“Corruption at King-Kincaid?” I scooted my chair a little closer to him. “Am I allowed to ask?”
Laughing, he shooed me away with a soft pat of the back of his hand. “No. You are not allowed to ask.”
I continued to stare at him. Apparently drinking made me shameless.
He let out a sigh. “It’s nothing that hasn’t already been suspected by someone at one point or another. Your guess is as good as mine. It was definitely one of the reasons that D and I wanted to do our own thing, though. So we can genuinely say we don’t know.”
While I doubted that Donovan ever preferred being in the dark, Weston probably truly did. “Well, that was smart, I suppose. And boring. Who’s going to give me gossip now?”
I turned to my other employer. “What about you, Dylan? How did you end up part of Reach with these bozos?”
He smiled and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I’d had previous experience managing operations at another advertising firm. Donovan wisely saw the need for another rational man to balance out the unruly ones.”
“Another rational man? Who are you counting as the first?” I regretted the question immediately because I knew the answer was Donovan. He was the man who formed Reach. The one who brought everyone together. The impetus behind all of it.
So I didn’t bother waiting for an answer. He was the one I really wanted to know about anyway whether I wanted to admit it or not. Might as well just go there. “How did you know Donovan? I don’t really picture you running around in the same circles.”
“Ha. No. We don’t exactly,” Dylan admitted. “We met years ago. I used to be married to the mother of his fiancé.”
My skin went cold despite the alcohol warm in my blood. I hadn’t been expecting that. “Amanda?”
“You know about her.”
“Yeah. Donovan’s told me.” The bare bones anyway—that he had loved her, that he’d been obsessed with her, that he blamed himself for her death. He’d told me that she’d been trying to outrun the private investigator that he’d hired when she got in the accident that killed her. I’d been searching for more information on her when I’d found his file on me.
“He did?” Dylan was openly surprised. “That’s good he’s talking about her. He tends to not mention her at all. He took her death very hard. As we all did. Sweet girl. So young.”
I glanced at Weston, ready to let him jump in. But he seemed to be happy to let me be Donovan’s spokesperson.
“I think he still takes it pretty hard,” I said. Besides blaming himself, Donovan had told me he couldn’t love anyone after her. Because of whatever it was he’d done to her. Which, if I had to guess without any real proof, looked a lot like what he’d done to me.
“Not surprising,” Dylan said, disappointment in his tone. “Tortured son of a bitch. That relationship was doomed from the start.”
“Why do you say that?” I tried not to sound too curious, not the easiest of tasks considering how desperate I was to know everything. Anything.
“He was too in love with her.” He set his fork down and began pouring the last of the bottle of wine around the table.
Audrey frowned. “Too in love?” She said each word deliberately. “How can someone be too in love?”
“He obsessed over her.” Dylan filled my glass, and I took a swallow. Okay, a gulp. “Knew everything about her. Cared everything about her. He hung the moon for her.”
It was ten years ago and the woman was dead and still I ached with jealousy.
I shouldn’t ask any more.
I couldn’t stop myself. “Like, what did he do?”
God, I was so pathetic.
“Dylan,” Weston leaned over to his partner. “She’s. You know. With him.” As if I wasn’t sitting right there. As if I couldn’t hear him talking.
“I’m not with him,” I snapped a little too defensively. “He’s in France. And I’m here. By no definition am I with Donovan.” I pressed Dylan. “What did his too much love look like? Was it obvious?” Did it look like what he does to me?
Or, what he did to me. I had no reason to believe he was still having me followed and watched. No reason to believe he still cared about me at all.
Dylan seemed to consider Weston, but answered me anyway. “Not flagrantly, no. I’m sure most people didn’t notice. It was subtle. The way he was always in control. Always a step ahead where she was concerned. I remember once she’d wanted this specific Tiffany bracelet. It was a piece the company didn’t make anymore but she’d seen one up for a charity auction and had convinced her mother to try to bid for it. She failed. Her mother didn’t try very hard, to be honest, and someone else bought it. Donovan found out and tracked down the person who’d bought it or something. A week later, Amanda had the bracelet.”
Audrey sighed next to me. “That’s actually quite romantic.”
I concentrated on Dylan’s eyes so that I didn’t shoot daggers with mine at my sister for her obvious betrayal.
“Another time,” he continued, almost as eager to share as I was to learn, “she’d gotten in an argument with her advisor at Harvard. A class she’d taken didn’t count like she’d thought it would. It wasn’t too long before her advisor was dismissed from the school on allegations of credit fraud.”
Weston scoffed. “Are you saying that was Donovan too? Because I heard about that and there was nothing tying him to it.”
Dylan shrugged. “King-Kincaid Financial couldn’t alter credit reports? All I know is that Donovan didn’t seem a bit surprised when it happened and Amanda’s next advisor had no problem accepting her course credits. He also drove a brand new Jaguar. What do you want to bet his loan had been approved through a King-Kincaid bank?”
Weston shook his head, unconvinced.
But he hadn’t seen the file on me. I had, and there were many things Donovan had done for me that had been just as extreme. And I wasn’t his fiancée.
“And you think those were signs that he loved her?” I asked Dylan, desperate for those acts to mean something.
“Those are definitely signs that he loved her,” Audrey said dreamily. She looked pointedly at me. “Anyone who did those things for someone else is obviously in love.”
I ignored her. I already knew her opinion on the matter. Already knew what she hoped would happen between Donovan and I.
“Loved her too much,” Dylan repeated. “If she’d lived, it wouldn’t have worked out.”
“You don’t think so?” Weston asked. He’d always said that Amanda and Donovan had been the real deal.
“Because he’d eventually smother her?” I asked, making my own guesses.
“Because it’s not real,” Dylan said matter-of-factly.
“What isn’t?” I asked, confused.
“The whole thing. Love. Marriage. It’s an outdated arrangement. Amanda seemed to know what was what and had reasonable expectations. But Donovan bought into the pitch. He bought into the feelings.”
“You don’t believe love is real.” Audrey’s statement was a mix of shock and disbelief.