.”
She closed her eyes, and I knew she was reliving the moment all over again.