“For sure,” Zander agreed. “Did he call the cops on you?”
Charlie shook her head. “He wouldn’t dare. He wouldn’t have wanted to explain to them why I’d done it.”
Zander scowled. “I want to hear the story, Charlie.”
“Me too.”
She looked to her right to find Griffin watching her closely. He looked concerned.
That made her stomach flip. The rest of the people in the bar were protective of her and would be appalled by this story when she told them. But something about having Griffin’s concern made her feel warm. It wasn’t that she thought he wasn’t the type of guy to care about a woman having issues with a man that might involve the cops. But when their eyes met, she could see that his concern was personal. That might have seemed like a strange thing to be able to read in someone’s expression, but that was how it felt.
“Alan, that’s the guy with the Porsche, had asked one of our interns out a couple of times before I got to Paris,” Charlie started. “She was a lovely girl, young, a little naïve. But she absolutely did not like Alan, and she had turned him down both times. She shared that with me one day at lunch when he had left her a message on her phone saying that he wanted to speak with her after work.”
Charlie shifted on the barstool. She was facing the room with the bar behind her. She now pivoted so that she could rest her right elbow on the top of the bar. That also caused her to lean closer to Griffin. He didn’t move back an inch. In fact, he seemed to lean in a little closer.
“She was nervous that he was going to pressure her to go out with him again and possibly use his position over her as leverage.”
Zander’s scowl deepened, and Ellie sat forward in her chair now.
“I told her I would go with her, but she turned me down. I insisted that I wait for her after the meeting though.” Remembering that day and how Isabelle had looked stepping off the elevator after her “meeting” with Alan made anger tighten Charlie’s chest even now.
“Turns out that he got on the elevator with her, stopped it, and physically assaulted her.”
“What?” Zander growled. “Tell me he was bleeding when you saw him.”
Charlie shook her head. “He didn’t get off the elevator with her. He’d gotten off on the floor earlier. Or he definitely would’ve been bleeding.” Charlie would have definitely gone after him. It might be a blessing that he had been a chicken shit and gotten off the elevator early, but she still felt the helplessness and rage.
“He’d backed Isabelle into the corner, and put his hands up her shirt. She told him no repeatedly, and he wouldn’t stop. Her blouse was ripped, and she was shaking so hard when I saw her she almost couldn’t walk.”
Zander’s hand came down hard on the table in front of him. The people around him jumped, but he was frowning at Charlie. “There was a camera in the elevator, right?”
“He’d turned it off.”
Zander shook his head. “So it was premeditated.”
Charlie nodded.
There were frowns and gasps throughout the room, which she appreciated. Of course, these people would think that was horrible. It was horrible.
“I walked her out to her car and tried to get her to let me take her home. She refused, but I decided to follow her. But on my way to my car, I saw his.”
Everyone nodded at that, obviously figuring out that was when she pulled her keys out.
“Please tell me that is not all you did to that asshole,” Zeke said.
Charlie took a deep breath and made herself smile. She tipped her head. “Gosh, what do you mean? You think he deserved more than just ‘I have a tiny dick’ scratched into the side of his most prized possession?”
“He would have been walking with a permanent limp if I’d been there,” Zeke said.
“And never would’ve fathered children,” Fletcher added.
Charlie glanced at Griffin. His jaw was tight, and his gaze locked on hers.
“What did you do, Charlie?” he asked. His voice was low enough that no one else could hear it. It was low and rumbly as if he was ignoring the rest of the room.
“You think I did something?”
“I do.” He paused. “And I’ll bet it was something he won’t forget soon.”
“You’re figuring me out.”
“It doesn’t take long to figure out that you can handle whatever is thrown at you, and you do it perfectly.”
10
She stared at him. She hadn’t been expecting a compliment. She definitely took what he just said as a compliment. She knew that Griffin liked a few things about her. He certainly seemed to like kissing her. He definitely liked her mouth wrapped around his cock. And while he didn’t like all of her ideas for the petting zoo, she thought he did kind of like her little update videos she sent to their clients and that she’d gotten Fletcher to fill in on the otter talk rather than continuing to press Griffin for it.
“I wrote down everything she told me and everything I witnessed about her after the incident. Then, the next day I got on the elevator with him, stopped it just the way he had with her, backed him up into the corner, and told him if he ever went near her again, I would sneak into his house and cut his dick off with a rusty knife. He stammered and stuttered and said that he hadn’t meant to scare her or hurt her. Basically, I got a full confession out of him. And I had a recorder in my pocket. Which I gave to Isabelle to take to the cops.”
“Well done, Charlie,” Zander said. “That’s amazing. I don’t love that you were stuck on an elevator with the scumbag by yourself, but you handled it. I hope he was arrested.”
Charlie realized she’d been looking at Griffin the entire time she’d told that portion of the story. The intense blue of his eyes and swirling emotion there wouldn’t allow her to look away.
“He was taken in for questioning,” Charlie said. “But I’m not sure what else happened at that point. I was fired later that day because of the car.”
“His dad fired you even after hearing what he’d done to the intern?” Zeke asked.
Finally, Charlie glanced at her cousins. “The CEO is his mom. And yes, she did. She, of course, wanted to believe that what happened with him and the intern had been a misunderstanding. But even if not, she said that my lack of impulse control was concerning.”
Ellie snorted at that. “She was clearly already intimidated by your fire. You don’t need people like that in your life, girl. You need to be surrounded by people who love your passion and encourage it.”
Charlie caught her breath. That was something she’d been dealing with a lot of her life. She’d learned to manage her impulses to an extent and realized that a lot of the time, it was inappropriate to do and say exactly what she thought and felt. However, she very much appreciated her grandmother’s stance. It would be so nice to have a job where she could just be herself and do what she was moved to do.
Surprisingly, the petting zoo had already given her a taste of that. Everyone was going along with her ideas and plans—even if they were hesitant or didn’t want to be directly involved themselves. She cast another quick glance at Griffin. He was no longer watching her. His jaw was tight, and he was gripping his glass of iced tea tightly in his hand.