Finally Adam moves and his weight disappears from the mattress beside me. “You’ll let me? You’ll fucking let me?” His angry voice fills the room, echoing around my pounding head. “Have you forgotten how this arrangement works? You do what I fucking ask. And yes, I’ll take your ass. I’ll take it right here where she watches.”
But at that point, finally, blessedly, I pass out.
Twenty-Eight
Present Day
Daphne
Oh fuck, my head. I wake up, grabbing my head in my hands and squinting against the sunlight. What hellacious things did I do to my body last night?
Which is when I look around.
Wait up. Where the hell am I?
I jerk out of bed and get to my feet.
Mistake, mistake!
I grab my head and double over, feeling so nauseous I’m shocked I don’t lose my stomach right there by the side of the bed.
When I finally manage to make it to the attached bathroom, I sit hugging the toilet bowl for another ten minutes, and finally splash my face with cool water when the worst of it has passed.
Bits and pieces of last night come back to me, but most of it is a huge blank.
I remember Rachel and I coming over to Adam’s place. Adam and I were arguing. He said I was letting my Mom and Dad down. I cradle my queasy stomach as I try to remember what happened next.
I started feeling bad and Adam asked how much I’d had to drink at the party. He and Rachel helped me to the bedroom…
Then there’s just…nothing.
Nothing till I woke up a few minutes ago.
I brush my teeth with a spare toothbrush and throw on a t-shirt, then head out to the rest of the apartment to see if I can make more sense of what happened. “Adam? Hello? Rachel?”
But the place is empty. When I wander into the kitchen, there’s a note. Didn’t want to wake you, sleepyhead. There’s coffee in the carafe and some bagels and muffins. Help yourself to anything. I meant what I said last night. I was just trying to make your dreams come true. I hope we can talk more soon, Adam.
I stare at the note for a moment longer. It’s so friendly and fits in with everything I know about Adam…but something feels…off. I can’t explain it.
All I know is I don’t want to be here anymore. I shake my head and slip into my athletic shoes, then pull two heavy suitcases of my clothes behind me as I hit the elevators and head downstairs.
It’s easy to catch a cab since Adam’s place is downtown and soon I’m on my way home. I’ll have to call a moving truck this weekend to get the rest of my stuff from Adam’s and from wherever he put it in storage.
And then what? What comes next?
Logan. Everything got so crazy last night I’ve barely had two minutes to think about him, but he’s got to be hurting right now. But he’s got to understand that I wasn’t rejecting him last night, just his high-handedness. In the bedroom, yes, I love it. He commands and I obey and in a wild way I still don’t fully understand, it’s allowed me to be free. But our relationship only works if we trust each other.
I need him to trust me as absolutely as I trust him.
I take a deep breath as I let my head sink back on the seat cushion.
“Hey, I know you,” the cabbie suddenly says. “You’re famous. You’re all over the papers today.”
“What?” I lift my head up and frown at him.
He’s squinting at the rearview mirror, sizing me up. “Holy shit, it really is you. Wait till I tell my buddies, they won’t believe it.”
We come to stop at a red light and he pulls out his phone. “You mind posing for a pic? Otherwise the guys’ll never believe I drove you around.”
“Wait, what do you mean, I was in the papers—” but he’s already snapping away.
“Stop it,” I hold out my hand as the car behind us honks its horn. The light’s turned green.
The cabbie drops his phone and starts driving again. Seriously, what the hell? Was my broken engagement to Adam in the papers today? Do the gossip rags really not have better to report on?
“So were they your idea or Archer’s?”
“What?”
“The piercings,” he points to my chest. “Wouldn’t have pegged you as that sort of girl.”
Who does this guy think he is? I start to pull out headphones so I can listen to music for the rest of the ride, but not before I hear him add, “The two of you looked cozy in bed.”
My head snaps up. In bed?
“What are you talking about?”
“Pics in The New Olympian Inquirer. You and Archer all hot and heavy. Everyone in the city’s talking about it.”
What. The. Fuck.
I stuff my earbuds in for the last ten minutes and give a minimal tip when he drops me off at my townhouse. What kind of crap have they photoshopped now just to sell that gossip rag? I hurry over to a newsstand close to my building, still dragging my two heavy suitcases behind me as I go.
I don’t have to look hard to find it. The paper is front and center, the headline above the fold reading, “Mogul Adam Archer’s Engagement: The Inside Story” and smaller, Insider snaps of couple canoodling after their big celebration.
I snatch the paper off the stand. It’s me. I don’t know how, but it’s me. In the red bra I’m still wearing now. I’m lying sprawled across Adam’s chest, in my bra, in a bed.
What. The. FUCK?
“Hey lady, you gotta pay for that. You’re mangling it all up!”
I rip the paper down. It is indeed mangled in my clenched hands. Mouth pursed in fury, I fumble in my purse for some cash and slap it down on the counter of the little kiosk, then I spin away and look at the paper. There’s not just one picture, there’s several. It’s clearly me. In only one of the pictures are my eyes open the slightest crack, but I look super out of it.
Which confirms the suspicion that’s been niggling on the edge of my mind all morning. It was just so absurd, I didn’t think there was any way—
But it’s terribly clear now.
I was drugged.
I was fucking drugged last night.
At the engagement party? At Adam’s?
Did Adam Archer drug me?
Even as I think it, it sounds absolutely ludicrous. He’s New Olympus’s golden boy. Heir to a billion dollar empire.
But I’ve been drugged before…and this felt eerily similar. And Adam was at the Autumnal Ball. So was Logan. And a lot of other people were at both events, for that matter.
I rub a hand at my pounding temple. Then another terrifying thought strikes. Did anything else happen to me while I was unconscious? But I squeezed my thighs together and do a quick inventory of my body and nothing feels off or like it was…invaded. At least physically.
But how in the hell did the paper get the pictures? I look back down. Adam looks asleep in the pictures, too. So who took them? What the hell is going on?
All I know is that it’s time to get some answers. I’m tired of being in the dark.
I hold up my hand and call, “Taxi!”
“She insisted she see you, sir,” Adam’s harried assistant follows after me when I barge into Adam’s office. His corner office is on the top floor of Archer Industries, as spare and masculine as his apartment.